Pastor Glen

When Worship Just Happens

2009-10-26T09:43:00.000-07:00

Sunday evening, after the youth Bible study concluded, we were all walking out to our cars when a car I didn’t recognize pulled onto the lot, backing up to the salt store next door. I decided to just wait a couple of minutes, let the driver get his salt and then follow him off of the lot, locking the drive-through gate behind him.

Instead, as the driver got out of his car, he walked straight toward me, asking as he walked, “Are you the pastor here?” I barely finished telling him my name when he asked, “I was wondering if I could ask you to pray for me?” Just a couple of days before, he’d been involved in a terrible car crash. The wreck was the other driver’s fault and he had died instantly. The total stranger standing before me was still visibly shaken at having seen it all, so much so that he was willing to ask a total stranger to pray for him.

Earlier that day, I’d left church feeling a little frustrated. Among other things, like asking people to “bow their eyes and close their heads” during the invitation, instead of the other way around, I had also forgotten to take my Bible to worship. I intended to read the gospel as part of my message but instead found myself standing there asking if I could borrow someone else’s Bible. Worship had not gone like I planned.

Praying with a total stranger wasn’t exactly how I planned to end the day, either. Yet, praying with that man turned out to be one of the most meaningful experiences of worship I had all day.

There is worship that we plan and there is worship that just happens. I’m so glad things don’t always turn out the way I plan them.

Tooth Fairy

2009-10-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

If you have followed my blog, you may remember this blog from July, 2008. It continues to be one of my very favorite stories. I share it again because I can't help but think of all the people I know who need hope this morning.

In another time and place, right before the children were to go on stage to perform their spring musical, another little boy inadvertently elbowed nine-year-old Ben in the mouth. Pain aside, Ben was so very disappointed that the elbow also knocked one of his teeth loose. Ben screwed up his courage and sang the entire musical anyway.

When he got home, Ben stood over the bathroom sink to finish the work the elbow had only begun. As bad as it had been, it did open the possibility of leaving something for the tooth fairy. Then, just as he worked the tooth loose it fell into the sink and down the drain. Ben was horrified! His dad, Scott, who is not a Master plumber but who is a master father, decided to see if he could rescue the tooth by removing the drain trap under the sink. In the process, he got the trap loose but not without breaking another pipe that would require calling a real and very expensive plumber. Now, both father and son were so very disappointed.

The plumber came and, while fixing the broken pipe, discovered something else askew in the plumbing that required climbing under the house to repair. While there, he discovered something more ominous. It was a water leak that had been dripping for some time onto a gas line that runs beneath the house. The leak was just about to corrode a hole in the pipe that would have soon started causing a very dangerous gas leak.

The rest of the story involves older sister Corrie coming to Ben’s rescue. The missing tooth was never found. So, Corrie offered Ben a souvenir. It was a fossilized shark’s tooth she’d had for some time, a prized possession. She gave it to Ben telling him that he could put that under his pillow for the tooth fairy. Ben was aghast. “I can’t put that shark’s tooth under my pillow. The tooth fairy will think I’m a vampire!” His sister’s good intentions persisted and Ben decided to use the shark’s tooth anyway. Just to be sure, he wrote a personal letter to the tooth fairy explaining all that had happened and, what started out as one disappointment after another turned into something very wonderful.

Which is meaning of the tooth parable. Had Ben not been elbowed in the mouth and lost his tooth in the sink causing the plumber to climb under the house, well, none of us would like to think about what could have been had the gas leak not been discovered. The icing on the disappointment turned hope cake was that all of this created an opportunity for big sister to prove her compassion.

One of the greatest and recurring themes of God’s word, from cover to cover, is the promise that what can at first cause us to be so very disappointed can, if we will let the grace of God have its way, come to be seen as nothing more than a painful way hope finds its way into our lives. Sometimes life can be so very disappointing. Even so, we also have this eternal promise from God’s word. “We . . . boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us . . ..”

Hope never disappoints because disappointment is just hope’s doorway into our lives.

God Knows

2009-10-06T12:18:00.001-07:00

In a moment freeze-framed only in the electrical synapses of memory from nearly twenty years ago, I’m standing beside a professor’s desk at John Brown University in northwest Arkansas. The professor was giving his new pastor the nickel tour. Just above his desk, already overcrowded with work from the new semester, hung a plague that quietly whispered above the clutter, “Happiness is someplace to belong, something to do, someone to love.”

I’ve never been big on theology or politics that can be reduced to a bumper sticker or a plaque. That day, though, I was reminded yet again that something doesn’t have to be complicated or sophisticated to be true. Common sunsets and tiny green-breasted hummingbirds’ wings, the loving sparkle in my wife’s eyes and the joy in a friend’s voice, all announce the presence of incomprehensible and creative love, any day I’m willing to look, or listen.

Jack Dorsey never dreamed that his simple e-networking brainstorm with a very common name, Twitter, would, be worth $1 billion, only thirty-six months after his first tweet. All he’s done is find a way of marketing a product designed to address a need as old as creation. By the millions and counting, people are tweeting and facebooking proof that, no matter how big or complicated our world becomes, the greatest of human needs include belonging, doing and loving.

In the very first book of the Bible, just barely above the din of creation itself, God’s sentiment is poignantly stated in only nine little words. “It is not good that man should be alone.” Centuries later, Jesus’ response to the dilemma of human isolation was what is now commonly known as the “church.” Some have given up on the church because it’s too human, as though it could be anything else, as in “non-human.” Yet, despite all of its failings, that’s what keeps me coming back, the voice of Holy God speaking hope right into the middle of all of this humanity. Even my creator knows that I need someplace to belong, something to do and someone to love. That’s what keeps me coming back, specifically to the church. I know God knows that. I know God knows!

Moo-Moo

2009-09-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

When Carol walked into the church office that day some twenty years ago, she had the misfortune of running into a very immature youth minister who had yet to learn that a man should never ask questions about a woman’s clothing, ever. We may have walked on the moon but in the entire history of the human race no way has yet been invented for a man to safely ask questions about what a woman is wearing or why.

Carol happened to be wearing a moo-moo that day, one of those tent dresses designed to cover everything without revealing anything of the form it’s covering. “I didn’t know you were pregnant,” I said to Carol, my mouth open just wide enough for my size 12 loafer to fit comfortably inside. “I’m not,” Carol said, rather plainly, staring right through me.

At this point, you’d think that I would know enough to shut up and look for a safe exit, both from the conversation and the room. Instead, like a snake disjoints its jaw in order to swallow a much larger animal whole, I opened my mouth even wider, enough for my other size 12 to fit comfortably inside, too. With both feet firmly in place, nestled next to my out-of-control tongue, I followed the first question with one just like it. “Then, why are you wearing a maternity dress?” I asked.

It’s a real witness to Carol’s maturity that all she said next was, “It’s not a maternity dress,” no expletives added for emphasis. It was a real witness to my immaturity that my judgment of her life’s condition was based solely on what I could see.

“The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, NRSV). Very early on, most of us learn how to disguise what we’re thinking or feeling by changing our outward appearance, chameleon-like, depending on the crowd we’re with. Too bad that, just as early on, we don’t learn to see others as God sees us, from the inside out, not the other way around.

Super Glue

2009-09-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t until after I dropped my Blackberry the third time that I finally learned that the devices aren’t made of rubber. When I went to holster it and it wouldn’t fit, I realized it was bent (read: broken) out of shape. It didn’t seem like there was anything wrong that a little Super Glue wouldn’t fix.

Super Glue people must assume that even an amateur handyman knows some basics. At least the $1.05 tube didn’t come with instructions. Like, about the value of punching a good hole in the end of the needle-pointed glue squirter before you squeeze. If you don’t, when squeezed, the glue will get out one way or another. If there’s no hole, it will make a hole wherever it wants, usually squirting out all over whatever fingers are holding the tube and all the while making a sound similar to a flatulent lawnmower that just won’t start!

After I had Super-glued my right thumb and forefinger to the tube, gotten a nice smear of the stuff on my desk pad and a healthy Super-glue thumbprint on the face of the phone, I finally got a drop where I needed it most. But, by the time I could free my thumb and finger and push the broken pieces back together, the glue was already set. My phone is fixed, sort of. Like my golf game, it now has an oversized handicap. It’s fixed, but it will never be the same.

A friend in another city is married to a man who broke their marriage badly. She’s trying but it’s already been years now and, to say the least, the marriage is terribly bent out of shape (read: broken). It’s just that marriages aren’t like phones. When you drop them and they break, you can’t just glue the pieces back together and then go on, as though nothing ever happened.

It’s been a costly lesson, and a painful one at that. Some things can’t be fixed (read: unbroken). They can only be forgiven.

Beau Dog

2009-09-08T12:49:00.000-07:00

Beau died July 11. He was, among other things, a fourteen year-old, blonde, thirty-pound Cocker Spaniel-Golden Retriever mix. He was so much more than that though. Clichés aside, Beau was one of my best friends.

