In Garden

Genesis 2:8-9 NIV
Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.

When I go through the Garden of Eden account I am intrigued by it for the same reason we all are. The simplicity and purity found there is winsome. How many of us have thought with a nostalgia we don’t actually personally possess that it would be a dreamy world to enter. Certainly vegans would feel quite at home there. So too would all of us who grew up with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Would there be anything cooler than sitting down beside a lion and petting his mane as he purrs contentedly. Still others would be thrilled to live in a corner of the planet where crime is non-existent and people just “get along” Not long ago over a five day period in Oakland California, eight people were murdered. A peaceful neighborhood is all many would love to have. How about free food and no worries about rising gas prices? Think about what it would like to have a world economy determined just by two people…no one to blame for the loss of jobs and certainly major corporations and big government would not be pressing issues.

Now there are three possible reasons why the account of Garden life is left to us. The first is to provide a history of our roots. This is what happened and how it occurred. Just as biographers have researched out the details of George Washington’s birth and early life, so too in Genesis two the facts about the first man are described. A second possible reason for the descriptions we find there is to make us a bit envious, create within us a longing for something we can’t make happen with lots of effort or group therapy…we are given as it were a taste of heaven a snapshot like we could find in a travel brochure. A third explanation is that God wants us to know how things ought to be…that there really is a right form of life, a benchmark of sin-freeness…corruptionlessness.

Let us just assume it is the third explanation that best tells us why Genesis two is in the Bible. God is telling us how things are intended. What do we discover? First, mankind had a calling…a vocation that was five-fold. Remember that there are two ways we look at life-long tasking. The first is career. It is what we choose to do or at least end up doing most of our adult life. A career is something we stumble upon either because we like doing it or through circumstances it is forced upon us. Whether we are a housewife, an electrician or a lawyer, a career is just what we do for our livelihood. A vocation on the other hand by root definition, is what God makes us to be. It is our Lord shaped design and guided life path. Most people have no idea what their vocation is. It may or may not coincide with their career…if it does it is only because they stumbled into it. But some see the hand of God in what they do and vocation is the step of faith into God’s direction. I have a certain career because that is how God moved me and designed my being.

The vocation of Adam had five parts. It was first to Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth…(Genesis 1:28 NIV) For all my good friends who think we already have too many people, God’s calling for Adam and Eve was to literally, as you would fill a jar to the top, fill the earth with descendants. The Bible uses the same Hebrew word to describe the presence of the Lord filling the Temple. As smoke creeps into every nook and cranny of a house, so God, was in every part of the Temple. That is what Adam and Eve were told to do…fill the earth. Linked with this were the twin callings to subdue the earth and rule over the creatures living on it. …fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground. (Gen 1:28 NIV) The term ‘subdue is a strong one. It is the good Hebrew word “cabash” and means to “bring into bondage, to dominate as in conquest or to subdue”. The second Hebrew word, “rule” is just as big and strong. “Radah” means to have dominion, to rule, to dominate”. The sinless couple was instructed to “overpopulate?” the earth and make every living creature their slave and to hold the earth in bondage. Nothing in this vocation makes mother earth the master and certainly Adam and Eve were not told they were to live as slaves to dodo birds or polar bears.

Now lest you think the vocation was to “toot as you pollute”, there were two more parts to their vocation. Adam was commanded in connection with the Garden of Eden to “work it and take care of it. (Genesis 2:15 NIV) The word for “work it” is “abad” and the root of the Hebrew Old Testament word translated “servant”. Literally, Adam was told to serve the earth, to work it as a servant would do his tasks. It is in fact the very same word that is used to describe what worship is, that we serve, or “work” the Lord. Now, this is a quite profound thought. We are both master and servant where we live, ruler and ruled. I honestly am not sure where to take this. Remember, we are still examining the vocation of the Garden of Eden, God’s perfect place and sin free world.

If I am not a servant of the earth but I am to serve it, then who is my master? That of course is quite clear, it is God. My activities, all having to do with this place where I am settled are as a servant, and God is to give me every charge. Each rock I overturn, every foundation I lay, every plane I fly or monitor I read is, as servant. I think it is fascinating the way we have completely rolled over our calling. God told Adam he was to serve the earth as ruler. We instead rule the earth as servants.

Let me illustrate. Suppose the king of your land came to your house and cleaned your carpet, washed your dishes and taught your children how to play patty-cake. What would you think of that king? Now suppose instead, your servant came into your house and threw away all your favorite clothes, cleared your computer of all its data and offered your house on EBay at a below market price. What would you think of the servant? The servant acted as your king but your king acted as servant. Which of the two is a better fit for the Garden?

The fifth part of Adam’s vocation is the,”take care of it” part. The Hebrew word is “shaman” and means to “watch over, preserve, and keep”. It is the same word used to describe the care a shepherd has for his sheep. He guards, protects and provides for the sheep. He makes sure they get to places where there is enough water, drives off predators and sees to it that they have grass to keep them well fed. In other words, a shepherd is responsible for the care of the sheep. Adam’s place in the world was to make sure the world was well.

The expression, “in a perfect world” actually makes sense here. In a perfect world, how was Adam to be? He was a ruler living as a servant. He was a guardian who monitored the vital signs. He was under God. I am not so sure global warming is occurring and I certainly do not believe the Bible teaches “population control.” But it is our vocation to love this world God has given us and do all we can to bless it. We were talking in our cell group about the cool parts of life in the Garden of Eden and someone mentioned the naming of all the creatures. My first thought about it is that it must have been a weird thing to come up with a different name, a meaningful name for every one of the millions of varied creatures roaming our world. My second thought was that it must have been a wonderful thing to see them all parading before him.

My daughter has this complicated morality regarding bugs and slugs. Crush them or guard their path. She does both. We seem to be the same way with people. We sometimes crush them and other times guard their paths. We belittle and praise, slaughter and cuddle, notice and ignore. Our biggest problem is not deciding whether or not we are “one nation under God.’ It is deciding whether or not I am one person under God. If I am, then all I can do with you is bless your steps and guard as much of your heart as I can from being broken. If I am, then my first thought always circles back to how God might handle this. The hand that lovingly detailed out the spine of a maple leaf is the God who has ordered me to keep watch over my part of the world.

Recently an extraordinary thing was reported. A mother, who was not married to the father of her child decided to have an abortion. She previously had given birth to a son who died of a kidney disease that started in the womb. Despite being on the Pill, she became pregnant and believing she could not cope with losing another child to kidney disease, had her baby aborted. The only problem was that not much later she felt fluttering in her stomach and discovered after a visit to the doctor that she was still pregnant. This was a child living on two strikes. She decided to keep the baby and finally gave birth to a boy who was born with minor kidney problems but set to live what the doctors deemed, “a normal life”.

So what do you make of this? It is quite possibly the perfect metaphor for the post-garden man. A little part of the world, this child, this one too many child, this not perfect child, this unplanned child, is part of my world and I must decide what to do with him. Whether it be the spotted owl in my back yard, the minnows in the tiny creek down the road or the grumpy husband who won’t pick up his socks, I must decide what I will do there. Jesus put Peter on the spot. “Do YOU love ME?” “O, yes”, Peter declared. “Then”, Jesus answered, “take care of my sheep.” It is, precisely the same charge once given Adam.

Adam Meets...

Genesis 1: 27 NIV
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.


Perhaps the most interesting statement in the entire Old Testament is this one, that man was created in God’s image. What precisely does this mean? There are two sides to this issue. What is it about man that makes him in God’s image? On the other hand, what is it about God that makes man be in His image? The two sides are equally mysterious and equally important. Put another way, what is it we learn about God from man and what is it we learn about man from God? Exploration is one of the most fascinating of endeavors. Why are we so enamored with getting to Mars? For that matter, why did we care about getting to the moon and before that, why did we think there was anything of importance about the Galapagos Islands or the tip of Africa or Manhattan? Why do we want to look into the nucleus and the DNA molecule? We want to know and see and understand and at some level, be there. However, the two most distant shores are the ones we think we have explored ad nausea and yet both are more unknown to us than the farthest star.

The greatest of frontiers are set here in our central verse. Who is God and who is man? We have two sciences dedicated to the later; psychology and sociology and yet neither has been able to answer even the simplest questions about man. For example, why do we use a cell phone to send a text message and a computer to make a phone call? Why do we use a remote control after spending an hour working out? Why do we eat out when we are inside and eat up when the food goes down? We haven’t got answers to these questions. Nor do we understand ourselves. Why do we marry, build cities, make phone calls and work so hard? Who really is God? What is He like and what matters most to Him?

What Do You Do?

