Pastor Glen

Framed

2010-11-16T15:04:00.000-08:00

Rudy, our sixteen-week-old Golden Retriever, chewed up my eyeglasses the other day. He normally goes after shoes left out, four pair down and counting, or a particular hairbrush he’s taken a liking to, making quick work of them all with his needle-pointy, razor-sharp puppy teeth.

By the time I found my glasses on the floor the other day, Rudy had left the ear pieces rough as cobs. Worse than that, he’d twisted the frames, leaving one lens pointing a full twenty or thirty degrees off of the direction of the other. I didn’t realize it until I went to put on my glasses and looked out onto a very distorted view of the world around me.

None of us sees the world with pure, perfect vision. Reality is one thing but the way we see it, and others, is often altogether another. We see the world in which we live through the lenses we inherited or we have trained ourselves to use or have simply accepted without question. All of our lenses are twisted to some extent, twisted into distortion by painful, unresolved experiences from the past, by unchecked passions for the material, by the sin of prejudices yet unresolved or even by the unfinished business of forgiveness of self and others.

Now and then, with Rudy around, I have to check the way my view of the world is framed. It’s just part of choosing to live with a puppy in my world, no matter how tedious it becomes. To adjust the way our vision is framed so that we see the world as God sees it and to seek greater understanding of why others see the world the way they do is one of the most difficult of all Christian disciplines.

A passage from Jan Karon’s Patches of Godlight has proven to be a good spiritual optometrist for me as we approach Thanksgiving. She writes, We are not here to prove God answers prayer; we are here to be living monuments of God’s grace.

My vision is more clearly framed when I realize that being thankful doesn’t just mean listing out all of the things God has provided. Sometimes, our material blessings can actually discourage others whose prayers they feel God has ignored. To be a monument to God’s grace, however, means to let others see in us and through us our gratitude for how God has chosen to see us, through the purest of all vision, God’s holy eyes, the eyes of pure grace, framed in mercy and love.

Snowflake

2010-11-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

About the time Jesus was born, just one little baby in a manger in a remote village in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles away a snowflake fell. It fell in a place so remote that no human has ever set foot there. It was just one snowflake, but, it was one of billions falling that night, in a place so far north it never gets warm enough for snow to melt, only to freeze even harder as it becomes part of a magnificent ice field, dozens of miles wide, even many miles longer.

As the snowflake fell, unnoticed by anyone but God, it floated gently into a place where other snowflakes had been falling for many thousands of years. All together, the frozen snowflakes became a river of ice, a glacier so deep and so wide and so cold that, even over hundreds of years, it had moved only a few miles. As it coursed its way downhill toward the sea, the river’s sheer weight carved out microscopic pieces of dirt and boulders the size of multi-story office buildings, slowing shaping out valleys where there had once been great mountains. It was just one snowflake. But, frozen together with all of the other snowflakes, it became part of something incredible, the very hand of God carving out God’s never-ending creation.

In 2004, twenty centuries later, Nancy and I stood with some friends in the place where that one snowflake now rests, atop Mendenhall Glacier, just outside of Juneau, Alaska. Our guide told us that the ice on which we were standing had fallen as snow about the time of Christ. Looking back up the valley it had taken that snowflake 2,000 years to travel, I stood in sacred awe of the patient hand of God and of the value of just one.

History is not so much the story of the great brushstrokes of powerful, brilliant or lucky people as much as it is the combined stories of the power of billions who make their contribution, unique from all others, one small stroke at a time on the canvass of God’s never-ending creation. One smile. One kiss. One word of encouragement. One prayer. One vote. One simple word of witness. One dollar for one hungry child. One line in one letter. One teacher’s influence in one classroom. One song. One life connecting with one other life, one at a time.

It was just one snowflake. But, it helped reshape the surface of the earth forever. Ours may be just one life. Only God knows, and God does know, the uniqueness of our lives and the power they are having, one simple act of love and mercy at a time, to reshape the course of the world we were given the privilege of touching, for this one brief moment in time.

I Will Love You Again

2010-10-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

More people I talk to than not these days tell me of how heavily life weighs on them. People are working so hard, in many cases, just to survive. When they aren’t working hard to survive financially, they’re working hard to keep their kids focused and in the right place at the right time.

Just this morning, another young mother tells me of a failed job search, one of many in many, many months. It was hard to choke back the tears as she shared her feelings of anxiety, mixed with her stubborn faith and positive, hopeful spirit that God will provide. She really, truly believes that.

Thinking of her determination to get up and put her face into the wind of one more job search this morning, and so many like her carrying back-breaking loads of responsibility, I was reminded of words a friend once sent me by an author of whom I’ve never heard. Why these kinds of words arrive when they do is mysterious. Their timing is almost, as we sometimes say, “spooky,” as in, Holy “ghost-like.” See what you think about what Ellen Bass writes in Mules of Love:

To love life,
to love it even when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air,
heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms,
a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say,
yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Loving life, it would seem, means loving the life that comes to us, not always waiting until life is more lovable.

Feel Like Crying

2010-09-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

Last week, a Dallas Baptist mega-church pastor said that all Muslims are evil. Or, at least the Muslim religion is evil. One and the same. He said it on television for all the world to hear. Painting with the most judgmentally broad and theologically and historically uninformed brush within politically correct reach, he effectively condemned all Muslims based on the activity of one Muslim in the ninth century A.D.

He knows all of this to be true because, well, because he believes it and because he read it somewhere, no documentation cited. No mention was made of what Christians did to Muslims during the Crusades during the Middle Ages. I wonder if the pastor, like me, doesn’t even know so much as one Muslim by name or has ever had a personal conversation with a Muslim.

A Florida pastor is leading his small congregation to burn scores of copies of the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11. Despite pleas from everyone from the Pope to a four-star general with boots on the ground in Afghanistan and who is concerned for the safety of troops actually fighting real terrorists, the pastor believes this is what God has told him to do and is planning on going ahead and lighting the bonfire. As though, like Hitler, he believes that burning books destroys ideas.

Isn’t that what the radical Islamic terrorists believed as they nosed-dived hijacked airliners into the twin towers nine years ago? God told them to. Incinerate, verbally or literally, whatever is different from you.

Of course, it’s always easier for so-called evangelicals to say such things, in Dallas or Florida, because that’s where their pulpits are located, safely removed by thousands of miles from the dying and those who actually have the courage to do it. I wonder if the pastors’ perspectives might change if they had to remove their feet from their mouths, lace up combat boots and sling M-16’s themselves.

Are we less evil because of what we believe or because of the religious worldview to which intellectually subscribe? Are we less evil simply because Jesus was holy and we say we believe in Jesus, even if, in the way we actually live, we are self-centered, greed-driven consumer-gluttons, unforgiving political and socio-economic segregationists?

Even the venomous vitriol spouted by Republicans against Democrats and Democrats against Republicans who all then sing, “Oh, How He Loves You and Me,” must rise like a putrid stench in the nostrils of the Father who calls all of us His children. What is evil, anyway?

Long before the Nazis lit the ovens in Eastern Europe that eventually helped incinerate six million Jews during the Holocaust, someone started talking about how evil the Jews supposedly were. Religious leaders were among those who at least condoned the vitriol and the eventual extermination of European Jews, all in the name of God, of course. We think evil and then we speak evil and then we do evil and the rest is evil history.

The world will not be transformed for what is truly good and not evil by those who spew hate in the name of political correctness, especially those who do so in the name of the Jesus who conquered real evil by his own, personal, blood-soaked death. Just because it’s said from behind a pulpit doesn’t make it true. Jesus really does love all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, Democrat or Republican, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or whatever.

No one has the right to speak evil of anyone for whom Christ died. The world will only be transformed by those who speak and then live out the gospel of the one who said, with his own mouth and because God really did tell him to, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9). Strange. Jesus didn’t specify the peace we preach or the name of the political party or religious affiliation in which we do so, but the peace we actually make.

As we approach the anniversary of 9/11, there is a sick feeling in my stomach. I cried that day nine years ago. I feel like crying again. How sad that all of those people died, not to mention those since, and no one seems to have learned so much as one thing about why.

Youthers

2010-08-18T13:48:00.000-07:00

Everyone needs a nickname, or tends to get one assigned whether they need it or not. At Grace Fellowship, among the youth, mine is “Papa Schmuck.” I don’t know if the young lady who originally tagged me with that nickname knew that “Schmuck” is a term of 19th century Yiddish derivation that, graciously translated, means, “Jerk.” I’m certain it was a simple shortening of my last name that led to me being called “Papa Schmuck,” the “Papa” part being of we-were-taught-to-respect-our-elders derivation.

One of our summer interns started calling our youth, “Youthers,” a term that loosely translated means “wonderful, beautiful and full of life and possibilities, the hope we have for our future.” That name stuck, too. I’ve kind grown attached to what we all call each other.

I’ve really grown attached to these youthers, too. I’ve never been closer to a group of youth, as a pastor, than I am with these kids. It’s part of the blessing of being the pastor of a small church. About thirty percent of our average worship attendance consists of Middle and High School aged youth. The downside is that we keep graduating about ten percent of our active membership each May. It hurts just a little more every May. Even this week, we bid goodbye to this year’s college-bound ten percent. It hurts to see them go.

This summer, I asked each of the kids to meet me one-on-one for one hour at Starbuck’s. I don’t usually care much for coffee in the summer but the Venti, black, unsweetened iced tea is pretty sweet in the heat. The conversations make me forget I’ve got something to drink until all of the ice is melted anyway.

I’ve laughed until I thought I’d be sick. I’ve wanted to cry. I’ve sat in utter astonishment as one after another told me of what they dream of doing with their lives. So far, most of these kids have left-brain skills that are simply mind-numbing to me. I think my left brain was starved for oxygen at birth or something because, beyond reconciling the bank statement, math leaves me out in the dark every time. I can tell you funny stories about math; I just can’t do math.

One youther dreams of landing on the third moon of Jupiter one day, and maybe playing his cello there. Why not? One dreams of being a pediatric cardiologist. Another has her sights set on biomedical genetics while another will someday mix medicines that make us well. Some will teach. One is committed to serving his country as a military officer. Some will do music and the other arts that help us interpret the meaning of it all. The list goes on.

The most significant thing I’ve felt with these kids is dignity. They are so good and respectful, so thoughtful. Thoughtful in that they are thinking very seriously about their lives, about their God and what their lives mean now and what they can mean.

One young lady told me of a surgical scar that is hers from early childhood. She said that she’s proud of the scar because it reminds her of what a gift her life is and how grateful she is for the one who was gifted enough to save her when she was too young to know she even needed saving. She wants to spend her life paying it forward.

I sat there, trying not to let my jaw drop. The third moon of Jupiter! Genetics! Pediatric cardiology! And, most of all, the maturity already to appreciate the value and meaning of scars. Youthers!

I’m feeling better about the future with each Venti, black, unsweetened, iced tea. Wish you could join me. I’m the lucky one!

Just Passing By

2010-06-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

Taylor called and asked if I’d write her a letter of recommendation. She’s applying to colleges for admission in the fall of 2011. Taylor is getting ready to leave? When did that happen?

Jake says he’s taller than his dad, by about half an inch. He’s leaning forward to a time that is not yet while I find myself too often leaning back, reaching for a time that is no more. I told Jake that no matter how tall he gets, he’ll always look up to his dad. Jake got it.

Like I still look up to my dad. There are some days, like today, when I just wish I could pick up the phone and give him a call. There are so many things I’d like to talk about. Sometimes, I’m almost reaching for the phone when it occurs to me that I can’t call dad. He died in January of 2005. Mom died nineteen years before that.

There are so many conversations I’d really like to have with my parents, conversations you can only have with the people who nurtured you in your earliest years and only once you’ve reached life’s midpoint. I guess those conversations will just have to wait.

Sometimes I wish I weren’t so nostalgic. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want not to feel as deeply as I do, though sentiment can overwhelm me at times. Old music, old movies, a picture of an aging friend on Facebook can all take me back decades in a split second. If I’m not careful, I can get trapped in the past, losing that careful balance between reliving a wonderful time and trying to live in another time other than this one moment. This day is the day the Lord has made.

Years ago, a friend told me that you cannot hold onto life. You can only kiss it as it passes by. I kiss Nancy a lot. I give lots of hugs, to my sons when I see them, even to Taylor and Jake and all the other kids shooting up like weeds on a hot summer day. Even to their parents. You never know when you’ll look up and little children will be grown and gone, conversations you should have had must be put on hold and you wish life’s passing would slow down, just a little.

I do savor life more now. I sip instead of gulp, trying to really taste before I swallow to make room for the next bite.

The more I kiss and the more I hug, the better I do. I only get in trouble when I try to hold on to what is just passing by.

Storm Scars

2010-06-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

When you are in the storm, it feels like your life will never be about anything but the storm. A hurricane leaves its scars, physically and emotionally, on the coastline it strikes. Eventually, the storm subsides, the sky clears and the sun does shine again.

The storm scars will never completely go away. They will always remind you, and others, of what did happen.

In time, as hard as it may be to believe right now, the primary story of your life will no longer be about the storm, or the storm scars, but about the life you rebuilt after the storm.

The suffering that you once thought was the central story of your life will eventually become just another chapter, if not a footnote, in the bigger book of the story of your life that you and God are still writing.

Here’s to turning the page! Can’t wait to read what’s coming next!

My Journey Toward God

2010-05-26T13:19:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, part of our worship experience included a time for a “Blessing of the People.” The entire service was structured around the power of words, beginning with the thought that words are themselves deeds. They are deeds that create or destroy. Before I got to the text for the morning from James 3:1-10, I asked the people to take just a moment to bless each other.

I wasn’t sure anyone would participate. Being a small congregation does tend to facilitate this kind of experience but I was still concerned that people might feel intimidated. I couldn’t have been more wrong. People were hungry to bless each other. As soon as I described what we were attempting, just to say a kind or affirming word about someone else present in the congregation that morning, people started blessing each other left and right.

Some of the blessings were humorously warm. Others were surprisingly personal and beautifully sentimental. All of them were moving. Before long, someone had gotten a box of Kleenex and started passing it around. People were as moved by giving the blessings as they were by receiving them. Even when I tried to bring the whole thing to a meaningful conclusion, people continued to raise their hands for the opportunity to say a good word about someone else.

One of the last to speak was eleven year-old, sixth-grade, Taylor. Her blessing was different than anyone else’s in part because it wasn’t for any one person in particular. It was a blessing to her church, her faith community. She said, “I want to thank everyone here who has been a part of helping me on my journey toward God.”

