The Journey is Home

Travel with those who love a journey,
accompany those who enjoy adventure,
be a companion to those who laugh often.

 If you heart is like a house with no door,
how can you ever feel at home with anyone?
If your heart is open, you can be at home
with anyone, everywhere.

 The people of The Way are never lost
because they are always at home,
no matter where they are.

Be like eagles,
why care where your nest is,
when your home is the sky?

Pray, “For the moment…”

A king gave one of his servants a challenge, he said, “Go and find a ring that will make a happy person sad and a sad person happy.” The servant searched the jewelers and merchants in every surrounding village and kingdom, and then he returned years later.
The king asked, “You’ve found a ring that can make a sad person happy and a happy person sad?”
The servant nodded and gave the ring to the king who looked at it closely then said to his servant, “Well done. Surely, this is a ring that can make a sad person happy and a happy person sad.”
The inscription inside the ring was, “For the moment…”

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The Potential of Imagination

Matthew 18: At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2 He called a child, whom he put among them, 3 and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

When I forget the distinct personality, the particular possibility and potential each person has, my children remind me, like when my son, Nathan, showed me the possibilities of a trashcan when seen through his eyes.  Continue reading “The Potential of Imagination”

Does God Play Hide and Seek?

Playing hide and seek, urban painting, acrylic on wallThe story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis has always raised a lot of questions for me. The encounter at the tree begins like this in chapter 3: Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3 but God said…

The two questions I have at the outset of the story are: 1. Where is God? 2. Why don’t they go looking for God to find out the answer to their questions instead of just talking to the serpent? It’s often said that this is the beginning of Theology, talking about God but not to God. It doesn’t go well for Adam and Eve, instead of searching for God before the end of the chapter they’ll be doing their best to hide by camouflaging themselves into their surroundings. Hide and seek, sin style. Continue reading “Does God Play Hide and Seek?”

Marriage is Like Football

To help you understand the premarital work I do with couples before they get married, I need you to watch this piece by one of America’s best theologians, George Carlin. Sure, Germany had Karl Barth, Geneva had John Calvin, Americans have had George Carlin. Makes a lot of sense to me. In this brief set, Carlin will clarify the differences between to two sports, and I help relate to marriage. Continue reading “Marriage is Like Football”

Slow Down to See Your Neighbor

Van Gogh’s “The Good Samaritan”

Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” and he replied with this famous story in Luke 10,

30  “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii,[b] gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

While the Samaritan has been called ‘good’ while we’ve looked down on the priest and Levite for two thousand years, I’d like to offer them a little sympathy. By nature of their roles as a priest and Levite, they had somewhere to go. They were likely in a hurry. Continue reading “Slow Down to See Your Neighbor”

A Parent’s Great Commission

   In the summer of 1996, just before midnight, the youth and adults on our Mission Trip to Lexington, Kentucky were bunking down for sleep while I was out driving the church van around the same three blocks in what seemed to me a never-ending track of exhaustion. Cayla, a little over a year old, on her first mission trip, was in her car seat behind me slowly losing the battle between wake and sleep. She wouldn’t go to sleep in the church where we were staying, so I put her in the van and went hoping the driving wheels and the hum of the road would lull her to sleep. That was her first of many ‘mission trips’ to come. By age 12, she’d been on 13. As she graduated from high school, she planned a trip to Russia. In college, she coordinated projects for our Haiti partnership that will end up providing ongoing health care to thousands of children in Haiti. Now, she through her cap in the air and her gown aside after finishing Berry College and is off in Morocco with The Peace Corps.
   As parents, Carrie and I have worked very hard to make a home for our family. That’s what we do, as parents, we work to make a house a home not knowing that our children are conspiring against us all along. While we tell them, “Settle down!” making that our life’s goal, having found each other and settled down, our children are, year after year, with every birthday, cranking it up. No matter what age, as soon as you think you’ve mastered being a parent, they grow to a new stage in their development and your incompetence. I had always heard, “Give your children, roots and wings.” Well, guess what. The wings are far more powerful than the roots.
   I should have seen it coming with Cayla. She put on her backpack for school, but school wouldn’t be enough. She chose horseback riding as a hobby but going around in circles only satisfied her for so long. 
   Yes, I should have seen it coming. Every Sunday she heard me charge a congregation to go out in the world, that’s what we do as pastors. But congregations are expected to come back a week later (or at least next Christmas or Easter). Even so, every once in a while, you get someone who does more on a mission trip than get a small dose, they catch fire. Every once in a while , you get someone in church who actually listens to the gospels and the words of Jesus who says ‘build’ 11 times but ‘go’ 111 times. Look at church facilities and budgets, I think we reversed the ratio. Not Cayla. Even though we seldom preach about the Great Commission where Jesus tells his followers to descend the mountain and “Go into all the world,” apparently on those Sundays, she’s been listening.
   Looking back as full-time parent and part-time pastor in my daughter’s life, I guess I should warn you. Be careful if you come to worship on Sunday, the warm coals of your heart might catch fire – then, as Dr. Seuss says, “Oh, The Places You’ll Go.”