What do you do when nothing you attempt works? What do you do when you can't understand something simple? What do you do when you don't have enough time or enough money or enough energy? What do you do when you pray and it just doesn't seem to be enough? The reason why giving up is such a common occurence is because so much life is hard. The finish lines are cool because the race is over and you made it all the way but the race...now that is a different story. I think the reason why I don't like artsy movies that don't ever really conclude and I dislike even more the story that turns out badly for the one character I really like is that it hits too close to home. I feel like I am always waiting for the miracle, the surprise intervention, the mystic turnaround. The cell group that is too small, the offerings that hamstring ministry, the discipleship effort that just fades all are a part of this garden where we have been commisioned. Holding on is not just a catch phrase, it is the ministry. It is the life. Weedless gardens are ours but just not yet. Until then, we make our best effort to love...to listen... and to hug...Baby Emma reminds me of just how lovely it is be a child. I remember pretending to be asleep when the movie at the drive-in theater was over just so that my dad would carry me from the car into the house. Perhaps that is the best part of life. Being carried by Jesus...life isn't that bad!

Restore us, O God; make your face shine upon us, that we ay be saved. Psalm 80: 1 NIV

Humility

Micah 6:8 NIV
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Humility is a slippery fish. Almost no one really has it or if they do, they don’t think it’s there. A teen recently told me that if you think you are humble, the very thinking it means you aren’t. That is the clichéd thought on humility but is it true? Humility is a reverenced trait in Christian circles…not so much because everyone wants to have it but more because it has the halo feel about it, the ancient icon sense to it. Moses, the greatest of the Old Testament heroes was described as more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. (Numbers 12:3 NIV) Jesus said of Himself that He was gentle and humble in heart. (Matthew 11:29 NIV) Whether it is the Apostle Paul (Be completely humble Ephesians 4:2 NIV), James the brother of Jesus (Humble yourselves before the Lord James 4:10 NIV), or the Apostle Peter (be compassionate and humble. 1 Peter 3:8 NIV) the New Testament declares humility a virtue of the highest order. But who of us is really like that? Who can say he or she is “humble”?

Humility is commonly expressed in several ways. In Asian culture, particularly in Korea bowing is a sign of respect, the deeper the bow, the more humble the personage. Humility is preserved within Catholic and Orthodox traditions by the kneeling bench. We do the same sort of thing in Evangelical churches when we bow our heads in prayer. In American culture we show a certain form of humility when we let pushy drivers merge in front of us. A common way to express humility is to deny a compliment its place. “Oh my drawing really isn’t that good!” “I got a lucky hit.” “I just threw some things together. It wasn’t really much effort.”

But do any of these humility forms necessarily indicate one is being humble? Can you bow before an elder and be vain, kneel in prayer and lack respect for God, let someone cut in front of you and despise the person driving, downplay what you have done but burst with pride at your work? Let’s take a quick glance at three examples of how humble behaviors can actually be nothing of the sort.

Genesis 32 illustrates the first corrupted form of humility. Jacob, who nearly thirty years before had duped his brother out of first his birthright as older brother and then his father’s blessing had lived those three decades as a prisoner of his brother’s wrath. He had narrowly escaped Esau’s deadly plot to revenge his lost honor and inheritance but now, with his own father-in-law a mortal enemy, Jacob had to make his way back into his brother’s good graces or have nowhere to live. When Esau got word that Jacob was returning, (Jacob had in fact sent emissaries in advance to test out his brother’s feelings about him) he came to meet Jacob with an army of 400 fighting men. Jacob was spent. All he could do was face the music and so as the two parties approached one another, Jacob and his wives and children and handful of servants and Esau with his band of 400 armed warriors, Jacob worked his way to the front of the line. The outmanned Jacob bowed down to the ground seven times as Esau came near. Now was this humility or fear fueling each of the bows? It could easily be deemed humility but the truth is that Jacob really did not want to have nothing to do with his brother. He rejected every one of Esau’s overtures at fellowship and as far as we can tell, never met up with him again. Is it humility if you bow before someone you don’t like?

We pick on King Saul often but perhaps for good reason. When Samuel the prophet declared him the first king of Israel Saul complained that he was from the lowliest of the twelve tribes of Israel and a member of the least respected of the clans. When it was time for Samuel to introduce him as the new king to the entire collected nation he was found hiding behind the piles of baggage. Now was this humility or just a crushed ego destroyed by social stigma? Was he responding out of his healthy understanding of how difficult it would be to serve as king or did he just despise himself because his friends and neighbors had made fun of him when he was young? Is it humility when we decide we are ugly or stupid or untalented or is it a wound refusing to heal?

Humility is often just ambition gilded. When David became established as king, he wanted to do something for his friend Jonathon’s survivors and was informed a son, Mephibosheth still lived. Mephibosheth had been crippled as a child and David called him to his palace and after interviewing him, made Mephibosheth an honorary part of his family and the land that had belonged to Saul was restored to Mephibosheth as rightful heir. What is more, the servant of Saul’s, who had been living a free man all these years, was now made, along with his entire family, a servant of Mephibosheth. Talk about a change of fortune, not only for Mephibosheth but also for Ziba, the servant. Several years later, David was running for his life because his own son Absalom had gathered a vast army and was approaching Jerusalem with the intent of wrenching the kingdom from his father. Just as David and his allies made it out of town, he was approached by Ziba with a string of donkeys loaded down with raison cakes, figs and wine. “Where”, David asked, “is your master’s grandson?” Whether he was lying or not, we don’t know but Ziba told David that Mephibosheth had stayed home because he was in hopes that Absalom was coming with his army to make Mephibosheth king. Now why Mephibosheth would possibly think that could be and why David would accept this, we cannot know but David did believe Ziba and freed Ziba of his servanthood to Mephibosheth and gave all his former master’s land to him. Ziba’s response? “I humbly bow. May I find favor in your eyes, my lord the king.” Can we call that humility? Bowing to a king to win his favor and gain his gifts?

If humility is not an attempt to gain favor, not the result of insecurities and not a response to fear, then what is it? There are three key components to humility. If one or more are missing, we do not have humility but rather some warped anomaly. Just as the Orcs in the Lord of the Rings were corrupted forms of elves, so too, lacking any one of these foundational components of humility makes it something quite different. The first part of humility is the recognition that without God we are nothing. A collection of molecules stuffed together in a solid mass is not life, certainly not human. God’s parting words to Adam following the latter’s sin describes well our true condition. “…for dust you are and to dust you will return." (Genesis 3:19 NIV) We have ideas, and creativity and strength and will not because we earned it; we have these because God breathes life into us and makes every part of us living. We are exciting and fun and creative and full of action due to God keeping it going in us and for no other reason than that.

Humility is built on the fundamental premise that I am first and foremost, sinner. I live against the laws of the universe and have nothing to offer a soul but wrongheadedness and abuse of the gifts given me. I am a violator of the basic morals that make life good and I do the wrong thing again and again. Humility recognizes, as Paul the Apostle did, that I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. (Rom 7:18-19 NIV) It is not humility to despise myself because I fail at things or am ignored or rejected by others. It is humility though to know that I make judgments about things as a sinner, take stock of my life and the people around me as a sinner, do acts of charity as a sinner and make plans as a sinner. When I correct my children, it is as a sinner; when I preach a sermon, I do so as a sinner and when I am angry over the way my meal has been cooked, my anger is cooked in sin. Without that sense that I am a first-rate sinner, I cannot be humble…not even a bit.

Humility rests also on the reality that I am so loved by God, Jesus died for me. My ugly profile, my clumsy hands, my inability to remember names, my boring little stories and my bad breath cannot be my first or even my third point about me. I am the beloved work of art a God who desperately loves me made. If I hang my head because I do not yet believe Jesus loves me, that is one thing. But if I hang my head because I do not think Jane or Jeffery love me, that is altogether another thing. I can wander away from Jane and Jeffery and find love because God made me beloved and only a fool would despise me. There are millions like me beloved of God who know it and are made to love me too. There is not a shortage of people to love me. There is a shortage of me who know how loved I am. Humility is based on God’s infatuation with me; his last dying breath breathed for me. I cannot be humble if I do not know the taste of God’s love in me.

So what is humility? How do I do it? Humility starts with a desperate faith in Jesus for salvation; salvation for our post death life but also salvation for our life now. My confidence in the Cross to save each part of me…my career, my family, my finances, my thoughts, my friendships is the most crucial choice we make each and every day. Either God does not exist and we live as a complete pagan or He is and we make it our most important task the complete reliance on Jesus to manage and fill every part of us.

