Thursday, February 24, 2011

Ben Carson

Saturday evening we watched a movie about Ben Carson, MD, the world's most renowned pediatric neurosurgeon.

I am always stirred somehow when I watch a movie.  As John Eldredge likes to say, they often sink deep into our hearts because they are telling a story...our story.  That's why they speak to us so deeply.

Ben Carson was raised in Detroit by a single mother who couldn't read.  She worked hard to provide for he and his older brother.  She challenged them to excell and not just go through life.  Ben was in need of encouragement.  He didn't feel like he was smart enough to do anything.

In a scene of what to some would look like child abuse, Ben's mom limited his and his brother's TV watching...severely.  And she challenged them to read books and write reports to her about what they read.  Ben became a walking encyclopedia.  He tapped his mental resources and excelled.  He discovered the joy of learning.  He applied himself to his passion and found his way into neurosurgery.  As a pioneer in neurosurgery he performed delicate brain operations to restore a somewhat normal life to children with seizures and other neuro-based issues.  He pioneered procedures that were cutting-edge with confidence in his abilities and in the Father who had given the gifts to him.

I was sad when I finished watching the movie.  I wasn't encouraged as I thought I would be but rather felt like I had failed to utilize my mental abilities to their fullest.

What does it take to motivate someone to their best?  What is your best...or my best?  How do we discover that?  I don't have an answer and so I could end this blog right here.

However, as I look back on my life, how I was raised and how I raised my children I think of the passage in Proverbs.  There it says to train up a child in the way he/she should go and they when they are old they will not depart from it.  In the era of my childhood that was to discipline and control the behavior of the child and when they grew up they wouldn't be a irresponsible adult.  They would behave.  I believe that is based in fear...fear of reprisal, fear of discipline, fear of failure, just plain old binding up fear.

As I look at all that I have processed about my life over the years I am more aware of what the fear really did to me and does to many other children who are raised as I was.  The fear is paralyzing.  It makes a monster out of risk.  It makes failure unacceptable.

I remember a picture when I was a child.  We were having a violent storm.  The wind was blowing strongly and the trees were waving in the wind.  My family was down in the basement watching TV when I went upstairs in the dark to look out to see the storm.  We had a beautiful silver maple tree in our front yard.  Uniform bark, nice round ball towering high over the front yard, tight limbs for climbing in...and it was laying on the ground.

After the storm had subsided we went outside to survey the damage.  It had popped off right at the ground.  In the dark we couldn't see why.  The next morning it became evident.  Whoever had planted the tree, took care to get it in the ground.  The burlap bag over the ball of the roots had been left intact.  It had long ago deteriorated but not the copper wire that it was held on with.  That copper wire was intact right around the trunk of the tree still at the size of the tree when it was planted.  The tree had grown around it over the years adding many rings of growth but the tree was really no stronger than the size of the original tree when planted.  And when the weight of the adult tree took the brunt of the storm, the size of the tree when planted wasn't strong enough to resist it.  It fell in all its beautiful glory...choked off at its base from real growth.

I needed to be turned loose when I was a kid.  Would I have gotten into more trouble?  Possibly.  Would I have gone down the "wrong" path?  Possibly.  Would I have turned out differently?  Probably.

Kids need encouragement to excell.  They need involvement from parents to develop their abilities.  They need wise mentors to help them discover their strengths and weaknesses and to be coached how to manage both.  I believe the passage in Proverbs was really talking about discovering how God has created a child with the gifts, strengths and abilities, and gently guiding them in that path in partnership with the Father.  The end result is that the child finds their place in life and excells to achievements that God has placed in their hearts.

As I said earlier, I don't have the answers for a perfect outcome.  I am still depending on my Father to lead me in the direction that I need to go so that the great accomplishments that he has for me to contribute to will still come to pass.  I consider them to be unfinished and still available to be achieved until the day I die.  I have to take it one day at a time, focusing on what can still be rather than looking back on what could have been.

One of my jokes is to say that I still have time.  Colonel Sanders of KFC fame didn't begin his company of finger lickin' good chicken until he was 65.  What does God still have for you to accomplish in the years, months, days or hours ahead? 

Monday, February 21, 2011

Living Word

I know at some point I'm going to run out of easy titles for these blogs.  But until then I'll keep making them simple.  I may have to have sequels later on.