Whenever I doubted the presence of God in this world or in my life, a brief glimpse into Beau’s big brown eyes reminded me of our mutual creator. I made many confessions to Beau. When confession was too hard, he’d curl up beside me, rest his head on my chest and close his eyes, as though absorbing into himself whatever was hurting me. The presence of God, in a dog?

Beau gave no warning of needing to leave. So, I was taken aback early that scorching Saturday evening when I heard an unusual noise that included the violent shaking of Beau’s tags. I looked up to see him writhing on the kitchen floor, obviously suffering some kind of seizure. I rushed to him. Nancy was outside. I yelled for her so loudly that I’m sure someone in Des Moines heard it. I was praying that Nancy, being a nurse, might be able to do something to save our friend. It was not to be. By the time she could get there, Beau’s eyes were fixed. He’d already let out some kind of soulful wail, as though he knew he had to go and was saying goodbye. In no more than two minutes, Beau was gone, fourteen years of love slipping through my helpless, powerless fingers, just like that.

Standing over Beau’s lifeless body, I was reminded of the words of an older friend as he reflected on his own life’s fleeting moments. “We cannot hold onto life,” he said. “We can only kiss it as it passes by.” Just this morning, I read Martin Luther’s similar confession. “Many things I have tried to grasp, and have lost. That which I have placed in God’s hands I still have” (Jan Karon, Patches of Godlight, Penguin, 2002).

Later that evening, as Nancy and I laid Beau Dog on the doctor’s table, we bent over and kissed his soft, furry head one more time. Just as I have with all those who matter more than life to me, I placed him in God’s hands one last time, entrusting to God what was never mine to hold onto in the first place.

Taking Out the Trash

2009-09-01T07:23:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in a shoebox, there’s a picture of me taken by my dad when I was about fourteen or fifteen. I’m standing in the kitchen, near the backdoor that leads to the alley. My arms and hands are full of sacks of trash, collected from all over the house. It was my chore to carry the trash out to the alley at least once a week or whenever the trash cans in the house got full. I despised that chore. Maybe it was stubbornness or teenage rebellion or laziness, or, all of the above.

I just hated carrying the trash thirty feet to the alley. I’d wait until I absolutely had to carry it out then load my arms and hands as full as they could get. I only wanted to make the trip once. Without fail, trying to carry out that much trash at one time almost always led to disaster. One or more of the sacks would rip and trash would spill everywhere. Then, I’d have to clean up the mess and still carry it out.

Dad absolutely refused to do the chore for me. It was my trash to carry out. Sometimes, he would actually stand there and laugh at the mess my pride and stubbornness could make of things. He told me more than once that, “if you’ve got to carry out the trash, it’s better to keep it up to date, every day if necessary. Sure beats the alternative.”

Our souls get clogged with trash. Unconfessed sin. Fear. Anxiety. Unresolved anger. Disappointment that God has not answered our prayers the way we thought God should. It all adds up. If we wait too long before we dispose of soul trash, disaster can result. Some of the saddest people in the world are Christians whose joy has been robbed by souls too full of undisposed trash. Sometimes, it’s just been too long since our last confession and the soul cleansing that always comes with it.

Now and then, hot tears coursing down my cheeks, tears that seem to have no reason, and a sadness of soul like low-hanging, dark clouds of winter, remind me of that picture my dad took so many years ago, and the lesson he hoped it would always teach.

Bird On A Wire

2009-04-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

Now and then, I ponder a bird on a wire. It doesn’t take much to get me intellectually stimulated. It’s just always fascinated me how a little bird can light atop a high-voltage wire without getting electrocuted.

My new friend and fellow faith-struggler, Dwayne Blevins, is more knowledgeable of all things electrical. An engineer by training and instinct, he’s been kind enough to fill in some of the blanks in the more simple explanation that the bird lives to chirp the story of its high wire act only because it’s never grounded. Dwayne kind of lost me somewhere in distinguishing amperage from voltage. My ignorance of something I trust every day to power virtually my entire world is truly shocking.

Turns out that the bird is floating atop a wire transmitting anywhere from 1,200 volts to some 300,000 volts, depending on how far that point on the wire is from its source. If the winged wonder were to reach across a very small expanse and grab another wire at the same time, it would close the circuit and be instantly vaporized in a white cloud of pulverized feather and beak. Remarkably, all of that voltage/amperage leaves the bird totally unaffected, as long as it doesn’t close the circuit.

From time to time, the memories of painful experiences from the past haunt me. Over time, I’ve observed the fact that those memories cause more pain at certain times than others. Sometimes, they feel like a slow, dull ache, like a bad bruise yet to fully heal. Other times, they feel like a terminal malignancy, slowly but surely growing to choke out my very life, deadening my soul and destroying any opportunities for loving the only life that is mine, the one right in front of my face. What makes the difference in how much pain the memories cause seems to have everything to do with whether or not I close the circuit.

When the painful current of a hurtful memory enters my heart, I can close the circuit by demonizing the person who sent it my way. Anytime we call someone by a name other than the one God has already given, we reduce the worth of that person to nothing more than the sum total of how much they hurt us. What a sad, egocentric existence! As though our comfort or pain were the center of the moral universe!

That’s why forgiveness that is waiting on an apology must be particularly nauseating to God. Forgiveness waiting on a down payment of contriteness is a forgiveness that has usurped God’s place. Indeed, it’s a not-so-subtle form of spiritual prostitution, as in, payment for services rendered. Why would we demand of others something as an exchange for our mercy that God has not required in order for us to receive God’s forgiveness (check it out – Ephesians 2:4-8)? Forgiveness waiting on an apology is nothing more than an empty piñata, the shell of religious piety void of any true holiness and only masquerading as Christianity.

None of us wants to be remembered for our worst missteps. Yet, when the memory of some hurt someone else put on us comes again, it feels so very good to lay the blame for all of our misery at their feet. Blaming really does feel good, but, just for a moment. In time, we cannot demonize others without demonizing ourselves. The moment we call someone else by the name we’ve given our pain is the moment that we close the circuit of unforgiveness and absorb into ourselves the lethal current of judgmental unforgiveness. To put it another way, no one ever pays a higher price for our unforgiveness than we do ourselves.

Or, we close the circuit by accepting the judgment of others as the final word about us. For whatever reason, when another person curses us, all they are doing is naming us after their own unresolved soul-killing pain. The curse of another has no power over us, unless we close the circuit by accepting it as the final word for ourselves. Someone once said that a false god is anyone or anything to whom we assign the power to declare our worth to us other than the God who first gave us life. The curse of others wounds so deeply only because we valued their blessing too much. We only need the complete blessing of others to the extent that we are lacking a sense of God’s blessing.

At Grace Fellowship, we’ve been pondering Jesus on a cross this past few weeks of Lent. About the way he, in fact, closed the circuit between God’s mercy-judgment and our sin. He took the lethal blow, absorbing into himself the penalty that should have been ours (Ephesians 2:14-18). Before he did, he told his disciples that anyone who ever wants to follow him must be willing to do the same, to climb upon their own personal cross of suffering forgiveness. Forgiveness always hurts. Wherever forgiveness has been extended, someone somewhere bled to make it possible.

Jesus died to complete the circuit between God’s mercy and our dead souls. Why can’t we just let Jesus’ work be what it is, enough forgiveness for all sin for all mankind for all of time (Romans 6:9-10)? Otherwise, when we close the circuit of unforgiveness, well, we’re mocking the cross as insufficient and also dying a death God never intended for anyone, even for those who, like me, are still struggling to learn the Jesus way of forgiving.

A bird on a wire. Jesus on a cross. Something to ponder just before Good Friday – and the Easter that follows shortly thereafter.

Six Mexicans

2009-03-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

After months and months of restraining myself, I finally created a Facebook account. It’s been interesting, fun and even frightening. It’s been fun and interesting to make connection with old friends from three decades ago. It’s been frightening as I wonder about whether or not I look as old to all of my friends as they do to me. Just to be safe, I haven’t posted a picture yet.

Most of my old friends have some kind of roots in West Texas, where I was raised in a small farming community southwest of Lubbock. It was a great place to grow up. We could ride our bikes all over town and our parents never worried about us being safe, even after dark. Neighbors helped neighbors raise each other’s kids. Teachers could paddle their students without calling an attorney first and even expect the parents to back them up. The worst and only incident of school violence I remember didn’t occur until my sophomore year when a kid pulled a knife and cut the boy he was fighting. There was no such thing as a metal detector in the hallways.

The good old days weren’t all good, though. Back in the 60’s, whites represented seventy percent of the population in our little town of 10,000. The Hispanic population made up most of the rest with the exception of a few blacks. We didn’t call them Hispanics, though. We called them “messkins,” a short, stunted kind of pejorative with not-so-subtle racial overtones. If you were using the word as a put-down, you could put a wicked spin on the inflection and say it with disdain. Some whites even referred to the Hispanics as “chili chompers,” belittling their diet as racially inferior or “wetbacks,” belittling their presumed country of origin, even if they’d been born north of the Rio Grande. It hurts me now to even write words I dared not utter in my father’s presence back then. To my parents’ credit, racial pejoratives were the same as curse words, punishable by the fear of a near-death scolding that blistered worse than any switch pulled from a tree.