Live Your Moments: Don’t Be Stronger Than You Need to Be

The Bible has a lot of paradoxical statements, die to live, lose to win, and then there is this one from Paul, “When I am weak, I am strong.” It’s a tough workout to practice, make yourself weaker to become more powerful. Here are Paul’s words of encouragement to the church in Corinth. He begins by sharing about his own struggles and praying three times for relief then opens up to what he learned from the process. Continue reading “Live Your Moments: Don’t Be Stronger Than You Need to Be”

Visit Despair but Don’t Live There

Soren Kierkegaard wrote of the blues calling it, “Despair,” and “the sickness unto death.” Despair can kill, but to never feel it, to not have experienced heart-wrenching pain is to not be alive. According to Kierkegaard, in our development from infancy to childhood and beyond, we begin to become aware of our existence, to notice that we are here. This awareness stirs in us a sense of awe, wonder, and amazement. During infancy, we become aware that we can intentionally move our fingers, toes, and cry and someone will come. We are alive and become aware of it. We are here and become aware that we are here.
Subtly, over time, we become aware of the limits of our being here, a toy breaks, a pet dies, perhaps we get sick, a friend or grandparent dies. Kierkegaard points out that this is the second part of our awareness, a second stage, where we become not only aware that we are here, we also start to realize that we will not always be here, aware that all which lives, dies.
Initially, there is denial. The temptation is to be special, to be spectacular, other than human. The devil tempted Jesus to try and be special, turn a stone to bread, throw yourself from the top of The Temple in the center of town for all to see, or take control of the world and fix it, be special, be significant, be something other than human, a superior human, better than others, other than mortal. Our existence, when fully attended, takes us to a place where we recognize the limits of life and the undeniable nature of death and can look beyond ourselves to the immortal. According to Kierkegaard, “(Despair) is the road we all have to take – over the Bridge of Sighs into eternity.”
If we want God to remove our challenges, to help us deny our weakness, our mortality, we will find God greatly disappointing as Robert Farrar Capon wrote that Jesus is like a lifeguard who sees a drowning girl. He swims out to her, drowns with her, then three days later comes out of the sea promising that everything, even the girl who drowned, is wonderful.
We want a lifeguard who always saves us, who prolongs our life, not one who helps us die to find new life. God is not a life preserver but a life giver. Our greatest problem with God is God’s contentment with our mortality, a reality that drives us to despair. According to Kierkegaard, experiencing despair is not a sin, living there is. Kierkegaard wrote,

Whether you are man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or free, happy or unhappy; whether you bore in your elevation the splendour of the crown or in humble obscurity only the toil and heat of the day; whether your name will be remembered for as long as the world lasts, and so will have been remembered as long as it lasted, or you are without a name and run namelessly with the numberless multitude; whether the glory that surrounded you surpassed all human description, or the severest and most ignominious human judgment was passed on you — eternity asks you and every one of these millions of millions, just one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether so in despair that you did not know that you were in despair, or in such a way that you bore this sickness concealed deep inside you as your gnawing secret, under your heart like the fruit of a sinful love, or in such a way that, a terror to others, you raged in despair. If then, if you have lived in despair, then whatever else you won or lost, for you everything is lost, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you, or, still more dreadful, it knows you as you are known, it manacles you to yourself in despair!

