Thursday, December 20, 2012

Merry Christmas


Merry Christmas. . . . no, really, Merry Christmas. Put down the “to do” list and take a moment. 

Stop already. 

Jesus Christ has come. 

Jesus is the reason for the season. 

So, stop scurrying and take a moment and . . .
. . .be still and know that he is God.

God so loved you that he sent his only son, Jesus, to save you and make you new.

Jesus Christ is born!

Jesus lived among us for a time.

Jesus came so that we could have life and have it to the FULL.

Jesus died . . . was buried . . . resurrected . . . ascended . . . and is COMING AGAIN!

Woo-Hoo, or Hallelujah, or fist-bump, or some other culturally applicable expression of joy. (Do your version now. Go ahead already!)

So be still. Know. Bow. Worship. Rejoice.

Merry Christmas.

It is the end of the year and if you want to help out our little church with a financial gift we would greatly appreciate it. But only give if it comes from a place of Joy. 

Each new church is prayer for revival and a place where we hope Christ’s Kingdom will flourish and be born all over again.

Please give if you feel led. 

We are close to having a 24/7 space (please join us in praying for this).

Our small group has committed to give $5,500 monthly—this is 10% more than our budget. But our budget does not include any extras. We are asking the larger community of Gathering watchers to help us get some equipment, supplies and budgetary margin to accomplish some outreach activities. 

Thank you for praying for The Gathering as we chase our vision to change life as we know it through the love, loyalty and friendship with Jesus.

Send checks to:
The Gathering in Carmel
484 E. Carmel Dr., Ste 285
Carmel, IN  46032

Blessings and Merry Christmas,

The Gathering Team

Sam & Kim Howard

David & Amanda Foust

Marc & Amy Imboden

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Abraham and Waiting and the Times In-Between


And Another Thing . . . Abraham and Waiting and the Times In-Between

I am writing this blog a little before 7:00 on election night 2012. I have decided to not look at news for a few hours and let the frenetic energy settle a bit. It is an odd thing waiting for news that will potentially change your life. Elections can feel that way, but many other things do as well.

For many years I worked for a large pharmaceutical company. During my tenure, there were three or four times when my company “downsized” their number of employees. The “deselection” process was always varied and always somewhat harrowing. Each time I had to sit by a phone and wait to hear what others had decided about my fate. I remember sitting in my office waiting for the phone to ring. The question was always, “Will my life change a little, or a lot, or not at all?” In those in-between times, I remember wondering what the people evaluating me were saying. Did they see my worth? Did I have any worth? Do I even want this job? What will I do if I lose my job? Why aren’t they calling? I wonder if we have any cookies. And on and on it would go.  Anger. Fear. Hope. Frustration. Assurance. Resignation. Impatience. Confidence. Doubt. Repeat.

Then the phone call came and fortunately for me, I was always retained and life resumed. Life is full of in-between times.

As a pastor, I have often sat with a family and friends in waiting rooms while people with grave conditions were being treated or operated on. I have heard life stories, philosophical meanderings, silly reminiscences, bad jokes and even mundane anecdotes all while waiting for news of a potentially life altering event. I have made new friends while waiting to hear if another person is going to make it. Life is mostly made up of the little moments that lie in between the big ones.

When Abram was 75 he had an incredible spiritual encounter with God. He heard God speak instructing him to leave everything and go to a land of promise. God told him that he would turn his descendants into a great nation. This was big news since Abram had yet to produce a child. As outlandish as this was, Abram obeyed.  He left everything. He followed God.

So Abram began his sojourn. Twenty-four years passed and there was still no child. I wonder if Abram ever felt silly. I wonder if he ever had a “what was I thinking” moment. We know that Sarai doubted. She forced the issue and Abram got a son from her servant. It was a mess. There were lots of stories in his in-between days. Twenty-four years of days without much news from God. Abram kept following. The odds kept getting longer. He was nearly 100 before he heard from God again. When he spoke, he said the same thing. “Great nation.” “Blessings.” Oh, and “circumcision.” “And, while you’re at it, change your name to Abraham” It just kept getting crazier. 100 years old and Abraham is still all in. He obeys, and low and behold, he gets a son.