The blacks and the “messkins” knew their place. If they were good at sports, they were respected on the field or the court. After the game, though, they knew where they belonged and invisible lines just weren’t crossed. The old courthouse still had separate water fountains for the whites and the “coloreds.” It was assumed, of course, that white was the standard color and anything else was a substandard and sad freak of genetic misfortune. A full century after the Emancipation Proclamation, most small town governments and even Deacon Boards hadn’t gotten the memo. We even had a “messkin” Baptist mission church in Brownfield. They still do.

I always thought First Baptist started the mission in order to reach folks who wouldn’t feel comfortable in our white church. It never occurred to me until decades later when I was able to demythologize some of my childhood memories that some of those who started the mission weren’t being altogether altruistic. They wanted to start a mission, in part, to keep the invisible lines clearly drawn; they wanted the “messkins” to remember their place.

In too many ways, nothing much has changed. In my former church, two miles from downtown Dallas in the 21st century, I once asked our Hispanic Director of Community Ministries to pray in our Sunday morning worship service. She prayed beautifully in her native tongue, the words I couldn’t understand sounding more like a symphony of praise than any prayer I knew. The next week, I got a call from an older white woman complaining that those who prayed in our church should only be allowed to pray in the language of the tithing people.

Aside from her, too many of those who made up the “tithing people” still referred to the non-English-speaking Hispanics as “those people.” I never dreamed I’d hear such profanity in the house of God. I’m so glad the tithing lady wasn’t there to welcome the first wetbacks who survived the Atlantic crossing. She’d have had to deport herself back to her very white Europe, leaving the American continent to the redskins who beat her and the other white skins to it through the Bering Sea back door centuries before.

The other day, I got an email from an old friend I haven’t seen in over thirty years. She was telling me about a friend of hers whose daughter was killed in a tragic automobile accident. My friend described how a “pickup truck with six Mexicans” came over a curb, striking the young lady and killing her instantly, just weeks shy of her graduation from a prominent university with a 4.0. My heart is broken for the young lady and her family, for a promising life that will never be.

My heart hurt, too, because of the way the accident was described. A pickup truck with “six Mexicans.” I couldn’t help but wonder. If the pickup had been carrying six whites, would my friend have bothered to make the racial distinction? I wondered, too, if she even realized she’d made the distinction. Was the pickup truck more lethal because those driving and riding in it were people of another color than hers? Did she hear what she was saying?

Old ideas usually die long, hard, slow and, even brutal deaths. Gandhi’s sandals, eyeglasses, bowl and watch were auctioned off last week for some $1.8 million. Part of what makes them so valuable is the brutal death Gandhi suffered, giving his life to help old and very profane ideas about people die.

Jesus died a brutal death, too, in no small part due to his trying to take profane ideas people have about each other to his grave with him. I wonder how long it will be until we never again refer to another person by the color of their skin, or their sexual orientation, or their political or religious ideology. Will we ever? Will we ever just refer to each other as what we truly are, brothers and sisters for whom Christ also died?

The way we treat people usually begins with what we call them, or how we speak about them in their absence. I wonder what the names of those “six Mexicans” might be, and how they felt about their role in a tragic accident. We know their skin color. Who knows their names?

Jesus loves the children. All the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. The dark-skinned Middle Eastern Jesus who spoke Aramaic loves all the children of the world and when he speaks, he calls them by name, not by color. So should we.

A Far Away Hill

2009-02-25T14:45:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday evening, Nancy and I watched a new HBO movie, “Taking Chance,” starring Kevin Bacon. It’s based on the true story of a twenty-year-old Marine private who was killed in Iraq in 2004, Chance Phelps, from Dubois, Wyoming. Bacon plays the role of Mike Strobl, the real-life Marine colonel who volunteered to escort Chance’s body back home for burial. The movie grew out of a journal that Strobl kept of the experience.

I had no idea what all went into escorting a slain soldier back home. If it was Strobl’s intent to educate us about what happens to all those young people who are otherwise just combat statistics he certainly succeeded, and then some!

I found myself being drawn into the deep sorrow and respect that accompanied the young Marine’s casket from one airport to another, from one hearse to another and then to the cemetery. As the movie draws to a close, there is one final, gut-wrenching scene where Bacon’s character stands alone, beside the casket at the cemetery. The twenty-one gun salute is over. The parents have received the American flag. Bacon stands there, speechless, as the casket seems to levitate over the black, hollow void of the empty hole.

The only noise is the sound of the wind as it blows a chain against the flag pole holding high the Stars and Stripes that Chance died to protect. Gray, dark clouds hang low over the wind-swept prairie. It’s almost as if nature is weeping, grieving the loss of such young life. Cemeteries have always seemed like lonely places. The wind never blows colder than it does after a funeral is over.

As we enter the season of Lent I find my mind being drawn into the dark void of the tomb that awaited Jesus and the sad irony that those who die for others often face such a dark, lonely resting place. Seeing “Chance” during this sacred season reminded me of a funeral I conducted for an old Marine almost exactly eight years ago. This is what I wrote the week after the funeral.

An old gospel hymn begins with these words, “On a hill far away.” Anyone born before 1970 can finish it from memory. Too bad those born since then cannot. As long as they know and never forget the meaning of the song, who cares what tune carries the words? As long as they never forget the meaning.

We buried Bill Curry this past week. I held my own at the funeral. It was just after the twenty-one-gun salute, when the stiffly starched Marine sergeant handed his widow, Jimmie, the neatly folded American flag, that I swallowed hard. Anyone who knew what that flag meant to Bill swallowed with me.

The evidence is in a scrapbook Bill kept. There he is, a stout and strong twenty-six-year-old Marine sergeant, standing atop Mt. Suribachi on February 24, 1945. He’d landed there, on Iwo Jima, with the 3rd Marine Division, done his job and then come home to raise a family.

On a hill far away, our Lord paid the price of our eternal salvation. On another hill far away, Bill and his comrades, many who never came home, paid the price of our national freedom. Both are hills most of us will never see. Nor do we have to. As long as we never forget the meaning.

Farting

2009-02-05T12:14:00.000-08:00

Only on what I consider a dare from a very close friend, who happens to be the Editor of a distinguished religious publication and whose initials are MK, do I publish the following blog. Thanks, Marv, for whatever credit or otherwise may come my way on this one. Like more and more of my blogs, it’s something of a composite of emails I’ve sent back and forth.

About a year ago, I was sitting in an airport with a friend who happens to work with the Baptist General Convention of Texas. We'd gone into a bar to get a coke. It was packed. It was humid and the air was hanging heavy. It was one of those times when, at the end of a long, hot and sweaty day, everyone was just trying to get home. One of those towns where Mexican food rules and people eat like there’s no tomorrow. While we were talking, this truly unbelievably wicked fart came wafting by. It lingered for what seemed like forever.

You know, a fart is its own form of nasty. When a fart comes along and lingers at half the speed of smell, no one has to ask, "Is that a fart?" In the real world, no one asks, “Who cut the cheese?” No one says, “Someone stepped on a duck!” No audible warning whatsoever and we were suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed by a biologic that could at least stun the enemy on any battlefield. No matter where you are, no matter the company or the country, when someone farts, everyone knows someone farted. For the record, elevators are the worst.

It finally got so bad that I had to say something and then tell my friend (name omitted for the sake of presumed innocence), I had to get some fresh air. As we were getting up, my supposedly innocent friend exclaimed out loud, so that the guilty party could at least know he or she had been sniffed out, "Someone ought to take credit for that one!"

Some months later, I’m sitting in a very nice restaurant after worship on Sunday. Our company included two people from our church and two distinguished (by that, I mean, really nice people) guests from out of town. It was a very nice place with well-dressed people. We were enjoying a wonderful conversation over a very nice meal. Whatever thoughts we had about dessert were soon to evaporate in a climate change that would make global warming jealous!

An indescribably wicked fart came wafting our way, then lingered for what seemed like forever. I put my hands up to my face, feigning a gesture of contemplation, but, solely meant for self-preservation. If a waiter had been close by with a lighter, I’m certain he could have lit the air bright orange, or worse. We all tried to carry on like nothing had happened although, unless someone was already half-embalmed, they smelled what I smelled. It was brutal. Sulfuric acid comes to mind, like in high school when we’d pour the stuff down the sink just to watch the yellow gas waft up from the drain.

Every part of me wanted to stand up and yell out loud, “Someone ought to take credit for that one!” Shouldn’t they? As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, we should “fart proudly.” Don’t do it if you aren’t willing to own it. Although, I will admit that, with older age, willing not to fart is less and less an inalienable right.

