New Life'n

Being sure

A few weeks ago Brenda couldn’t find a small block of wood that went with a table we bought at a yard sale.  “I put it right here in the corner of this box in the garage.”  We looked all over.  Looked in the garbage can.  Maybe the grandkids played with it and lost it.  Are you sure it was there?  She totally remembered putting it in the corner of that box. 

I looked up and down the driveway anyway, then opened the hatch on the 4-Runner – there it was.  In the corner where the wheel well bulges up.  I could picture her putting it there and then seeing the box in the garage and being busy and just thinking, corner.  Really, she was totally sure.  I was glad it happened to her – now I’m not the only one.  Lately, when one of us thinks the other is a little too confident in some matter of judgment or memory, we say, “and that block is in the corner of that box, too.”

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I was sure the balloon boy thing was NOT a hoax.  I heard the whole 911 call – it was way too real.  When you’re acting, most people try too hard and add too much drama.  This was convincing because it wasn’t trying at all to convince.  I’m pretty discerning on this kind of thing.  Most people didn’t take time to listen to the entire eight-minute 911 call – I did.  Plus, you could really picture a kid messing up, getting scared, and hiding.  Even when the kid made the comment about doing it for the show, I thought it’s just a kid saying a thing that people misinterpret – happens all the time. 

*  *  *

We all knew Michael Jackson was all drugged up.  Abusing pain medication, right?  And who knows what else.  Friends, doctor acquaintances, everybody in-the-know, knew.  Even his sister said when the toxicology results come back all heckaroo would break out.  When the results did come, all that talk stopped.  He may have been all messed up using an anesthetic to sleep, but only the drugs the doctor gave him for that and to try to revive him were in him when he died.  No illegal drugs or evidence of abuse.  He was a normally healthy 50-year old.

*  *  *

I’ve been around awhile and you’d think your confidence in your ability to be right would grow as you get older.  It’s not working out that way.  Maybe it’s best to not let your conclusions put down roots when it comes to being sure about people, events and your own performance.  It could get embarrassing.

Fun, fun, fun

The barber said the shiny old Thunderbird out front was maybe worth $30-40,000.  “It’s a fifty-five.”

We laughed about how old things in new condition can be worth more than new things in new condition.  There aren’t that many really old things in new condition – you get one, it’s valuable.  You’re paying for overcoming the natural law of deterioration.  You can do the restoration yourself and pay with your work and time, or you can pay for someone else’s work and time.  But someone pays and works for restoration. 

It’s the same with people, but different.  Your body’s the T-Bird and there’s deterioration – you see it and feel it if you’re anything over 30-years old.  You can restore things and hold off the deterioration, but only to a point, and even that requires work and constant oversight.  Diet,  Denial.  Exercise.  You can shine up the outside with lifts and tucks but it still doesn’t look like new.

Your soul and spirit is a different deal.  It’s born a wreck, so wrecked it can’t be restored.  It’s condemned and needs to be replaced.  That’s what Jesus does, when you agree you’re a hunk of junk doomed to the scrapheap and trust only him to restore you.  But once that’s done a whole new dynamic gets started.  Your spirit never deteriorates!  You can ignore it, reject it, starve it to where you may not get the full benefit from it.  But no matter what you do or how many decades pass, your spirit will not stop being what it is with the potential to roar like that T-Bird when it was brand-new. 

You see it in front of the barber shop, in your mirror, and in your Bible:  Outwardly wasting away but inwardly being renewed day-by-day.  Putting on a new self and taking off the old -- the perishable putting on the imperishable.  Transformed, from one degree of glory to another.  A new creation and birth, with a new heart and spirit.  The path of the righteous is like the early morning that gets brighter and brighter until the sun fully blazes.  

A kid's-eye view of a dad's 60-hour work week

The dad worked those 60-hour weeks for 35 years with no vacations. Years later the son wrote that if he had worked eight hours a day instead of ten, the dad would

have had in those years many days amounting to two or three years of time for work of his own choice, for rest, for play and talk with his children and friends, for his accordion and his Bible.  In those added two hours a day across those years his personality would have reached out and down and up, would have struck deeper roots in the good earth and sent higher branches toward the sky.

He never knew his son, Carl Sandburg, grew up to win two Pulitzer Prizes, meet Presidents and become a world-wide celebrity -- he died before those happened.  He never knew the son had any of that kind of thing in him. 