Her words stunned me, literally. “My journey toward God,” Taylor said. All these years I’ve been preaching, teaching or writing about what it means to be a believer, or to be “saved” or to be a follower of Jesus, always looking for the best way of describing this thing called faith. In those few, very simple words, Taylor said it all.

Faith isn’t a structured set of ideas about God. I keep forgetting that. I keep wanting to tweak my thoughts about God into perfect form, like maybe God will think more highly of me if I can think more deeply about him. That’s a frustrating way to live.

Taylor reminded me that faith is a journey toward God, a pilgrimage toward a deeper way of living and loving both God and those on the journey with me. Church is what happens when two or more people on that same journey get together and just help each other along, on their journey toward God.

Thank you, Taylor. You have blessed me more than you can know, even as I tell everyone else what you said when we really had church last Sunday, and you helped me on my journey toward God.

Even When We Make Mistakes

2010-05-03T13:34:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday morning, in lieu of our normal worship service, the youth of Grace Fellowship presented a play in a dinner theater setting. It was one of those priceless projects where, with the exception of the catered Italian meal of salad, bread, ricotta-packed lasagna and chocolate cake, as well as the professionally written play, everything was produced in house.

The cast of some fifteen, with the exception of two adults, was made up entirely of our kids. The other adults pitched in with logistics and background, props and decoration, publicity and food service. It was wonderful to watch the way it all finally came together, with the largest attendance to date crammed into our small worship space around well-decorated card tables and metal folding chairs.

Last night, we had a cast party at our house and I was reminded of how it once felt to be young. After wolfing down home-grilled cheeseburgers, chips and dips and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, all washed down with ice-cold soft drinks, the whole group went outside and played a long, hot, sweaty game of football. I mean, throw-‘em-to-the-ground-like-rag-dolls football. Girls were neither shown nor showed mercy.

It was brutal and hilarious. Their laughter chased off all the deer and echoed across the 18th fairway the kids had commandeered for the game. To my knowledge, even after that big meal, not one of them puked, or hurt. How do they do that?

I stood by, laughing at the game while choking back joyful tears behind a smile as broad as the sunset. These kids love each other. They know what faith community means. They call me, their pastor, “Papa Schmuck,” and I love it. I was tear-smiling because I was trying to find adequate words to thank God. To thank the God who has blessed me by allowing me to share these young lives for this ever-so-quickly passing season of life, and how they have blessed my life in ways they could never, ever imagine.

Somehow, I was able to corral their sweaty hides back inside for a few minutes of celebration. I asked the kids to each share their favorite line from the play, either theirs’ or someone else’s. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time. Some of those lines will be our favorite pet phrases for a long, long time.

I also asked them to share what they felt was the best part of the whole five-month experience. Thomas, one of the youngest, raised his hand and said, “It was really cool the way we just kept going even when we made mistakes.”

That was the best sermon I heard all day long. Up until the day before the performance, some of us were still struggling with our lines and cues. Everyone was nervous. Then, it was time, ready or not.

We made mistakes. Some lines were either forgotten or someone would just pole-vault right over a cue, leaving the cue-less to make it up as they went along. In the end, by the mercy of God, it all came to its purposeful conclusion, to thunderous and sincere applause.

Thomas was right. The best part was when we made mistakes and just kept going. Isn’t that the only way to live?

Friends and Tears

2010-04-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

Our community has been hammered by the death of four young boys, all sophomores in high school, in a tragic automobile accident a few days ago. Two of the boys were twins, the only children of their parents. They were all skateboard fans and were on the way home from a skate park when the accident happened. Two died at the scene and the other two were dead just a few hours later.

I remember the death of a guy named Johnny when I was in high school. He was about sixteen when he died from suffocation. He was experimenting with an inhalant to get high. The inhalant coated his lungs like lacquer, a doctor later said. He died in the back seat of a car driven by friends who didn’t even know he was in trouble until it was too late. One of those guys has never fully recovered even though that was forty years ago.

I still remember the sick feeling inside when I heard the news of Johnny’s useless death, the hollowness, the fear, the slug-in-your-face reminder that life is so fragile, even when it’s just beginning, that some mistakes are fatal. I remember the church being packed the day of his funeral, the open wailing of his girlfriend that could be heard by everyone throughout the sanctuary. This week’s car wreck takes me back. I didn’t know the boys. My heart aches for those who did know them and can’t hold back the tears. Tears that express a pain too deep and too confusing to express in words.

Last night, as we were preparing for a youth play rehearsal at church, I expressed my condolences to a young man who knew the boys well. As I put my hand gently on his shoulder, he broke into tears, a quiet sobbing. There were several other young people sitting at the same table with us. When the young man started crying, something incredible happened. The table grew absolutely silent. No one said a word.

I’ve never seen such unspoken compassion. It was an eerie kind of beautiful. It wasn’t anything anyone said. There was nothing to be said. Death hurts. It hurts every time, but especially so when it’s a senseless death, a useless loss of precious life, times four. It was just the silence. Silence that went on for at least three or four minutes, uninterrupted. The only sound in the room was the quiet sobbing of the young man whose heart was so broken.

Several others had tears in their eyes. I could tell they were hurting, too, but, it seemed, as much for the young man at the table as for the four who died. It’s hard for a man to cry, especially in front of others. Unless those others are friends to whom you can entrust your tears.

Death is a sad darkness. It is so final. In some cases, like when four friends were just going home from skateboarding, it seems so useless and meaningless. Death always transfers a terrible pain to the shoulders of those left behind. Death always leaves unanswered questions. When there are no answers, the only thing we can do is what those kids did last night, respect and safeguard the tears of those whose shoulders now bear the unbearable pain of permanent loss.

When that pain is mine to bear again, I hope I have friends like I saw last night. Friends who just sit and listen as I cry. There is no better friend than one to whom you can entrust your tears.

Just For One

2010-04-08T14:29:00.000-07:00

The day before Easter, while their California family was vacationing in New York City, two-year old Bridgette Sheridan slipped away from her dad’s hand and fell twenty feet into the ice-cold East River. Another man saw the little girl in the water, thinking at first it was a doll, not a person. When it occurred to him what had actually happened, he pulled off his coat and jumped into the water without even thinking.

The stranger reached Bridgette even before her father, David Anderson, who had followed him into the water. While her dad held Bridgette above the water, the mystery man held onto both of them so that they wouldn’t be carried away by the current. Rescuers soon arrived and all three were pulled to safety.

Once out of the water, the unknown rescuer, dripping wet, hailed a cab and disappeared into New York City traffic, not even waiting long enough for anyone to get his name much less thank him. This past Tuesday the mystery man was identified as Juilen Duret, a tourist from France, where he was finally tracked down. When asked about his bravery and his willingness to risk his life for one little girl whose name he didn’t even know, his response was, “I’m just happy the family has been reunited.”

Jesus once said something about a shepherd leaving ninety-nine sheep in order to go after one sheep that was lost (Matthew 18, Luke 15). It’s not that the ninety-nine didn’t matter. It was simply Jesus’ way of saying that the only way ninety-nine can matter is if one matters. Even the number one billion is nothing more than a billion ones.

The 60’s/70’s rock group, Three Dog Night, made fame and fortune with their lyrics, “One is the loneliest number.” Jesus might sing, “One is the onliest number.” Virtually all of Jesus’ miraculous and redeeming encounters were not with the masses but with individuals, one-on-one, one at a time.

In so very many churches today, empty pews mock the church’s worn-out methodologies for reaching the masses. Maybe one good result of that will be that we will once again discover the importance of one. One life. One soul. One heart. One name. Just one. One God saving all of humanity, one soul at a time.

When large crowds have failed to show up to hear me preach, one of the worst responses of which I’ve been guilty is to let my preoccupation with those who didn’t show up cause me to overlook the ones who did. The easiest and, in some ways, the most evil of my responses to the numbers is to let their smallness define me to myself as insignificant.

Just this week, I got a call. One friend from another time and place was calling for advice about how to take the next step in the Journey. I’m pretty sure it was the Holy Spirit who tapped me on the shoulder, reminding me to pay attention to that one phone call. To let it remind me that, just like the stranger who jumped into the river and risked his own life for one little girl, God always measures the work of God’s eternal kingdom in terms of one.

Miracle of miracles, God let me share in the count, that one day, in the life of that one. As I shake myself dry from having jumped into the very same river from which I was once rescued, to help someone who felt they were drowning, my heart is full and bursting with joy.

I’m one whom God once took the time to save. Then, God let me jump into the river, too. Just for one. Is there any bigger number than just one?

Stale Wafers

2010-03-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

One Sunday morning I asked another minister to lead the Lord’s Supper during worship. The young man did a great job of helping us prepare our hearts for receiving the meal, just not our palates. Seated with the congregation, I took a wafer when the tray passed my way and, exercising good communion etiquette, held it until all were served. At the appropriate time, I slid the wafer into my mouth.

What happened next is hard to describe. The wafer was so old it surely dated back to the first-century church. It was so dry and pasty that it instantly sucked all the moisture out of my mouth, causing me to pucker, sucking both cheeks almost inside out.

I turned to a young couple seated nearby, Kayce and Neal, and saw Kayce puckering up, too. As best I could, I quietly puffed out to her, “That is one nasty Lord’s Supper wafer.” She whispered back, “Have you ever tasted a good Lord’s Supper wafer?” It occurred to me that I never had asked for seconds at the Lord’s Supper.

It also made me wonder how the bread must have tasted to Jesus the night he first took what we now call the Lord’s Supper. It was a meal he felt compelled to serve and receive, not one he seemed to particularly relish. After all, it was his body, he said, broken for those who needed its forgiving power.

In his remarkable work, The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard postulates that “the most telling thing about the contemporary Christian is that he or she simply has no compelling sense that understanding of and conformity with the clear teachings of Christ is of any vital importance to his or her life, and certainly not that it is in any way essential. The practical irrelevance of obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today.”

In other words, taking Jesus’ supper at church is one thing, but actually surrendering ourselves daily to the same death Jesus called us to share with him just doesn’t make practical sense. Isn’t that taking things a little too far? Forgiving others as God has forgiven us? Praying for our enemies instead of avenging ourselves? Selling off our stuff and giving the proceeds to the poor? Dying to self, whatever that actually means? Well, those things just aren’t palatable to our ever-refined taste for good living. A good living to which we’ve increasingly grown accustomed to believe we’re entitled, not in spite of our faith, but, because of it.

I’ll never forget that nasty wafer and the way it was almost too hard to swallow. Jesus never forgot either and, having choked down his last earthly meal ever, he then said, Eat this stale bread, “in remembrance of me.”

We can’t really celebrate, or experience, the resurrection to a truly good life until we observe and surrender to the stale death that made resurrection possible, and still does.

Easter Patience

2010-03-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

There’s a growing sense of excitement, even impatience, as people await the arrival of spring, the season that teases us the most each year. Birds are singing their springtime medleys, perched upon branches filled with blossoms of red, white and purple. Flowers have started peeking out of their underground winter homes. Easter is just around the corner.

With new life bursting out everywhere, we’re filled with a stubborn sense of anticipation, awaiting the opportunity of witnessing God’s annual reminder that life always overcomes death. Then, just about the time we think we’ve turned the final corner coming out of winter, another cold front blows through and we’re left to wonder if the skies will ever clear and the earth will ever warm again.

Waiting patiently. That’s the hard part. That’s the Easter discipline. “If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:25, NRSV). Not that we’re expected to just sit on our hands until God proves our hope true with our own resurrection from the dead. Quite the opposite, we’re compelled to work like the resurrected people we are now for what is eternally good.

Impatience is born of futility, the sense that what we’re doing now is just biding our time until something better comes along. It’s born of a sad cynicism, most often fostered exclusively at church, that only when the clock starts on eternity, as in future time, will anything really matter. Yet, waiting with patience as we hope for what we do not see means laboring now in the faith that working on what we can see matters in ways we cannot see, in eternity present and eternity future.

Easter patience means believing in the worth of this moment, even as we wait for the new thing God is about to do. It means loving and forgiving, working for justice and peace now, sharing our hope in Christ that sin is forgiven, now and forever. Easter patience means leaning into this day’s work even as we keep our eyes on the eastern horizon, watching for the day when God will bring God’s kingdom to be on earth even as it is in heaven. Easter patience means trusting that eternal life is not just about going to heaven after we die to live there forever, but, instead, that “eternity is now in flight and we with it” (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy).

Easter patience means living a life fueled by the hope that eternity is not so much a heavenly moment that begins when all earthly clocks stop as much as it is a relationship with God now and forever, not limited by time or place. Patience, Easter patience, is both the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1, KJV) and, at the same time, the offspring of hope, the result of believing in each moment we live now for its own value and purpose. So that, even as I tend my earthly garden or love my wife or tend to the work of my earthly calling, I’m participating, even now, in God’s eternal plan.

Happy Marriages and Cattle Auctions

2010-03-09T13:16:00.000-08:00

Last week, ABC’s, The Bachelor, aired its final episode of the spring season. If you’re not familiar with the plot, The Bachelor is a weekly series during which a well-tanned, chisel-jawed, six-pack bachelor is presented with several stunningly beautiful young ladies from which he gets to choose one he’d like to marry, before the season ends, of course, and it’s too late. The audience gets to watch in as the bachelor dates each of the girls, even as he closes the door on their love nest for a near-end-of-season romp in the sack. Each week, the bachelor eliminates one of the girls until there is only one left, the right one for him to marry.

Aside from the blatantly chauvinistic nature of the show, Bachelor is an interesting commentary on American cultural values. That sexual intercourse, for example, is just an extension of making out, the next natural thing to do in order to get to know each other better before making a marriage commitment. That one’s ability to perform sexually should be a standard part of the litmus test that helps us all decide if we’ve found the right person. Really?

Aside from treating women like cattle at a sale barn auction and devaluing sexual intercourse, it’s that “finding the right person” idea of marriage that is most troubling. The entire premise of the show, and too many marriages, is that happiness is based almost exclusively on finding the right person. All of which is based upon the assumption that happiness is a commodity, of sorts, outside of us, that can be acquired or possessed, like a piece of jewelry.