Not bad advice for this “please-bail-me-out-blame-anyone-but-me” culture. I’ve thought about asking my church to apply for federal bailout funds. I’ve told them I’d be willing to set my salary cap at $500,000. A silent but deadly response is all I've received.

The bottom line, no pun intended, is that there are too many hot-gassed fart-heads running things these days - and not enough willing to take credit for their own stink!

Perfect Mate

2009-02-03T09:01:00.000-08:00

More often than not, I learn what I believe by listening to myself explain it to others. There’s almost certainly a name for that disorder, I’m just not familiar with it since I’ve never heard myself use it.

Over coffee the other day, I heard myself telling another man what may well be the most significant thing I’ve learned about marriage, indeed, about life from marriage. In our youthful days, we tend to think of marriage as a point of arrival. A point in time in which the person who will make us completely happy finally wises up and decides to share the privilege of our life’s journey with us. Therein lie the seeds of the destruction of most marriages.

In truth, marriage is not a point of arrival. It is a point of departure. The traditional wedding vows hint at that. Most of us need more than a hint. We need a two-by-four between the eyes to get our attention.

Secondly, marriage is not the completion of a journey to discover our perfect mate for life. Marriage is the opportunity, if not the commitment, to learn what it means to become the perfect mate. The reason our mates often piss us off so badly is because they’re just doing their job, giving us the chance to grow up. A process which can only begin once someone has demonstrated to us how much growing up we are yet to achieve. In time, children come along to take up any slack in the process our mates started, the process of learning to face our own immaturity and childishness. That’s another blog, though.

Most marriages won’t survive the unrealistic expectations two people carry to the altar and then spend their best energies putting on each other, starting a week or maybe two after the honeymoon. We get lots of hints throughout our lives that no other person in this world can make us happy. Again, hints rarely work. Too often, over fifty percent of the time in first marriages, even among Christians, it takes the two-by-four of watching of our mate’s butt clear the door on the way to anywhere not with us to get our attention.

Now and then, someone is fortunate enough to actually get to the altar having already learned not to demand of anyone what only God can give the human soul: joy, and its third cousin twice removed, happiness. The fact is, if we don’t arrive at the altar fundamentally at peace with ourselves, we’ll more likely than not spend the rest of our lives trying our best to make the unfortunate soul who put their clothes in our closet miserable with us. Misery doesn’t love company because misery can’t love, only destroy. Like C.S. Lewis, I think that hell will be the place where those who choose to go there discover just how alone they’ve always been. Is there any worse hell than loneliness? If we aren’t good company at the altar, there’s nothing our mate can do to change that, other than prove to us what we never could accept about ourselves, our own lonely misery.

That’s because, long before marriage exposes any weakness in our mate, it exposes us for who we are. Our mate’s inability to make us happy simply provides the best reflection of our personal misery. If, in fact, if we did make a poor choice in a life’s mate, that only tells us more about ourselves than it does the one we chose to marry.

The corollary must also be true. If our choice of mates exposes us for who we are then I must be a much better man than I give myself credit for being. My wife is the best human being, the best Christian and the best friend I know, and, as she grows older, more and more the most beautiful person I ever laid eyes on (Thanks, Buddy Griffeth!). I must be something myself, right?

Now and then, I find myself listening to what I was saying out loud at the altar. Truth is, I wasn’t listening to me. I was too busy getting a buzz out of listening to Nancy spout her undying pledge of faithfulness and love to me. Wow! What a buzz! I can still feel it when I take the time to listen again. I’ve been learning since then that I wasn’t having an out-of-body experience at the altar. I was there, too. I should have been listening to me, too!

Marriage offers a much broader life lesson, too. Life’s happiness is not shaped out of what others give us. It is shaped within, out of the unspent fuel used to give ourselves away to others. Joy and happiness are the soul energy that flow back to us as we’ve worked at being the best person we can be, no matter how truly rotten others may prove to be. God’s greatest gifts come in the form of those God sends our way who are patient enough to join our journey with us and who keep giving us one opportunity after another to grow up.

A Letter To Old Friends

2009-01-21T19:15:00.000-08:00

First, I'll never think the same about church the rest of my life because of the influence you had on me. I suppose there is a way to read that humorously. I mean in it all sincerity. You four men personalized integrity, character, patience, hope, love and friendship, indeed, the Spirit of Jesus, in ways that few pastors ever experience. I was blessed to know and will always be blessed to count you as friends in the journey.

You challenged my theology and were, at the same time, willing to listen to my hair-brained ideas about God and church. You challenged me, more by example than by words, to reach for a level of excellence that rarely inspires most people in my profession. Cliff Temple was always an interesting blend of outworn carpets and dreams of excellence in the same place. Not many places you find both of those co-existing.

I had a great meeting this afternoon with the Chair of our Church Council. Over and over again I found myself referring to lessons I learned at Cliff Temple as touchstones for the new conversation we're having here. I find myself extremely disinterested in issues of governance - which is a very good thing - because these folks are very protective of their concept of a "lay-led" church. What they want and what I don't want seem to be a very good fit right now. For example: our church's process for selecting people to leadership positions is very fluid, if not loose, right now. A new man (a very good man) was added to the business committee and I found about it after the fact. That kind of thing. I'm just not worried about that anymore. Maybe I should be - I just don't have any heart for it anymore and these people know that and seem very happy about it.

Nancy and I miss our old house - which we still need to sell. Sam desperately misses his great big back yard. We miss our friends and being just around the corner from people. We love our new home, very much. You've heard me talk about the deer a lot. We're surprised at how attached we've become to them and how important it is to feed them. There are wooded hills in our window and we're anticipating a wonderful Spring of bluebonnets. I have to tell you that, honestly, I don't miss looking out my office window that fronted the back alley of Jefferson. I still can't believe God has blessed us with this opportunity - an incredible mix of what we believe in about church and our love for nature and animals at the same time. What more could I ask?

I'm learning to forgive - and to let go. I was very surprised to discover that a great deal of the forgiving I had to do was waiting on me until I got here. The two or three months we had in Dallas after I resigned were not nearly as difficult as the two or three months after I got here. I know it began to worry Nancy a great deal that I seemed stuck. And, I was. I didn't know why and, honestly, I don't know why now. Maybe someday I'll understand it all - you know, better, by and by. All I do know is that about two weeks ago I began to awaken to a new day in my life.

My latest blog, "Worth It," was my effort to express that. Those things I talk about in that blog are not just good memories. They are touchstones. They are mile markers along the road that remind me that the best things we do are often the things that, at the time, don't register as that significant. They are also places I go to touch in my heart that remind me that, when you love people as much as I always will many of the CT folks that let me into their lives, they are always with you - no matter where the road leads.

I've learned to accept the fact that, with some people at CT, I really blew it - more in little things along the way than in any one big thing. There were those who, for their own petty reasons, needed to hurt someone and I was convenient. I also made some huge leadership mistakes. I can see them now so clearly that I shudder to think how blind I could have been to them at the time.

I'm learning not to beat myself up so much - to learn from my mistakes - and to find some way of at least wanting to bless those who hurt me. Jesus' words on the night of the last supper haunt me when I'm unforgiving: "On the night he was betrayed, he took the bread and broke it . . .." I'm not to the point that I want to give those who sought my destruction a plaque at a banquet. But, I'm making progress. And, I've decided that, in this life, we can't ask for much more than progress - especially if it's in the right direction.

My prayer now is that someday I will love myself as much as Nancy loves me, which is the closest I think I'll ever come to knowing the love of Jesus in this life. She is, indeed, the presence of Christ to me. I'm not there yet, either. But, like the deer who come from hundreds of yards away when we put out the corn in the dusk of the day, I've sniffed the good thing in the wind and have turned my face that direction.

I listen to good music (secular and Christian, if there is actually a difference). I try to find a way of meeting someone new each week. I listen especially for those who seem to have lost their way. I'm making a place for myself at the Boerne Grill, where the older men meet for coffee every Thursday morning (go figure!). I thrill when I hear a nine-year-old boy say, "I like Grace Fellowship because I don't feel dumb when I talk there."

I try to say good and biblical words on Sunday. I try to stay true to the only Jesus I know. We had 58 a week ago Sunday - a record high. That means a lot and, at the same time, doesn't mean what it used to - if you know what I mean.

If that's even a small part of my contribution to the Kingdom - then, well, Thanks Be to God!

Thank you - for all you will always mean to me.

I love you all very much.

Worth It

2009-01-16T12:50:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been having an email exchange with a good friend. He and I re-established a college-era relationship over the past ten years. He stood by Nancy and me during some very difficult times. In an effort to be understanding and compassionate, he made the comment that only I could know whether the total experience of my last pastorate was worth the painful departure that brought it to an end. Though it’s a much larger conversation than this space allows and with some editorial changes to protect the privacy of the unnamed, this is what I said in response.