Just enough

Brenda was changing channels and the very end of Entertainment Tonight came on.  Have you ever seen how they do the credits?  They fly by – they scroll up at 100 mph at least.  No way you can read any of them.  Maybe you recognize a logo or two – you think.

Brenda said, “Legalistic.”  She’s joking but she has a point.

You don’t really mean it.  You just want to be able to say you did it.  But you got no interest or passion or caring.  It’s all external.  Fulfill your legal obligation as minimally as possible, and if anyone challenges you, you can always say, Hey, whadyamean?  I did what I was supposed to. 

Lots of things you can do that way:  Work.  Parenting.  Marriage.  And of course religion.

Access

Somehow we hooked up with Missy a couple of hours before the race last Saturday at Lowes Motor Speedway.  She works with Motor Racing Outreach.  She wanted to take us to the chapel that happens before the race.  So we followed her.  She walks us thru the infield and thru a gate in one of the chain link fences.  There’s an official at the gate and she tells him we’re with her and he waves us in.  The crowd is thinner here.  Then another fence with another gate and official and she draws big circles with her hand over us and says, “They’re with me.”

We walk past trucks and RV’s, but not the campers of the fans elsewhere in the infield -- these are really big, clean, modern homes on wheels.  Gee, are these driver RV’s?  Then we’re waved thru another fence and gate.  And then thru doors into one of the long pit garages that’s empty of cars and filled with people.   

Everyone here either belongs by NASCAR birth or they have credentials or they’re with the right person.  In the old days in Israel there was a temple with outer courts for the regular folk and inner courts the more of an insider you were.  In the very middle was the ultra-exclusive holy of holies.  This is it.  It’s like we’re with Jesus and as long as we follow him we go anywhere he does.

The pre-race drivers meeting is happening at the other end.  I’ve heard of this -- I didn’t know humans were allowed in.  Most of the people inside are lining a walkway waiting for the meeting to end so they can watch the drivers leave.  We hear Richard Petty and Bill France introduced.  It’s like being on the mountain with Jesus, and Moses and Elijah appear.  I felt like building them all a little shelter thing.  The meeting ends, most of the drivers leave thru the crowd and we go take our seats for the chapel.

Missy is next to me and whispers that Bobby Labonte is sitting on her other side.  She says behind us on the left is Bill Elliot, and Mark Martin and Matt Kenseth are over our right shoulder.  I don’t look – I might be struck dead.  The band Mercy Me is standing at the back.  Because we’re with Missy, we sit.  A mix of drivers, crews, family members, NASCAR people and don’t-really-belong-here’s like us all listen together to a message on who Jesus is and what he’s done, and we sing Mighty to Save with a lone guitar player at the front. 

Surrounding this garage are 150,000 people with a variety of beliefs and lifestyles, all living out those beliefs and lifestyles their own way before the race.  You see some loud and sloppy and rude and crude.  Most don’t realize that in the very heart of the speedway, the place where access is most coveted, in the middle of all the power and business and money and competition, an hour before all the gentlemen start their engines, there’s a quiet little holy place where some insiders and outsiders have come voluntarily to bow their heads.

What if all the outsiders could get in?  No guards, no gates, no credentials, no passes, no connections, no family birthright.  What if all you had to do was acknowledge your total unworthiness to be in that garage, put all your trust in only one person to get you in, and agree to quit living your own way?  Would it need to be bigger?

There are invisible eternal things going on around us daily that you’d never suspect.  Once in awhile you get to see one, and it reminds you there are others you might notice if you were sensitive. 

Do you ever hear, 'Psssst?'

I think buying a book because you feel like it has something to say to you is a good reason to buy a book.  That’s why I bought this one – Penelope Niven’s biography of Carl Sandburg.  Used ($8.50).  I think it has something to say to me from reading a bit in it and from visiting Carl Sandburg’s home in Flat Rock last June.

All we knew then was he was a famous American who wrote that big Lincoln series a long time ago and won Pulitzer Prizes in poetry and history.  Sounded like an interesting fellow, and it’s only a few hours drive.  At the entrance to the long hike up to the house there’s a restroom building.  On the walls outside are photos and stories and quotes of Sandburg.  I saw these words and was hooked  -- I even had to go back to the car to get my notebook to write it down:

There is a place for me somewhere, where I can write and speak as much as I can think, and make it pay for my living and some besides.  Just where this place is I have a small idea now, but I am going to find it.