In the movie, The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Lucy the youngest of the children brought back to Narnia to help rescue the Narnians has a hint that she has glimpsed Aslan the great lion (who symbolically represents Jesus Christ) but isn’t so sure it was him and can’t get the others to go with her to follow where he is leading. In the end the kids don’t believe her and it turns out disastrously for them. Finally, when Lucy does come face to face with mighty Aslan, she wants reassurance that earlier it was indeed him pointing the way to a safer and more direct way of saving the Narnians. Yes, he tells her, it was him. She then asks how many lives might have been saved if they had taken his directive. Oh, my child, she is told, you cannot go back and discover that for it is already done. But then he makes the sword thrust into Lucy’s heart. You, my child, even if no one else had gone with you, could have followed and it would have made all the difference.

The better part of humility is not the bowing of one’s head or the lowering of one’s dreams or the giving in to every poor soul who thinks he should boss you around. The better part of humility is following Jesus whether anyone goes with you or not. Last night, my boys were with me and two unbelieving friends who have been taught nothing in their home of following God or giving in to his will. We had bought some burgers and fries and were sitting in my car in the back side of the parking lot. I asked (told) one of my boys to lead us in prayer. At that moment was a great quandary. Not for me but immediately for my son. Do I speak out or mumble a complaint. Do I argue that I can’t or don’t feel like it or have nothing to say? Do I pray? In humility, my son bowed his head, opened his mouth and before his friends, thanked God for our food. Humility is not a way of thinking; it is and always has been the micro submissions we make to the God who through us is changing our world.

It Matters...It Matters Not

My friend is on the verge of completely rearranging his life through a career move and I could not be happier for him. How do we end up here or there, befriend him or her, have this child but not that one, marry her but not her or her or her? And then when it all is, we call it a life. We circle the wagons and try to defend this choice or that, squeeze this wish out of God vs that one and make a go out of finding happiness. Last night my son almost crossed home plate...but didn't. Should he have prayed more and forced his way past the catcher through God force or better yet, bowled him over? One cancer cell in the liver and we are battling into death, one lovely chance meeting and we are barreling into marriage. I have never been more in love with Jesus than I am now and yet more reluctant to try to plan my way into success or happiness or comfort or peace. I just finished Surprised by Joy and if there was one theme that bopped me more than any other in C.S. Lewis' book, it was this. all that is good is that we are in Jesus...Cross home plate or not, find a new house or not, get a more comfortable job or not pale in comparison to living within Christ. The stuff of it all...the encouraging conversation, the rolling waves, the cozy book, have a place to this life but never are the home of it. In Christ, we are home...

The Life We Know And The Life We Don't

Psalm 25:21 NIV
May integrity and uprightness protect me, because my hope is in you.

Recently the wild child Lindsey Lohan was in the news because she was named in a lawsuit alleging she stole a fur coat from a friend whose party she was attending. Now, the most important question for us is not whether she did it or not but whether that same sort of absurdity is in us too. Of course it makes no sense whatsoever for this multi-millionaire actress to go about stealing coats. But is she alone in her fractured state? Is she the only one of us who does things that don’t make any sense, who say things we can’t believe we said, who act nothing like we are? The other day I was driving along and someone cut in front of me. This little housewife when she made her lane change easily could have slid behind my car but must have decided in some dark part of her soul that it was crucial she take from me my lead. Angered by the idiocy of her act, I did an equally absurd thing. I swiftly changed lanes and made my move to get back my spot on the road. Of course I immediately got trapped behind a slow moving truck and was forced, if I were to make my left turn, to cut in front of the woman immediately behind the person I was trying to conquer. This infuriated the woman I cut off, and after I slipped into the left turning lane, she, as she passed by me cocked her head back to give me the evil stare down. The idiot I sought was now the idiot I was.

There are several Lindsey Lohans in scripture that acted absurdly. In the Old Testament is the barely remembered servant of the prophet Elisha. Gehazi was Elisha’s right hand man and the witness of spectacular miracles. But it was one of those miracles that was his undoing. When the Aramean, Naaman came to Elisha begging for a cure from his leprosy, Elisha gave the general a perplexing prescription. “Go” he told the foreigner, “and dip your whole body into the Jordan River seven times and your flesh will be restored.” Naaman thought Elisha was clueless and at first refused to do what he was told, despising the soupy Jordan. But when Naaman’s servants advised him to give it a try, he trooped down to the Jordan, dunked himself seven times and to his amazement came up out of the water totally healed. Stunned and eternally grateful to the prophet, Naaman and his retinue returned immediately to thank Elijah for what he had done Gehazi the servant stood by in shocked silence as his master Elijah turned down Naaman’s offer of a million dollars in gold and silver as a gift for the healing.

Faithful servants don’t often betray their masters but Gehazi could not stare down all that gold and silver without making a go of it. Surreptitiously Gehazi slipped out and chased down Naaman.and lied to him that his master Elisha changed his mind and actually did want some of the silver and two changes of clothes. Naaman immediately obliged and Gehazi rushed home with his cache. Finally returning to Elisha with his treasures safely hidden away, Gehazi was shocked to learn that Elisha already knew about his covert trip to Naaman, knew about the story he made up to get the silver and clothes from him and knew he had his loot hidden away at home. Gehazi’s punishment was swift and heavy handed. The leprosy Naaman had just escaped fell upon Gehazi. Could Lindsay Lohan top that?

A second Lindsay Lohan is actually a pair of them…the infamous Ananias and Sapphira. We know their story all too well. When many of the early Christians were selling off property and giving the proceeds to the Church, one of the couples in the group thought they would join in the extravagance. No one told them they had to give anything; there were no rules about sacrifice and generosity in the Church. But Ananias and Sapphira decided they also would sell a field and give the proceeds to the church. The catch though, was that they wanted everybody to think they had given all their profits when in fact some of the earnings they were keeping for themselves. Again, there was no rule that said they couldn’t do this, keep part, but why did they lie about it. It was a disastrous Lindsey Lohan moment. God immediately struck each of them dead when they lied to Peter about their charity.

A third Lindsey Lohan is the Apostle Peter himself. When the Christian community made its thrust into the non Jewish world and started winning Gentile converts to Christ, the Jewish Christians were thrown into a tizzy. What kind of expectations should be placed on these Gentile believers? Should they have to keep the Jewish Law too? Would they need to eat only Kosher? What about the Sabbath and circumcision and Feast days and morality? What were the requirements for good Christian living if you weren’t raised Jew? Finally it was settled that only four Jewish restrictions would remain. No eating meat of strangled animals, no drinking blood, no feasting on food offered to idols and no sexual immorality. That was it. The sum total of Jewish requirements Gentiles had to keep to remain good Christians. Peter though still had friends who thought this wasn’t enough. Gentile believers really had to be Jews if they were to be accepted. On the other hand, he had good Christian friends who were Gentiles that thought the entire Jewish legalism thing was rubbish. When Peter was with them he was fine with the freedom of Christian faith. But then Christian Jewish legalists came to town and Peter slithered away from his Gentile friends because he was afraid of what his Jewish friends thought of them. A Lindsey Lohan moment!

What is the point of connection between these three incidents? Each time someone did something ridiculous that was completely out of character and totally unnecessary. Gehazi needed neither the silver nor the clothes, Ananias and Sapphira didn’t even have to sell their field if they didn’t want to do so and Peter had no reason to be afraid of the opinions of his Jewish brothers. Integrity is not just moral character; it is defined as wholeness, as unity, as the state of being complete. The Greek word most often translated integrity in the New Testament is “alethia”; it describes the condition of truth, or trueness within. It is what the Pharisees, who were trying to trick Jesus into condemning Caesar’s taxation, had to say of Him…Jesus was a man of “alethia” or trueness. Integrity is more than simply doing the right thing; it is true character spilling out into common activities.

Integrity is a frequent theme in the Old Testament, often found in the Psalms and Proverbs. The word most frequently used to express integrity is the Hebrew term “Tome”. It describes completeness, fullness, simplicity and innocence. Tome is a state of maturity that develops into a lifestyle of innocence brought on by a whole-hearted walk with God. David spoke of integrity as a source of protection, a sort of castle where he could find safety. May integrity and uprightness protect me, because my hope is in you. Psalm 25:21 NIV Integrity is etched in God. You cannot divorce the two from one another. A person without God is a tangle of turmoil, of competing values and concerns. The one housed in God, living within Him has wholeness, purpose, direction. Proverbs 10:9 expresses this perfectly. The man of integrity walks securely, but he who takes crooked paths will be found out. Literally, the one walking within integrity walks peacefully and confidently but the one taking crooked paths is made known..or uncovered.