I know. Shows like Bachelor are about making money for networks struggling to stay afloat in this Internet, DVD, Netflix generation. They are about high-dollar marketing, finding out what the audience wants and giving it to them in non-judgmental, amoral HD. Shouldn’t it tell us something about ourselves, however, that researchers have done their homework and concluded that shows like Bachelor are what it takes to get and keep our attention? What should it tell us that Christian marriages dissolve at the same rate as non-Christian marriages? Is it possible that just being a Christian doesn’t guarantee happiness?

Marriage doesn’t make anyone happy. Marriage only provides an environment which exposes our depth of happiness, or lack of it. Happy marriages are not the result of finding the right person as much as they are about being the right person. Healthy people tend to attract other healthy people. Happy people tend to attract other happy people. Happy marriages happen to happy people.

We were created for more than just standing around at someone else’s auction, hoping the highest bidder comes along before it’s too late.

Elevator

2010-03-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

A week ago Monday, one of my wife’s colleagues at work had to take his young wife, the mother of their only baby, to undergo a double mastectomy. We're just heartbroken for them. The next day, after sitting with a woman at the hospital while her husband had surgery, I was getting on the elevator to go home.

Trying to get on the elevator behind me was a middle-aged Hispanic woman, in a wheelchair, missing both legs just below the knees, freshly bandaged. I’d already witnessed her missing one elevator as I was walking up. She didn't have anyone there to help her get to the elevator and get on fast enough. I got to hold the door for her and something inside of me felt warmer.

As I stood in the elevator, staring at the closed door, taking the six-second ride up from sublevel 2, I thought, "I am so blessed. I have a spectacular and beautiful wife who loves me without reservation, I have two sons who still enjoy talking to me. I have a job, a roof over my head, food on my table, my health and, not least, a great dog. Everything else, I mean everything, is gravy - just gravy.”

It put all of my anxieties of the week into perspective. I said to myself, "I will love this day. I will live it fully. I will choose peace over anxiety. I will rest in Nancy's love and in the love of the Jesus who brought us together. I will not wait until all the bills are paid, until I have perfect answers to every question and absolute guarantees to all the uncertainties. I will dance in the sunlight that is mine today!"

Suddenly, the elevator door opened and I was standing two floors higher than I had started out. Not a bad day at all.

Hope

2010-02-22T08:51:00.000-08:00

Just the other day, a baby cardinal flew into our sunroom and got trapped, unable to find its way out. We’d left the door open so Sam, our Golden Retriever, could get outside and get some fresh air. We hadn’t counted on what could get in if Sam could get out. Open doors work both ways.

Before long, we noticed Sam going crazy. We rushed out only to discover that he had cornered a baby cardinal. A beautiful bird and very tiny. A blood-red beak, canvassed against smooth, mocha-brown feathers. It had found sanctuary behind a potted plant on a plant stand, just outside of Sam’s reach, where it sat motionless, paralyzed either by fear or injury or both. Nancy had already made it clear which one of us would have to put the bird out of its misery if it came to that. I owe her one baby bird, but that’s another story for another time.

To Sam’s dismay, I cupped my hands around the little bird and carried it outside. To my amazement, it didn’t fight me. I could only imagine how frightening my massive hands wrapped around it must have felt. Yet, it was almost like the bird knew I wanted to help and, so, surrendering to my power, it didn’t struggle. It let me carry it outside and set it down in the grass where, just a few moments later, it took flight into the freedom of the sky.

If baby cardinals are hatching, Spring must be near. Easter is coming. Life always finds a way to trump death. Always.

Faith is when we stop fighting the God who has come to rescue us from death, even the paralyzing fear of it, and surrender to the same hands that were once nailed to a cross. What happens next is called hope, and the freedom to fly, our wings resurrected strong and high in the endless sky of God’s life-giving mercy and grace.

Friends

2010-02-15T09:14:00.000-08:00

Over lunch at a steakhouse in Abilene years ago, I asked my friend Ron how he had survived the death of his four-year-old son a number of years before. His little boy had suffered from some kind of congenital heart defect and one day was just suddenly gone from Ron and Bobbie’s lives. At the time, I had two little boys of my own. The thought of losing one of them was simply incomprehensible and how a parent could endure such a loss even more so.

Ron was, and still is, one of the most mature, well-balanced, rock-solid Christians I’ve ever known. Frankly, when I asked the question, I expected his answer to have something to do with a particular Bible passage or prayer or something like that. And, I’m certain scripture and prayer played a significant role. Yet, his one-word answer caught me off-guard. I’d asked him how he had survived such an inconceivable loss and his simple answer was, “Friends.” Friends had become the presence of Christ to them, gotten under the load of an unbearable burden and carried the weight with them.

Jesus once said to his disciples, “‘I no longer call you servants . . . instead I have called you friends’” (John 15:15, NIV). Jesus thinks of me as his friend? That’s incredible! It occurred to me as I peer over the horizon into the possibilities of this new day that one of the most spiritual things I could do this week is seek to be a true friend to those with whom God gives me the privilege of sharing this journey.

When a man once got word that his father was dying, he went back home for one final visit. This is what he told his father as he lay dying. “You have always been there whenever any of us children needed you. And, across the years, you have given us the best single gift that any parent could give – you took delight in us. In all sorts of ways you let us know that you were glad we were here, that we had value in your eyes, that our presence was a joy and not a burden to you (John Claypool, Stages, Word, 1980, p. 23).”

The definitions of friendship are hard to reduce to a simple list. I do believe that, according to Jesus’ own word, that must mean that he takes delight in us. In all sorts of ways he lets us know that he is glad we are here. We have value in his eyes and our presence is a joy, not a burden to him.

How I thank God for my friends! How I pray that I might be that kind of friend to even one person this very week!

Tiger

2009-12-15T14:05:00.000-08:00

I’m convinced that, when observing the lives of others, there is a story we know and then there is another story behind the story that we don’t know and may never know. When a man is walking with a limp, we assume there is a childhood injury in his past, or maybe a birth defect, or, maybe he was driving drunk one night and caused a terrible accident and suffered a permanent injury himself. The point is, we rarely ever know the story behind the story. That’s why judgment is God’s business and God’s business alone. Only God knows the whole Tiger Woods story, and the story behind the story.

Besides that, it’s been my experience that, when I’m busy pointing the judgmental finger at someone else’s moral failure, I’m not paying attention to my own steps. Which means that I run the risk of stepping in the very same pothole as did the one I’m judging. Judgment is God’s business.

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be discerning and doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have boundaries and certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold people accountable. It just means that we never know the whole story, and probably never will.

In the meantime, there is a silver lining in the cloud that will now shadow Tiger Woods the rest of his life. All of this outrage over his infidelities ought to tell us something. It would appear that, despite what we see on television or in the movies, by and large, as a culture, we still hold certain values to be dear. Like marriage instead of just cohabitation. Like marriage instead of divorce. Like staying faithful to your spouse. It would appear that adultery is not all it’s cracked up to be. Like a good habanera pepper, the first taste may be great but the painful kick on the backside just isn’t worth it.

Honestly, I’m disappointed in Tiger Woods, not because he’s Tiger but because of what his choices will mean for so many people. At the same time, my heart breaks for him and his family. He apparently made some terrible choices. I can only wonder what would have become of my life if I had been worth $1 billion by the time I was 30. Not many people ever have the maturity to handle that kind of prosperity well. Is there any chance we can learn something from all of this about the dangers of the false gods of fame and fortune that too often distract us from God?

My only job now is to let all of this serve as a reminder to pay attention to my commitments and responsibilities. All of us are, every day, only one step away from taking a step from which we could never publicly recover. I’ve got all the prosperity and responsibility I can handle. Managing my own life is a full-time job.

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.

Sangre de Christo

2008-09-23T19:10:00.001-07:00

If you drive north on highway 287 out of Amarillo toward the northeast corner of New Mexico, you will cross over the Canadian River though, most of the year, you probably won’t know it. At that particular point, eighty-five percent of the Canadian runs underground. Unless it’s just rained, all you will actually see is a dry riverbed. You won’t actually see a river.

The river is born in northern New Mexico at some 9,600 feet high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It runs for almost 800 miles before pouring itself out into the Arkansas River and, eventually, the Mississippi. As it resurfaces in eastern Oklahoma, it is dammed, creating the spectacularly beautiful Lake Eufaula, with 600 miles of shoreline and over 100,000 surface acres of water. If you ever see that lake, it’s almost impossible to believe that it was created by a river you can’t even see, hundreds of miles away.

I’m not a specialist in the physics of water. What I have observed, however, is that whatever is forced underground almost always finds a way of resurfacing. The only question is whether that resurfacing will be well-managed, so that it creates a source of new life, or it is allowed to run its own natural, ravaging course. Whether it’s water, or anger or sadness or hatred, what goes down must, and will, come up.

It’s also been my experience that one of the primary culprits in forcing destructive currents underground is the church. Though we are promised healing in our confession (James 5:16), sad as it is, too often at church we are made to feel that, if we confess those things which are destroying us, we will be judged as less valuable by those with whom we are supposedly worshipping. Or, we legitimately fear that we’ll be ostracized by those who assume that human frailty is some kind of lethal contagion.

Fear forces our sin underground instead of out into the light where the warm embrace of God’s grace can destroy what is destroying us, creating pools of mercy from which others can draw new life. The only people who have ever helped me change the course of my life’s current are those to whom I could make my confession in the confidence that I would not be judged or ostracized.

I’m praying that, as I go to Grace Fellowship, I’ll help create the kind of community where people find healing through confession. Where people can know that, as they allow their pain to resurface, they will do so within a family of hope. Otherwise, what’s the point of doing church, if all we do is participate in forcing sin underground?

Wherever there is a human soul, a river runs through it. The church should be the place where those souls are reborn as rivers of hope, in the Sangre de Christo, the redeeming flood of God’s grace, the blood that flows from Christ.

Squirrel

2008-09-21T19:56:00.000-07:00

Everything I’m about to describe actually happened in the brief span of maybe three seconds. The consequences ended a life unnecessarily.

I was driving home just the other day on a residential street not far from the house when a squirrel ran out in front of my car. It couldn’t have been more than two or three car lengths in front of me. I was traveling, I’m sure, at the posted speed of 30. Everything was fine until, for some squirrelly reason, the tree rodent decided to change his course. Then, just as he cleared my path, he decided to go back where he came from. (I will assume it was a “he” squirrel and not a “she” squirrel only because someone would accuse me of chauvinism for assuming otherwise). Making a U-turn in less space than it takes to write that word, the squirrel reversed course on the razor’s edge of its claws and started back, it’s huge, furry tail whiplashing with every turn. My heart stopped.

I know people who brag about hitting squirrels, or other living things. I’m just not a hunter. I shot a rabbit once, about twenty years ago. I grieved for a week and took that as a clear sign that hunting was simply not in me. I can’t shoot anything that can look back at me with its own eyes. When the squirrel cleared my lane, I felt instant relief about being able to keep my private vow not to take a life.

Then, for yet another squirrelly reason, the varmint did the same thing all over. It made another U-turn and then another. In the one or two seconds it took my car to close the distance, the squirrel was basically standing in the same place making one U-turn after another, like a drunk square dancer who’d lost his partner on the dance floor. Another car was too close behind me to slam on the brakes. The next thing I heard was a thump. I looked up quickly enough to watch in my rearview mirror as the now flatter squirrel went for a long roll behind me. Why did the squirrel cross the road? That’s one question for philosophical pondering. The more important question might be, why didn’t the squirrel just go ahead and cross the road?

I didn’t mean to kill the squirrel. He’d be leaping through the branches on this beautiful Fall afternoon or squirreling away nuts for the winter if he’d just made up his mind and stayed the course, one way or the other. An ancient scripture records something about “choosing this day whom we will serve.” Make a choice and stay the course. Stop making U-turns. Unless you can actually see a reason why moving in a certain direction is otherwise destructive, more likely than not, you’ll put more at risk by turning back than by moving forward.

There is a time for repentance, for changing the course of our life’s direction because of a higher call from a holy voice. Time and again, however, it’s not the sins we leave behind that finally catch up with us. It’s the sins to which we return over and over. As long as we are seeking Truth and honestly searching for God, there is very little out in front of us that is as threatening as the stuff behind us.

In my experience, even God can only do so much for someone who keeps looking back over his shoulder and going back because they really believe the good days are the old ones behind, not the new ones ahead. The apostle Peter was less tactful, describing such navigational folly as the equivalent of “a dog (that) returns to its vomit” or a “sow that is washed (and then returns) to wallowing in the mud” (2 Peter 2:22). What it is that is so appealing about vomit or mud that it would lure us back rather than urge us forward is truly one of the greatest mysteries of my own life, and human experience in general as I observe it.

The poor squirrel couldn’t make up his mind and the rest is road kill history. Life is in front of us, not behind us. The sooner we make the choice of which way to go and stay the course, the sooner we’ll make progress toward our true calling and avoid living a very miserable life, no matter how long it lasts.

In Control

2008-09-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning I took Sam for a walk. Sam is our ten-month-old seventy-five pound Golden Retriever. To say I took him for a walk is actually a tongue-in-cheek way of describing what actually happens when we go walking.

Sure enough, we were rounding the last corner, just yards from the house, when we encountered some doggie traffic coming the other direction. A lady was walking her yippy little pup, maybe five pounds wet. Sam doesn’t know his own strength. He may be one dog but he pulls with the strength of more than one horse. Nothing gets him in a playful mood more quickly than seeing another dog. I could see it coming.

I pulled the leash up tight, moving Sam off of the sidewalk. I was hoping the lady would take the cue from all the barking and just keep on walking her terrified terrier on down the road. For some incredibly mysterious reason beyond belief, she stopped, parking her paws just feet from Sam’s lurching! Sam didn’t want to hurt anyone; he just wanted to play. This just wasn’t a match. It was an overweight professional middle linebacker trying to wrestle a seventh grade volleyball player, not quite through puberty. It was a mess.

Before I knew it, Sam had stretched the leash free of my grip. I still had hold, I just didn’t have any say in what was about to happen. In the blink of eye, he bolted around the lady, going for her excuse for canine company. I was yelling at Sam, Sam was yelling at his new friend’s fast-retreating butt and the lady was screaming something in Spanish that I don’t think was complimentary of my dog’s butt or mine.

Sam went 360 degrees around the lady then, following the puppy’s lead, snapped right back toward me, instantly clipping the lady’s knees right out from under her like he was a free safety and she was going up for the pass. She kind of fell and rolled at the same time, scraping a pretty good piece of fresh meat off of her elbow. By now, I’m apologizing profusely in English and the lady is yelling louder in Spanish and Sam’s just having a great time.

