God's Perspective

I'll continue to be out of the loop for a while, as my wife recovers from two abdominal surgeries in the last month and a current bout with mild pancreatitis. She's still hospitalized, being fed with a central line so that the gall bladder and pancreas can relax. She's been through a lot, but her faith remains strong, she's getting stellar care, and prayer support has been heroic.

So, rather than trying to sift through my current jumbled thoughts, I thought it better to go to someone else. As a gift my wife received a great prayer book entitled Prayer: A Holy Occupation by Oswald Chambers. Here are a couple of thought provokers from that book:

"We use prayer as a last resort. Jesus wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do. Jesus wants us to pray before we do anything at all." (Page 7)

"When was the last time I tried to see an issue from God's perspective rather than asking Him to see it from mine?" (Page 10)

What do you think? I'll see you around the next bend in the river, though don't be surprised if it's a ways downstream.

The Director

This weekend our associate pastor spoke to our fellowship about that which our bishop calls "passionate worship." Borrowing from the thoughts of Soren Kierkegaard, he noted that many churches assume that worship is like the components of live theater. God is the prompter, pastors and worship leaders are the actors, and the congregation is the audience. In this model, he argued, the presumption is that those who gather for worship are consumers. It is the duty of the "actors" to take cues from the "prompter", and provide a "performance" that sufficiently entertains or moves the "audience." Worshippers are in a the mode of receiving at best, and passive at worst.

My colleague observed that Kierkegaard argues that the worship of Jesus is the reverse of this categorization. In fact, God is the audience. Worship is done to honor and glorify Him. Pastors and worship leaders are the prompters, guiding the direction of worship toward God. All of us who worship then, are the actors, fulfilling our role as God's people.

My colleague went on to add his spin to this analogy. In keeping with the imagery of live theater, he suggests that God is in fact also the "director." He is the one who knows the flow and aim of the entire drama. He knows how each person will contribute to the best possible production. His aim is that everyone flourish in the production, and He works and guides to that end.

Excellent image...what would worship be like if it were really that way?

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.

Another Surgery

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. My wife, who had a hysterectomy on October 6, had to go back into the hospital for another surgery to deal with an abscess and infection. The surgery went well, but this is rough on her, as she hadn't hardly started recovering from the previous surgery. As always, prayers will be appreciated.

My wife once gave me a sign that I still keep in my office. It's a variation of an old Yiddish proverb: If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans! Cliche but true, life doesn't always go according to plan. But life always goes with God. God is good, all the time; and all the time...

It may be a few bends on down the river, but I'll eventually catch up.

Busy

Ask many people how things have been going for them, and lots will respond by saying, "Busy!" Schedules are full and strained for all kinds of folks. With people pulled in a dozen different directions, even some churches I know have adjusted their ministries around busy calendars. They scale back Bible experiences, small-groups, mission and service involvement or whatever, in an effort to accommodate a multi-tasking era.

The other evening my wife and I were talking about how busy all of us seem to be. (She's home and recovering from surgery, with a lot of time on her hands right now.) As she talked, I remembered something about her. Through the 1990's all of our children were going through their elementary school, middle school, and high school years. My wife was a "soccer mom" long before Sarah Palin even thought about being one. Elaine worked full time as a social worker in a nursing home, and still managed to taxi all three of our kids to games, musical practices and performances, church activities for students, and school organizations. In the midst of that hectic lifestyle, she maintained a strong, deep, and vibrant daily prayer and devotional life. She was constantly involved in group Bible studies, which meant daily scriptural reading in addition to her prayer time, as well as weekly group sessions. In addition, she found time to be involved in mission work and mission trips. Looking back, I asked her how she managed to do that. She says she has no idea; she just did it.

Maybe it's not just a matter of being too busy. Generally I find that we make time for the things that really matter to us, and we work everything else around those priorities. Perhaps it's more than crowded schedules. Perhaps it also involves priority and resolve.

Or maybe I'm all wet...What do you think? I'll see you around the next bend in the river.

A Welcoming Place

Try to remember a time, place, or circumstance in which you felt uncommonly welcomed. You were accepted as is, without pretense. It was so comfortable a situation that you didn't want to exit it. The very thought that you would experience it again sometime gave you the motivation to face most every day.