To live fully requires facing death, moving through our frailty with God’s strength. We fear death; God mocks it. We live trying to be everlasting in life without death, God offers us life beyond comprehension and understanding. We try to achieve immortality while God gives it freely through our mortality. We want to be free from dying while God wants to liberate us from the fear of dying. We have no power to give ourselves life beyond death any more than we gave ourselves life at birth. Birth was not an achievement but a process, so, too is death into life. Like birth, life in death comes as a gift from God. We do the dying; God does the resurrecting, not just in our final deaths, but our momentary ones, as we let go and look to God for the gift of the next moment, and the next, and the…

Slow Down to Show Up: Lesson from Our Town

In 1965, a Senate subcommittee predicted the upcoming changes in technology would so revolutionize life in America, and that by 1985, Americans would be working twenty-two hour workweeks and would be able to retire at age thirty-eight. However, the result has been that instead of giving us more time, the new technologies have enabled us to fill every minute of our day as the boundaries of work and home vanished. We can work from anywhere and anytime. Whatever time is left, the list of distractions are infinite. A more accurate forecast of the future came earlier, in 1955, with Parkinson’s Law of Busyness (That’s busyness not business). The law states,

Busyness expands to fill whatever time we have. Busyness is like helium gas released in a room. The gas will expand to fill the whole room, however, as it expands, it becomes less and less dense.

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Baptism – Just How Long Would John the Baptist Dunk You?

Looking at the Baptism of Christ presents some deep theological questions.

Consider this painting by Pheoris West, what images do you notice?

Can you see:
a rigid image of John the Baptist to the right?
the dove?
the face and arms of God?
why does Jesus face turn? What is he looking toward following his baptism?

Continue reading “Baptism – Just How Long Would John the Baptist Dunk You?”

New Year – New Life

Here is some inspiration from my good friend, Carol Reed, for the New Year’s opportunities.

I Am The New Year
Author Unknown

Life, I am the new year.
I am an unspoiled page in your book of time.
I am your next chance at the art of living.

I am your opportunity to practice
what you have learned about life
during the last twelve months.

All that you sought
and didn’t find is hidden in me,
waiting for you to search it out
with more determination.

All the good that you tried for
and didn’t achieve
is mine to grant
when you have fewer conflicting desires.

All that you dreamed but didn’t dare to do,
all that you hoped but did not will,
all the faith that you claimed but did not have –
these slumber lightly,
waiting to be awakened
by the touch of a strong purpose.

I am your opportunity
to renew your allegiance to Him who said,
‘behold, I make all things new.’

I am the new year.

Epiphany – Are You Like Herod or the Magi?

What we can learn from Herod…

When Herod met the Magi at the palace in Jerusalem, neither had met the infant Messiah. Both were experiencing their perceptions of who and what he might be. Herod is a vivid illustration of what the philosopher Epictetus observed, People are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them. The Primary Concept for us is: People and events don’t bother us, but our perceptions of them do.

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Blessings at The Crossroads

Martin Guitars has an ad campaign called, “Crossroads.” In the ad, they retell the legend of Robert Johnson’s encounter with the devil. It’s a gloomy night at a crossroads on a rural Mississippi plantation in the early 1930’s. A struggling blues musician named Robert Johnson has a burning desire to play his guitar better than anyone else. At this lonely intersection, the Devil waits for Johnson. With the moon shining down, the Devil plays a few songs on Johnson’s guitar. When Robert Johnson gets his guitar back, he has complete mastery over the instrument. His soul now belongs to the supernatural being, and for the next 5 years or so, he creates music that will live past his tragic, suspicious death in 1938 at the age of 27.

A closer look at the lyrics of “Crossroads” shows not a man struggling with the devil and fame but with loneliness and pain. The crossroad is whether or not his pain will overwhelm him or whether or not he can come through it with a song. Here are Robert Johnson’s lyrics and a video to listen to the original version

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Great First Lines or “This is just the beginning…”

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."(Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell) 

A friend and I were discussing our favorite writers, those who offered an amazing phrase, art in a sentence. After discussing our mutual admiration for Norman McClean’s masterful, A River Runs Through It, he suggested I read Wallace Stegner starting with Angle of Repose. When I got the novel, I didn’t have time to start the book, but I did want to know what words he chose for his beginning. I opened the cover and read the dedication, For my son, Page. My response was, “Really, you’re an author, and you name your son, Page?” I was stuck. I did move on, and so far, Stegner has delivered as my friend promised. My fixation on first words did lead me to pick my top five first lines of novels, though my list is subject to change without notice.

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