A man stopped his car at the corner stop sign and looked sympathetically over at the lady, like I’d accosted her or something. I wasn’t enough of a coward to blame it on my dog. I said my last apology and then scampered away like I was as afraid a of lawsuit, which I was.

I really felt sorry for the lady. but, either I didn’t speak her language or she didn’t care. She never looked me in the eye. We both kept our dogs and I learned one valuable lesson.

Just because you’re bigger and stronger and smarter and just because you have something on a long leash doesn’t mean you’re in control.

No Questions Asked

2008-08-28T18:40:00.000-07:00

Having just returned from a long weekend, I had to make a grocery run. Making a run means that you want 7-11 speed with major grocery store selection. I figured fifteen minutes total from start to finish. What are the odds? As luck would have it, everyone else made their run at the same time. As luck would also have it, I found myself standing in line behind a woman with a basket full of groceries. It’s one of my life’s greatest unsolved mysteries, how I can pick the one line, at the bank or the grocery store, that always moves the slowest.

Sure enough, after the checker finished totaling up her purchase, the woman slid her debit card through the reader and it was rejected. The checker suggested she do it again, which she did, with the same result. She fumbled through her purse looking for cash or whatever. Finally, the checker suggested she take her card to the customer service desk and see if they could use her debit card to get cash. When she moved out of the lane, to my impatient relief, the checker started in on my basket.

Just as the checker finished with my purchase and I was pocketing the receipt, the debit card lady returned to announce that she’d had no luck getting cash. “I guess that deposit I made yesterday just hasn’t posted, yet,” she told the checker who then, very unsympathetically, helped her begin unloading her food. I couldn’t help but wonder how embarrassing all of this had been for the woman, knowing that several people saw and heard the whole ordeal.

By this time, my impatience had turned to pity. I remembered the times my mother, long before debit cards, wrote checks for groceries just hoping to beat the check to the bank the next day. I remembered the times when I was still in Jr. High mowing lawns for spending money that mom would borrow money from me just to buy groceries, making me promise I wouldn’t tell my dad. She always paid me back. It’s not the money that kills families, it’s those family secrets. They really suck, don’t they? Mom and dad both went to their graves without my breaking the private vow.

So, I’m standing behind this lady, about my age. No wedding ring on her finger and a basket full of single-serving meals. She had no credit card when the debit card didn’t work. Not enough cash to pay the balance. Never married? Divorced? Children? Who knows? It wasn’t mine to ask. I was pushing my cart away from the counter when something (or Someone) stopped me cold in my tracks. I looked back at the lady and wondered. I didn’t know her story, whether she was deserving of help or not. Then again, when the Prodigal came home, his Dad just doled out the grace freely, no questions asked.

Walking three steps back I asked the lady if she’d let me buy her groceries that day. You see, I remembered my mom and how sad I still feel for her. I still wonder how many humiliations she encountered at the grocery counter. I also remembered that we’d just gotten back from a weekend in South Texas where people hadn’t asked questions, they’d just doled out grace freely, generously, beyond belief. My heart was so full of unearned grace.

I honestly believe if I hadn’t given something of it to someone else, my soul would have burst from overflow. The lady tried to say “No,” graciously. But, it looked like she knew she needed to say, “Yes.” I didn’t and still don’t know her name, much less her story. She came and stood by me while the checker rang it all up. “I hope this makes you feel as good as it does me,” she said. “It does,” I said squeamishly. I could feel myself blushing; I felt embarrassed for being thanked for something I really needed to do. I didn’t have time to tell her the story of my sadness for mom or the unbelievable grace I had just experienced and how giving to her was both a healing experience for me and a liberating one.

“I’ll let you pay if you’ll give me your name and address,” she said. As I walked away with my basket full and my heart bursting at the seams, I shook her hand and said, “Don’t worry about it.” It wasn’t a loan. It was a gift.

It would be hard to describe how I felt while walking to my car. It was a rush like I haven’t felt in a long, long time. Giving, just for the fun of it! Wow! How do you describe that? I walked away, as though floating on white puffy cumulus clouds carried by the winds of the Spirit, having been reminded that grace isn’t really grace until it’s received and then given away. When we accept grace without giving it, our souls become Dead Seas of sad, dark, lifeless narcissism. We know that the Truth is setting us free when grace completes the circle and we give to others what Someone else gave us, no questions asked.

Stillness

2008-08-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

A friend’s mother was gracious enough to tell me part of her story the other day. It was priceless. There is nothing more beautiful or unique than the stories of other people’s lives. Nothing more humbling than for someone to open up the treasure trove of their life’s story and share just a little of it with you personally.

Amos Whitlock, her dad, was born in 1895 in Commanche County, Texas. He never had a chance for an education, just the opportunity to scratch a living out of the dirt with his family. Then, along came WWI. Amos went to the train station with a whole slew of other Commanche County boys and shipped off into a world they’d never seen. To leave a North Central Texas farm and end up in combat somewhere in France must have felt like being transported to another world altogether. Maybe it was.

Amos was there, in the trenches, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month when hostilities formally ended. November 11 would later be designated Armistace Day and eventually Veteran’s Day. His daughter says that, the rest of his life, November 11 was his favorite day of the year.

Like most people who have personally witnessed combat, Amos rarely spoke about what he saw or what he did, even to his family. When he did, he reflected on how it sounded to him the day the guns fell silent. At one exact moment, all those years of war just stopped, at the very same exact moment, all along the front. After all the shooting stooped and the bombing ceased, Amos said, “the stillness was deafening.”

The other morning in Fair Oaks Ranch, I was watching the sun come up. In just a few hours, I would be formally accepting the call as pastor of Grace Fellowship Baptist Church, a decision that looks like a long-awaited chance to begin life again, at least in another world. I have to tell you, after nearly dying last summer and then dealing with issues for several months afterward that made death seem appealing, the other morning, the stillness was deafening.

It was so quiet, even in my soul, I think I almost heard the roar of the sun’s blaze. It’s amazing how loud the stillness can be. It felt like – well – like a long-awaited and desperately needed God-from-heaven-sent peace. Have you ever heard stillness like that? I have. It’s truly amazing, how deafening the stillness can be.

Vocation

2008-08-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

Grace comes in different ways. Sometimes we experience it as forgiveness, from God and others. Sometimes we experience it as receiving a gift we didn’t deserve from someone we didn’t even know cared. Sometimes, grace comes to us in the form of a new opportunity. That grace of a new opportunity means all the more when it helps reawaken your personal sense of calling in life, your true vocation.

Yesterday, Sunday, August 24, I accepted the invitation to become the pastor of Grace Fellowship Baptist Church, Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas. Fair Oaks Ranch is a community in the Texas Hill Country, just northwest of San Antonio, not far from Boerne. Grace Fellowship is a new church, with about 30 active members. They are affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Most importantly to us, they have extended a real, genuine grace to us.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back into the pastorate after my last experience. One or two churches sniffed around. Having been out of a job for six months, that wasn’t particularly encouraging. Yet, I never could get excited about anything they were doing. I hadn’t gotten desperate – yet. It never occurred to me that I would ever want to be involved in leading a new church, at my age. I never dreamed a new church would be interested in me. Sometimes, grace surprises us. Some of the kids took to calling me “Papa Schmuck” over the weekend. For the first time in my life, it felt like affection and not purely an age reference. I will confess that it was strange to join a church and, at the same time, become the sum total of their Senior Adult Sunday School.

The paradigm out of which most of us preachers live out our entire careers usually has something to do with hop-scotching from one church to the next largest church. Even in seminary, the model we were given for success had more to do with the size of one’s congregation than almost anything else. Forget vocation, just grow that church at all costs, even that of staying true to yourself. Not surprisingly, in my last experience, there were those who could not even see the remarkable ways in which we were touching the community because they could not look past the size of the congregation, which has been slowly shrinking since 1938, sixteen years before I was even born. A very noisy few found very creative ways of projecting their sense of failure onto me, because I couldn’t make that church bigger. The only way I could pull the plug on the projectors was to put distance between myself and them. I was very close to letting them hijack my sense of calling.

On the way to San Antonio, I decided to re-read Parker Palmer’s wonderful little book, “Let Your Life Speak.” Its size belies its potency. I’m so glad some editor didn’t decide it wasn’t big enough to publish. This one passage reaffirmed the decision I was making about Grace Fellowship as the right one. “From our first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take all our clues about living from the people and powers around us. Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. ”

Grace surprised us over the weekend. It seemed that saying no would have been a choice not to listen to my (even our) vocation, an unwillingness to accept the grace gift extended to us. So, we said, “Yes.” Already, I’m feeling true to myself again, as much as to the God who gave my self to me.

With no face further than ten feet away when I preached yesterday, I could see every smile, every tear. It felt like family. It felt like grace. It sounded like vocation.

Be Kind

2008-08-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

The mournful look on his face is permanently pressed into my memory, like one of those patches mom used to steam press over the tear in my blue jeans. Something was torn, terribly deep, in that young man’s life. It had something to do with moral failure and was so painful he couldn’t talk about it. Whatever it was, it had happened recently those many years ago. He wanted help so badly he would sit in my office and just cry, or stare mournfully into some other world only he could see and I could not. Like he was watching the life he thought he was going to live passing before his eyes, slipping from his grip.

I was working overtime not to be voyeuristic in my questioning. I had long since passed the stage where I found the moral failings of others intriguing or even remotely fascinating. If there is any compassion in you at all, the kind borne of self-humiliation, watching others stumble only breaks your heart for them, never seeing their failings as a source of entertainment or distraction. Something had broken that young man’s heart. He was able to say enough to point toward himself as the source of the failure. There wasn’t an ounce of blame in him toward others. But, he was never able to actually name whatever breach of trust over which he was self-destructing before my eyes. Looking back some years, I sense that it had to do with marital infidelity, though, to this day, I don’t know that for a fact. He had certainly broken someone’s trust, especially his trust of himself.

Of all the ministry experiences I’ve wished I could relive, that moment rates at the top. I’ve replayed that hour in my study so many times, saying out loud the things I wish I had said then. Something, anything that would have helped ease his burden or bear it more responsibly. That young man eventually faded into the rest of the faces of the past that stand like mile markers on my memory’s highway. I have no idea what became of him. I wonder what he finally made of the sin that was haunting him that day, his own personal demon.

A colleague recently told me something one of his professors once wrote in Greek on the chalkboard. “Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.” Some people have better poker faces than others and you’d never know anything is wrong. With others, you can read their pain in the grimace being permanently etched into their face as though with a laser, one burning cut at a time.

No matter what we see on the surface, we just never know what stories, what demons, lurk in the shadows of another’s heart. We never know what private battles of conscience they are fighting. It’s just safer to assume that every person we meet is fighting some battle and to be as kind to them as we would have them be to us. Almost certainly, the kindness we extend to others in their private pain will come back to bless us in ours’. Or, not.

Electric Fence

2008-08-14T08:52:00.001-07:00

The very first church I served as pastor was located in the extreme northwestern corner of the Texas panhandle. The country was flatter than your computer screen and, for the most part, treeless except for a scrub brush here and there. Any summer day could be hot unholy but, a long sleeve shirt felt good at night as even the hottest July days cooled off in the high elevation. The winters blew cold, hard and long and wet. Maybe it was the stark geography or the spirit it took to settle that country but, whatever it was, the people were the best.

One of those folks was Kent Cartwright. Kent and his family lived fifteen miles northeast of town. There was nothing between his place and the North Pole but so much barbed wire. His ranch wasn’t in the middle of nowhere but, as the old-timers liked to say, you could see it from there.

Kent made his living out of the earth as a cattle rancher. It was hard to see where the dirt stopped and his well-worn boots began. He worked long, brutal hours, rain or shine, light or dark, sleet or snow, blistering hot or freezing cold. Raising cattle was a 24/7 kind of life. Something about being that close to the earth gave Kent a common sense view of reality that I found not only refreshing but even healing.
When things at church got boring, or started driving me crazy, I’d drive out to Kent’s place, hop up in his pickup and just ride around with him for hours. Kent had this long slow West Texas drawl. It took him ten seconds longer to say anything. Conversations could take a long time. An hour in the cab of Kent’s pickup was better than three on anyone’s couch.

One day, Kent began explaining the science of fencing. Turns out, there is one. Different kinds of cattle, geography and weather patterns demand different kinds of fences. In time, the lesson included electric fences. I couldn’t resist asking the next question.

“Kent, have you have you ever peed on an electric fence?” I asked, not sure how Kent, one of my deacons, would feel about knowing that his pastor knew how to say “pee.” Kent thought for a long time. Then, in that pokey-slow drawl, he answered, “Nope. Talked to an ol’ boy once that did – and that was good enough for me.”

I’m still laughing, twenty-five years later. Whatever that “ol’ boy” had described as his experience must have been horrifying as the stream of electricity followed his stream back up to his private parts in truly shocking ways.

I’m also still remembering the sage warning. We really don’t have to try to something before we criticize it. We don’t have to commit adultery or cheat on our taxes or spend money we don’t have or drink too much or stay in a career that’s robbing our soul and destroying our family. Sometimes, we can just talk to some ol’ boy, or girl, who did. Maybe that will be good enough for us, too. There’s more than one way to learn a lesson from an electric fence without getting burned, too.

Normal

2008-08-13T08:53:00.001-07:00

Last summer while I was so very ill, unbeknownst to me, a dear high school classmate was also deathly ill, 1500 miles away. It was months before we caught up with each other’s stories. The illnesses were different, though both life-threatening. I just got started a little sooner than she did.

We talked about how strange it had been trying to re-enter our worlds, looking for some sense of normalcy. We both affirmed that, when you are gone that long, for whatever reason, the standard of “normal” has been redefined. New roads have been built. Others have closed. People have moved on while you were locked down. From your bed you could see the sun rising and setting each day. In my case, my hospital room was too high to be able to see the cars and lives passing on the streets below, on their way to their new life, while mine stood freeze-framed, locked in place.

People would ask us if “we were back to normal.” Some asked because they were genuinely concerned. Some asked with a tone in their voice that betrayed impatience. Answering their questions, despite their motives, was complicated by two facts.

One is that, when you are hit that hard, every part of you gets taken down. There is no part of your being, physical, emotional, spiritual or psychological that is not sick with you. In my case, when my liver nearly died, my heart, my soul and my mind all suffered. In short, it was easier to recover physically than it was to recover, say, spiritually.

