Now what?

Yesterday my two good Mennonite neighbors mowed their lawns so I was assured that it was okay to do the same to my lawn on Easter Monday.  Don't ask me where Easter Monday came.  I think it's an Amish holiday...another way to get a day off.  Maybe it celebrates that Jesus rested after being resurrected.  I checked to make sure there weren't any other restrictions on Easter Tuesday.

I've been waiting for Easter since Christmas.  It was then that I had a conversation with a devout Hindu, the father of a friend of Ben and Rose's.  He mentioned in the course of our conversation that he had seen a sermon title on the sign of a Lutheran church somewhere..."He is Risen...now what?"

Easter has so many memories attached with it.  Easter egg hunts.  New shoes and an outfit for church.  The energy of spring after a long winter.  Sunrise services.  Breakfasts at church so we didn't have to go back home between the services.  But now that it is over, what do we look forward to?  Or as I entitled this blog...now what?

What does it mean to be a Christian post Easter?  How does it change my life that Christ, my redeemer, has risen from the dead?  For one thing, no other religion claims their founder rose from the dead.  For that matter I'm not sure any other claims to have come from the Father to show us how to live a redeemed life in relationship with God and then returned.  It's more than my human brain can comprehend (and I would suppose anyone else's) to understand how God can be three in one.  I don't think we're supposed to figure that one out.

So will people know that I serve a risen Savior because I have a new pair of shoes?  Or I can show them the remnants of the candy I got (with the green artificial grass all over the house)?  Or have the nicest lawn with my mulch already in place?

It's got to be more than that.  In fact those other indicators don't even need to be repeated next year.  I serve a risen savior and I have an intimate relationship with the Father because of Jesus.  And it changes my life today...and every day since Easter.  In fact, I downplay Easter now because I don't want people to get the impression that that is the only time I serve Jesus.

I serve him in the way I treat my neighbors.  I serve him in the way I respond to aggressive drivers...first by not being one.  I serve him by loving the unlovely.  I have compassion on those who are angry and spiteful.  I treat my wife with respect.  I serve those around me.  I live a lifestyle that is different because I serve a risen Savior.  Not because I want to be in tune to the green focus our culture has now.  Or give away money so I can get my name on buildings all over LA like the guy I saw on 60 Minutes a few days ago.

It's time for us to live as people of a risen Savior...every day of the year and not just on Easter.  It's time for us to have an intimate relationship with him so that we can love as he loved us.  It's time for us to repent of the daily ways that we don't reflect the Savior when the Holy Spirit prompts us.  It's time for us to change our lives and join in the resurrection of our Redeemer.

Forget the dandelions in your yard and focus on removing the dandelions in your spirit.  Forget getting a new pair of shoes and get a new heart by giving your life to him.  Forget getting up so early for one morning of the year just so you can have coffee and donuts at church with your friends.  Join others who need fellowship and need to know the risen Savior at the local Dunkin Donuts next Sunday morning.  Love the checkout clerk at your local grocery store.  Show compassion to the attendant at the convenience store.  Come in the opposite spirit of the aggressive driver and bless them in their stress.

Now what?  We've got a whole year ahead of us, 365 days to live like people who have been resurrected.

Learning

I've had conversations with a couple of parents of kids in schools these days.  One of them was my daughter this morning.  We sat around solving the worlds problems...and still didn't get her lawn mowed.  By the way, my neighbor has faithfully mowed his twice now, taking off at least a quarter of an inch each time.

I'm not the first to say that one of the tragedies of school these days is the education toward taking a test.  Unfortunately, some PhD in Washington decided that we needed to aim everything toward teaching kids how to take a test and get the answers right.  That's not learning...by a long shot.

First, that encourages cheating (and I'm not justifying that by any means).  If you are evaluated by the answers then you do whatever it takes to get the right answers.  That may include using your iphone or ipod or other electronic device to store the answers.  It may mean the administrators of the tests will need to go back over the scores and change some of the answers as they are accused of doing in the DC school district.

That is not learning.  Let me say it now.  The greatest tragedy of our current education system is that we aren't teaching kids the joy of learning.  It takes a motivated, inspired, enthusiastic teacher to motivate children to learn.  They need to see the personal application to the subject matter they are being exposed to.  What is the joy of learning?  It is the thrill of grasping new information and concepts that impact your life today.

I first learned that when I was 34 in a seminary class on Church History taught by Gerald Brunk.  He showed how when Constantine marched his troops through the river to "baptize" them all to being Christians it transfers to experiences of person today who think that getting baptized is all there is to Christianity.  It might be all there is to Christianity but it isn't all there is to being a follower of Christ.  Ah, but I am chasing a rabbit.

I am thankful that over the years I have been inspired by many to the joys of learning.  They included teachers, others who ate, slept and lived their fields of study and parents.  Let's talk about them.  Parents.  So Mark Zuckeburg gave $100M to the Newark city schools of which $99M still sits in the bank while they argue how to spend it!  That $100M will not touch the parents of those kids who need to be supporting the learning process.

If parents aren't as excited about the process of learning they aren't going to be able to help their children focus on the facts while Facebook and Twitter call them.  I'm reminded of how Ben Carson's mom restricted his TV time so that he would be inspired to learn and not just vegetate in front of the boob tube.  He became the premier child neurological surgeon of our time.

I was reminded of the movie Finding Forrester about the young man who was inspired to learn by one of the neighbors in his inner city community and the movie I can't remember the name of right now where the teacher inspired her kids to write.  They were "low achievers" who were inspired to learn by a motivated teacher.