Integrity is not what you do, it is who you are. It is a state within rather than a set of actions without. And yet, one is never a person of integrity without the straight paths being taken. Now the mistake many make in trying to lay out a plan for taking up integrity is setting a list of rules or standards that plant you in a moral Christian box. Integrity is not cheating on your wife, not stealing from the 7/11, working hard and earning your salary, avoiding gossip, living up to your promises, paying your taxes and setting high standards of what you watch and read. Integrity for most is a do list that if you are reasonably successful gives you permission to rip anyone else who isn’t your moral equivalent. It is the Christian equivalent of the Hindu caste system.

Now lest you think I am implying that integrity means a sort of free-wheeling whatever goes Gnostic moralism, that is not so. Integrity is a change in me that is unmistakable and discernable.
But it isn’t me making me. It is God reshaping my life into His image. Let me share a scriptural example. When Solomon insisted that we aren’t to go around righting all the wrongs done us, he wasn’t just talking about personal revenge. He was describing a revolutionary way of life that lives by faith. Do not say, "I'll pay you back for this wrong!" Wait for the LORD, and he will deliver you. (Proverbs 20:22 NIV) The Lord is insisting that whatever you need to be secure will be done by Him to you….The key to this is that God does not promise to bomb blast your enemies, your problems, your messed up work plans. He will instead rescue, or better, save you. Take matters in your own hands and you might quite well blow up your enemies and everyone who aggravates you but there will be no deliverance, no “saving”.

There is one more scripture that defines integrity. All a man's ways seem right to him, but the LORD weighs the heart. (Proverbs 21:2 NIV) This may be one of the most disconcerting verses in scripture. It insists that every road we take is a straight one to us…we see nothing crooked in our ways. But God knows what it really is in us. We can be and often are terribly misdirected, thinking we have gotten it right…what we’ve said, how we have reacted, what we decided, but we have veered horribly off course. Imagine taking a trip to Hawaii in your million dollar boat and winding up in French Guyana or Manteca. Worse yet, being there and not knowing you aren’t even close to Hawaii. That is what each of us do day after day, year after year with our integrity because we don’t know our heart nor the real force behind our actions. Without the heart being straight, the integrity of the journey is crooked and will land us nowhere and anywhere both at once.

How do I stop being a Lindsey Lohan, having rational, logical explanations for nonsensical behaviors? My heart must be shaped by God. Proverbs 19: 1 is a bit of a twisted, unbalanced verse if you don’t get what integrity is. A literal translation is, “Better a poor man of integrity than a dullard of twisted speech.” The contrast would seem to be the poor man and a rich man or a wise man and a fool but what we find is that neither is true. The opposite of a fool is one made poor. Not every poor man lacks money but every poor man lacks. This is the fundamental rule behind integrity. Integrity is built by me being made empty and letting God fill me. Why is it so crucial that I don’t try to fix those who frustrate me, settle matters with those who harm me and square off all the difficulties I face and avoid them. It is because when God makes me poor, whether it’s through what others do to me or through circumstances that make life hard, I am developing integrity. Integrity is God, percolating within me and giving me a rebuilt heart and will.

There are four commands that seem completely unreasonable to the crooked man. They are: do not divorce, do not fight back , do not hold grudges and do not judge. All four are a direct assault on self-will and the crooked heart. All four require I give up my right to do as I wish and require I trust God to make right my messy life. There is a fifth hub though within integrity. A heart can not ever be made whole unless it stops complaining about what God brings.

There is a fascinating little vignette in Job 2 that is unfortunately most remembered because Job’s wife encouraged him to curse God and die. Yet the most important part of the entire two part dialogue is her question to him, “Are you still holding on to your integrity?” Job’s response is most enlightening if we too want to have whole lives, if we want our inner heart to be free of Lindsey Lohan urges. He asks pointedly, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” Here is the key to integrity. The Hebrew word receive is rooted in the idea of being led by. The gist of this is that integrity flourishes within us when we let God lead us with the good things, the pleasant things and we also let Him lead us with hat we deem evil, ugly, unpleasant, sometimes even unbearable things of life. Integrity is built in us when we refuse to jump off the train God has made us His passenger. How do we do this? We don’t rip those we find frustrating, we don’t leave those who make our lives hard and we don’t make pain the worst of our enemies. The question before us is the same as Job’s question for his wife. Shall I be led only by God if it led is pleasant and not when it pains me? The straight path turns crooked when one is abandoned for the sake of the other. It is both the good and the bad that God brings my way, that keep my road straight and sure.

The Facts Of Life

Weddings remind us of priorities...that it really does matter we love, hold hands, blow bubbles in the wind and laugh. Sometimes I miss the details because the big picture fails me. Get the sermon finished, hold the cell group, write, talk to people. But sitting at the reception next to friends and laughing and talking about silly things like "Lost" and wedding cermonies gone bad, I was brought back to living. It is not having converstations so that I can "build community" or "grow the church", it is having conversations because that is good, friends are good and cracking up is good. Love isn't the easiest thing we do and enough of the time doing something about it is a chore. But when we laugh and breathe deeply together..and drink vanilia milkshakes out of the same germy straw, the rough edges of being smooth out a bit...rough edges like the big picture...like making our kids right, our wife or husband right, making our friends right, our cell group right, our church right, ourselves right. Thanks Will and Erin for another chance at life. It was fun.

But may the righteous be glad and rejoice before God; may they be happy and joyful.
Psalm 68:3 NIV

What is Lindsey doing now?

The other day I got trapped in the internet by a Lindsay Lohan crash and burn account and after I finished reading the gory details I felt like I had taken a bath in a slime pool. Then yesterday I came across this side note by C S Lewis in his book Surprised By Joy.

"Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France and quadruplets born in New Zealand."

How much reality are we missing because we dive too deeply into the absurdity of pop culture? If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie turned out to be just an invention of People Magazine and they didn't actually exist, would we be worse off? Our friends and family make integrity real and love real and joy real. But Jesus is the capstone of the entire Temple and He is where all of reality lives and has meaning. I wonder what Paris Hilton thinks about this?


Psalm 25:21
May integrity and uprightness protect me,
because my hope is in you.

Three Legs

While Dan and I were praying together,the rather bizarre thought came to me (I should never admit this) that I do not know of multiple generations of three legged men. For that matter you hardly ever see multiple generations of two tailed dogs or cats passing along the trait of three ears to their little kittens. The entire premise behind evolution is that rather extraordinary changes in body composition occur in species which result in entirely new species...a lizard with feathers becomes a bird...a rhinoceros develops skinny legs and a mane and turns into a horse...fish sprout legs and are shellless turtles. Of course cloning seems to be the scientific way to recreate evolutionary processes (if they ever existed) Wouldn't it be cool if suddenly we had a baby born with a functioning eye on the back of her head. Clone that child and you suddenly have perfectly adapted parents. Of course it would be even better if those eyes could extend out and follow your child to school. Then you might really have something. Imagine greeting your son when he comes home by the offhand comment, "I saw what you did in the lunch line" and be able to mean it...
1 Peter 3:12
For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous
and his ears are attentive to their prayer,
but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil."

Noah Part Two

Last night Noah had a Little League game and he had been slumping pretty badly. He was striking out and seemed to be drooping a bit. Last night he had his second straight game getting two doubles in three at bats. He scored three times and it was his hit that started the winning rally for his team. As we were getting into the car, Noah told me what he thinks turned things around for him. At the beginning of the season he was hitting pretty well and he said he had been praying whenever he came up to bat. But in the middle of the season, he stopped praying. He was, he told me, "too proud". The last two games though he started praying again. That, Noah insisted, was why he was doing better. It is pretty funny but just before the game, Noah got a pretty noticable haircut. I heard one of the coaches tease Noah about his haircut being the key to his success. Noah sees it a bit differently!
"Ask and you'll get,
Seek and you'll find,
Knock and the door will open." Luke 11:9

Too Many Babies

Yesterday a friend told me that the biggest problem with the United States was overpopulation. California has doubled in size and the United States as a whole will soon reach one billion in population I was warned. My friend then asked me rhetorically why people are so stupid to not realize that we have to stop having so many children. You must understand two things. First, this was a friend who genuinely likes me and doesn't think I am stupid. Second, my friend knows I have four kids and just met one of them the day before. I was asked where we will put all these people we are producing and importing. I responded that Arizona and Texas seem to have plenty of room. My friend just gave me a blank stare as if Arizona or Texas were mere Republican black holes. I guess if I had mentioned the command in Genesis to multiply and fill the earth I would have lost all credibility. I never asked if my friend's parents should have followed the program of zero population growth. I think I would have received another blank stare. Long live baby producers! We all had at least two. Well honestly, if you take Genesis 1 seriously, it takes three to tango!