Then this:

It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in a forest and ask of himself, ‘Who am I, and where have I been and where am I going?’

Well, hello.  Maybe that doesn’t say ‘pssst’ to you, but it does me.  What kind of life did those words come from and lead to?  Getting to the house, we began to find out.  Self taught.  Eighth grade drop-out.  Owned 17,000 books.  Rejected by academic critics.  Most of the things I like reading are spiritual or leadership biography or business -- this guy was none of that.  It was the start of a growing little curiosity.  

You may not know what a book (or a life story, or a sunrise, or a piece of music) has to say to you, but you know what it feels like when you’re asked to listen.  It taps you on the shoulder and you tilt your head and give it a second.  If after a few taps you’re still listening, there may be something there for you.

"Hurting people naturally hurt people"

John Maxwell said that in a devotional I picked up at a used bookstore last week.  So think: When you see dysfunction in family, marriage, workplace, church – do you see contentment, security and peace in the individuals? 

I don’t think hurting people say, “I’m hurting so I’m going to make sure everybody else hurts, too.”  That’s a cliché.  Hurting people hurt for a reason, and the reason makes you act the way you do.  If I’m confused or scared or feel insignificant, I might be short tempered and protective and act in selfish ways that hurt others.  If I feel unloved, I might feel lonely or bitter, and I might do unreasonable things to try to get love.  Fill a family, marriage, workplace or church with hurting people and hurt gets multiplied.

But if your need for love and acceptance and approval is met, you can stop grasping desperately for it.

When you know you have a soft place to land, when you know your need for love and comfort and significance is met by someone who is able and eager to fully meet it and who will never reject you, it does something to the hurt.  It stays where it belongs, away from others.  And it’s replaced by something that bubbles up the same way hurt does:

Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.  The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life – John 4.14

Earth got rhythm

This is more of The God Show.  We’re in the nature channel, seeing ways the whole earth is filled with God’s glory.  The previous post is HERE.

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So on the nature channel of the God Show, the whole earth is filled with God’s separateness (or holiness); the whole earth is filled with people adjusting to God; the whole earth is filled with birth, growth and death.  And the whole earth is filled with cycles and rhythms.

Cycles of storms and peace, and life and death.

Thru the nature channel God gives us our basic division of time: The rhythm of days and years.  The earth spins once a day and each day has a morning and evening – our life is built around it.  A trip around the sun makes a year and each year has seasons – our lives are built around that, too.

There are tornadoes and hurricanes and thunderstorms and blizzards and floods.  And calm, beautiful days.  In living. there are seasons and times of storms and peace.  Sometimes the storms are big.  In the middle of one it seems never-ending.  But when the storm’s gone, you move on and often forget what it was like.  Between storms, especially if it’s a long between, can fool you into thinking the season of storms is over.  And it is – for a season.

There are droughts – will it ever be normal again?  In the Bible it’s a deer panting for water, a soul panting and thirsting for God, tears as food, taunts of “Where is your God?” and a downcast, disturbed soul within you.  And that’s just in one psalm (42).  

Nature proves itself stronger than we expect.  The Mount St. Helens eruption was supposed to ruin the area for decades.  But nature ran riot within a few weeks as plants and animals began returning.  The Crepe Myrtles in my backyard were hit by a long, hard freeze a few springs ago and looked dead and black.  My brother the landscape expert said we’ll just have to see, they could be goners.  Then slowly – pop! – flowers.  As long as it was alive it was going to do what a tree does.

Life is resilient.  Think back to a time of drought, fire, freezing, death or hopelessness.  Most of those episodes you’ve forgotten but at the time you felt they’d never end and life would never be the same.  Can’t you now look back, amazed at how some of those were resolved?  He restores what the locusts have eaten.  Nature is a constant reminder of the power of resurrection life.

Creation also reminds that resurrection life comes after death.  Without death, there’s no new life.  If you’re alive and following Jesus, you’re always being given over to things that feel like death so that Jesus’ life can be revealed in you (1 Corinthians 4.11).  Unless a seed dies to being a seed and falls to the ground, it remains only one seed – but if it dies it produces fruit (John 12.24). 