God kept his word, but there were lots of days of silence before the promise was realized. There were lots of in-between stories. Twenty-four years of the odds just getting longer. Twenty-four years of being tempted to believe he got it wrong. Twenty-four years of waiting for faith to become sight.

God did keep his word. And all these years later, Abraham’s name is still known and his story is still told. The book of Hebrews says this of Abraham.

Hebrews 11:8-12  By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

What a huge ending God brought to this slow and plodding beginning. Eventually this humble story turns glorious. Abraham’s sojourn established a foundation for the beginning of the Jesus story. In his in-between days, although sometimes he stumbled, he remained faithful and God through him did more than anyone could ask or imagine.

So, while I wait to hear the end of this election story, I know that the big picture belongs to God. The big news of this election night may wind up being a big deal, or perhaps it will just be a footnote. Either way, God will do good things through his people if they choose to remain faithful in their in-between times.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Adam & Eve, the Apple, the Snake and the Apartment Kids


And Another Thing . . . The Perished Kingdom

We have started to tell “The Story of God” at church on Sunday and at a local apartment complex on Thursday nights.  We sent postcards to everybody in the complex, around 200 units. I have heard in church-planting circles that such mailings typically elicit a .5% response, which is exactly what happened. One person from the complex showed up. A few of our people gathered with this individual and we had a great conversation. That was week number one.

Tonight was week number two and our lone respondent returned. Then, as we got ready to begin our discussion, one of our crew noticed a bunch of junior high kids playing outside the clubhouse. He invited them to join us—and amazingly, they did. I asked them their names and a little about themselves. Most did not go to a church, some did not believe in God, and most had never heard the Bible story of the creation and the fall.  A few knew about Adam and Eve and a little bit about an apple. One said, “Maybe there was a snake.”

So we told the story. We told about how God created the world, about the garden, Adam and Eve, about the snake—the temptation by the devil. We spent a little time talking about how God immediately promised to send his son to crush the serpent’s head. I was amazed at how many of these kids stayed engaged.

They listened. Asked questions. Wondered if we’d be back next week. 

Oh yes, we absolutely will be back next week. 

In telling this story to kids who had barely or never heard it reminded me of how foundational Genesis 3 is to the whole Christian faith. The seeds of all that will follow are in this story. The beauty of creation is broken. God’s intended kingdom perishes and is replaced by death, pain and lies. The world that humans were created to inhabit is lost. They are exiled from the garden of God. The potency of the adversary’s lie changes the story arc. Man is aligned with a new father. John 8:44 says, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Before we swallowed the forbidden fruit, humans lived in a world of clarity. With the knowledge of good and evil came confusion. Before the Fall, man’s perspective and God’s perspective were one. There was no such thing as doubt. Satan asks, “Did God really say . . .” and doubt emerges into the world. The forbidden tree’s name, “good and evil,” implies choice. With choice comes confusion. When humans separate from God everything gets murky. Paul says, “. . .now we see through a glass, darkly. . . .” Now humans must choose. In a world where lies exist, every truth becomes suspect. 

The good news is that, in Genesis 3:15, God promises that man’s new father, the father of lies, will one day be crushed. The first hint of Jesus entering the world to save lost humans is predicted within minutes of the Fall. God moves immediately to rescue the world he loves. 

When Jesus appears on the scene he challenges Satan’s rule. In John 10:10 he says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” In John 10:15 he says, “. . . I lay down my life for the sheep.” And in John 14:6 he says, “. . . I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Truth is the way to life; the way to the Father. God overcomes the lies of the enemy with the truth of his son sent to crush the serpent’s head. Second Corinthians 5:19 says, “For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them.” 

God undoes all that Satan did in the garden.

In Genesis 3 God promises to rescue man from the destruction of the Fall. In Revelation, at the end of the story, Jesus declares, "Look, I am making everything new!"

I hope our new friends at the apartment complex will be back to hear the rest of the story. It’s a good one.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Friday, October 19, 2012

Of Politics and The Intended Kingdom


And Another Thing . . . The Intended Kingdom

In the midst of a political season, it is interesting to think about God’s intended Kingdom.. Politics can be nasty and divisive (especially in October of a Presidential election year), but at democracy’s core, I believe there is an underlying desire to make things better. We want a government that lifts burdens and inspires hope while facilitating opportunities for prosperity in a just and unencumbered way. We want our society to reflect the good place we imagine in our head. Inherent in all of us is a sense of longing – a feeling that we have been displaced from our intended dwelling. As C. S. Lewis wrote in Till We Have Faces,
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home?”
Eden was God’s vote for what life should be like. It was perfect. All of the painful issues that rage against life were absent.  There was no death or illness. No hunger. No war. No religion. No sorrow. No politics. No racial divides. No classes (social, economic or otherwise). No lack of understanding. We were in perfect harmony with God and with nature and with one another. I can only imagine.