Passion

1 Samuel 13:14 NIV
But now your kingdom will not endure; the LORD has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him leader of his people, because you have not kept the LORD's command."

Now, of all the compliments we find in scripture, this is perhaps one of the most extraordinary! God looked about and of all He considered in Israel, there was one person who was “after His own heart.” As far as I can tell, no one else is described in such a lofty way. There are others in scripture that are praised but none to this extent. Now as we attempt to unravel the gist behind the Lord’s accolades, the Hebrew does give us a few extra clues to best understand the comment. Before we go any further, we must point out that it is young David, the eventual second king of Israel that God is referencing. Saul, the king being addressed by the prophet Samuel, has just failed miserably in God’s eyes with his kingly vocation. As a consequence, the Lord picked out someone else to take his place as king. But not just anybody, it was an after his own heart king.

There are two key parts to this characterization. The first has to do with the seeking. There are two ways to look at this Hebrew verb. The first is that God went out on an intensive search and frantically looked high and low for someone who could replace Saul as king. The implication is that the Lord has to figure things out, sort through things…as if he went out among all the Israelites and checked each psychic resume before stumbling upon the right man for the job. The second way this verb can be read is that sought to make the right person ready for the task before him. God sought to secure the will and character of the future king and that one became a man after God’s own heart. For obvious reasons, this seems to be the better reading of this. God made David who he was. It wasn’t David’s marvelous make-up that convinced God he was the one. God secured David and got him ready to be a man after His own heart. What else were those attacking bears and lions that threatened his little flock intended to do but steel his character? And what of those “few sheep” his brother Eliab derisively characterized David’s chief vocation? Why did God saddle him with such a lowly career when David was good enough to be king? That too was God’s “sought”. The family he had, the village where he was raised, the dusty fields where he worked all became God’s seeking.

The second part of the characterization is the “after his own heart”. What does this mean? Heart is the Hebrew word for the inner parts, the part of us that we are inside…our soul, our personality, our mind, our emotions. It is us. “After His own” indicates as is. In David, God said He had someone just like Him. That David is like me! It is just as if you watch your daughter do the exact same thing you would do in a situation and you go, “Wow! That was me!” But then you might respond, “So what?” How does that change my life? Of course this doesn’t. But there is something that does. How was David just like God in who He is and what would I be like if God said the same of me? That is an intriguing question.

There are many traits of David that could qualify. He was courageous…But for courage there must be something that makes you afraid and how would God get there? Perhaps it was the cool way David wrote praise songs….of course that wouldn’t make sense other than maybe the adoration he offered God warmed the Lord’s heart to him. Was it his adultery with Bathsheba…that was a joke! Could it have been his warrior persona? Now I think we are getting somewhere. He was told that he couldn’t build the Temple he so badly wanted to construct because he had “shed much blood.” So it wasn’t that he killed lots of people in battle. But, I do believe there is something in the way David went out and conquered that made him a man whose inners were like the inners of God.

Everything about David exuded passion. Whether it was the way he was undaunted by Goliath’s height or girth and insisted he could lick the big “fella” or his ability to rally a crowd to join him when he was an “enemy of the state: David was passionate and it rubbed off on those around him. Several stories come to mind. The first is David’s response to the bravery of his soldiers who broke through enemy lines to grab some water from the well at Bethlehem. It was a foolish risk of life but done out of deep love and respect for David. When the men returned, despite his clear craving for that well water, David poured it out on the ground “to the Lord”. Embarrassed by his selfishness, he responded almost bizarrely. No one would have faulted him for drinking the water, particularly since it could have been misconstrued as disrespecting the efforts of his men to bring it to him. But the passion of David could not be swayed by his concern with propriety. Far be it from me, O LORD, to do this!" he said. "Is it not the blood of men who went at the risk of their lives?" And David would not drink it. (2 Samuel 23:17 NIV)

Of course we are well familiar with David’s near erotic dancing before the Lord as he led the procession bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem. His wife Michal castigated him for his passion, calling it an embarrassment to his office. But David did not care what others thought of his behavior. He was deeply in love with God and could not stop the effervescent flow of affection bubbling up out of him. Listen to some of the Psalms he wrote. Sing to him a new song; play skillfully, and shout for joy. (Psalm 33:3 NIV) My lips will shout for joy when I sing praise to you--I, whom you have redeemed. (Psalm 71:23 NIV) Not only did he shout for God, he also shouted happily for his friends when they got it right. We will shout for joy when you are victorious and will lift up our banners in the name of our God. (Ps 20:5 NIV) Something tells me, when I reflect on David stripping down and wildly dancing in front of the Ark all the way through the streets of Jerusalem, when David said that he would shout…scream if you will with joy when you were victorious…he meant it. Passion

There is one other lesser known example of David’s passion that caught my eye. When told that he would not be allowed to build the Temple himself, David was saddened but undeterred. He gathered 3,750 tons of gold and 34,500 tons of silver for the construction of the Temple he would never live to see built. Listen to David’s detailed concern that the Temple his son would construct be precisely correct in every way. He gave him instructions for the divisions of the priests and Levites, and for all the work of serving in the temple of the LORD, as well as for all the articles to be used in its service. He designated the weight of gold for all the gold articles to be used in various kinds of service, and the weight of silver for all the silver articles to be used in various kinds of service: the weight of gold for the gold lampstands and their lamps, with the weight for each lampstand and its lamps; and the weight of silver for each silver lampstand and its lamps, according to the use of each lampstand; the weight of gold for each table for consecrated bread; the weight of silver for the silver tables; the weight of pure gold for the forks, sprinkling bowls and pitchers; the weight of gold for each gold dish; the weight of silver for each silver dish; and the weight of the refined gold for the altar of incense. He also gave him the plan for the chariot, that is, the cherubim of gold that spread their wings and shelter the ark of the covenant of the LORD. (1 Chronicles 28:13-18 NIV)

Honestly, if this was a friend of ours, who in old age made such elaborate instructions for so many almost insignificant details, we would think he was at best a bit anal. Why would David care in the least how much the serving forks in the Temple weighed? He had psalms to finish, governors to instruct, generals to manage, wives and children to correct and take on vacations. Really, what did it matter if the table was 12 pounds of solid gold or 11.8 pounds? The answer is found in the next line of 1 Chronicles 28. All this," David said, "I have in writing from the hand of the LORD upon me, and he gave me understanding in all the details of the plan." God gave David the details down to the minutia for the construction and he refused to deviate even an inch from what he was told. That, my friend, is passion.

Let us now turn to the most important person in our life, Jesus. What can we say about the passion he exhibited? Perhaps the most enlightening passage found in scripture outlining the psyche of Jesus is John 11. Three details catch my eye. The first is His devotion to the lost sheep of Israel. Jesus certainly puzzled many by His actions but perhaps the most surprising…at least from the standpoint of His friends was the way he responded to the news that His buddy Lazarus was sick. Hearing of it, He dawdled where he was an additional three days. Rather than panicking and immediately taking off in a rush to heal Lazarus or at least reassure Lazarus’ two sisters who had to have been worried sick, Jesus kept up His ministry with the people across the Jordan river. Now, John tells us it was very successful ministry as “many believed”, but did that justify Jesus’ leisurely response to the deadly illness? What is intriguing is that Jesus’ enthusiasm or should we say “passion” for the people coming to Him trumped His concern for his friend’s condition. Perhaps one day dawdling would be seen as enthusiasm for the work, three days has to be labeled extreme passion.

The “b” part to this entire account is Jesus’ response to either the weeping of His friends, the hopelessness of the crowd or some other aspect of it all not explained. Jesus, at the moment He was going to raise His friend from the dead, burst into tears. There is another word for weeping which is for more often used in the New Testament to describe the response to sorrow but the specific word chosen is a derivative of tears. Now, I ask, why did John, as he pondered what happened that day, not use the more normal term for weeping rather than the one that emphasized tears? I think it is because the Disciples were caught off guard by how many tears Jesus shed, the sheer rush of them. As John look back nearly seventy years later, he still could not shake the picture of Jesus bawling. The passion of it stunned them all.

Move now to the “c” part of Jesus’ psyche. When Jesus called Lazarus from the tomb, we are told that He “shouted”. It is the same expression used to describe the uproar of the crowd when it screamed for Jesus to be crucified. Again, it is the same phrasing to express the passion of the voice from the throne (Jesus there also) shouting the end of time as we know it and the crushing of death along with the completed reign of Christ in heaven and earth. This is the shout of the stadium when home team wins the championship of the world and the fans jump from their seat in spontaneous uproar. Jesus could, and did scream with joy.