We hate death and failure and confusion and hopelessness.  And trees may hate dying leaves in the fall.  But the death of the old makes room for the new – there’s no new life without death.

When we see the cycles and rhythms of storms and peace and life and death in nature, it can help us have the right expectations of what life is like.  Storms and death are as normal as peace and life.

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The God Show is five channels (in addition to the Bible) that don't change over time or according to culture, where God's ways, invisible attributes, eternal power and divine nature are clearly perceived but often missed: 1. Nature, 2. Authority, 3. Family, 4. Marriage, 5. You.  Really, he's all over the place. 

You can get caught up HERE or at the link on the right under “other writings.”

For the teacher in you / me

For some reason in the Christian world there’s this tendency or urge for many to be little teachers.  It’s beyond the individual calling that some have to preach or teach.  Regular, everyday (is there such a thing?) Christians (like me) will start teaching in the middle of a conversation, complete with upraised finger, repeating things they’ve heard as if you’ve asked.  The most common tip-off that this is happening is the phrase, “We as Christians should…”  Since I know that phrase is the tip-off, I avoid it to keep astute hearers from knowing I’ve just gone into teaching mode.

We like to impart knowledge and wisdom.  We like to be needed.  Maybe we also don’t mind letting people know how much we know and how wise we are.  For the less mature of us, it becomes more about me than you – I’m looking for an excuse to teach and you’re it. 

For the more mature ones – well, it will take you awhile to recognize them; they tend to hold back and pick their moments.  They use teaching in conversations sparingly, like seasoning.  Like a NASCAR driver who knows how to go 200mph in a race, but on the interstate he holds back and you don’t notice so easily what a great driver he is.

Much of Christianity is podiums and lectures and seminars and classes and conferences.  There’s analyzing and pondering and scrutinizing and controversy.  The Christians we really respect do that.  So if you were a serious Christian, wouldn’t you teach every chance you got?  Isn’t that what Christians do?

I’m thinking of all that after seeing this quote from John Piper, about the impression he had of God speaking to him when he was called to preach 30 years ago this week;

I will not simply be analyzed; I will be adored.

I will not simply be pondered; I will be proclaimed.

My sovereignty is not simply to be scrutinized; it is to be heralded.

It is not grist for the mill of controversy; it is gospel for sinners who know that their only hope is the sovereign triumph of God’s grace over their rebellious will.

One of the sneaky sins

Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses? – Numbers 12.8

Like most families, and especially in the Bible, sooner or later there’s a family mash-up.  Moses’ brother and sister have a little gripe against him, and they expand that to, “Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses?”  If they leave it at that, you might be able to dismiss it, but they give themselves away with, “Has he not spoken through us also?”

Moses is the meekest man there is and would never say anything like that – he even tried to avoid letting God speak thru him.  He also won’t take up for himself. 

But God hears it and he’ll do the taking up.  He calls the three together and he’s angry and has his way of making the point that oh yes I have indeed spoken only thru Moses.  And a little leprosy should help them remember.

Moses was one-of-a-kind but the idea of God deciding who’s in charge is all over the Bible.  And finding a fault is not evidence that God hasn’t put them there.  He says he gives authority to even the lowliest.  He does it on purpose.  They’re not there because they’re better (although they might be). 

It’s so common it seems normal -- the idea that finding faults and weaknesses releases you from respecting a boss, parent, pastor, husband, teacher, president…you know the ones.  Yes, you can have disrespect for a person and still respect their position.  But once there it’s a very short foggy step to rejecting their authority over you.  And an even shorter step to the unspoken attitude: I could do better – it should be me.

David knew the difference and stayed far this side.  He even had the added motivation of knowing he was the chosen new authority once Saul was gone.  But when presented several times with the chance to fix the problem of an unrespectable overseer (with friends telling him these opportunities were signs it was God’s will to take Saul out), David will not touch what he calls ‘God’s anointed.’  When someone else does, David asks the same question God did – How is it you were not afraid to destroy him?  Then David takes him out.

The insecure, persecuting, rebel Saul chased David for 10 years with the seeming intent to kill him (protecting yourself is not the same as disrespecting).  Is your authority worse?  If not, speak against them and you may be speaking against God.