God, the three in one, chose to make humans “in our image.” God’s three members are perfectly distinct and perfectly one—each separate and yet connected. This connectedness is an essential part of creation. God is connected to everything in the beginning and in Eden all of God’s distinct creation is harmoniously married to the Creator and to each other. This is our intended natural state and it still exists as the quiet longing that is at the heart of all of our striving.

We see injustice in the world and intuitively know that this is different, somehow, from the way it was supposed to be. We see suffering and something in our gut tells us that only a broken system would allow this. We see abuse and react with incredulity and an impulse to set it right. As Joni Mitchell sang, “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

East of Eden the clarity of the garden gets fuzzy. God pronounced everything in the garden “good.” Outside of the garden people pronounce all sorts of other things “good,” and pursue them with a noble passion. In his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton puts it this way:
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered . . . it is not merely the vices that are let loose. . . . the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
Chasing after virtues is an attempt to get back home. We were intended for perfection. So we struggle to make the world right, finding that the task is too much for us, but it is not too much for God. Second Corinthians 5: 19 says, “For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.” 

The whole story of God is about God’s love creating a perfect place for his creation and then sacrificing himself to get us back to the life he designed for us. “For God loved the world he gave . . . .” 

So God is reconnecting people to himself through the gift of his son, Jesus. Through Jesus he is making all things new. God is fixing the mess we made of things. 

In the meantime, here is some advice for surviving this political season. 
“I met those of our society who had votes in the ensuing election, and advised them, 1. To vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy: 2. To speak no evil of the person they voted against: And, 3. To take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side.”  
                                 John Wesley, October 6, 1774

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Friends, Timing and the Grace of God



And Another Thing . . . Remembering a Friend

“Friends,” Tony Campolo once said, “are people with whom you share your heresies.

It is an exhilarating surprise to find yourself in a place where you don’t have to be careful; where you feel safe enough to say scary things. In a world where everyone is taught to play it safe, a friend is someone with whom to share the dangerous edges of life. To modify Shakespeare’s Lear, with a friend you can “speak what you feel, not what you ought to say.”

This kind of friendship is hard to find. It is a rare sort of alchemy that can coalesce a climate of freedom and emotional security with an intellectual curiosity and acceptance.  In this mix, great things can happen. And, even if they don’t, everyone laughs and has a good time. I have been blessed to have a few of these rare creatures inhabit my life.  One such person was Gary Rowe.

Gary’s birthday was October 9. He died last year, two weeks after turning 55. He has been missed. So today, a few of us got together and celebrated his life without the privilege of his presence. We met for lunch (since Gary was a foodie, this seemed appropriate). Gary was a wise and avid learner who never lost interest in his world, while also remaining a big fan of “The Three Stooges” and Groucho Marx. He had the rare ability to give helpful advice and poke fun at you at the same time. He was an enormous smart  . . . aleck, and a genuine friend.

I am grateful to have known him.

But I believe I had some help with that.

Acts 17:26 says, “. . . and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.”

C. S. Lewis writes,
“. . . we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart.  But for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances.  A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends, "You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another."

The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship, God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him—and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast, it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

Jesus said, “I have called you friends.” I want to say thank you.

Friendship is another one of God’s great ideas. I am glad that God pulled Gary and Rich and Tommy and David and Greg and Robby and Tim and Dan and Kent and Bill and Paul and . . . (you get the idea) into my life. Not to mention Kim and Kelsey and Kaleigh and Noah, and, oh, Mom and Dad and Sue and Sherri and . . .  (once again, you get the idea). God has brought amazing people into my “times” and “places.”