Now, let’s consider the passion of the Father. I realize most of us think of God the Father as the austere, subdued thinker who is a bit overwhelmed with all the responsibilities of running the universe that He doesn’t get overly emotionally involved with most of us. We are there, but so are the other six billion out there. But Jesus, who should know what the Father is really like described Him as a Father who has a missing son…you and me. When that son finally comes to his senses, (and yes it feels like an eternity to the Father) repents of his sins, and comes home, God the Father rushes to the boy in a mad dash, throws himself upon him and affectionately kissed him. There is nothing austere about this description of the Father. It is embarrassingly goopy passion.

What do we make of all this? I think we are most like Jesus when we shout more about him, are openly wild in our affection for one another and when we pump fist more often even the tiniest of steps forward we fellow pilgrims make in this plodding journey of faith. If you look at the bad guys in all three stories, whether it is the account of David’s passion, the story of Jesus’ passion at the tomb and the Father’s passion for his returning son, it is always the sour puss observers who think it beneath their dignity to overlook flaws, revel in God and shout out loud about the kindness and mercy of Jesus. I have never been very comfortable expressing myself loudly…perhaps it was the way I was raised, maybe my own personality but I am completely in love with the way the Father greets us on our way home. If there is anything the Christian community can do to make us more like God, wouldn’t it be nice if we threw our arms around one another more often and made fools of ourselves. And what if, somewhere, someplace, we would every once in a while fist pump the air and shout a praise to God that was as bold and brave as David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. .

A Frightening Seminar To Lead

I have been asked to lead a seminar on sexual abuse at a local church and it frightens me. It has been more than 20 years since I last worked actively with abused children and I honestly wonder what I have to offer. Yet I have dealt with numerous adult women who were victims of sexual abuse and rape and the devastation they suffer still continues to astound me. In the chapter on Darkness in Transformed I touch on it but in a vague and illustrative way only. The darkness rape or sexual abuse brings is perhaps the worst I know. Nearly every woman I have met who came to me for counseling because of profound difficulties in relationships or drug abuse was as a child molested. I can almost sense because of the symptoms I observe as the discussion deepens that a woman has been sexually abused before she begins to hint at it. The numbers of women who have been traumatized, in some cases irreparably by rape or sexual abuse is mulitplying at a frightening rate and I think this is the frontier the church has been most afraid and poorly equiped to enter. Let me illustrate the problem for us. A child is molested at your church by an adult that everyone loves and trusts. The little girl has no mechanism for expressing what happend to her and so she stuffs her morbid re-living of the event into her broken little heart. As she grows into adolescence, her damaged sense of self and her corrupted view of church work in conjuction to create a young woman who is poisoned by guilt (she must have caused the molestation because the man who did it is too nice a Christian to be a bad man) and tries mightily to love a God who did not stop the abuse and lets her remain in constant pain over what happened. Combine that with a deep mistrust of men and an inability to form lasting love relationships outside a very tiny circle of trusted people and you have a splintered psyche that finds almost no solace in prayer, barely if any comfort in marriage and a scrambled love/hate relationship with her own children. I am praying that I can enter into the discussion so that at least a few churches in our area can not only watch for sexual abuse among the kids they see but also be a home for young women (and men) who are breaking apart their own homes because they are so wounded that they perpetuate their pain by not being able to receive or express the love they so desperately long to hold. I hope I can be of help in a small and very limited way...

Mercy Mercy Me

Hosea 6: 6 NIV
For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.

Mercy has never been the way we think of one another, it is how we act with each other. The question before us is not, “what should I do to be merciful”. It is rather, “who should I take into my life and mercy”. I used to think I had to feel sorry for someone if I were to be merciful. I don’t believe God feels sorry for any of us and yet He is our standard for mercy. He does not look in on my thoughts and grimace over how bad I have it or how poorly I am treated. He looks in on me and despite how nastily I have treated Him and how warped and self-centered my outlook, He dies for me. In a sense the crucifixion is over but in another sense it never is. Jesus was for a moment in time bound within hours and minutes but He is eternal and the crucifixion is lived out in Him forever too. There is that part of God that we fail to recognize. Time is always now and in that sense, He dies for me today just as certainly as He did the moment two thousand years ago Jesus hung upon the Cross next to two warped and corrupted thieves. Mercy of God is now. Who can you mercy today? Happy are the merciful for they shall receive mercy…

Birthdays And Dreamscapes

Tomorrow is Hannah's birthday. When she was born, I thought she was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. Of course it wasn't like I was an obstetrician or pediatrician so my sample size wasn't in the thousands but she was as perfect a baby as was possible. Nineteen years later Hannah has cleared the way to become a vocational missionary and it seems as though she is the obvious and desired compliment to what can come of years of praying, loving, training and encouraging. It is true that you can become a mechanic or cab driver and have God's heart but few mechanics and cab drivers sought Jesus when they turned to those vocations but almost no one becomes a Christian missionary without an earnest pursual of Jesus. Which brings me to Hannah. All of us should have our birthdays celebrated; certainly someone should be remembering us somewhere and it would be great if we all were mentioned in blogs but with Hannah, I think of everything I once dreamed would be my point as pastor and see it wrapped up in this niece of mine I do this pastor life because I am certain God called me to it but what drives me in it is the thought that from the womb a child can be carried through the church into something noble, something that truly makes our parts of the world more lovely. Can we say it? More Christian. Hannah is kind and generous and bright and certainly godly but she is more than that. She is one light shining who has been lit by a forgotten class...the praying faithful. Hannah's name is Hebrew and not so surpisingly means prayer...or more specifically mercy prayer. Whatever God does with you Hannah, you are set apart but not moved apart. You are within this big family that dreams even bigger things for you than you are capable. No need to try to make anyone proud of you because we all love you more than that and besides missions isn't your goal, it is your being. Follow your calling Hannah but wherever your mission field is, it will always be within your home! Happy Birthday Hannah!

Core Values--Courage

Ps 91:5 NIV
You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day,


There is a divine purpose every person possesses that makes the coward courageous and it is this. God makes our most feared moments have eternal value. Jesus died we all know for one reason. His death rescued us from the brutality of death brought by the sins we each have cursed God by committing. Nothing we do matters a whit if Jesus does not that moment rescue us from Hell. Everything dies with us and nothing lives that we do, think or say. But if we put our faith in Christ for our everything eternal, then something new emerges. A purpose for everything we fear to do. One example and then we decide what to do with this. Last week I thought about asking the manager of Wal-mart if she would let me sell my book at her store. I dreaded the conversation. My self-esteem was pretty shot, my conviction that anyone would buy the book was pretty low and I was not at all certain I had a good reason that could convince her that she should put it on her shelf. The book after all is a religious book, it is not bound yet so it looks worse than plain and I have no publisher to back what I am doing. But one thing was certain. I had to bring my book to her. So, as I was driving down to the store, one thought kept coming to me. What if this one store manager actually read the book and it convinced her to follow Jesus fully? Would then my conversation with her matter? That is the point. What if the things that frighten us are in fact crucial to God’s plan and key to getting done what must not be stopped! Courage is not bucking up my emotions and doing what I dread doing. It is having a purpose that screams past this life and doing what the Enemy makes seem the worst of outcomes. I die to self and live for Christ. That is courage.

Just Quit

Yesterday I took my kids to a baseball game and we sat next to a group of guys who were entertained by screaming at the pitcher of the oposing team who was warming up in the bullpen. "You are gonna give up a home run!" "You're no good!" "You call that a fastball?" "Just give up!" Of course they had some spicier terms also that they hurled down at the bullpen. My boys were pretty surprised by the vitrolic quality of the comments...they didn't use the word vitrolic...they caled them angry drunks. Of course Jacob and Noah aren't used to that kind of behavior since all they know are Little League games where all (almost all) of the fans are encouragers. The more I considered the comments, the more kin they seemed to what I hear in my own head as I wade through pastoral responsibilities and my work connected to ministry. I am certain it is Satan who hurls the spite and levels the accusations but many of the criticisms and characterizations feel pretty dead on. Some of the attacks I can't quite fend off and they stick. So what do I do with all my "just quit" plaque clogging my heart? I wish I could say I just bring it to Jesus but it never is quite that simple. The finiteness of my vision makes it very difficult to see anywhere much past what I have done, the response I receive from others and the silence guarding my efforts. If I could just get one "ata boy!" from God, I would probably be pretty satisfied but that doesn't seem to come often enough to keep me clearheaded as I "fight the good fight". We do see through a glass dimly, our vision blurred by the frailties of our efforts, the quietness of our friends and the scorn of our critics but that does not mean it all ends there. We press on because there is an end in sight where we will finally be cheered openly by the only One who really knows what we have attempted. Why God doesn't just give us all a group of cheering fans who love our work and applaud us onward, I do not know. But I am certain of this. It was pretty lonely in the Garden of Gethsemane and I am most thankful Jesus went on with what He had to do... So there it is. Press on! Victory is despite appearances, within reach!