I got out of the hospital just a little over a week ago. Hard to believe it’s been a whole year. I want to say that I’m back to normal, except that normal isn’t what it was the day I went into the hospital. That’s the second thing that complicates answering the “Are you back to normal?” question. What’s normal? I’m still figuring that out, frankly, and hope to be for a while.

There were those who just couldn’t understand why it took so long. That’s only because they’ve never been that sick. Someday they will be and then they’ll be more compassionate, maybe. Until then, the lesson from it all is just for me. “Be kind,” someone once wrote. “Everyone you meet is carrying some heavy burden.”

We don’t have to have a personal understanding of anyone else’s pain in order to be compassionate toward them. Compassion and empathy should be our default positions with everyone we meet. We never know when we may need to ask them to scoot over so we can climb into the same bed with them.

Fresh Air

2008-08-09T07:43:00.000-07:00

The other day I was driving along and, out of nowhere, there came this memory of a person at church who had been particularly unkind to me, even seemed to enjoy it, get energy out of it. What she did and said easily rate as some of the most disrespectful, dehumanizing, insensitive and heartbreaking things I’ve ever heard come of out of the mouth of one who would claim to be a Christian.

Where did that come from? I was having a nice day until that memory got caught in the car with me on a very hot day. It was flying around like a wounded hornet looking for someone to sting again, me in particular. Every attempt to flush her out the window only made her madder and drove up the chance of me having a wreck exponentially. How’d she get in my car? How come I couldn’t get her out?

As I remembered what she said, the tone of her voice, the scowlish-mean look on her face, I found myself right back in the room where that conversation took place. My heart was racing. My palms were sweaty. I was coming up with things I was going to say back to her if and when she ever came up for air. I actually started talking back to her, as though the hornet was listening. Suddenly, it occurred to me that, by just allowing myself to remember what she said, I was actually reliving the moment, physically, spiritually, emotionally, feeling the hornet’s sting. From head to pucker, I was tight as a drum, needing to cry but not able.

Just as suddenly, something (or, Someone), recalled to my memory one of the Apostle Paul’s more potent hornet-swatting scriptures. “This one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and pressing on to what lies ahead.” Like a swatter, it’s one piece of equipment, with two sides. One side is forgetting, the other side is pressing on. Without both sides, it doesn’t work.

That’s when it occurred to me. One of the greatest of all spiritual disciplines is that of being able to remember but choosing, instead, to forget. The capacity to remember is a gift of God. Some researchers say that every event we’ve ever experienced, good and bad, is recorded somewhere on a molecular piece of our cerebral computer. Along with that gift, God also gave us the gift to say no to certain memories, to assign them a place in our heart and mind where they will starve to death for lack of attention. It’s a spiritual discipline, remember. It takes commitment and practice, all of your life, knowing how to remember but choosing instead to forget.

I’d like to tell you about some really awful things others have done to me, and some I’ve done to others. But, then again, I’d just be swatting at hornets and reliving the stings of them all, and wrecking my life and the lives of others for no good reason at all. Driving along, I think I’ll just leave the windows down and let the fresh air of God’s future clear my head. I might even stick my bald head out the window and feel the freshness of the new morning that just came with the sunrise!

Getting Lost

2008-08-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

Back to Garmin. Nancy gave it to me for Father’s Day. We found out pretty quickly that you don’t need it to navigate places you know well. At home, Garmin leads a lonely, quiet life. Out in LA, though, Garmin was a life-saver. Driving in totally strange places, we never once got lost, unless we ignored the directions, which was an option we actually chose once.

What we could see from the freeways was so limited. The winding drives up the mountains where palatial mansions clung by inches to vertical hillside foundations kept begging us to come have a closer look-see. We decided to listen to whatever voice was calling us up those unknown pathways, to take a closer look, without directions. We just wanted to drive wherever the road took us. We weren’t afraid of getting lost. We knew that, when we were ready, Garmin would tell us exactly where we were on the planet and how to get back home. Getting lost was the cost of exploring a world you just can’t appreciate from a distance.

Letting your children go off to college, you can’t realistically pray that they won’t ever get lost. They will. Sometimes, horribly lost. Sometimes, lost for a long time. What you can pray is that they will have the courage to explore unknown pathways. (I didn’t know until horribly late that education’s synonym is “exploration.”) A huge part of me believes that the day we won’t ever take an unknown road for fear of getting lost is the day we stop living, no matter how many more years we keep driving. I want Cameron to explore. I know that this all comes with the very real risk that he will get lost sometimes. I take my courage, my eternal hope, in God’s raw, unconditional grace.

Years ago, Cameron asked Jesus into his heart. Letting me lower him into the water, he made his profession from the baptistery as he arose symbolically to a new life as a faith trailblazer. In a time, a place and a way no human mind could ever grasp, the Jesus who had known and loved him before he was even born became an even more intimate part of his life that day, one of the benefits of which is the presence of God’s Spirit in Cameron’s heart. A kind of spiritual Garmin, if you will, is always present with him, even when he chooses to ignore the directions.

My hope comes in knowing that getting lost is a part of life, even of faith. I can’t explain this as much as I trust it. But, the best stories of my life and the best part of my faith were forged while stumbling through lost places, looking for a way back home, even when I was lost because I chose to be. Like I said, I can’t really explain how God’s unconditional grace just won’t give up on us. I do believe with all my heart that grace never, in all of eternity, ever gives up. God is the eternal shepherd, never resting until the last single lost sheep is found, even when they behave like bad-tempered goats.

As he leaves for LA and whatever unknown roads await him there, I can also hope that Cameron has seen in me a good witness of what it’s like to get lost and still believe. Losing is an invaluable part of faith exploration. When he is lost, there will still be that still, small voice within his heart. If Cameron will just listen, that voice will lead him back home, no matter how lost he is, no matter how long he’s been lost, no matter why he got lost.

That’s how God is. There is no place on this planet where God is not already present. We can never go where God is not, and, therefore, where we cannot be found. Joy happens the day we personally discover just how much God loves exploring, too, looking for his lost children, and leading them back home.

Male Assist

2008-08-02T06:48:00.000-07:00

“Male assist!” the TSA agent always yells just after I set off the metal detector at the airport. It happens every time and I’ve finally resolved myself to the fact that it always will. That’s unless they invent a device that can distinguish between the titanium that used to be my right knee and a genuine security threat. The other day, on the way to LA, they actually put me through one of those machines that blows spurts of air all over you. It was kind of exciting, actually. Almost like a cheap ride at Six Flags. Not sure what Puff the Magic Blow Machine tells them, but it didn’t hurt, nothing fell off of me and at least I cleared that level of security.

The part that bugs me the most is what happens right after I take everything off that’s holding me up. My shoes, my belt, my watch. Like one of the sheep being led to the sheering, I drop it all into plastic bins and onto a line that’s passing through an X-ray machine so fast they couldn’t possibly detect a 747 trying to get through. At least I’ve learned the value of only wearing shorts and sandals when flying. I don’t look very hip showing that much hip but it does help get my knee through easier. Something about being able to see my knee replacement scar makes the security guys frisk me less.

Frisk me they do, though. Some friskier than others. Not that I’m really worried about untoward advances at my age, from any sex. But, honestly, some of those guys seem to enjoy it more than others! One time, after the security guy wanded me over like he was prepping me for a giant rotisserie, he then gave me a thorough blue-glove pat down in the places he’d just wanded! When he finished I actually asked him if he wanted to share a cigarette. He looked at me with one of those thousand-yard stares and I figured trying to explain the joke would just ruin it, or get me locked up for the night. I just moved on.

“Male assist!” is always the first warning the National Security Agency gets when I set off the alarm. It’s so abrupt, almost crass or rude. The biggest set of lungs in TSA history announces, “Male assist!” so loudly to anyone who wants to hear that even to my not-too-pre-hearing aid ears it sounds like, “Herb! Tampons, aisle six! Price check!”

They never tell you you’re growing older. You don’t even realize it yourself until one day you wake up and shock yourself with the first glance of the morning in the mirror wondering how your granddad slipped his skin over your body during the night. Other than that, the surgeons will begin replacing your broken, falling-off parts and, if you have to travel, someone will yell, “Male assist!” Then, you’ll know for sure.

Calling Home

2008-08-01T09:04:00.000-07:00

The first thing I felt this morning was nostalgia, and I’ve only been in this place three days. That was long enough to add some new life-long memories to a place in my heart reserved for Cameron, my youngest son. It’s been way too long, longer than I remember, since he and I had seventy-two uninterrupted hours together. Part of me wants to stay, though my heart is calling me home.

We landed in Los Angeles Tuesday, missing the earthquake by just about two or three hours. We were actually kind of bummed about that. I’ve never felt an earthquake, don’t stand much chance of ever feeling one in Texas. I’ve had plenty of earth-shaking experiences, though. Like taking my youngest son 1,500 miles from home to find a place to live just one month before he moves away.

We found the place, by the way, the very first day. We both laughed about how men hunt and women shop. We took the first place we saw. It’s one of three 11x19 rooms just above an art professor’s really messy studio. (Do clean studios ever produce really good art?) He will share a bathroom and a kitchen with two other students who are never there, like he won’t be, either. The Craigslist advertisement read “Spartan conditions,” which turned out to be an artistic way of describing a 1930’s era place with rotting stairs, cracks in the walls, barely enough light to walk around and no AC. In LA, though, that’s where he’ll start. He loves the place, plans to paint the walls and make it his own. The smile on his face was like soul medicine; it did my aching heart good.

Finding a place and talking to the financial aid people at the Art Center College of Design seemed to quell the little bit of anxiety he felt about moving this far away. It’s where he wanted to go. I’d never even heard of the ACCD before he mentioned it. Apparently, a degree in film from there will go a long way in the world he’s passionate about exploring.

Yesterday, having already bagged the crib, we went to see The Dark Knight, at the Universal City IMAX. I’d been on those grounds before, over twenty-five years ago with a youth group from Abilene on a “mission” trip. I have few memories of that trip. I’ll always have yesterday’s.

After that, we took a drive up Mulholland Drive. Its breathtaking mountainside overlooks gave us a spectacular view of downtown Los Angeles and a little more perspective of the massive city my son will call home for the foreseeable future. In the middle of all those millions, a piece of my heart will live there now, too. I’ll have to come back and check on my LA heart when Southwest runs Internet specials.

We cut our traveling budget by being more careful about where we ate. Olive Garden saw us twice, the same one. Last night, over really good Italian flatbread, chicken parmesan and a so-so plate of fettuccini alfredo (I make the best), Cameron looked up and thanked me for coming with him. At 19, I let him swig the last drop in my complementary glass of way-too-fruity house wine. He almost looked a little too experienced at the swigging part. I swallowed my spit harder than he did the wine. Flatbread and wine, it was a communal kind of thing, you know.

We rediscovered something I always suspected, that we have more in common than I think I ever did with my dad at nineteen. We actually enjoy hanging out with each other. We played together with the Garmin while the irritating computer-generated holy-spirit-of-driving voice guided us around a city I’ve never driven, without ever getting lost (well, almost). We finally found the mute button and just read the directions. The radio stayed off most of the time. We talked and said “Wow!” more than once, gawking at the hilltop mansions humans from another world call home.

Our plane takes us back home tonight, at least for another month. Where will home be next month? What do you when one son you love more than yourself lives one place and the other son you love that much, too, lives 1500 miles away and your wife who loves you more than you love yourself sleeps right next to you every night? You reach down and pat your dogs on the head then you roll over and thank God that your heart is big enough to love that much, to stretch that far and to call more than one place, “home.”

Interpretation

2008-07-31T09:46:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday I had the privilege of preaching at the First Baptist Church, Longview. The only place I would have rather been was in Latvia, where the pastor was, which is why I was filling in for him.

During the sermon, I mentioned the story about my dad being laid off some 36 years ago. He was a petroleum engineer. The oil business was way down. Dad had been with the company for some 20 years but one barrel of oil just wasn’t adding enough to the bottom line. Computers were also quickly replacing the work men once did from pickups. Some 1500 people, including my dad, got their pink slips. In our case, it was just two months before I headed off to college.

What happens in families is one thing. How parents interpret those events for their children is everything more. From the minute I first saw my dad after he got home with the bad news, the interpretation began. He was sitting in his favorite bedroom chair, changing socks, calmly telling me about the day he’d had.

He’d been laid off and, oddly, was not only relieved but even grateful. For years, he’d felt stuck in a corporate dead end. He wanted more for his life and his family, mainly the dignity of opportunity that corporate ladders with only so many rungs don’t afford. He’d prayed for relief, that God would open a door. Suddenly, according to my dad, God opened the door. It just wasn’t the one he expected, the trap door underneath his career. He was interpreting to me what had happened to him as nothing less than an answer to prayer. Now, he would be forced to look for the dignity of new opportunity, something he confessed he would have never done as long as he was satisfied to take home a guaranteed paycheck every two weeks, the one thing the corporation did offer. Until the layoff, that is.

Until he died, my dad said that losing his job was the best thing that ever happened to him. He spent the rest of his career doing what he loved most, working as an independent contractor in petroleum engineering.

Well meaning friends encouraged me not to leave my last job until I had something else nailed down. I wanted to honor their advice. But, I kept wondering what opportunities for dignity might be passing me by just while I stayed in a place where there was a somewhat guaranteed paycheck. Is it better to worry about money while it’s coming in or worry about it when it’s not? What’s the difference? Prostitution comes in many forms, not all of which are sexual.

I couldn’t get my dad’s testimony out of my mind. I kept hearing him say, “The best thing that ever happened to me . . ..” One day, I awoke with a “hold my beer and watch this” attitude and took the leap of faith into the unknown.

Last Sunday, an engineer came up to me after the service and asked about what my dad did with the rest of life. He feels stuck, after 30 years, on a corporate ladder with few opportunities. He wants his life and his training to count for more. It felt really good to tell him my dad’s story, the story that has now become my own.

I took the leap myself back in April. I’m still not sure, for a fact, how we’re going to make it. But, make it we will. I’m absolutely trusting God. I’m convinced that the day will come when I’ll say to my sons, “The best thing that ever happened to me was when . . ..” They already know the rest of the story. They’re just waiting to see how I’ll interpret it for them. Maybe someday it will be their story, too.