He is good.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

The Mustard Seed Conundrum


And Another Thing . . . Mustard Seed

Matt 17:20 “. . . Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

I am not a farmer. I am not very agricultural—or mechanical, or handy, or any number of other helpful life skills. When Jesus says, “. . . if you have faith as small as a mustard seed” I have no real context for it. I used to pull the weeds in my mother’s garden, and I think I planted something in a Styrofoam cup once for school, but I have no deep well of “seed” knowledge to draw from when reading this scripture. I just read the word “small”, and then read “as a mustard seed” which for me translates into “really small.” In studying this passage I learned that while there are even smaller seeds in the east, in Jesus’ time the “mustard seed” was proverbial for tiny. So what Jesus was saying is that faith is incredibly potent. Faith is turbo-charged potency on steroids. It doesn’t take much of the stuff to make a big things happen.

Encountering this verse makes me think that my faith must be comparable to one of those even smaller seeds, because the idea of moving a mountain seems impossible. It seems the tiny amount of potency required to accomplish this enormous task is way beyond my reach. Which I think is the correct conclusion and part of the point that Jesus is making. It feels impossible because it is impossible for me. I look at it (the mountain), and then at me (my assessment of my own ability) and conclude that in the battle between the mountain and me, the mountain will win. Jesus says in Luke 18:27, “What is impossible with men is possible with God." The essence of faith is getting out of your own head and into the mind of God. Jesus is saying (at least in my opinion), “If you could just see the world the way I do you could accomplish anything.” 

The trouble is I do not see the world the way he does. I see it with my fallen, practical eyes and my faithless, semi-reasonable mind. I tend to be a matter-of-fact, cautious, and self-protective person who is afraid to explore the necessarily ambiguous regions of faith. Jesus says that my idea of “possible” and his are vastly different. I have to accept this by faith because his idea is in conflict with my own. I find that my “smaller seed” sized faith is still trying to apply reason to a truth that is larger than me. My reasoning becomes a limit. My theoretical construct conceives an explanation which must necessarily be a miscarriage of the truth I hope to understand.

So how am I supposed to embrace this thing that is outside of my ability to comprehend? The simple answer is to trust God with it. Proverbs 3:5-6 says to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; (and) do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.”

The secret to getting our faith up to “mustard seed” status is to trust God. I can hear the groans as I uncork this Christian platitude. Trust feels intellectually lazy and is emotionally unsatisfying. It is a theological sound-bite that is mouthed by many and seemingly understood by few. It is the thing that is said when nothing else makes sense. Trust is a catch-all. It is also the truth. When we depend on our own understanding we mess things up. When we are faced with impossibility, we must trust God. The only way to step into the improbable is to trust the person who is asking you to take the improbable step.

This is a difficult idea to discuss and an even more difficult one to live out. Paul settled this conundrum in his own life by saying, “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” (Phil: 4:13). God’s strength moves in us to do things we know we could never do on our own. His strength makes everything possible—including moving our “smaller seed” size faith up to the size of a “mustard seed.” As faith increases, mountains get wobbly.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Our Refugee Family Arrives


And Another Thing . . . Refugee Family

This week, much of my time was spent in preparing for the arrival of our Refugee family, and so this morning I thought I would send out an abbreviated blog.

The Gathering Community rallied this week to furnish an apartment with beds, dressers, table and chairs, couch and recliners, food, clothes and much more. On Friday the stuff we collected and the people we were giving them to all came together. Lots of smiles and nods, faces straining to understand, the joy of watching a baby play in her new home all coalesced as we listened to the interpreter and tried to make new friends. It is awkward to sit in a room where the differences between us are so large. There is a language barrier and a huge cultural barrier. The interpreter is himself a refugee who came to Indy three years ago. Today he has learned English, works as a nursing assistant and volunteers for Exodus Refugee Immigration. He is excited about his new life and is already trying to pay it forward. He believes that he is the only one who speaks this language in the city. 

I know very few of the particulars about these young ladies. I may never know much of their story. My assumption is that there were some very hard things that spurred this dramatic move. They stepped out in faith with the hope of finding a better life. Our gathering in their new apartment on Friday was an important step in this new adventure. As we were trying to get to know them, we asked if there was anything they would like to do in their new town. They answered, “We would like to worship.” 

So, it turns out that in spite of all of the barriers, we have much in common. We love our children. We hope for better days. We laugh and cry, and we worship Jesus. 