One Shouldn't Equal Ten

Last night Rachel told me I was the best dad! I asked her if she meant that I was the best dad she had and she responded, "No dad, you know what I mean!" I couldn't argue with that...not that I think I am as she put it, "the best dad in the world". Why is it that criticism sticks so harshly in us like a twisting Ninja star and the compliments we get are so liquid and slippery? It is such a bane, this hurt we carry when one critic disdains our best efforts and ten give us the thumbs up and we barely notice them. I will pursue this one step further. If we are all so painfully aware how awful it feels to be turned away and so greedy for even the smallest of compliments, why are we so frugal with our praise and so quick to critique? Have we only got a limited supply of kind and generous words...like Essau begging for just a morsel of blessing from his dad Isaac, we are all starved for a bit of thoughtful praise. I don't get it. Why do I so closely monitor my compliments? What evil gets in me that makes me think I have not enough kind things to say to people to last this little lifetime? Will I run out if I say something generous? I don't know if it has been proven but I bet my friends who say nice and kind things to me have better and more joyful lives than those who don't. And so too for me. I bet those who outdo me on this praise thing live better than I do. Thanks Rachel for letting me have a glimpse at how good life can be when I think the waitress is the best waitress in the world and my friend is the best friend in the world and my doctor the best doctor in the world and the missionary speaker the best missionary speaker in the world and that even if you are my only daughter, you are the best daughter in the world. We may run out of oil...I just hope we don't run out of praise.

By the way...Nicole D. your courage is astonishingly lovely...and Greg you are equally amazing as you keep going when the world is spinning wildly about you!!!

Moving The Center

Take the most insignificant detail of your life. A pebble on the ground before you….a glance into the mirror…a forgotten conversation with a co-worker…the Swanson’s frozen dinner last Monday…the toothpaste you picked up from Walgreen’s on the way home from the dentist. Why did you decide these moments were insignificant? Was it the little attention you paid them, the lack of relevance to anything else you did, the low impact they had on your retirement plans? How come the stock market crash in 1929 led to so many suicides and my four month old daughter spitting up on my shirt went unnoticed and forgotten in both my inner world and the universe at large? What strange magical electrode in your brain sparks and sets off a chime warning “this is important” or more legitimately, what triggers the dump mode, sending so much of experience into the recycle bin of your soul?

If we could be brutally honest just for a moment, most of life is terribly boring. No one cares that you had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch and the TV show you watch tonight with such rapt attention will be completely forgotten next week…or tomorrow. You go to work and you go home and next week you go to work and go home and for forty years you go to work and go home and then you make a major shift, you eat your lunch at home and go to Wall-mart in the afternoon. Six billion of us will live and die and five Billion, nine Hundred and ninety nine million, nine hundred and ninety eight thousand will never know it happened. Or maybe more...

What if you never lived? Would it cause a ripple in the tide or a shift in the alignment of the continents? Of course not! And by your living, does the star Alpha Centauri burn any brighter or democracy shine any more in America? No…So does it really matter what you do or don’t do? Now that is a completely different question. I recently posted on my blog a short discussion on how universal the tendency is to see everything almost exclusively from one’s own perspective. Of course that can be a bad if you are self-centered and ugly about your lack of interest in others but it is the way we are. We cannot really get into anyone else’s head any more than they can get into ours. We live, even with so many all around us, isolated. The most important journey any of us make in life is the one outside our minds, outside our wants and dreams and hopes…it is the journey away from ourselves.

There is a quite strange passage in the Old Testament that took me years to get a handle for understanding. Honestly, most times I read it I came away flummoxed by God’s hardness, His strident harshness. Every criticism leveled against God by unbelievers seems illustrated in this account. God is just mean, He makes big things out of little things, He is all about rules and takes the fun out of life. I think most people who don’t believe in God aren’t so impressed by the evidence He doesn’t exist, it is just they don’t like what they see of God and close their eyes to His presence, creating a network of proofs to do away with the God they don’t want. This incident I am talking about in 1 Samuel is the very sort of thing atheists and agnostics and anti Christians point to as reasons for not believing. If God is God, why would He be like this? Why so stubbornly hard and unbending?

The account is found in 1 Samuel 13. Saul had recently been appointed king over all Israel by Samuel, the prophet of God. Samuel’s authority came from his position as spokesman for the Lord and all the people respected his clear sense of God’s guidance nationally. Israel was formed, not as a democracy, not as a monarchy, not as a socialist state but rather as a people governed by God and every time they strayed from that mooring, the entire country fell into chaos and pain. But now, for the first time, a king was being appointed to lead the people and it was a bittersweet moment. Saul, as the new king had lots of promise. He had a talent for leading large numbers of people. He was tall, good looking and bright. His ability to raise up an army and instill confidence in a vision was becoming clear. The future looked bright for Israel with Saul at the helm.

But if Israel was to be a nation that followed God as ultimate King, then the most crucial skill set Saul had to have was making God king of his own heart. The first great test of this came with the invasion of Israel by the vast army of the Philistines. Saul had been told by the prophet Samuel that God absolutely did not want Saul to just do things on his own. He was to go down to Gilgal and wait seven days until Samuel returned and then Samuel would make a set of burnt offerings and a fellowship offering for all the men and after that, God’s instructions would be handed to Saul.

What follows is most perplexing but not surprising given our understanding of human nature. Saul’s son Jonathon, a courageous and reckless spirit, got the Philistines stirred up by attacking one of their outposts. Saul had already conscripted an army of three thousand men but when the Philistines arrived with their army “as numerous as the sand on the seashore”, Saul faced his first true crisis as king. Wanting to be faithful, Saul waited the seven days for Samuel but when the morning of the seventh day arrived with no Samuel in sight, Saul took matters into his own hands. All week, his men had been deserting. The Philistines, without ever firing off an arrow or swinging a sword were, by just camping nearby, decimating Saul’s fledgling army. As the early morning sun broke across the sky, Saul called for a heifer to be brought him and roasted it on the camp fire as an offering to God. But just as he was finishing, Samuel arrived. Samuel, spying the roasting calf on the skewer asked the king, “What are you doing?”

Listen carefully to Saul’s response. "When I saw that the men were scattering, and that you did not come at the set time, and that the Philistines were assembling at Micmash, I thought, 'Now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal, and I have not sought the LORD's favor.' So I felt compelled to offer the burnt offering." (1 Sam 13:11-12 NIV) As he worked through the crisis he faced, Saul took into account two factors: how others were responding and his own take on things: I saw that the men were scattering and that you did not come….so I felt compelled.

Everything we do, say or think is worked through one of three filters. They are self, others or God. Some would protest that there is a fourth filter through which we live and that is circumstance. What about broken legs and financial windfalls, car wrecks and promotions? Don’t they determine our actions and how we think about things? No situation we face stands alone. Every circumstance is filtered through ourselves, others or God and it is the filter that dominates which determines how we respond. A classic example of this is Paul’s famous assertion in 2 Corinthians 12: 10. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. The circumstance hasn’t determined Paul’s response nor his mental state. Why do some when faced with bankruptcy commit suicide while others seem almost refreshed by the crisis? Of course we realize that it wasn’t what happened that made them act like they did. It was the filter through which they translated it all.

Let’s return to King Saul. Saul used two filters, the response of his men and his own intuition to decide he had to offer up the burnt sacrifice before Samuel got to camp. God had told Saul that he must, no questions asked wait until Samuel arrived before any sacrifices were to be offered. When Saul didn’t, he was chastised and punished for his disobedience. “You acted foolishly”, Samuel cried. "You have not kept the command the LORD your God gave you; if you had, he would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time. But now your kingdom will not endure; the LORD has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him leader of his people, because you have not kept the LORD's command." (1 Sam 13:13-14 NIV) Now why do you suppose God punished Saul so severely for such a minor indiscretion? It is all a matter of perspective!

As long as Saul governed with himself at the center, he could never get things right for the people he led. He could not know what they really needed, never understand how to help them, how to lead them, how to set their lives right. His fatal flaw and the one we too possess is that Saul could not enter a single person’s heart, could not ever really know what they thought and how they could be helped. Being isolated, Saul was of no real use to anyone in his kingdom. Every decision he made impacted everyone else in Israel as well as the nations surrounding but his ability to get it right for them was corrupted by his sin. Selfishness combined with a lack of insight into each person he was affecting killed Saul’s value as king. He could never govern well as long as his decisions were based either on what he thought or what he saw in others.