I know I wasn't the kind of husband my in-laws had in mind for their daughter. They had lived all their lives in rural north-central Missouri. I came from the city. I imagine they hoped for some nice local boy to marry her. I was from a totally different world. And yet, from the first time they met me, these gracious people went out of their way to welcome me. If their daughter loved me, that was enough for them. Their home was a warm, welcoming place; a place of relaxed acceptance and a deeply chosen love. Each time I went to their house it was like a trip to a homespun oasis or retreat. For over three decades that house and those people lift my spirits and warm my heart. My mother-in-law is with the Lord now, and we don't get to my father-in-law's home as much as we once did. Yet I still get a sense of an on-going unconditional embrace from my wife's dad and the lovely woman he married after my mother-in-law passed on.

I wish everyone could have some place and circumstance like that. I wish all followers of Jesus could connect with such a situation, and do everything they could to make their congregations the kind of gatherings that inspire that kind of embrace in those who are seeking God.

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.

Why Would Someone Want to Be Like You?

If you are a Jesus-follower and if you are a part of a gathering of Jesus-followers - a church, wrestle with this progression of questions:

Most congregations and followers of Jesus want to welcome newcomers. Let's assume both you and your church fellowship would like new people to come and join you. Why do you want them to do that? I find it significant that when I have asked this question over the years in various church settings, I've often met with a stunned and uncomfortable silence for a moment. That by itself speaks volumes, but let's assume your people have an answer. "So we'll get new members," some might say. All right, why do you want to make new members out of newcomers? Church people might say practical things like, "So our church can grow, so we can get more volunteers for our programs, and so we can get more contributors to the budget." These would be honest and real answers, but these are institutional maintenance answers. Newcomers won't come and invest just to become busier than they already are or to keep an organization alive.

In dealing with this question about why we want to welcome newcomers, someone might remember Matthew 28:19 and say, "We want to welcome new people so we can make them disciples." Good answer, obviously. Let's push that further, though. How will such people know what disciples look like? Church folks might answer with, "We'll teach them about Jesus. We'll teach them what disciples look like." The truth is that we who are church folks are already teaching us. To find out what a disciple of Jesus looks like in any given church, they're looking straight at the people in that church. How are their lives different because of Jesus? If we're asking people to become disciples in and through any given congregation, we're asking them to become like the Jesus-followers in that congregation.

Which brings us to the singular question: As a follower of Jesus, why would someone want to be like you? Most Jesus followers shy away from this question, claiming the need for humility, but mostly seeing the negative examples of discipleship in their lives. Don't focus on what you have brought to the table of your own effort and ability. What has God placed in you? How have you encountered God in a life-changing way? What has happened or is happening to you that you could not create on your own; something that can only be explained by the intervention of God? What spiritual gifts has God given you for ministry? How are you different now than you once were because of Jesus?

Why would someone want to be like you? Think about this. Wrestle with it. On any given day, at any given moment, we may be the only evidence of Jesus at work that someone else will be able to see.

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.

The Blame Game

I hate election years.

Yeah, yeah...I know...I should be all "rah-rah" about the democratic process and exercising my voting right as a citizen. Trust me, I'll vote. It's all the pre-election garbage that just wears me out. Instead of focusing on real specifics about real issues in our society, way too many candidates at all levels find all kinds of ways to blame their opponents for everything from the mortgage crisis to Original Sin.

As a good friend reminded me last Sunday, the blame game is the easy way to deal with troubled times. In fact, it's the coward's way, as this method offers negativity and complaint without the guts to work for a positive solution. With regard to these shaky financial days, there's plenty of blame to go around. Credit companies are to blame and so those of us who built our financial planning on instant gratification and runaway indebtedness. Lenders are as culpable as borrowers. Governments shoulder as much responsibility as private enterprise. Politically, neither side of the aisle has clean hands. Most circumstances are a maze of complexity, and assigning blame to one component makes no more sense than saying an iceberg is only the tip you can see.

The blame game is infectious. It seeps into families, organizations, churches, and all relationships. It is surely one of Satan's joys and an easy button to push. History's heroes have never been the blame-assigners. Such heroes have been the woman and men who push, lead, and sacrifice for light at the end of a dark tunnel.

God, save me from my tendencies to point the finger of blame. Remind me that the finger will always point first to me. By your grace in Jesus, give me the courage to be a solution-finder.

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.

Hospitality and Radical Hospitality

My thanks to all of you who have been praying for my wife Elaine through her surgery on Monday. The surgery was successful, and she is recovering well.

She is helped in her recovery by a very attentive and skilled surgeon, and by compassionate and hard-working nurses and certified nursing assistants. If you spend enough time in and around hospitals you can tell the difference between people who are doing their job well and those who are going the extra mile. We've benefited from the latter.