When we signed up to help a Refugee family relocate I believed there was a good chance we would be called to serve people who were from a different faith. My prayer was that we would faithfully serve whoever He brought us as an expression of his love and ours. And so he brought us sisters.

Our new sisters will be joining us at The Gathering this week. Come meet them and let’s join with them in worshiping the God who does such great things.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Love, Truth & Church


And Another Thing . . . Love, Truth & Church

My parents were church goers. So when I was a kid, I went to church too. The church of my childhood was the non-instrumental Church of Christ. This was a great church to begin in because they were big on teaching young people about the Bible. Every Sunday night, all the children five and older were asked to come up front and share a verse they had memorized that week. The preacher would then quiz the kids about the Bible. I remember as a preschooler sitting with my parents and longing for the day when I could go up too. I learned a lot about the Bible in that church.

In fact, I enjoyed many things about the CoC. It was only when I was older and began to understand their take on biblical truth that I experienced a growing sense of estrangement. As a kid, I felt loved and included. I especially enjoyed listening to the a cappella singing. It was fun to hear men and women singing, from the shaped-note songbook, the harmonies to all of the old hymns. Shaped-notes were a now archaic musical notation system that made it easier to read and then sing harmony and our church would teach new members this system, as well as how to use a pitch pipe, and to lead hymns in 4/4 time. My early perspective was that shaped-notes were somehow more spiritual. 

Superior spirituality was an underlying theme in my formative Christian journey—a theme that was subtle and somewhat insidious. The fact that it affected me the way that it did may have more to do with my weaknesses than any intention on the part of my teachers, but I nevertheless interpreted what I learned as “My group is right and everyone else is wrong.” My knowledge, my truth, nurtured a sense of moral superiority. Paul admonishes believers to, “speak the truth in love.”(Eph 4:15) This has always been a tricky thing to pull off. First Corinthians 8:1 says, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” I fear that much of my early Biblical learning resulted in a puffing up rather than a building up. Love gets messy, but truth feels clean and clarifying. Love involves giving of our self and dealing with all of our own insecurities in the process. Truth is of the mind and insulates our feelings and elevates our perspective above the fray of frailty. The challenge is to marry the two. To speak truth in the midst of our relationships with an awareness of our mess and insecurity is the call of the church. Love without truth is blind. Truth without love has clarity, but it isolates. Truth spoken with love directs, connects and elevates.

In the parlance of the KJV, the church is called to be a peculiar people. We are to love one another and the world like Jesus does. Unfortunately, it has become a cliché that our culture is frustrated and at times even disgusted with the church. Much of the atheism creeping into today’s culture has, at its root, a hurt or disappointment with people who claimed to be followers of God. Many are open to Jesus but are leery of his people. Not all of this is the fault of the church, but a significant portion of those who now doubt the church have been shaped by an encounter with her truth untempered by her love. Second Corinthians 5:14 says “Christ’s love compels.” God’s love is what changes everything. It is what changed each of us who claim to be Christ-followers. It is what changed me. 

The love I felt in the hearts of the good people of the CoC was the first taste of a reality I would continue to experience over and over again throughout my life. Later, I, too, witnessed hypocrisy and disappointment and doubted the truth of the Christian faith. It was the love of friends who were believers who showed me the reality of a God whose story I doubted, but whose love compelled. 

God’s love draws and changes us. 

God’s truth liberates and leads us. 

God’s Son makes all things new.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Screaming Mee Mee-E's and Changing Your Mind


And Another Thing . . . Change Your Mind 

As the Christmas of my eighth year of life approached, I was busy making a large list of all the things I either seriously needed or desperately wanted. Before the Internet existed, the Montgomery Ward Christmas catalogue served as the source of childhood fantasy. I stared at the pages in that brightly colored booklet the way my own children now watch YouTube videos of the things they desire. At the top of my list that year was the Screaming Mee Mee-E rifle. (Here is a link-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeSpk6YQw4o-- so you can see the thing my dreams were made of.). I wanted this toy badly. 