See The Figure on the Left... Self At The Center

See The Figure in the Middle... Others At The Center


Here is the second part of Saul’s painful difficulty. Even if Saul somehow became an expert student of men, made the people the filter governing his behavior, he would be unable to govern himself. Just the extra attention the women of Jerusalem paid David made him jealous and crippled his ability to make wise decisions. He thought he understood what he should do because of what he noticed about David and the response of the people to his kingship but he was completely wrong. Not only that, Saul was surrounded by advisors who were unable to correct him when he began to struggle with his insecurities. Sinners failing to look to God guiding sinners failing to look to God are a bad combination. We either don’t know what to make of others and their actions or we don’t really know who we are nor what we could be.

If you were to nail down the theme of the Bible in one concise sentence, it would be this. All men are sinners and everyone needs a Savior. Everything we do or try to do is corrupted by our sin and it makes us completely scattered and our lives meaningless wanderings. Unable to break free of our lives because we cannot really get outside our own heads, we fail to make good on the promise we had when we first sprung into life. We don’t help others rightly because we can’t and we don’t do much for ourselves either because we too often get that wrong too. We are like a polluted lake with no outlet. Sin corrupts more and more of us the longer we go and it makes a mess of our relationships too. Without a Savior, I live lost.

Saul was not bad because he offered a sacrifice. Saul was bad because he did it without God. While my family was watching one of the episodes from the first season of the TV show Lost, we were stunned by how the story unfolded. The show is about a group of survivors whose plane crashed on an island somewhere in the South Pacific. I am not really certain if the title is more about the state of where the passengers are located or the condition of their lives. As we get to know them one by one, the broken strands of their past reveal just how lost they have been. One of these characters, Charlie is an ex-drug addict who on the island has been freed of his drug cravings. In this episode, Charlie is broken by the capture of his pregnant friend Claire and haunted by the thought that he didn’t do enough to help her escape. He is worried sick that Claire has either been killed or is being tortured by her captors and he has become psychologically wrecked. Rose, who has lost her husband in the crash but is certain he somehow is still alive somewhere on the island comes to Charlie and breaks through to him. She tells Charlie that no one thinks it is his fault Claire was captured and he must stop thinking he is the only one hurting on the island. Tough medicine! But then comes the best part. As Charlie sits beside Rose, weeping uncontrollably, he begs Rose to help him Her response floored me. She tells him that he needs help bigger than her. Immediately a cross comes into focus on the screen.

See the figure on the Right... God At the Center


There is only one filter through which life ever comes into focus. It is through the life of Jesus…through God. What we cannot know, what is best for every person we influence God does. As we pray and look to Him for help, He shifts our actions and corrects our sin corrupted motives. I may not understand why my boss yelled at me but this does happen as I turn to Jesus. I respond to him with God behind what I do. My actions become, through God’s guidance, the very hand of God. In the miracle of Christian faith…in a sense, I become God for him. Not only that, I see myself more clearly too. Saul could not face the women cheering David because he thought that made him smaller. No one can make us small and insignificant because our value is never what others make of it. We are what God sees of us…and that is too big for us to comprehend.

Can we say this more clearly? Your life and mine is a wreck as long as we hold a perspective of any sort other than what God makes it. We can live all our days and in the end nothing will matter but this. Do we have a Savior? Have we followed Him? What passes for good intentions and honest effort to get it right is the fatal flaw of the sinner trapped by his own contained heart. We cannot get it right either for ourselves or others as long as all we do not filter our lives through Jesus. I was visiting with a friend and he was talking about David and God’s description of him as a “man after my own heart”. What made this murderer and adulterer and collector of wives and failing father such a person that God was pleased with him? If you read his life story, you discover that constantly he was calling on God to guide him. The only times he didn’t, David found himself in terrible trouble.

Judas was not such a great sinner because he betrayed Jesus. The truth is we all have done that. He was such a great sinner because when he realized he was, he did not turn to the Savior. When all he would do is filter his life through himself or what others thought of him, he was left with only insane alternatives because nothing is sane that is not done through Jesus. Why is lying so bad, sexual immorality so bad, cheating so bad or selfishness so bad? It is because they leave Jesus out of the picture and that is the basis of an insane life.

What happens when we find God at the center and it is through Him we meet ourselves and others? Look no further than Zacchaeus. Lonely. Selfish. Despised. He took one look at Jesus and decided to pay everyone back that he had overcharged for their taxes four times what he had taken. He gave half of his fortune to the poor. Then he had lunch with Jesus. That sounds to me like how it is when Jesus becomes the center. We love our friends and enemies. We forget about our past sins. We live.

Lord Of The Rings

Yesterday Noah found Mary Jo's missing diamond ring!!! It has been lost for several months and we looked everywhere in our bedroom for it. This was the third time Mary Jo's ring has disappeared and the other two times we had to buy replacements. But last night, Noah decided he would give it one more try. He told us later that he prayed and asked the Lord to show him where it was...

Is it just me or did the episode on Lost in the first season where Kate and Sawyer found the briefcase seem a lot like the scene in the Lord of the Rings when the ring was found by Smealgol's friend? The fight for it afterward, the strange power of the item to corrupt, its shininess in the water, the strangeness of it being located...

By the way, that same episode had a crazy scene that was mighty provacative. The conversation between Rose and Charlie sent chills down my spine. I haven't seen in a nonChristian forum quite as open an assertion of Christ's power to rescue the broken life as that scene portrayed...

The Lord of the Rings is really a vehicle of Tolkien for explaining the power sin has over us and the strength of temptation as well as its final destruction. He gets it right when he shows Frodo fiddling with the ring when he knows he should have nothing to do with it. Finally with demon kings surrounding him, Frodo puts it on thinking the ring will save him. But all it does is expose Frodo to the attack of the demons and they mortally wound him. Although Frodo is healed by Aragorn (the promised king), he bears the scar and the pain it carries the rest of his life. Temptation is nearly always a very bright and sensible solution but its filth is hidden. When we quietly slip on the ring, we become as vulnerable as Frodo; sliced and bearing the pain sometimes our entire life.

Back to the show Lost. Every character in it so far before he or she comes to the island seems "lost". I am not sure if the title refers to the before or after state of their lives. By the way, is Rose an intentional reference to Touched by an Angel...for me she is its brightest star...I do like Jack a lot though!

Enough random thoughts...it sure was good to find the ring...lost...found...I do not know if the ring was all that was found last night. I think Noah found his way too!

Return To Me

I'm not sure when it dawned on me that I am not the center of the universe. The truth is, perhaps it still hasn't really. What seems so simple, caring about others really isn't. The moment I start to feel for someone, I almost immediately turn to the same theme, how does this affect me. Give me ten broken people with heartaches and maybe two or three I will cringe with them over their pain. In flashes I love, in belches I roll over and return to me. It is certain God knows this about me and yet He still considers it normal to expect me to love and nurture and heal and care. While at the hospital, I watched the nurses check the readings, mark off their charts and measure out the meds and I wondered how they did it, seeing people always in pain, always broken, always dreading. How do they cope with the problems of others so much in their face? People sometimes ask me how I manage carrying the burdens of so many people. The truth is I can't and honestly I don't. I bear them as long as I can and then I have to drift back into the Holy Spirit where every wound is held and healed. I don't turn to prayer as a crutch, I turn to it because I want to love, I want to care and I want to leave the narrow confines of my selfish little heart. It is tough to admit it all returns to me but I am sure it does, just like it returns to you each time.

Stones and Sheep And Making The Move

Today I was walking and I stumbled upon a decorative stone that had been kicked out into the street. I bent over and tossed it back in with the rest but I didn't get very far before I was drawn in to Jesus' comments about His sheep getting out of their pen. Suddenly it dawned on me that I was one of those sheep. Ninety-nine in and one out seems pretty solitary but what has had me fooled has been the thousands and millions of one sheep also out of the pen. All of us are wandering about as if we are in a group but it isn't so. We have just been thousands of loners mingling. I admit I have been for too long intoxicated by the good stuff I have done and fooled into thinking I have it figured but I am just bleary-eyed and my thinking dimmed by busyness. Suddenly in a blip of sense, I saw my place...outside the pen. Too many times I make excuses, claiming it is not that big a deal to live far from where the Peters and Pauls and Billy Grahams and Elizabeth Eliots and Julians of Norwich and Richard Fosters graze but I can't now. Realizing I have wandered off, I can no longer explain away my deep character flaws that point out my locale. I did not beat my chest or weap uncontrollably but I prayed. Then I slipped back into the pen. There might not be any dramatic changes in my character or how I visit with God but I don't want to make any excuses either for comfortably grazing outside of the one pasture.