It was worth it. It was worth it for the little four-year-old Hispanic boy who sat in Santa's lap in our fellowship hall one Saturday morning ten years ago and, when asked by Santa, "What do you want for Christmas?" he responded, "Love." Santa asked, "Who from?" The little boy said, "Anyone." Then, he disappeared, unnamed into the crowd, leaving us to forever wonder what came of his wish.

It was worth it to have Nancy plop a little diapered orphan in my lap in Riga, Latvia, the first orphan I ever held, and hear her say (because she saw my anxiety), "Get with the program, Schmucker!" It was worth it for that little girl to wet on my left forearm and find out that a little pee never killed anyone. It was it worth to hear ten-year-old Olga, taking my face tightly between her two tender little palms, and say while laughing, in her native Latvian, “I love you!” It was worth it for Inars and Rinalds, Liva and Madara and all the orphans we met (and whose faces appear to me every single day in deep places in my soul) and the incredible, truly Christian, servants of God who minister to them when we aren't there.

It was worth it to see 75 kids come to our building every day and get After School care and tutoring.

It was worth it to know an elderly patriot, who fought on Iwo Jima in 1945 and who finally laid his undeserved guilt down about that in my office just before he died five years ago.

It was worth it to stand in that pulpit and hear some of the best music I ever heard in my life and then feel the incredible challenge of preaching.

It was worth it to be there to walk with dozens of other people whose marriages ended in divorce and to be able to hold their hand and pray with them when human words just weren't adequate.

It was worth it to go the VA Hospital every single day the last two weeks of an old man's life. He was a member at Cliff Temple. No one knew him, though. His wife had Alzheimer’s and since they’d joined the church five years before in absentia, they’d never been able to attend. It seems that I was the only one who would hold his hand. It was worth it to hear this man who had always believed tell of how he was scared of dying, and to be able to know that something I said seemed to comfort him, and encourage him that it was OK to go ahead and let go. That when he let go on this side, Jesus would be there to catch him on the other side.

It was worth it to be there that day in my office when a very successful and very bright forty-something dad discovered that believing and doubting are one in the same. Worth it to hear him say to me that, if I could have doubts about God and still be a pastor, then he could be a believer. Worth it to then baptize him and his ten-year-old son together in the same baptistery soon after.

It was worth it to meet, know and walk with scores of others who will always rate as some of the finest human beings and Christians I've ever known in my life. To have them hold me accountable to my own preaching and then also walk together with me when our faith got stretched to the breaking point, only to discover that's what happens when your faith is growing, not dying.

It was worth it to be close enough to your office to have lunch with you and establish a friendship that will last a lifetime.

It was worth it to discover, on what was nearly my death bed, what it means to have friends, friends who will never, ever abandon you. Worth it to hear Nancy say to me through the fog, "You're going to be OK."

It was worth it. And, that's also why it will always hurt at least a little. If it didn't hurt, it didn't mean anything. That it hurts reminds me how important it was. In time, I'll remember the things that made it worth it more than the things that hurt. I truly do believe that.

Blessed

2008-12-26T08:55:00.000-08:00

It never seems quite like Christmas unless I see “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the 1946 James Stewart Americana classic, at least once. Though I first saw it over two decades ago, I’m still caught off guard by the power of the closing scene, the classic image of someone awakening to the life that had been happening to them while they were making other plans.

George Bailey had lived virtually his entire adult life wishing he’d found a way of getting out of Bedford Falls. He just knew he’d lost out on the life that could have been, the life to which he felt entitled. Instead, he’d been stuck in his Podunk hometown, taking care of the Building and Loan he inherited, while his younger brother, Harry, went out and saw the world, making a big name for himself at the same time. All along, while he thought life was happening somewhere else, George was busy taking care of the poor and disadvantaged, making more friends than money. In the end, he realized that a man with friends is truly the richest man in town.

The movie came on the other night, just about the time of the closing scene. So did the tears, but, this time, for a different reason. For perhaps the first time ever the movie had the impact its original author may have intended six decades ago.

As I watched all of George’s friends come to him at the time of his greatest need, I realized that the approaching New Year brings to a close my own “wonderful life” moment. A moment that stretches all the way back to July 7, 2007, when Nancy rushed me to the emergency room and I nearly died from a liver infection. A moment that stretched, like a bad dream that wouldn’t end, over the next 18 months. At the same time as Nancy walked with me through a long, hard recovery, we also suffered the loss of our church home of ten years. It was truly a bad dream from which, in many ways, I feel that I’m just now awakening.

This year, perhaps more than ever in my life, I’ve grown to realize how I must be one of the richest people in the world. In our time of greatest need, Nancy and I discovered like never before what it means to have friends. Friends who will come from hundreds of miles just to stand by you. Friends who stand faithfully by, even while you are not, literally, conscious enough to know of their presence. Friends who call and write and come by unannounced bearing gifts of food and wine. Friends who will listen to your story again and again, not because they haven’t already memorized its every detail but because they know how badly you need to tell it. How do you measure the value of friends like that?

Yesterday, I felt little two-year-old Adeline’s fingers grasp my left index finger as we said grace over the Christmas feast of glazed ham, medium-rare beef tenderloin, sweet potato casserole, black olives and home-pickled okra, broccoli and rice, hot rolls and iced tea, all spread out before us. It was nothing less than a parable of the sea of blessing this year has brought. I felt like a Pilgrim, without the hat.

Last night, as we said goodbye to family in the driveway, I looked up into the sky. Venus burned like a laser through the South Texas night sky, its ancient stones from the beginning of time reflecting the white light of tomorrow morning’s sun. The light that has come unbidden into my world, along with the blessing of being able to see it.

As this morning dawned, the day after Christmas, I took out the trash. No need in holding onto yesterday’s rubbish. Time to kick it to the curb and move on. New gifts wait to be given, and received. I turned back toward the house and looked up. Wispy-gray clouds of the new morning were sailing by in the warm breeze, carried by winds they neither created nor controlled. I felt something warm inside, too. What was that? What is it a new day dawning, a new light coming into the world, into my heart?

The deer came for the morning corn, just outside our bedroom window, too many to count. Sam and Beau pressed their rubber-black noses to the cold glass, wondering who these new friends might be in their world. Yellow-bellied Finches were feeding just above the deer’s heads, feasting on the seeds we gave them just for the privilege of watching them eat.

As these miracles of nature paraded in front of me, mocking all the times I’ve worried about how I’d pay the bills, I wondered how it was that I could have ended up in this house, in this place, on this day. Just one year ago I fretted myself sleepless as the long winter days stretched out unendingly in front of us, wondering where we’d land when all the dust settled.

Now, aside from Venus, Sam and Beau, the deer, the birds of the air, the little-girl-two-year-old fingers wrapped around mine and four generations of one family sitting around the same table filled to overflow, we have a new, first-generation church family to serve and to love. Nancy has a new, invigorating job, something to stretch her personally and professionally. I have Nancy and she has me. The boys are coming in just two days. I have them all to myself, for a whole week! All of that, not to mention the friends we have, from coast to coast. People who don’t measure us in terms of anything but the inestimable value of the laughter and tears we’ve shared together, and know we’ll share again.

Will I have all of this one year from now? Who knows? What I do know is what and who I have in this moment, right now. Is this me, standing in my world, with more blessings than I can count? Is God determined to love me, to bless me, no matter what?

Life is what happens to us while we’re making other plans, or while we’re regretting a past we can’t change or fretting a future we can’t control. Life-giving gratitude replaces soul-killing fear in the moment we stop to see the smiles in the faces of those who are genuinely glad to see us when we show up, those willing to hold our hands and share the feast. People God gave us, in this moment, just to be our friends. Nancy and I turned to each other last night just before we slipped off for a night’s rest. We said thanks to Eternal God, ever-present. Then, to each other, we said, “We are blessed.”

Red

2008-12-12T11:50:00.000-08:00

That’s virtually all I know about my maternal grandfather, his nickname, Red. His given name was Harold Eugene Lockwood. I’m guessing that he got the nickname from the color of his hair, although I’ve only ever seen two pictures of him and they were both in black and white, from sometime just before World War II. In one, he’s wearing his oil field khaki shirt and pants and he’s fairly unkempt.

Freeze-framed, he’s standing all alone in some long forgotten oil field where he made his living. The squint in his eyes speaks of a sunny, probably blistering hot and muggy, Gulf Coast summer day. When I let my eyebrows grow unchecked for not too long, they are bushy and slightly reddish, just like I’m told Red’s were. Even though I never met him, there is solid physical and even emotional evidence in my life that the man did exist.

When I was a little boy, my dad took me with him from time to time to the oil fields of his career so often that I can almost smell the picture where Red made his living, too. Now and then, when I pump gas into my car, I literally smell my family history.

Red died of an intestinal blockage after a botched appendectomy when my mother was only eight or nine, the same malady that later claimed my mother’s life when she was only 54. Her dad, Red, is buried in Jennings, Louisiana, in a family plot. The sadness of his premature death cast a dark shadow over my mother’s life, some of which she passed along to my siblings and me. All of which has made me more sensitive to the fact that it’s not just the lives of those who went before us that made our lives what they are. Their deaths, too, though unknown to our personal experience, also shaped our character in ways we cannot ever know.