Our bishop (the leader of our denomination in our state) talks about the need for healthy churches to practice what he calls radical hospitality. Too many times Jesus-followers regard hospitality as mere cordiality. That's not what our bishop means. Hospitality for Jesus-followers is based on Jesus Himself. Jesus is God's love going above-and-beyond to reach us and to welcome us. So that applies to hospitality given in the name of Jesus. It's like this:

A church practicing hospitality has greeters at the door. A church practicing radical hospitality posts greeters with umbrellas in the parking lot on a stormy day.

A church practicing hospitality wears name tags. A church practicing radical hospitality prepares permanent name tags for any guests, as a signal that the congregation wants them to return.

A church practicing hospitality welcomes visitors in worship. A church practicing radical hospitality gears every single element of worship, from the announcements to the worship order to the language used in print, for the first time visitor.

A Jesus-follower practicing hospitality invites a friend or co-worker to worship. A Jesus-follower practicing radical hospitality invites the friend or co-worker, pick up him/her, stays with him/her throughout worship, introduces the person to others, answers any questions, etc.

Radical hospitality takes work and motivation. If that which Jesus is and that which Jesus offers isn't motivation enough for us, then that's another matter.

I hope your path is crossed by people who go above and beyond in their hospitality. I'll see you around the next bend in the river.

One Way Out

My wife and I finished off our mini-vacation today by experiencing a little of the "Roots 'n Blues 'n BBQ" Festival in Columbia, Missouri. It was a beautiful day and a great crowd gathered for three stages of R & B music plus great food. As my wife, our son, and I wandered past one of the stages, a real good blues guitarist played something I recognized. It was his version of "One Way Out." It took me a moment to figure out what it was, but he was doing his rendition of this blues classic. (My favorite version is the live performance of "One Way Out" done by the Allman Brothers Band at the Fillmore concerts in 1971. Am I old, or what?!?) I'll bet that song's been done a thousand different ways by scores of different musicians.

I'm no music expert; I'm barely a music novice. I really like blues and jazz, though. I'm drawn to these styles by the fact that songs are never done exactly the same way from one artist to the next or even from one time to the next. You know full well you're listening to jazz or blues, and you recognize songs, but you delight in how the song changes from one performer to the next, one audience to the next, or one moment to the next.

I think there's health in that, and I think Jesus-followers can take a lesson from it. Sometimes we get fixed and stodgy about the form in which we deliver the good news of Jesus Christ. We decide that it has to be a certain way, or we have to repeat it exactly the same way, regardless of how audiences, circumstances, and times vary. Or we bend and reshape it so much to go with the current flow, that the core of it becomes unrecognizable. Jazz and blues do neither. "One Way Out" is always "One Way Out," but it's new and fresh every time.

Postings will be spotty again this week. My wife is having surgery on Monday. All should go well. Prayers will be appreciate. Keep on paddling, and I'll catch up soon.

Eternalizing

I've spent part of the week watching soccer matches. Last night's was particularly exciting, having gone into double overtime. The fans from both schools whipped themselves into a pretty intense frenzy. All of us, including me, acted for the moment as if life itself depended on the outcome. Afterwards I imagine most of us sat back and thought, "Well that was exciting. But it is a game, after all, and they are just kids."

It's pretty normal to get excited about events, people, and circumstances. Sometimes, however I think all of us can allow such things to have more weight than they actually do. Henri Nouwen, a great leader in Christian spiritual formation, regarded this as "eternalizing," especially when we allow people, events, and things to let us sink into negativity. Nouwen said, "Small, seemingly innocent events keep telling us how easily we eternalize ourselves and our world. It takes only a hostile word to make us feel sad and lonely. It takes only a rejecting gesture to plunge us into self-complaint. It takes only a substantial failure in our work to lead us into a self-destructive depression." (Henri Nouwen in Reaching Out.)

I'm afraid that when we eternalize people, events, and circumstances around us, we lose complete perspective. Our favorite team's performance makes our day or breaks it. As Jesus-followers our outlook rises or falls depending on whether or not we liked the music in worship, whether or not the message in worship moved us personally, or whether or not the right people said the right things to us. All of this bleeds energy of the things that really do matter eternally - Loving God and loving each other as Jesus has loved us.

Sometimes I think we just need some healthy distance from the world of immediacy around us. This doesn't mean detachment or apathy. This just involves a realization that eternalizing puts yet another barrier between us and God, and between us and the fulfillment of what God has called us to be and to do. Nouwen says, "This lack of distance, which excludes the humor in life, can create a suffocating depression which prevents us from living our heads above the horizon of our own limited existence."

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.