Going Back In

2008-07-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

Some thirty years ago, my very first pastorate was in a community so tiny that part of its name included the word, “burg.” Forestburg had two stop signs that slowed anyone down going through. A post office, one school for grades 1-12, a grocery store where the clerks would pick out your groceries for you and three churches rounded out the cultural structure that some 300 families called home.

My parsonage was a single-wide trailer that was dated beyond repair even then. It kept the rain off but not the rats out. What I caught with cheese under the kitchen sink could be classified as big game. In the summer, it was a thermal conductor sucking in hot air like a starving furnace. It the winter, you could have hung beef, literally. But, it was almost like a camping adventure and it was my home for two years.

Sometimes, I got so bored that I’d actually go visiting total strangers in the community. I mean, visiting anyone whose porch light was still on after dark. This one young couple lived at the edge of town in another single wide. One cold winter night I pulled my 1974 Caprice onto their graveled drive. The young man was sitting outside smoking cigarettes non-stop in the cold early winter chill. Something was obviously wrong.

I’d no sooner told him who I was than he began making his confession. He and his wife, who was still inside and whom I never met, had just had a horrible fight. He wouldn’t tell me what about and I didn’t ask. I’d never been married and had the good sense not to presume to give him marriage advice. Even then, I seemed to have a sixth sense that anger that deep represented an even deeper pain (a lesson too many never learn about why people they love are so angry). Whatever they’d fought about had stripped him of his masculinity and dignity for the night. All I knew was that the frost-bitten air didn’t hurt as much as what he feared back inside the house. (Remember, I never heard her side of the story).

I just listened as the night air grew frostier by the minute and our breath blew whiter into the dim yellowish light that came through the kitchen window giving us a flashlight view of reality. I must have stayed the better part of an hour. For whatever reason, I never knew the outcome of that fight. At some point, even if for no other reason than to collect his things and leave, that guy must have gone back in and faced reality. Maybe they made up and found a way of making marriage meaningful for the last three decades.

The church and I had this pretty serious spat over the past year. Not all of the church, mind you (you’ll have to ask her about her side of the story). But, enough spatting went on to make sitting out in the cold for a few months seem more attractive than being inside. So, I’ve sat outside for a while. It looks like someone is about to invite me back in. There is someone inside that Nancy and I love very much. I’ve pondered my options. I think I’m about to go back in.

Cheesecake

2008-07-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Hope is knowing that our lives count for more than our mistakes. That we’ve accumulated more substance than fluff. That the balance of our lives is weighed more toward the good than the bad, the things that are eternally good more than our mistakes. Though I’ve learned all of this in more significant ways, I made a simple mistake once that has become a parable of eternal hope.

Some years ago, I decided to bless my family by baking a cheesecake. I had yet to learn the simple truth that, when it comes to cheesecake, in cost, time and effort, it’s pretty hard to beat store-bought.

The recipe I was using called for a number of rather expensive items and a time-consuming process that all ended up in an electric mixing bowl. Before long, a beautiful mix of cream cheese, eggs, flower and other ingredients bearing mega-fat was swirling around just inches below my knuckles. The next step called for fresh lemon zest. I’d never zested a lemon or anything else for that matter. Not knowing any better, I went to work running the lemon over the grater just inches above the yellowish whirlpool, carefully slicing the tiny slivers of lemon rind into the mix. Not carefully enough, though. In a split second of inattention, the lemon slipped and my knuckle ran with the lemon over the grate. Before I could say “cheesecake,” I had added one more ingredient not called for in the recipe, a huge drop of my own blood.

There was no stopping it. That one drop of blood swirled into the mix and created something like a strawberry swirl. By the time I reached the power button the damage was done. There was blood in my cheesecake and there was no way to get it out. Even if I had wanted to, there was no time and not enough ingredients to start over. I pondered my options. I could throw it all away and make an excuse over dinner. Or, I could get creative. I looked around. No one was watching. I looked into the mixer and realized that there was more cake than blood. So, I turned the mixer back on, blended the blood in until it disappeared, slammed that puppy in the oven, baked it up and served it to my family later, none of them the wiser.

That’s the way life seems to work. Despite our best intentions and efforts, up to and including the passion to give our best to those we love, our humanity keeps getting in the way. Drops of our own blood get spilled into our parenting, our marriages, our finances and so on, places that we prefer remain pure. Everywhere we look, there’s blood in our cheesecake.

Hope comes from knowing that what God is up to in our lives is of greater substance, means more, than the sum total of all our mistakes. “This . . . is how we . . . set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:19-20).

Hope is knowing that, even when we disappoint those we love the most or make the most humiliating mistakes, our humiliation and our humanity both get blended into the greater purpose of God for our lives. That’s why we call it hope.

Morning Light

2008-07-21T12:09:00.001-07:00

At first we were kind of sad. During the night, a storm blew with a wicked wind and a tree across the alley gave way. We awakened to find it lying lifeless across our fence over into our backyard. It was just one of those alley fence trees, whatever kind that is. But, when you grow up in West Texas, every tree is a sacred thing.

Besides, for seven years we’d watched it change colors in the fall and blossom again in the spring. We’d grown sort of attached to it watching us grow, too. We were sad when the wind blew it down. Until the morning came.

As I sat down to write, staring out the north window to where the tree had been, I was able to see farther than ever before. And, oh, what a sight! The rising sun’s rays cut horizontal shafts of light through the morning’s haze, splashing the open meadow with pallets of gold and yellow all mixed with shadows cast by the morning light pushing its way through the tall prairie grass. As far as the eye could see, the view was simply spectacular. Now that the tree was gone.

We never realized how the tree had blocked our view. Until the morning came. It was only then that we realized how the storm had actually cleared the way for us to see farther than ever, especially to see the good gift of nature’s Master painter, just beyond the fence of our imaginations.

Storms can be like that. Wicked though they may be, they often clear the way for us to see what we’d never seen before. When the wicked wind blows, it seems like nothing good could ever happen again.

Until the morning comes.

Tooth Fairy

2008-07-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

Last year, 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. Besides being painful, 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!” 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.

That is all the scripture is encouraging us to see. 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. But, 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 . . ..”

Since I first wrote that story something else has occurred to me. It’s the singing we do anyway, even after someone has kicked in our teeth, that is the sweetest melody.

Bag Lady

2008-07-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

A dear friend is working hard to start a new church in a fast-growing suburban community. It’s a progressive Baptist church in an extremely conservative culture. No question his voice and that church are needed. It’s just a lot of hard, gut-wrenching work. It’s often a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back kind of life. As it turns out, in what is otherwise a very wealthy community, a bag lady is one of the founding members of his church

Starting a new church these days means that you will more often than not find yourself swimming upstream against the cultural tide of high demand for simple answers to complex questions and good feelings confused as worship. You find yourself trying to make it work in a world where even the most committed followers of Jesus are having a hard time figuring out how to “do church.” You have to watch carefully for those who will guilt you into selling your soul (and family) to the church.

Not in spite of, but, because of all of that, my friend is trying to start a new church. Now, a new baby is on the way. The cost of failure just went up substantially. No one would ever blame him for working hard, real hard. The need to provide for one’s family and not fail God mixed together at the same time, working for a living where you also try to worship, can be a spiritual toxin.

By his own admission, he found himself not able to shut off his mind even when we was at home. Which means, his wife felt a little neglected. She knew he was worried. She wanted to support him. She also wanted him. One day, she found a way of both blessing him and getting his attention at the same time. “If you ever decide you have to leave town,” she told him, “I’m the only person in the world who will pack her bag to go with you.” The bag lady is his wife.

After he told me that story I tried counting how many people would pack their bag to follow me if I ever left town. It didn’t take long. On the other hand, if you have only one bag lady, or bag man, in your life, you are a very wealthy person.

Stories

2008-07-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

There is nothing more powerful than a story. If I’ve learned anything from the Bible, it is not only that God is up to something redemptive in creation and recreation, it is also that each of us are a part of that bigger story. The best preaching I hear is preaching that helps me see how my story is a part of God’s story. The best reading is the reading of stories that connect my story to God’s story. The same can be said of music, art and so on.

Not everything worth reading and not all music, etc., is overtly Christian. Yet, all truth is God’s truth. Every discovery of truth is a discovery of the greater Truth. I’ve never seen a conflict between faith and science; they are just two parallel roads leading to the same destination.

Nature, God’s physical creation, helps us see ourselves as part of the grander scheme of God’s story. I’ll never forget the first time I stood on the open midnight prairie of northern New Mexico and found myself awestruck by the stars where no artificial light interfered. I was all alone and no one was singing or preaching or teaching a Bible study but it was, indeed, one of the most spiritual moments I’ve ever had.

In every human story, if we will listen, we can hear something of the voice of God. Even in the greatest of all tragedies, God’s voice is never completely silenced. Indeed, there is solid evidence that suffering helps quell the artificial light of temporary sensory experience so that the stars of God’s eternity are able to shine through all the more, thereby giving us hope beyond the moment in which we are living.

For the next while in my blog, I want to just tell stories. In particular, I’m going to repeat stories that have been encouraging to me over the years, helping me find God and stay meaningfully connected to God’s purpose. If you’ve ever read my preaching, you may notice some of these stories as reruns. That’s because these are the stories that I find myself repeating over and over again in conversation.

That’s one of the main ways we came to have our Bible. People kept telling the old, old story until someone decided it might be a good idea to write it all down. It was such a big story it took centuries to get it done. I’m convinced that God is still revealing and is still writing the story. Maybe in ways we can’t imagine, God is letting us be one of the authors of one or two lines of the story that someone will read generations from now.

I hope you enjoy these stories, and find encouragement and hope in them as well.

Dignity

2008-07-14T06:51:00.000-07:00

The new kid on the block shamed me, totally humiliated me. It was bad enough that the rest of us had lived and played there for years before this newcomer showed up. He was very athletic and good-looking and all the girls let him join the street gang free of the normal cost of at least one year in school together. None of the boys had the nerve to challenge his instant status. But, I did find some way of irritating him. His response was to call me down in front of all the people I’d known since second grade. I wouldn’t fight a kid I knew I couldn’t whip. I turned away from the laughing crowd and rode my bike home, totally shamed.

Shame is the robbing of someone’s dignity. That distinguishes it from discipline, an effort to instruct another person, or punishment, which is discipline to the extreme involving the withdrawal of some privilege or even the infliction of some form of pain. Shame involves the sheer stripping down of someone’s being for reasons that having nothing to do with hope. Parents who have had no good example in their own lives often result to shaming their children by thinking, falsely, that they are disciplining them. Shame is emotional torture to anyone on the receiving end.

Years ago, I observed a sad example of shame as discipline gone awry in another family. While playing with my sons on a local playground, another child was playing on a swing set nearby. The child did something that angered his mother. The mother shouted at the child, “Stupid!” As I watched, the boy changed his behavior for the moment. My heart broke for him, and for his mother. If that was or continued to be the standard way that mom chose to discipline her child, almost certainly, he grew up bearing a deep sense of emotional shame. The most important person in his world had stripped him of the simple dignity of being a person of inestimable wealth in her eyes. The sun in his spiritual universe had announced to him that he was out of orbit with the gravitational center of all that mattered. He was a shameful presence instead.

That may sound like an overreaction. But, in my experience, nearly every form of adult misbehavior is rooted in some form of unanswered shame from the past. Sin begets sin, shame begets shame. In its rawest, most unadulterated form, the gospel of Jesus is the only answer to shame. Sin may cause eternal death. Before eternal death, shame causes soul-mauling, heart-breaking, mind-numbing torture.

Feeling tortured, but keeping it to myself, I rode my bike back home. It was a summer day. Everyone sat outside back when there were only three black and white TV programs to watch inside. I pulled my knees up under my chin as a I parked myself on the front left fender of dad’s 1957 Ford two-door Fairlane. Dad knew something was wrong. He pulled himself up on the fender with me. No words were exchanged. In a moment, he slipped his arm around my shoulders and I began to cry. He never asked me what happened. He just wanted me to know that, in his eyes, I was of inestimable worth and no one, not even the block bully could change that. Through his beefy hands connected to my right shoulder, physical, emotional and spiritual refueled the empty tanks in my heart and soul with dignity and hope. My father was my friend; I knew I was loved. What else mattered.

The only remedy for shame is the presence in our lives of at least one other person who becomes the presence of Christ, the one who bore our shame on the cross, for us in moments of shame. The first person who ever did that for me was my dad. How about you?

Shame

2008-07-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

Do you remember what it was like to come home from school when you’d just been beaten up on the playground? Or, maybe, when you got a little older, the first girl you had a crush on broke up with you and made fun of you to her friends in order to make it stick? Do you remember when they were picking teams and you were the one no one wanted on theirs? You may not remember the names of the people who shamed you but you never forget the feeling. (Anyone who can’t answer “yes” to at least one of these questions need not read further).

Do you remember what your parents said to comfort you? Things like, “Just because people say or do mean things to you doesn’t mean you deserve it.” Or, “When people treat you badly it says more about them than it does about you.” Or, and here’s the best one, “Jesus taught us to forgive those who hurt us.” Maybe so, but that was little comfort when I was still licking my wounds. I never could seem to find Jesus on the playground. My inability to immediately do what Jesus would do only added to my sense of shame. There is no deeper wound than the one shame inflicts. I’ve found that hasn’t changed with age.

It still hurts to lose. The playground has changed and the game counts for more but it still hurts to lose, to be rejected or to have someone say untrue things about you to others. Never more so than at church. Especially at church. The one place where everyone is supposed to play by the Jesus rules. Whatever nerve endings convey that kind of pain to our brains doesn’t dull like the nerves in other parts of our body just because we grow older. Shame, like most pain, is an equal opportunity provider of misery. Shame hurts spiritually, emotionally and even physically. I was still very young when I first felt the ends of my fingers aching like they were frostbitten, shooting electric bolts up my arms to the shame center of my brain anytime “I got my feelings hurt.”

There are remedies for shame, one in particular. I’ll get to that tomorrow. Today, I just wanted to ask if you remembered.

Dying

2008-07-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

Dad used to edit his 8 mm home movies with a desktop reel to reel splicer. He’d view the developed reel a frame at a time, snip out the scenes he didn’t want to keep and then splice the two cut ends together. By the time he finished, we had another volume of family history, the editor’s cut.

That’s how I remember last summer. That’s because one year ago this very day I was dying. I didn’t know that because I was semi-comatose with tubes and hoses running out of every orifice. I don’t even remember getting hooked up. Nancy holds my memory of those days for me. The toxins from a dying liver and all the meds fried whatever part of my brain takes pictures, like a splicer on steroids.