Three of the gospel writers, Mark, Luke and John, tell of us Jesus’ birth only in the starkest, minimalist kind of ways. I like John’s best, “the word became flesh” version. It’s mystical and even mysterious, the way I know God best, more in terms of questions that demand faith than in terms of absolute answers that require nothing but the presumption of human intelligence. It’s Matthew alone who goes into great detail about Jesus’ family tree. It’s pretty boring reading, unless a person looks deeper at what Matthew is giving us other than
a list of names we’ll never pronounce correctly.

Matthew is telling us about where Jesus came from in the physical, biological sense. He’s telling us that, though Jesus may have been born of a virgin, he wasn’t born in a biological vacuum. Jesus had roots in the same human family we do. Which is at least part of the point Matthew must have been trying to make. In Jesus, Eternal God grafted himself into the human family tree, the very fallen one he created, so that he might graft his eternal life into ours. Go figure!

All of which means that, somewhere back in our human lineage, our genes make connection with Jesus’. The blood Jesus shed on the cross was red, just like ours. Matthew’s not just giving us a list of weird names to pole vault on the way to the exciting stuff that happened in a manger. Matthew is telling us that we have a human family history, even with God.

It’s really sad that some of us know more about the donkey Mary rode into Bethlehem than we know of the history she was carrying in her womb. We weren’t born in a vacuum. Just like his birth, Jesus’ suffering on the darkest levels of human existence and his very excruciating human death played one of the most profoundly formative roles in the shaping of our lives even before they began, whether we believe it or accept it or not.

Here’s a mystery worth exploring. We all have a history with God! The only question is whether we’ll take the time to know it and the possibilities that our history with God opens for our eternal futures. Christmas is one of the best chances we have each year to rethink the mystery of our very human family tree, and the color red in it.

Truth, In Blue Eyes

2008-12-05T11:04:00.000-08:00

If you were to ask me why I love my wife, Nancy, as much as I do there are many answers I could give. I love her eyes. Gentle, ocean blue that invite you in. They see right through you like lasers and love you all the way through at the same time. I can’t count the times her eyes changed my view of the world, of myself and of my place in this world, all at the same time.

I love her laugh. She has more than one. I love them all. I love the one that comes from deep within, especially when we’ve both seen something that makes us both laugh in sync.

I love her body. OK, this is getting personal. But, my wife’s body is a daily reminder that God finds joy in giving us good pleasure. The first time I saw her she was walking away from me and I’ve been in love ever since. What a body! Interesting how age has only made it better. How someone looks to you has everything to do with how you feel about them. I’ve known people that, on face value, would be measured pure ugly, until they smiled or opened their mouth. The smile melted the ugly and, like hot wax in a potter’s hand, reshaping their figure into the most fetching, intriguing physique.

It happens the other way, too. I know people who, on the outside, are reasonably if not spectacularly beautifully, like Sports-Illustrated- SwimSuit edition beautiful, until they open their mouths and expose their inner character.

My wife is beautiful, because of what I see and what only my heart sees – and hears. Tonight she told me the truth about something I was doing wrong. She nailed me about how I was spending too much time worrying about lost opportunities of the past instead of giving myself away to the opportunities that were lying at my very feet. Dang! I got angry and defensive. She didn’t give an inch. She kept pressing the issue.

Down inside, I knew she was right, long before I admitted it. But, she didn’t give up and what little integrity I have when I’m stripped down to my bones was begging for relief. About four hours later, I told her that she was right. I told her again how much I love her. Because she tells me the truth.

I went on to say that, because she tells me the truth when I’m wrong, it makes it possible for me to believe her when she says she loves me, too, or, that I preached a great sermon, or wrote a great piece, or, that she loves me just because, go and freaking figure, just because. Go figure!

All I know is, when I’m with my wife, in a crowd or all alone under the sheets, I’m with truth in the flesh. Truth, in blue eyes. I can live with that – for the rest of my life and then some!

Mashed Potatoes

2008-12-03T08:17:00.000-08:00

Cameron called from L.A. this past Saturday afternoon asking for my recipe for mashed potatoes. He wanted to make dinner for his girlfriend. It never occurred to me in all the years I thought I was just making dinner that someone was paying attention. Maybe that’s the way parenting happens.

We think we’re just doing the laundry, or paying the bills, or mowing the lawn, or arguing with our wife (or husband, as it may be), or complaining about how things went at the office when we think the kids can’t hear, or, if we are fortunate, reading the Bible and saying our prayers at day’s end no matter how crappy the day. All the while, we’re showing the best students we’ll ever have the recipes for managing life, taking care of business, maneuvering the mundane, dealing with success and failure as well as the give-and-take disappointments of daily life, not to mention how to handle conflict and respond to impossible people.

Most often, our kids just go on down the road, concocting the family recipes for all of the above from blind memory. It’s not until they get married and start having their own children that we begin to recognize the recipes on the plates they set before us at family gatherings. Only rarely do they ever call, from 2,000 miles and two time zones away, to ask us the exact recipe.

Of course, part of me is honored. I make dang good mashed potatoes if I say so. The trick, aside from proper proportions of salt, pepper and butter and from not cooking the potatoes too long so that they become mush instead of mash, is found in warming the butter before the mashing starts. Putting cold butter on hot potatoes cools them off too much before you serve them. Salt and butter to taste all you want, just don’t serve mashed potatoes cold. Hot mashed anything tastes better than cold potatoes. (I won’t even mention the unpardonable sin of instant potatoes.)

What honors me, humbles and scares me all at the same time is in knowing that, deep in his soul, Cameron has other recipes. Most of those he’ll make from memory, without even thinking, much less calling for directions.

That’s where faith comes in. Train up a child in the way he should go . . . we are promised (Proverbs 22:6), and in the long run, the recipe will pay off. I trust that word. That, though some of my life is a recipe for disaster, there was a bigger part of it that had something to do with calling on Jesus when I didn’t know how to handle the mix of ingredients life handed me. Cameron saw me pray, heard me pray, even heard me cry as I prayed and saw me cry, too, when the music touched me deep in my soul and heard and saw me laugh at life’s stupidities. He also saw me sing in church, stay awake during the sermon and even heard me brag when George Mason knocked one out of the park, which he did virtually every single time I heard him preach. How in the heck does he do that? What’s the recipe?

Anyway, Cam called. He wanted to make dinner in his cramped apartment for the girl that is the center of his world right now. I guess you could say that I was the unseen guest at the table. Isn’t the One who knows the best recipes always the uninvited guest, no matter what the recipe?

Thanks be to God!

Responses

2008-12-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

Occasionally, someone responds to my blog on the blog site itself. Most of the responses I get come to my email address from people who want to say something but don’t want it for public consumption with their name on it.

Here are some of the responses I’ve already gotten to “Crunch Time,” yesterday’s blog. They are anonymous, of course. But, I hope they reach even deeper into someone’s heart.
One minister writes: "As I’ve thought about your experience over the months, I have been reminded of the many times when I did not receive the respect or authority that I thought I deserved. Sometimes I suffered “quietly,” and other times I spoke my “mind.” Sometimes I wouldn’t/couldn’t forgive myself for what I said or did. Other times I couldn’t/wouldn’t forgive others for their injustice or pain inflicted on me. I still bear the wounds and scars from some experiences, even some from my years (serving as a minister). I ask my self occasionally, what value is there in holding on to these memories? What need does “rehashing” the memories meet in me? I have been ordained 50yrs, and I still wrestle with some of my dragons. But God is gracious, and slowly with the help of my therapist and others, the healing continues. Whatever growth or healing has come, it has come with the help of others."

A man who rarely ever attends church anymore, a very sincere and gentle soul writes: “I’m writing you with tears running down my face as your words from “Crunch Time” are seared in my heart. I’m just beginning to realize the depth of pain and hurt that you have experienced recently and it hurts me too. I know what you mean…it’s so bewildering at times how hateful, how cruel and how un-Godly some of God’s people can be. What’s that all about? Those confrontations and conversations that keep coming back to haunt us are so dangerous. With God’s grace they will fade away soon, and replacing those thoughts with “anything worthy of praise” will bring us God’s peace. You said it all in your writing… “Blessings for me to enjoy over and over, every time I choose to think of them”. Yes, it’s our choice. And don’t you know God smiles with love every time we make the right choice?”

Just thought some of you might find encouragement in their words. I know they touched me deeply. In my experience, the institutional church has done as much to wound as it has done to heal. By the grace of God, I will to be a part of a healing community.

Crunch Time

2008-12-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

A week ago Sunday, November 23, I preached from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things . . . and the God of peace shall be with you (4:8-9). Suddenly, even as I was preaching, Jesus and I started having our own private moment. I heard myself talking. What was going on inside of my head was so much louder.