As it turns out, my grandmother owned a children’s clothing store, and when we arrived in Kentucky for our annual family Christmas vacation, I learned that the grand prize in her Christmas contest was the aforementioned Screaming Mee Mee-E rifle. I could not believe it. There was the source of my Christmas wish vision being proudly displayed by my own grandmother in the boys section of her store. To say that I started begging and lobbying for that gun would be an understatement. I don’t remember the full extent of my pleading, but I know that it was so outlandish enough that my parents were embarrassed and made me stop.  But of course, by then the case had been made and my strategy worked. On Christmas morning I received the object of my desire. I eagerly removed it from its box, loaded its screaming dart, aimed and pulled the trigger. The dart flew out of the gun with a screaming sound that immediately annoyed the adults in the room—and, in a few short moments, even began to annoy me. Also, the dart did not go nearly as far as it had appeared to in the commercials. Horrifyingly for me, within about 15 minutes I was bored with the toy. But because I had made such a big deal about wanting it, I felt obligated to fake it for a while—even though it fell far short of my expectations. So after getting what I thought I wanted, I quickly changed my mind.

The notion of changing your mind is the thought behind the biblical word repent. The story of my Christmas gun has been repeated many times in my life, and I suspect most of us can relate to chasing something only to find it is not what we hoped it would be. Many things in our life look different when they move from fantasy to reality. Solomon, who is said to be the wisest man who ever lived, declared in Ecclesiastes that “everything is meaningless.” The King James Version of the Bible translates this passage as, “all is vanity.” Mick Jagger later translated it as “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Solomon concludes Ecclesiastes by saying, “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” In other words, you cannot be the source of your own fulfillment. Only God can fill the emptiness we carry with us.

The process of moving from a life of self-directed ambition to a life of faith begins with learning to believe in God and then growing to understand that his plan for your life is both different and better than the choices you have been making. The second step, after believing in God, is to repent or change your mind about what is important in life. You change your mind about chasing after meaningless vain things in hopes of finding some sort of fulfillment. Jesus’ counterintuitive declarations begin to make sense, like when he says in Matthew 10:39, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” 

Whether it is a Screaming Mee Mee-E gun, a house, a job, or a relationship, unless we are seeking first his kingdom and his righteousness all of these other things will ultimately feel meaningless. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Changing our minds to recognize that there is a way more compelling than our own enlightened self-interest reveals the possibility of walking in a hope that is beyond what we can see. 

In our natural state, we are all Screaming Mee Mee-E’s and at some point we become annoying even to ourselves. The good news is that God has made a way for us to change our minds, even about ourselves.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

God in the Box


And Another Thing . . . God in the Box

The documentary “God in the Box” was a Heartland Film Festival selection for 2011. The premise is pretty straightforward. A portable box is constructed with cameras hidden behind a mirror. Random pedestrians walking by are invited to go inside the box and answer one or two questions about God . The first question is, “What does God mean to you?” and the second is, “What does God look like?”

The answers surprised me. Some were funny, like the girl who thought God looked sort of like Kenny Rogers. Some were sad, like the burly, shaved-head guy in sunglasses who said, “God used to mean everything to me . . . but not anymore.” Some were quirky, like the Elvis impersonator who said, “God is sort of like Elvis . . .” The Hindu and Muslim participants seemed to have a bit clearer perspective on how to address the question. Several people spoke of the way that God had changed their lives for the better. Several others were atheists who felt the whole question was the province of the ignorant, superstitious, or uninformed.  One man who claimed to be an atheist  said, “I wish could believe in God, because I would probably be happier.” 

Mystery is inherent in any discussion about God. God cannot be perceived by our senses and so he is intangible. Intangible is hard to quantify. Still, people claim to experience God but typically in an extrasensory way . The language that is used to describe these encounters is almost always on an emotional scale. We sense God’s presence and immediately wonder if it was perhaps something we ate. We have learned to not trust our emotions, and yet our emotions are an important part of any encounter with spiritual things. This quickly becomes confusing. At one point in the documentary, the narrator says something to the effect of, “I wish God would just show himself to us and clear this whole thing up!”

That of course, from the Christian perspective, is exactly what he did. The great grace of the Jesus event was that God revealed himself by becoming one of us. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” “Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.” “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

Jesus entered the human story and showed us how God would act if he were in our shoes. He loved deeply. He pursued truth. He sacrificed his life. In his love he gave all of himself to others as he submitted himself to God.

God looks like Jesus. 