The last day I recall with clarity was June 30, when we visited Gettysburg. On the reel of my memory, the next thirty days are pretty badly spliced up. Every now and then, I’ll ask Nancy to fill in some of the blanks my brain threw away. I’ve wondered if this is how Alzheimer’s victims must feel about their whole life.

One thing I do remember was coming face to face with my own mortality. I have snapshot memories of doctors and nurses working over me, talking about how sick I was, people praying. All the time, I could only look up at them from the bed, helpless to even participate in the conversation.

I’m still amazed at how quickly I got so sick, like as unto death. One day walking free, the next tethered to a bed. Thinking back on that week reminds me of the one thing I do remember learning for sure, a memory that stayed. However short or long our lives may be, they can end faster than an editor can snip a reel of film.

Whatever we intend to do, dream of doing, hope to do, we’d better get after it now. The worst thing we can ever do is allow ourselves to believe we’ve got tomorrow to get it done. This is the day the Lord has made for us to live the life he’s given us. We’re all dying. We just don’t know when the reel will come to an end.

Rest

2008-07-08T14:56:00.001-07:00

Back in its TV days, I don’t recall watching one full episode of the nighttime soap, Dallas. The only soap that interested me was located just to the right of the faucet. Somewhere along the way, I did pick up one of J.R. Ewing’s more memorable sociopathic lines, “Once you give up integrity, the rest is a piece of cake.” That must depend on what you define as “the rest.”

A while back, someone asked me how my ministry was going. Almost without thinking, my knee-jerk answer was, “Once I give up my ego, the rest is a piece of cake.” My inquirer smiled knowingly then asked, “Isn’t that the way it is with all ‘the rest,’ too?”

She was right. Ministry, marriage, work, friendship, golf, you name it and all the rest, it all comes easier, once you get your ego out of the way. The only thing I ever tend to stumble over on the way to nearly anything meaningful or joyful is my own need to be in control, or to win, or to just be right all of the time. Once I give that up, the rest, the easier breathing, the deeper sleep, the more peaceful life, is a piece of cake.

Just before he lost his head over losing his heart to the Messiah’s call, John the Baptist spoke of a joy that comes only as a gift from heaven, once we give up our ego. “He must increase, I must decrease,” the martyr said.

He was right, the peace that so eludes us this side of heaven, the rest, the deep-breathing, soul soothing, heart-stilling, peace of God, is just the other side of letting go of the big ego. Once you give that up, the rest, the real rest, is a piece of cake, and it even tastes better at that.

god

2008-07-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

A very wise man once said that a false god was anyone or anything other than God to whom we assigned the power to declare our worth to us. He was telling me this while I was going through a divorce a decade and a half ago. I was feeling so worthless because one person in this world decided that I wasn’t who she wanted to be married to anymore. Without knowing it, I had assigned that one person the power to declare my worth to me by whether or not she loved me, liked me, wanted to be with me, etc. It wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t applied for the job. Nonetheless, she had become, for me, a false god. That’s god with a little “g.”

God, capital “G,” is God by virtue of his Godness. God was from the beginning and will be after the end ends. No one appointed God to be God because there was no one there to appoint God. God, for mysterious reasons that outstrip our human capacities to rationalize, always has been.

God then, for mysterious reasons beyond our human capacity to rationalize, created us to experience his Godness, even share in it (made us in his image). We even get to look at all God has created and stand in awe of God (worship) and even use it to make a living and help others (stewardship). God’s very first warning to us was that we should exercise holy caution about letting anyone take God’s place in our lives. God told us of the dire consequences of worshipping at the feet of false gods because of their consistent tendency to destroy us instead of enliven us.

The rest is redemption history. Because we thought we knew better (pride), we did what God warned us not to do and God’s been trying to clean up the mess ever since. Adam and Eve took the first bite and we’ve been shopping at the same road side fruit stand ever since.

As false gods go, I’ve never had trouble with apples. Chicken fried steak and gravy, maybe, but not asparagus or broccoli. My biggest problem, though, has been with the church. Since before I can remember, that’s where I went to feel good, to feel worthy, to feel like I mattered (all exclusive rights of God, not god). When the church is your false god, getting rejected by a church (not the Church) feels like, well, being sentenced to hell. The most dangerous thing in any church is a pastor whose false god is the church.

Maybe this last year has been worth more than I realized. It’s made me realize I had a false god in my life that needs to be dethroned. The church is not God. It can be our false god, but only if we assign it that power. The church is not Jesus. The church, when it’s at its best, is nothing more than a group of people who are tired of shopping at roadside stands for what God alone can give (never sell) and who have gathered to stand in awe of God, therein discovering their reason for being and living out of that accordingly.

If all of this has been worth that one discovery, then all these years haven’t been wasted after all. Maybe I’m just now getting ready to truly worship and serve (and even laugh again).

Buffet Believers

2008-07-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

Not long before his tragic death, an interviewer asked John Kennedy, Jr. about his memories of his father. Kennedy told him that he wasn’t sure which memories were his and which ones had been given to him by others. Reporters loved taking pictures of what appeared to be the idyllic and beautiful Kennedy family. Since he was only four when his father was assassinated, John, Jr. had to put together a picture memory book in his mind made up mostly of pictures others had taken of his family. Kennedy said that he had only one memory of his father that he knew for sure was his own. The rest of his memory was borrowed from the pictures others took.

It has always concerned me, as a pastor, as a father and a friend, that the faith of so many people is not really their own. It’s a borrowed faith, cobbled together with the bits and pieces of the faith of others. Like they had walked through a spiritual all-you-can-eat buffet, loading their plates full with the bits and pieces of the faith of others that seemed palatable to them.

If you ask them what they believe about God, it’s hard for them to speak with clarity. They believe what they believe because their parents or grandparents or older siblings believed it. They didn’t believe what they did because they thought critically, but because they were willing to let others do their believing for them, as though that is possible.

I often chaffed under the ministerial collar others attempted to put on me by trying to live their faith vicariously through me, the hired hand. They enjoyed a glass of wine or a margarita, but, from the pulpit, they wanted their pastor to rail against the evils of drinking. They never shared their faith with others but expected the pastor to preach about the importance of being evangelistic. They expect their pastor to preach about forgiveness but rather enjoyed keeping score, sometimes for years, on those who had offended them. If the pastor said it, they considered it said by themselves, since they paid for the sermon. There is nothing more dangerous or fragile than a faith borrowed from someone else but never made your own. Living on borrowed faith is like expecting to lose weight because you watch your neighbor jog by every morning.

The Apostle Paul talked of the time he stopped thinking and speaking like a child and chose to become an adult. Becoming an adult biologically is something that just happens, whether we want it to or not. Becoming an adult spiritually is nothing less than a choice. It won’t happen until we decide to think critically about what we believe, no matter how threatening that may feel. Unquestioned faith is not faith, it’s just a bumper sticker looking for a place to ride. Unquestioned faith is not faith, it’s a conscience lazily surrendered to the latest folk-faith fad. Too many people these days have not one piece of their faith that is their own.

It’s never too late to choose to grow up.

Traction

2008-06-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

Except for a couple of area rugs, we have wood flooring throughout our house. We like the way it looks so natural. It seems easier to keep clean and matches our taste in furniture. The only thing it’s not good for is chasing cats, especially if you’re a 60 lb. Golden Retriever chasing a 10 lb. calico.

Sophie largely wins the war with Sam by ignoring him. Something instinctive tells her that pests tend to go away when they realize they can’t control you through manipulative irritation. Sophie can sit mere inches from Sam and win the snout-to-snout battle by just letting him wear himself out barking. A soft answer may turn away wrath but no answer at all drives the crazy-makers nuts.

Now and then, however, Sam gives chase and Sophie gives in, just for the fun of it, I guess. In a split-second, she kicks in the after burners and, at the last second, takes a hard left from the hallway into the kitchen. Sam, going full speed right behind her, locks down on the brakes to make the turn with her only to discover that his paws get no traction at all on the wood floor. His four legs go their own separate direction as Sam’s bellies out on the floor, like the overweight kid in 6th grade who did gut-busters off the high dive at the public swimming pool just to get attention. Before Sam’s had time to figure out what’s happened to him, much less gain control, Sophie’s high-tailed it to a place of safety where even we can’t find her.

I’m guessing that if Sam had his way, he’d prefer carpet to wood flooring. As hard as it is to keep carpet clean, there’s something to be said for being able to get traction.

Occasionally, we wish others smooth sailing. It’s a fitting metaphor if you’re going to sea. On dry land, smooth sailing may not be all it’s cracked up to be. If you can’t get traction, what happens when you need to apply the breaks or make a quick turn in another direction?

Rough times in the journey sure make it hard on that part of our personalities obsessed with high maintenance. It’s hard to keep the rough places clean and neat, spill-free. We tend to resent it when rough spots make the road hard, even cursing the speed bumps of difficulty and confusion. On the other hand, when things are roughest, we tend to pray more, seek the guidance of scripture and others God has put in our lives just for those times we need an extra dose of humility and wisdom at the same time. It’s when we hit the rough spots that our souls and our faith are getting more traction than they ever do when the sailing, or running, is smooth, don’t you think?

I may not like where I am at any given moment. But, as long as I’ve got traction so I can make a critical turn or just stop for a while, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll look back on all of it someday and, from the vantage point of holy retrospect, thank God for the rough spots. As jarring as they can be, the rough spots where I put down my feet have given me soul-traction I wouldn’t have any other way.

Along the Road

2008-06-26T08:47:00.000-07:00

Years ago, when I was going through a divorce, the road ahead looked pretty frightening. The things that I knew for sure about divorce and its consequences were scary enough. What was most frightening were the unknowns. What would this do to my kids, my finances, my health, other people who were counting on me, my ability to make a living in church work? What would this do to my relationship with God? What would it be like to be – so alone? All the logical responses to those questions aside, when you know your life is about to wreck and there is not one thing you can do to prevent it, those fears are as real as your own hands in front of your face.

An older minister had become something of a mentor/spiritual father to me in the years that led up to what became a divorce. I had confided in him. I’d told him things I’d never told another human being. I had grown to love him for the way he had loved me unconditionally. I have to admit that, when he died in the summer of 1998, I took some comfort in the fact that he had literally taken some of my secrets to the grave.

Whenever I called, he always had unrushed time to talk. I called a lot. He was always available. He didn’t have answers for everything; no one could. But, one day, when I was talking about my fears about the future, he said something I’ve never forgotten – something that profoundly shaped my life. “Whichever way the road turns for you,” he said, “I’ll be with you on it.”

Dente, Becker and Ashton once sang, “Joy at the start, fear in the journey, joy in the coming home. A part of the heart gets lost in the learning somewhere along the road. Along the road your path may wonder. A pilgrim’s faith may fail. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Darkness obscures the trail. Cursing the quest. Courting disaster. Measureless nights forebode. Moments of rest, glimpses of laughter, are treasured along the road. Along the road your steps may stumble. Your thoughts may start to stray but, through it all, a heart-held hunger levels and lights your way.”

My old friend and I didn’t see each even once the last ten years of his life. He lived a long way off and did his caring long distance. But, care he did. Until the day he died, though, I knew that he was on the road with me, even thought that road did take some nasty turns. My heart got lost in the learning more than once. But, I knew that I was never alone.

The people that have the most profound impact on our lives are not the people who always have all of the answers to all of our questions. They are not the people who offer false assurance just to get us off of the phone or just to make us feel better. Even when they have to be the bearer of bad news themselves, the people who make the most profound difference in our lives are the people who stay with us, no matter which way the road turns.

Our best friend once made the same promise. “Lo, I am with you always.” He doesn’t always offer up answers to our questions. But, no matter what, we are never, ever alone. Never. No matter which way the road turns for us.

Ribs

2008-06-24T11:01:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to remember how many times I was asked, “Did you taste the ribs?” I was sorry to say I hadn’t. Because of the generosity of a dear friend, I was able to attend the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Assembly in Memphis this year. I spent the night in downtown Memphis, just yards from some of the most famous barbeque in the world. Sorry to say, I didn’t taste the ribs!

I could say I was too busy. That’d be a lie for sure. I could say I felt guilty for not being at the Assembly every waking moment. That’d be true. Not that I attended every meeting. But, I did feel guilty for it. I feel guilty for not doing a lot of things – always have – a skill I’ve learned well from my religious upbringing. You get so deep into religion that you learn that you may as well go ahead and go to church. Even if you’re miserable at church, if you skip, you’ll just spend the time feeling guilty for not being there.

At the Memphis airport I ran into a friend catching the same flight home. “Did you taste the ribs,” he asked. Turns out, one night when I thought it was most crucial to be at the “meeting,” he and another friend tasted the ribs instead and even caught a ball game, too.

Many of us spent so much time in church getting ready for the big eternal meeting, we never learned to enjoy the life we had now, to sample more of life’s wonderful buffet of simple joys. We’ve been trained well to believe that the only part of life that really counts is the eternal part, heaven and not earth. Eternity, we were taught, doesn’t begin until the moment we die. That’s why we Baptists are better at scaring the hell out of people and not so good at dealing with the hell they already live in, and injustices that created that hell and continue to fuel its fires.

Is this world just a waste of time, a dirty bus stop on the way to heaven? If so, why did God bother creating all of it and give us the ability to enjoy it? What if eternity has already begun and our lives now are an important chapter in the eternal story?

Surely, God didn’t create this earthly world just to throw it away. This is our Father’s world – and always will be. He gave us all that is in to enjoy it – while we have it. To revel in it. To celebrate it. To love and even protect it. There is something of Adam’s rib in all of us, is there not? Something that made God say of it all, “That’s incredible!”

Wouldn’t it be something if the first question we’re asked at the Pearly Gates is not, “How did you like church?” but instead, “Did you taste the ribs?”

Angel

2008-06-23T08:49:00.000-07:00

Just after 9/11, I had to fly to Atlanta for a meeting. It was very late on a Wednesday night when my plane arrived. My nerves were shot from having to fly back then. No sooner had I gotten my luggage than I found myself riding a train across the dark city to a place I’d never been before. As late as it was, the train was packed. You could tell the locals from the tourists. The locals had this thousand-mile stare of boredom in their eyes. I had this deer-in-the-headlight look staring at maps and signs hoping not to spend the night riding loops around Atlanta.