The apostle Paul was in prison when he wrote those words. He was facing imminent death. He was facing all of that specifically because he’d been faithful to what he believed to be the call of God on his life. I thought I was being faithful, too, when I served Cliff Temple. What some of those people did and said to me is, in my opinion, simply unconscionable, not to mention un-Christian. Their words still haunt me. Oddly enough, I think some of them would take pleasure in knowing that their words still cause me misery.

Now and then, those words come back to mind. I find myself going back over the conversations word for word, arguing in my mind with these people, telling them off, saying the things I wish I’d thought to say then. As though, even if I could out-argue them, it would have changed them or the outcome!

The other day I was walking my dogs when we came upon a twelve-point buck. He was a phenomenal animal, beautiful, excellent in every way, just pure beauty on the hoof. Just thinking about him brings a smile to my face. The next morning, Nancy called across the house to tell me that we had deer in our new backyard, some twenty, all told. I went outside to put out some corn. It’s been a long hard drought for these animals; they’re starving.

One of the deer, a spectacularly beautiful Axis doe, came right up to me and ate the corn out of my hand, even let me pet her on the smooth of her neck. I could hear the crunch of the corn in her mouth. I stood there transfixed.

Crunch time, even as the deer slobber wet my open palm, was also when the words of scripture came back to me. “Whatsoever things are true, honorable, right, pure, lovely . . . if there is any excellence and if anything is worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.” The man who first wrote those words had a choice. In his deplorable state, he could have had those mental arguments all over again with those who had treated him so unjustly. Or, he could think the good thoughts. The only real power he had was to choose his thoughts. The only thing that hung in the balance was his peace of mind, if not his sanity.

Walking along with my dogs, just after we passed the buck, when I started having that same old argument that I’ll never win in my head, I looked up. Across the way, the leaves were exploding in reds and yellows and oranges, all framed in the beauty of the low-hanging gray fall sky. Then, even as the deer crunched the corn from my hand, I thought of all the blessings that are mine from the hand of the Father. Blessings he’d given me when it was crunch time. Blessings for me to enjoy over and over, every time I choose to think of them, instead of the little, petty, painful thoughts that others would choose for me.

It worked. With each passing moment, as I think the pure thoughts, there is less time to think the painful ones. Less room in my brain or in my memory for the sewage others flushed onto me, for reasons that are their own. With each passing moment, as I think the pure thoughts, well, the God of peace comes to abide with me, and heal my mind and my heart.

Just thought I’d share this with you, in case it’s crunch time in your life, too. Look around at all the excellence and purity and beauty God has put in your world. Let me know if it makes the same difference for you it did for me.

Free Peanuts

2008-10-20T11:19:00.001-07:00

Nancy and I have spent a lot of time on Southwest lately, commuting to and from our soon-to-be new home just outside of San Antonio. It’s fifty-five minutes down, fifty-five back. We’ve done it so many times now that very shortly I expect the flight attendants to call me by name.

Yesterday, I didn’t know the flight attendant but I knew the routine. The plane was packed and while we were waiting to “push back,” everyone was making their last cell phone call or digging out something to read for the flight. In short, everyone was pretty much consumed with their own stuff. All the while the attendant was regurgitating the security information, how to buckle a seat belt and even how to inflate the life vest in case of a water evacuation. I’ve always figured that if I needed to know how to inflate a life vest while flying from San Antonio to Dallas, I’d have greater problems than a life vest would remedy.

Anyway – the one thing that stood out during the security briefing was that no one was listening. I found the routine irritating myself. Aside from the fact that the intercom was cranked up to a decibel level that would compete with both 737 engines, the attendant was talking so fast that he sounded like a 45 rpm record ramped up to 78. If you don’t know what that means, you’re too young to appreciate why loud noises bother me more than they used to.

For another thing, it sounded like the attendant had licked the microphone while it was ice cold and his tongue stuck to it. Either that, or the mic had been surgically implanted inside one of his cheeks. His lingo was absolutely indistinguishable. All blubbed out from rote memory. Loud, way too fast and fuzzy. If he was saying anything important it was lost in translation. Even he seemed hopelessly disinterested in his own lecture. And, no one was listening.

I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s how my sermons must sound to some people. Loud, way too fast and fuzzy. Not that what is being said isn’t important, just that the competition for attention is too great, people tend to be self-absorbed and no sense of urgency is grabbing anyone’s heart beyond the need for something temporarily distracting from the boredom of routine. When I’m speaking I can’t help but wonder if anyone is hearing, much less listening.

I drove by a church the other day and the marquee read, “In Christ, we are high priests.” Aside from the fact I’m a Christian, I’m also seminary trained and yet that reading on the church marquee bored me stiff. If there was ever a greater waste of money in the kingdom of God than that spent on church marquees, I don’t know what it is. For the unchurched, church marquees like the one mentioned above must read like internal memos from a high-tech engineering company, the language foreign, the meaning mysteriously irrelevant, something like the noise that comes over an intercom just before someone passes out free peanuts.

I get in trouble with folks now and then because I don’t preach like a preacher. I rather enjoy just talking as though I’m one of the people, which I am. I don’t like preacher tones and preacher words. I just can’t imagine spending my life’s energy saying things that only sound like I’m regurgitating from rote internal memos that only a few understand. It’s truly frightening how many people go to church every Sunday and say “amen” to stuff they’ve heard all their lives, regurgitated unthinkingly by preachers who may be heard but not listened to. Yet, at the same time, those same people tend to regard as heresy anything said different than the last ten thousand lectures and, sometimes, even if it’s just said differently and even if it all ceased being relevant to them decades ago. Why is it that some church people need so badly to be reassured of truth even they no longer accept as meaningful and for which there is not one shred of evidence that their lives are transformed by hearing it?

I want what I say to make a difference. All the rest is just marquee gobbledy-gook. Don’t we all have better things to do than just gobble down free peanuts?

Rough Draft

2008-10-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

It all started at the dinner table over a conversation about the potato fish. If you haven’t heard of the potato fish, not to worry. Apparently there is no such thing. I didn’t know that when I asked, “What’s a potato fish?” The question was natural enough. We’d just finished our Miso soup, Chinese honey shrimp and brown rice when the subject of Jake’s unfinished science project came up. Sterling had been helping him with it earlier and was now suggesting that, in order to create a fish that demonstrated all the evolutionary developments of the fish in an anatomically correct manner, a potato would make a good main frame.

“Evolution?” I asked. “Your school allows you to ponder that possibility?” I told him that I have friends whose children attend private Christian schools where evolution is downplayed, even mocked, as nothing more than heresy. To which Sterling replied, “In the debate over evolution vs. creationism, all I know is that God created all that is. It doesn’t matter to me how he did it.”

That opened the floodgate on all kinds of theological ponderings, with a seventh grader and senior leading the way, with their parents and Nancy and me watching from the galley more than anything. We talked about predestination and Calvinism, about Roger Williams and about the omniscience of God. Holding one end of an unwrapped straw to his left eye while pointing down its length to illustrate, Sterling speculated that, while we mortals see time as a linear continuum, God is not so limited. Seeing from outside our limited perspective, God has something more like a three dimensional view of all time, seeing every second that ever was and ever will be as though all time is happening right now.

By this time, I was looking for a way to excuse myself from the table before I embarrassed myself and asked another question like, “What’s a potato fish?” That’s when Jake, the seventh grader, broke in. I’d said something about God’s intention to redeem all of his creation when Jake suggested, “Maybe, to God, we are all like a rough draft, the piece of paper he never throws away.”

Nancy and I looked at each other, our jaws dropping in amazement. I sat there humbled in the presence of such profound insight and grace perspective, already bearing hopeful fruit in the tender hearts and minds of another generation.

Rough drafts? The piece of paper God never throws away. A work in progress, all of our lives. We’re the ones who define ourselves by where we are on a continuum, in infancy, youth, middle and old age. We’re the ones who too soon write ourselves and others off as being too young or too old to do this or that. If these two young men represent the generation that will take the torch of kingdom leadership we are passing to them, then we need to get busy passing it faster. There is great, wonderful hope for the future with minds and hearts like that sitting at the table of communion.

In the meantime, since these two young men will be listening to my sermons, I’ll be putting in more time on the rough drafts of what I say. I’ll also be celebrating, with Jake and Sterling, that we are all works in progress as well as the pieces of paper God never, ever will throw away. We’ll walk humbly together in the presence of the creating and redeeming God as we watch the impact of God’s grace evolve all around us and in us. I’m not a finished work, no matter how old I am, but, indeed, a rough draft, the piece of paper God never will throw away.

The Substance of Softness

2008-10-03T09:45:00.001-07:00

One terribly sad day in the mid-60’s, when I was about ten, in a family just one block over from ours, a man left his wife and three sons for another man. My parents had been close to this family so it was particularly devastating for them. Remember, this was the mid-‘60’s and it was small town West Texas. Divorce, for any reason, was a huge scandal. Back then, two people who were miserably married just tended to stick it out no matter who it destroyed for them to stay together hating each other. For a man to come out of the closet as gay and leave his wife was the unspeakable scandal and unpardonable sin all wrapped up as one.