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Belief & Unbelief


And Another Thing . . . Belief

Selling drugs to doctors makes for an interesting life journey. I started my career in pharmaceutical sales back in the ‘80’s before things were regulated, and also before medicine had advanced to anywhere near where it is today. I remember calling on an old country doc in eastern Indiana who told me of an “off label” use for one of my products. The drug I sold was essentially a form of Tylenol packaged in an impressive two-toned capsule and with an obscure but powerful sounding name. This was in the days before the internet, and people had no way to Google what a medicine was, so the country doc used my drug essentially as a placebo. It was benign medically, but it looked impressive and he would sell it as a “powerful, rarely used drug, which he thought would help.” He mostly used this placebo to treat patients he had diagnosed as hypochondriacs and so it probably was an appropriate therapy. He was selling hope by creating belief.

Jesus said in Mark 9:23, “Everything is possible for one who believes.” This is both an inspiring and a troubling statement that has garnered many stipulations over the years. People have tried to minimize or make it more rationale, but one thing is definitely true. Everything is impossible if you have no belief. Belief enables hope and vision. Lack of belief leaves a person paralyzed or at least unmotivated. If you do not believe you can, you probably won’t try. Belief leads to action.

Jesus speaks this truth to a father who wants his son to be healed. The father responds by saying in Mark 9:24, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” His statement has resonated across the ages. This is each of ours confession. Each of us is aware of the bloom of faith in our life and of the shadow of doubt which lurks around and through it. We believe in God and yet we wonder at times. We step out in faith and hope that the ground will hold. We pray believing and yet know that there is a partial wish embedded in our amens.

Fredrick Buechner once wrote,
“Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep.
  Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:7, “For we live by faith, not by sight.” People are wired to trust the things they see. Seen things are easy to believe in. Doubtable things are the only things that may be embraced by faith. Therefore, those who “live by faith” are always vulnerable to the questions raised by people who only believe what they see. This is why it is important to live in such a way that “sight-livers” can see the evidence of lives changed by the hope created through faith in an unseen God. 

When we believe in Jesus he begins to change us. Belief stirs and inspires action. We begin to shine. Jesus is unseen, but the actions he inspires in the hearts of the people who believe in him are not. Jesus tells us to, “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”


A changed life is a great argument for God. Loving others is good one too. What we believe matters, because “everything is possible for the one who believes.”  

And that’s all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Lies of the Moment




And Another Thing . . . Lies of the Moment

It seems that we live our life in moments. And no moment yet has been the final moment. Everything is constantly in a state a change. Much of the time I feel caught in a stereophonic cacophony of positive and negative thoughts and circumstance. Optimism surrenders to pessimism and then rises again, and then surrenders, and then resurrects, and so it goes. Moments are a difficult place from which to judge life. It is difficult to know, at times, if one is winning or losing or simply treading water.

I read the story of Eli in 1 Samuel this week. His life ended in a very tragic way. His final moment was as horrific as could be imagined for a priest, filled with ominous foreshadowing. Samuel, the young boy in his care, is awakened one night by God and told that the priest and his sons had been judged and would all soon die. Later, a random holy man shows up and foretells the destruction of Eli’s family. His boys are the source of his fall from blessing. They had turned the family calling, being priests in the temple of God, into a family business and had gotten rich and fat off the sacrifices offered to God. They made a habit of profaning sacred things for their own benefit. Eli let this happen, and everything started to fall apart.

Eventually, his boys decide to carry the Ark of the Covenant, the embodiment of God’s presence among his people, into battle. They hoped it would work as a charm, to force God into blessing them in their crusade. They had manipulated the religious system to their own advantage for so long that they thought God was just another pawn in their clerical schemes. “We will carry the Ark into battle and God will be forced to make us win,” they thought. The lies they believed about God were vigorously corrected. Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were killed in the battle along with 30,000 Israelites. The greatest tragedy, though, was that the Ark of the Covenant was captured by their enemies, the Philistines.

When Eli heard this news it made for a terrible moment. His thoughts were filled with failure and horror. God’s warnings were fulfilled in the death of his sons, and I’m sure he felt responsible. Eli had allowed his boys to make a mockery of holy things. He allowed them to take the most sacred gift Israel possessed, the Ark of God’s Presence, into a battle and now God himself was lost to the nation. The army was diminished. His sons were dead. He felt judged and rejected by his God. And the Ark of God was no longer residing with his people. This was the end of the faith. The thing that could never happen did happen. With the horror of this unthinkable circumstance swirling in his head, he fell off of his chair, broke his neck, and died. In his last moment, it seemed that all was lost.