Even with maps and signs, I was still so very lost. At one point, a woman sat down beside me. Early thirties, Eastern descent. Pakistani, Iranian, Palestinian, maybe. Easy to profile with suspicion in those days. She was reading a technical paper, not that I was looking. She and I were also observing the unwritten rule that you don’t talk to strangers in the city on the train. I was so lost. I bet I smelled nervous.

Leap-frogging the unwritten rule that men don’t ever ask directions, I asked her for help. And, she gave it, very generously. She told me where to get off the train (not the first person to ever do that). When I got off, she stopped to point to the elevator that led from the loading platform to the street. She’d seen my luggage and knew the stairs would be too much.

I took the elevator. It opened up to a very dark and spooky place. Not the kind of place you want to be alone late at night looking so very much like a tourist. To my surprise, about thirty yards away, was my angel of the night was standing, waiting. She’d taken the stairs and gotten there first. When I came off of the elevator she pointed me toward the street, where my ride was waiting. Then, she walked into the darkness, like an actress exiting stage left, and I never saw her again.

I never knew her name. She didn’t owe me that extra bit of help. Why did she stop and help? Had she been lost once and someone waited on her? Someone who knew that signs and maps, rules of the road, can never substitute for a real human being who cares enough just to take a moment to show you the way. That you need rules but you also need hope.

A crowded train in the city. A person of Middle-Eastern descent. In my suspicions, I could have just written her off as not worth trusting. As it turned out, the very one I was tempted to judge was my personal angel, the one who knew the way and even cared enough to stop and give me hope.

It is true. Sometimes we welcome angels unaware. Sometimes, they welcome us. You just never know.

Dog Food

2008-06-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

We have two dogs and one cat, just one animal short of a herd. Fortunately, the cat takes care of herself for the most part. Both dogs are high maintenance. They know the other dog’s name better than their own. If we want one dog to come, we call the other, and so forth.

Beau is a thirteen year-old Cocker Spaniel-Golden Retriever mix, weighing in at about 28 lbs. He’s spoiled and arthritic, half-blind and half-deaf. I’m already shopping for doggy diapers. Sam is our new addition, a rusty-colored eight month-old Golden Retriever weighing in at 60 lbs. and counting. He’s got a huge pink tongue with beautiful brown eyes. We got Sam last Christmas because I told Nancy I couldn’t bear the thought of coming home to a dog-less house one day. Getting him not only threw Beau’s world for a loop, it introduced a whole new level of competition I never imagined.

At first we had to feed them separately. The vet told us that a new puppy’s nutritional needs were vastly different from an older dog’s. We’d have to lock one dog in one room while the other ate. After a while, we just settled for one multi-generational dog food. The dogs didn’t get the memo. For some reason, Beau thinks Sam is getting a better deal than he’s getting. Sam thinks the same thing the other way.

Even though we put the same food in each dog’s bowl and neither dog lacks for anything, once we put their bowls on the floor, each dog runs to the other’s bowl. They’re so afraid that one dog is getting a better deal. Feeding time is comedy time. Nancy and I stand back in amazement and just laugh. Why is it that neither dog can just appreciate the fact that there is food in their bowl? Like their animal cousins, the birds of the air, they neither toil nor spin. Their master takes care of them just because – well – that’s what loving masters do. We’d sooner neglect ourselves than let them go begging, like a dog.

Why is that we run when someone else’s name gets called, like we don’t have our own name and God doesn’t know it, too? Why is it that we are so eager to eat out of someone else’s bowl, when ours is full to overflow? Why is it we always want what someone else has, like their house or their car or their job or their wife or whatever, instead of just thanking God for what he’s given us?

I wonder if God just laughs sometimes.

Last Place

2008-06-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

One of my sons has a terrible time losing his keys. It used to be funny. Then he called one night from work, like 1:30 in the morning. The phone never rings that time of night with good news. Your mind can run marathons through hell in the few seconds it takes to say hello. My son couldn’t find his keys and, even though we didn’t have an extra set at home, he thought talking to me would be helpful anyway. At 4:30 that morning, he finally found them in a nearby dumpster. I didn’t want to know the rest of the story. I figured he’d learned his lesson.

A couple of days later, he lost them again. At first, I considered exploring what it would cost to have his key chain surgically attached to his right wrist. Then, I remembered the most basic of finding-lost-things skills. I told him to look in the very last place he remembered for sure having his keys. “Trace it back in your memory to the last place and work forward from there.” It worked. This time he found them under the pillow on his bed.

When recently preaching about Mary going to Jesus’ tomb the first Easter, something occurred to me. Mary had lost Jesus the Friday before. Was she returning to the last place she knew for sure she’d seem him last, hoping to work forward from there? The scripture doesn’t say; scripture doesn’t tell us many things. I couldn’t help but wonder. What better place to find Jesus than the last place you remember for sure having seen him?

Of course, the really good news is that Jesus never loses track of us. He is the Holy “G” in our spiritual GPS. He can pinpoint us, geographically, emotionally, spiritually in all kinds of weather, day or night, 24/7. The problem is, we can’t always find him. He gets or seems lost to us. As though Jesus’ question to his Father remains hanging all these centuries later, “My God . . . why have you forsaken me?” Translation: “God, I feel like I’ve lost you? Where are you now?”

Sometimes, in order to find Jesus again, I have to go back to the last place I remember for sure having seen him. One day that might mean taking a physical journey to a special place, like the altar of a church not many miles from where I now sit. Another day it means taking a trip down memory lane, to the Sangre de Cristo mountains north of Santa Fe, where, sitting alone atop a summit one summer afternoon, I touched the face of God if I ever did. Sometimes, I at least hear his voice in a song. As much other noise as there is in my head, the moments when I know for sure I saw Jesus, or heard him, are few and far between. They are touchstone moments for sure.

When I am lost, I like to go back to the places I knew for sure I last saw Jesus. Then, the adventure starts all over again, the adventure of working my way back from the last place to wherever I’m standing now, then just taking the next step forward.

Stronger

2008-06-11T20:01:00.000-07:00

I think the strongest I’ve ever been in my life was one summer during high school. It wasn’t because of the boot camp that they called “two-a-days” football camp, most of which I sat out “on the bench,” even in two-a-days. It wasn’t because I mowed my dad’s lawn to perfection, which he taught me to do before the days of weed-eaters, clipping the edge of the grass up by the fence on my hands and knees with hand-clippers. It wasn’t because I loved to run, which I didn’t.

I was so strong because I worked for a farmer every day, from spring break until two-a-days started in late summer, moving irrigation pipe. The pipe was laid out on the ground in thirty-foot joints for a quarter of mile. It took twelve quarter-mile lines of irrigation pipe to water all of his cotton. Every morning, just after the night’s twelve-hour watering, the farmer’s son and I would move the pipe by hand. We had to move it sixty feet forward in the freshly plowed and newly muddied field, one thirty-foot joint at a time per man, all three miles of it. It took from sunup until sundown, every day, six days a week. We did get Sundays off because he was a Christian.

My only real motivation for slogging through calf-deep mud carrying 100-pound joints of pipe in a mind-numbing routine was the whopping $1.15 per hour the farmer paid, a good check every week and no time to spend it. That, and the sunrises and sunsets. I love West Texas sunrises and sunsets. When all else fails, they inspire faith in eternal Providence every single time.

All I could do when I got home at night was eat whatever mom left out for my late supper, take a shower and go to bed. I was worn out every night, my muscles aching to the core, every sinew stretched, my chest strong, my thighs pumped up and my belly flat. I don’t know if I’ve ever been stronger.

Someday, a long time from now, I wonder if I’ll look back on this moment in my life and say of my soul, “I was never stronger.” It’s really hard to pray right now. It’s really hard to have faith in a lot of things I told people when all the bills were paid as far as I could see. It’s hard to forgive – and I really like to. It’s really hard to write, and I love to write. I saw a sunset the other night. I watched until the last micro-second when the sun slipped beneath the horizon on the other side of the world I could see. My soul took a deep breath.

I wonder if someday I’ll look back on this moment, when everything souls are supposed to do is harder than ever, and say of myself, “I was never stronger.” I wonder.

This Week

2008-06-02T14:53:00.001-07:00

This week, Ken Hall, President of Buckner International, has graciously asked me to write the posts for his blog. Please take a moment to link over to that site, just for this week. The link is: http://www.bucknerprez.typepad.com/

God Bless!

Laughing Again

2008-05-26T08:42:00.000-07:00

My older sister is retiring from her life-long career of special education teaching this week. She has spent her entire professional career caring for children who are the most profoundly disabled, mentally, emotionally and physically. Not many have her gift of compassion.

She and her husband invited us out to their lake house this past Sunday afternoon for a retirement party. Like all families, we tend to pick the conversation up where we last left it off. In our family’s case, that means that we start laughing within seconds of seeing each other. We laugh a lot in our family, with each other, at each other, because of each other. We’ve done our share of crying, too. But, we love to laugh.

After my near-death experience last summer followed by the trauma at church followed by my resignation, laughter was hard to come by. After I resigned, I went back to the office one day and one of the staff commented, “It’s good to hear you laughing again.” I didn’t realize that I had not been laughing so I certainly didn’t realize that I had started again. To him, it was a sign of a return to sanity and normalcy and wholeness for me.

Laughter is truly one of God’s greatest gifts. If gratitude is the only antidote to pride, fear, greed, idolatry, lust, etc., laughter is a close second (watch for the gratitude blog coming soon). It’s hard to be truly grateful and not break a smile. If you smile, it’s not uncommon for a chuckle to be far behind.

What made my sister’s retirement party particularly meaningful was that, for the very first time in almost a year, I actually heard myself laughing. My brother-in-law had been bitten by a dog while riding his bicycle. The dog was a neighbor’s and, it turns out, had never had any of its shots. The mutt is now quarantined while Phil nurses a nasty, puss-running puncture wound on the back of his right calf. All of us had advice for how he could have avoided the dog bite. We all wondered aloud whether he already had rabies and just didn’t know it. We were merciless – and we were all laughing so hard our sides hurt.

I heard myself laughing – for the first time in a year. Sunday was a good day – the one the Lord had made – for me to hear myself laughing again. If I am laughing, joy must not be far behind.

Fossilized

2008-05-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

If you’re a child of the 70’s or earlier, perhaps you remember those days when small children could ride their bicycles all day long without parental supervision. You’d disappear in the morning knowing you were only expected to be back home by dark.

On one of those long ago days, Kristi Coleman was riding her bike in a gully that doubled as a neighborhood bicycle ramp when she spotted a beautiful rock in the dirt. It was no ordinary rock. Crystals studded the surface like diamonds on an expensive piece of jewelry. Kristi picked it up and started home with her newfound treasure. Somewhere along the way, trying to balance the rock and handle bars at the same time, she dropped the rock and, to her horror, it split in two when it fell.

Broken-hearted, she reached down to pick up what was left of her prize only to make the most fascinating discovery. Hidden inside the rock was what turned out to be the fossilized dentures of some long extinct animal. She kept the fossil all these years. It’s a priceless life story and a beautiful parable.

Looking at the two-piece fossil, I couldn’t help but think of other things that have broken in two only to reveal a deeper beauty. Dreams break, only to give birth to bigger and better ones. Relationships break, only to make way for healthier, deeper love. Sometimes our most cherished ideas are broken, revealing greater truth to which we’d otherwise been forever been blind.

Jesus often said something like, “You have heard it said . . . but I say to you.” It was his custom to take old ideas about God, fossilized in generations of religious tradition, break them open and show people the real and beautiful truth hidden inside.

If your dreams, or your ideas or some treasured relationship have just been broken in two take a closer look. It may be that something had to break in order for you find the better thing that’s been hidden all along.

Blaming

2008-04-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

The first thing that tends to happen when we are hurting is that we start looking for someone to blame. We’re constantly trying to make sense of our world and our place in it. Tommy Lee Jone’s character, the sheriff in No Country for Old Men, tries to make sense of his west Texas world where people take life for no reason. His moment of awakening comes when, having spent his entire career dealing with the darkest side of humanity, he finally admits that, though it puts his soul at risk, he sees no alternative to admitting that he is part of this world, too. Each of us bears some of the blame for the misery in it.

Then there is Jesus, on the cross, asking his father not to lay the blame for his death at the feet of those who are actually causing it because; “they know not what they do.”

Blaming is easy. Drawing a direct line between the hurt I feel for abandonment or betrayal to the person(s) I once trusted who have now caused is easy. But, once I’ve drawn the line, what good have I done? Where does blaming get me? Where does it end?

It hurts to leave a church after ten years, especially when I dreams of ten more and then some. There’s plenty of blame to go around. And, around. And, around. The blame-game is circular in motion, with no one knowing who will finally discover they don’t have a chair when the music stops. The world becomes a particularly unsafe place when there is no one left standing to take responsibility.

The only way out is when someone finally decides to break the cycle of evil by absorbing into himself, as Jesus did on the cross, responsibility for all the blame. Blaming is a dead-end street. Acceptance opens doors of hope otherwise inaccessible.

Godforsaken

2008-04-11T08:49:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I took the boys to see Ft. Griffin, one of those post-Civil War era frontier forts just northeast of Abilene. It must have been a very lonesome and miserable assignment in the late 1800’s. Bitterly cold winters. Unbearably hot summers. One of those places that certainly inspired the birth of the word, “godforsaken.”

That mid-summer day was hot and still, with not so much as a gentle breeze to stir the soup-thick humidity. Out to the east, a spectacular thunderstorm was cranking up. Mountain-sized puffy-white cumulus clouds boiled up in the ocean blue sky. We could hear the million-volt lightning flashes splitting the air not far away. The storm was coming close. Then, we sensed something eerie, unusual, something different. We got quiet and stood very still.

In the open prairie, all we could hear was the silence. Except for whatever was coming from just the other side of the trees back toward the storm still brewing. Then we saw it, a rustling in the branches. Wild breezes were dancing unharnessed in the treetops at the edge of our miserable stillness. Wind that we could not yet feel but that we could hear and see was ushering in the storm’s refreshing, life-giving rain just behind it. It’s unusual to have proof of what is about to happen just before it does.

Sometimes godforsaken is not the place you’re standing; it’s the way you feel. Hell’s hot winds scorch the barren landscape of your soul. It’s then when Easter people gather, stand still and look to the east, where the sun still rises after the darkest of nights. They listen quietly for the cool breezes of unharnessed hope, rustling in the branches at the edge of their misery, ushering in what God is about to do. Easter faith is the close-by, quiet-rustling assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not yet seen.
03/10/08