I’ve tried the best I can to figure out why it was that, at such a tender age, I didn’t grow up hating gays because of that. Those three abandoned boys were some of my best friends. My parents and others tried to help soften the social blow for them by giving the family a place to land. Soon, though, because of the scandal and to make a living, their mom had to move what was left of the family out of town to a large city where she could start over. In all of that, though, I have no memory of my parents saying anything hateful or vengeful of that man. I knew they were heartbroken, but they didn’t use that as an excuse to belittle him in my eyes. If anything, I remember them being sad that a family they dearly loved had been irrevocably broken.

Some years later, one of my closest friends, the valedictorian of our senior class, confessed to me and another friend that he was gay. It was in the same small town, in 1972. I remember the night we sat in Karl’s Volkswagen van just outside my driveway and heard Jerry’s midnight confession. I didn’t understand homosexuality. I did know Jerry and his family like they were kin, which, because of church, they were. I had heard him pray and share Christ with other people. I was confused, for certain. But, I never remember thinking less of him because he was gay. The only solid example of how to respond to him was the one my parents had already given. Jerry has since devoted his life as a research physician to treating and finding a cure for AIDS. Only God knows which of us has done more good for humanity with the gifts we were given.

I’ve gotten in trouble with church people before not because, as their pastor, I failed to say more about our responsibility to orphans and widows, but because I refused to hammer gays about how they were going to hell for their sexual orientation. It has troubled me deeply that those, in the church, who oppose homosexuality tend to do so while quoting a very selected couple of scriptures and do so with a venomous anger, something like you’d see in a frightened wild animal trapped in a corner. Aside from the fact that there are far more orphans and widows than there are gays, there are three reasons why I just can’t slam that judicial hammer down on the pulpit.

My parents’ response to a hurting family was one reason. Long before I knew the theological meaning of grace, my parents modeled it for me, teaching me how to live it before I could define it. Both of my parents had been raised in one of the most conservative and racist regions of the world. Yet, something turned them toward grace instead of exclusivity. Whatever that was (like Jesus?) seems to have rubbed off on me. The older I get, the less I’m interested in excluding anyone from church or my life because they aren’t oriented to this world the same way I am. Frankly, my sense of orientation about lots of things in my own faith struggle gets so wobbly at times it scares the dark side of eternity out of me.

It’s always easier to judge homosexuality when it’s just an issue, like divorce or whatever. When “gay” is someone you know and love, a person with a name and eyes and a beating heart, it transforms “gay” from an issue into a human being, one for whom Christ also died. Some of my dearest friends are gay. Strange how the more friends of any kind you have the less possible it becomes to judge anyone for anything. Is judgmentalism a function of loneliness, something we can only do in isolation? Is community a cure for judgment?

For another thing, I don’t get to judge who goes to heaven. As someone recently said of another issue, whether Jews will go to heaven or hell, “I’m not the gatekeeper.” I only have the privilege of standing at heaven’s gate and inviting others to join me as I hope to enter myself, not judging how people got to that gate or who God allows to enter.

I got an email from a gay man this past week, a friend whose name and story I know well. He is hurting badly because of the way a church slammed the hammer down on him. I reassured him that people behave differently in groups, even at church, than they ever do as individuals. (See Scott Peck, “People of the Lie,” read the Bible or, attend church regularly). Sadly, I have no answers for his dilemma. I have no church where he lives to recommend to him as a place to worship, openly, as he is.

I share in his sufferings only because I, too, have felt the church’s judgment of what some call my “softness” toward sinners. Some of the meanest people in the world pretend to worship in pews on Sunday. For the most part, they’re only mean in packs, like wolves wearing their Sunday morning wool’s best.

One on one, by and large, mean church people have these things in common. They almost exclusively define sin as something outside of themselves, “issues” with which they’ve never personally struggled. With rarest exception, they are wimps; their knees get wobbly under the weight of trying to be mean face-to-face. Like the playground bully, they only act the way they do when they have an audience. In my dictionary, “mean” is defined as “yet unchanged by a personal encounter with grace in Christ.”

It is also true that the finest people I’ve ever known are people I met in church. It is one of the most mysterious paradoxes of my faith experience that those who are meanest sit right next to others in the church who have modeled grace beyond belief for me.

If I’m soft, so be it. The only people who have helped me find my way into and through the Kingdom of God are those who showed me mercy and grace, not judgment. Mercy and grace are much harsher taskmasters than judgment could ever hope to be. It’s much harder to live with forgiveness, both giving and receiving it, than to experience the sad relief that hammering or being hammered tends to offer. It seems to me that those for whom mercy and grace are exclusively defined as the substance of softness just haven’t yet personally experienced the high premium Mercy and Grace have paid in order for God to give us a hopeful place to land in our suffering instead of a place that would have destroyed us for sure.

Some

2008-09-29T06:41:00.000-07:00

“Happiness: Something to believe, someone to love, something to do.” The saying was posted just above the professor’s desk. It was impossible for any visitor to miss. It was a small, private, Christian university, a place where the teacher-to-student ratio was very small. A place where the impact of his teaching would be pretty much in his face every day. For the few seconds it took me to first read those words so very many years ago, my mind took a snapshot of the saying.

All these years later, I still wonder what had possessed the professor to keep the words so prominently posted. Had his dreams been bigger than reality turned out to be? Had he surrendered his passion to mediocrity? How could anyone be happy in such a terribly small place? Was the saying true or did he just hope that someday it might be?

Yesterday, as I stood to preach my first sermon as the pastor of Grace Fellowship Baptist Church in Fair Oaks, Texas, I got the answers I’d been seeking. It occurred to me that, at 54, I have forever surrendered the idea of serving as pastor of what some would call a “strategic” or “prominent” church, the big church with the big name that most seminarians dream of serving the day they graduate. The church that will put their name in lights and make others ooh and aah. Every time I ever introduce myself to others as the pastor of this church I’ll hear the same question, “Where’s that?” Kind of like my last name, I’ll always have to spell it out for people. But, I now know why that professor always seemed so happy, in such a very small place.

When I was preaching, no one was more than fifteen feet away. I could see tears. I could see smiles and hear the smallest snickers at my poor attempts at humor. For the most part, these aren’t “church people.” I’ll probably never hear them say “Amen!” to one of my points. But, I could see it in their faces, in their back row blue eyes. I could hear silence when no one making any noise was the best response. It wasn’t a huge crowd, only 41. As the worship service ended, four people, ten percent of those in attendance, said they wanted to join us in the journey. As I pronounced my pastoral blessing on the congregation I couldn’t get that saying just above the professor’s desk off my mind.

I’ll never serve a huge church and have all the acclaim that goes with it, like the invitations to speak at huge conventions where the pastors of prominent churches are always asked to speak. However, I do have some thing I do believe very passionately. I do have some one – about forty someones – to love. I do have some thing – a very important thing – to do.

I am very full this morning. I feel electricity shooting through my fingertips as I dream about tomorrow. God has truly given me a gift that fills my soul to overflow. Do I need more? The gift of God’s grace is more than one soul can use. It must be true that it's not the size of the gift that matters, it truly is the substance. It’s something to believe, someone to love, something to do. If some is enough what more could anyone ask than some of what I already have?

Eight to Ten Seconds

2008-09-28T19:47:00.000-07:00

The moments we actually grasp the meaning of the unconditional love of God “have a shelf life of about eight to ten seconds.” We should “savor those moments when” such grace appears. So says David Roche, the pastor of the Church of 80% Sincerity (Anne Lamott, Plan B). I agree. For me, holding onto grace is like grasping the proverbial greased pig.

After chasing it around in something I’m writing or singing, in a field of Pacific-blue spring flowers or in a church full of fellow greased-pig-chasers, I find myself making a diving catch. Once in a slippery while, I think I’ve finally got it! I latch onto the thought that God really loves me, just like I am. Sure enough, in about eight to ten seconds, the grace moment slips away and I’m left to wallow in the self-made slop I can make of life when I think it’s all up to me.

Someone has said that the significance of life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath. A few years ago, I had one of those moments. The entrance to the pastor’s study was just off of Sunset Avenue in Dallas. Our preschoolers released some pigeons one of the teachers had raised. I was invited to share in the moment. With diaper-stuffed britches, the children stood there with their faces full of expectation turned toward the morning sky. The pigeons were pulled from their cages, held between gentle palms and then released upward to the morning sky. In just eight to ten seconds, they’d been freed from their cages on Sunset, then circled back east toward the sun still rising. I stood there transfixed, savoring the moment while it lasted, about eight to ten seconds.

In those few seconds before the pigeons disappeared from sight, I saw the meaning of grace. Grace is not mine to capture and hold. It has captured me. Grace has held me close in gentle palms and, in Jesus, set me free to soar on wings lifted strong by hope in a sky full of mercy. It’s amazing what you can see, in just eight to ten seconds.