I made a decision when I started to learn to read in 1970 that I would not put a book down until I had read it all, in spite of how bad I thought it was as I read it.  I didn't make it a vow and I haven't stuck to it religiously over the years.

The book I just finished reading was in danger of being one of those exceptions.  It is Paul:The Mind of the Apostle by A N Wilson, published in 1997.  I don't know how long it has been on my shelves.  I got it from my former pastor who I knew during my teen years.  He gave it to me before he died when we visited him in NC some years ago.  I got desperate to have something to read and I pulled it off the shelf.  I had tried to read it once before and even during the reading this time I toyed with the decision to throw it in the trash when I finished reading it.  I wasn't even going to send it to Goodwill.

But I stuck with it and had some interesting insights.  I was trained in seminary with the historical critical method of Scripture study.  It has caused much gray hair in the fundamentalist camps and even some of the more conservative evangelical camps.  There seemed too much in the Scriptures that was questioned by this method.  I remember sitting in the library at school, pondering the research I had done on a passage and then having a spiritual insight to the meaning that was connecting with my heart.  Those insights were "Aha" moments and were thrilling to me in the midst of all the reading of theological books.

This latest book on Paul had me judging the writer for his lack of furvency toward the Scriptures.  He was questioning too much of the authenticity of what has been handed down to us over the years--the authorships, the authenticity of the books as we have them now.  I had a similar insight recently when hearing a talk on the Apocrapha.  How do we know what is inspired Scripture and what is not?  How can we be sure that those who have gone before us have judged righteously in what we have as Holy Scripture today?

I certainly won't solve that theological dilemma in this short blog.  But my conclusion after reading this book and hearing other things over the years remains the same.  That is, that if we are going to understand what the Spirit of God is doing today in a world that is 2000 years removed from the time of Christ we have to rely on the Holy Spirit to give us guidance.  We can't take the written word, seen through the eyes of a 2011 understanding and expect it to hold fast.  We can not expect the documents that were inspired by the Holy Spirit then to have the same scientific validity as something that is written today.  We can't use the same grid to understand them.  We don't live in the Middle East, for one thing.

One of the things I learned is that language usage changes approximately every 30 years.  If the Scriptures had been passed to us in English over 2000 years there would be problems understanding them.  Multiple that by the fact that we have them in Greek...that was used over 2000 years ago.  Not the same Greek you would hear spoken at your nearby gyro shop.

That sounds heritical, doesn't it?  But how can we expect the writings that we have in our Holy Scriptures to be viewed with a microscope of scientific accuracy if we don't have the original documents that were written by the authors?  How can we hold for absolute accuracy the messages that have been passed down to us if we can't verify the context of when they were written?

How will anyone for that matter be able to understand what God is doing in our day and time 50 or 100 years from now?  Will any one author be able to capture all the variations of experiences we all are having in our relationship to Christ in our individual communities?  Let alone in our state, in the United States or even anywhere else in the world?

Let me say it bluntly...we are not able to take the Bible and make it a book of facts like a Policies and Procedures Manual where everything is lined out in black and white.  We must be people of a Living Word.  We must be living in a vibrant relationship with Christ daily for us to be able to interpret what is the Godly thing for us to be doing.  The Scriptures can be a guide but they don't speak of twittering, texting, IM, gigs or RAM and I don't believe we should expect them to.

So how do we live in that moment by moment relationship?  The same way we live in relationship with anyone else.  That's a problem because some of us don't know how to live in relationship with someone else.  We don't understand intimacy.  We don't know how to connect on the deepest levels of our heart.

But for sure in order to develop that type of relationship we need to spend time with someone.  We need to listen carefully.  We need to clarify what we think we are hearing.  And we need to listen unconditionally so that the speaker can say what they need to say without getting a judgemental response from us...a shaming response.

If we are going to be people of the Word, we need to be people of the Living Word.  What is Jesus saying to us today about how we are to live his life among those we find ourselves living?  Can your local pastor or the radio preacher or the Pope be the only one interpretting what God is saying?  Or where is our responsibility as followers of Christ to be in communion with him on a daily basis?  Does it matter what God is saying to us and not just to others?  Do we always take everything second hand from someone else?

I want to know Christ today as the Living Word and not sit back comfortably expecting others to have his word for me today.  It would be a lot easier to sit back and let someone else do the work for me in my life following after Christ but I'm going to take the hard road.  I hope you will join me, because I can't do it alone.