1 Samuel  5-6 tells the story of the next moments. It turns out that the Philistines could not manipulate God any more than Eli’s sons could.  After months of dealing with tumors and rats, the Philistines had had enough and decided to send the Ark back to Israel – sort of. They created an against-all-odds-situation in which they yoked together “two cows that have calved and have never been yoked.” Then, with the cows lowing as if moving against their wills, they marched directly out of the land of the Philistines and straight home to Israel. This was an amazing moment for everyone. The Philistines were relieved and the people of God were ecstatic. God proved he was larger and more improbable than the schemes of the men on either side of the battle lines. He would not be manipulated or trifled with. His faithfulness to his people was stronger than the evil of the men who tried to ruin his name. Eli’s last thought was that he was witnessing the end of God in Israel. That was the way it looked for a moment. Eli’s story ended, but God’s story did not. 

In the next moment, the boy Samuel grows and becomes both judge and prophet and leads Israel back to God -- sort of. Then there is the moment where Israel rebels and asks for a king and a gets a lousy one. Followed by the moments where the lousy king, Saul, tries to kill the future amazing king, David. Succeeded by the moments when David presides over a glorious age of faithfulness and expansion. Continuing into the moments of his son’s reign when the temple is built and, conversely, foreign gods are reintroduced back into the kingdom. And so it goes . . .

This past week we held our second concert at the Carmel Gazebo. For many moments before the concert it looked as though rain, in contradiction to our prayers, was going to bring a halt to the whole event. Then there was the moment when the sun came out.

And that’s all I have to say about that . . . for now.



Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Of Slugbugs & Seeking


And Another Thing . . . Ask, Seek, Knock

When I was a kid (and as it turns out that was a long time ago), our family trips were far more primitive than those trips are today.  Our car had an AM radio, which my dad controlled.  His listening choices always seemed to be either static or boring-- and sometimes both of those together.  So, to amuse ourselves, we would play road games.  One of my favorites, though it usually ended up with someone getting in trouble, was “Slugbug.” For the uninitiated, the rules to Slugbug were pretty simple.  All the players examined the oncoming traffic looking for VW Beetles (or “Bugs”).  The first player to see one shouted “Slugbug” and hit the other player or players on the shoulder.  Of course, there was the inevitable cheating and bruising, followed by a parental halt to the whole fiasco. The interesting thing about the game though, was that once you started looking for Bugs, you found them.

Jesus said in Matt 7:7, “seek and you will find.” We tend to find the things we look for.  When playing Slugbug my brain functioned much like a computer. I saw, for the most part, two kinds of cars:Bugs and Non-Bugs.  (Corvette’s were always the exception; I always noticed them.)  Scientists tell us that the part of the brain which helps us focus on these distinctions is called the Reticular Activating System, or RAS.  Among other things, the RAS allows us to filter the data being received by our brain.  Parents sleeping in a noisy apartment can become immune to the sounds of traffic and trains, but the sound of their child crying will instantly wake them.  We are programmed to pay attention to the things we care about.

“Caring about” is the heart of the Ask, Seek, Knock passage. Jesus wants to be one of the things we care about.  He wants his voice to be a voice we have trained ourselves to listen for. “Ask” implies relationship. We ask the people who are near us and who we believe are capable and willing to help.  Jesus wants to be near us (Mt 28:20). He wants to be our help (Ps 46:1).  He wants to be asked.  James 4:2 says, “You do not have, because you do not ask.”

So, ask God for the stuff of your life. Let him become part of all that you do. Seek him. Knock on his door, just as he is knocking on yours (Rev 3:20). When you look for him, you will find him. Ask and it will be given. The “it” in this case is God. All of the things we ask for are ultimately, as Oswald Chambers puts it, to be “our utmost, for his highest.”  When we ask for God, we receive him.  When we seek him, we find him.  When we knock, we find he has beaten us to the punch and he is already knocking on the door of our heart.

Ask, Seek, Knock is a formula for a relationship with God. That relationship will change the nature of our requests. As we know him better we will begin to honestly pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

As Rich Mullins used to say, “God will give you what you ask, only if he can think of nothing better to give you.”

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.