So we need capable teachers, interested parents and finally, an involved community.  I'm not touched directly by the school system in my area.  I don't have kids attending any more but my grandkids and the future young men and women who are being "educated" there are going to run the world I'll retire in.  So I better get involved or I will taste the fruits of my disengagement.

On a closing note, Pat and I were talking the other day about how she has finally gotten inspired to read books.  I have enjoyed reading for many years but she didn't have the encouragement to discover the joys of reading.  She had to wait until she was 55 or so before she discovered the fun of learning from books.  That seems like a tragedy to wait that long to discover the joy of learning.  But we're educating another generation with that same lack as we speak. 

What are we going to do about it?

Hope

Anyone who has cooked Italian food will know that it's always better the second time around.  That's because the spices have a chance to permeate the whole dish.  I learned a trick from an Italian cook once when he was doing lasagna...take it out of the oven for about 30 minutes and it fakes out the spices and allows them to saturate the dish.

Hope is like that.  It takes some time to simmer.  Hope is not the kind of thing that you get in a flash of Holy Spirit power but is rather built over time.  It grows when you see the Father show up to bring you his resources.  He doesn't always come right away, in fact, I have a friend who says that God is always late...at least based on his timetable!

Unfortunately, we put our hope in the wrong things...a job, a big bank account, dependable cars, friends.  All of those things can go away in just the flash of an instant.  But if that's all we've ever trusted in then that's what our hope is built on.  And it will fail.

Hope is knowing that the Father will show up.  In order to learn that you have to put your hope in Him and not in other things.  That's scary.  That's because we have interpreted the Father's hope based on hope in things or people.  They've been kind of our security in case God doesn't show up.  That's why so often when people and things let us down we interpret the Father's heart as being just as fickle.  We blame Him for the failure of those we have put our hope in.

It's a hard habit to break and one that takes lots of God's grace to master.  By His grace He pulls the rug out from under us, takes away the things we rely on and leaves us with only one hope...Him.

Growing in a mature hope is like Italian food.  The circumstances have to simmer some.  They have to permeate the dish.  They need time to make the best meal.

As I age I see that God is a lot slower about some things than I would like Him to be.  He doesn't like to microwave my hope but rather to let it saturate slowly over time.  When I left my job last September the colleagues who let me go said that I would have a job quickly.  They were sure.  That wasn't based on a revelation from God but just nice words to leave me with.

It hasn't happened that way.  I am trusting in the hope that the Father knows my gifts.  He knows my needs.  He knows where he wants to put me.  And He is letting me enjoy the time off.  I have read 40 books since the beginning of the year.  I finished some remodeling projects (and started others) that I have dreamed of doing for 3 years.  I used to lament that I wished I had a week to work in my yard, a week to work in my shop and a week to work on something else.  I've had them.  Gifts from my Father who has instilled in me hope over the last 6 months.

My hope isn't built on the economic stimulus package put together by the President and Congress.  It isn't set on a broad circle of friends that I sit with every week.  It can't be measured in how much money I have in the bank.  It can only be valued by the relationship that I have with my Father.  My hope is built on nothing less.

Hormones

Pat and I have been doing a lot of reading lately...a way to escape reality I guess.  We've read a lot of books by Jodi Picoult, Nicholas Sparks and one by Belva Plain.  I would have to say that so far my favorite has been Nicholas Sparks.  We both like the NC settings of his novels and he is a master story-teller.

I suppose these novels are to reflect the culture in some way.  In all of these books it is common for the characters to have hormonal sex.  By that I mean, they have an attraction, hop in bed and have passionate sex.  The books don't describe this in detail but the theme is the same.  Later the characters go about getting to know each other and see if they are compatible...after many times in bed.

This reminds me of another book I read several years ago--Bonding, by Dr Donald Joy.  In his book he takes a theory of animal bonding for those species that bond with one mate for life and extrapolates it into a theory of bonding for human beings.  I like the book.  In fact, it's one of the ones I have kept on my shelf after discarding many others.

In our world today, the norm is to try on the relationship, meaning living together.  I may be old-fashioned but there is still something that sticks in my heart about the need to decide that you are committed to someone before you leap into bed.  Part of Joy's premise is that if you have the ultimate bonding experience, sex, without the rest of the issues being worked out...the rest of the issues never get worked out.  You never bond.  You never share values, dreams and other parts of your heart.  The physical aspect of sex takes over.  It is literally physically and chemically more exciting to have sex than to talk to each other about life.

Bonding takes time.  It takes time to share activities together, decide what you like to do, talk about what is deepest in your heart and put together a relationship that won't end when the sex begins to wane.  If you are sexually active and responding to the hormones every time you get around that attractive person, you have time for sex but not time to bond.  And the bonding is what lasts 40 to 50 to 60 years into a relationship.

I'm not doing Joy's book justice.  I'll have to write about it more in depth some other time.

Now that Pat and I are older (and I'll be frank) we aren't hopping into bed every night, every afternoon, every morning...you get the picture.  We are bonded on many more things.  One of the more unusual ones we are enjoying together now is reading books.  I've always enjoyed that but Pat hasn't.  Now it is more common for us to go to bed and read together.  We're trading books, talking about what we read and enjoying a few passionate moments along the way.

If our relationship was just founded on physical sex we would be drifting apart like many couples do as women go through menopause and men look for their second childhood in cars, sports, etc.  One of the things Pat and I still enjoy doing is traveling where we have hours to talk uninterrupted, sharing our thoughts and continuing to bond with each other into our twilight years.

Look for it soon.  I'll write about what it really takes to bond with someone so that its not just about passionate, hormonal sex but about values and shared activities that will last for a life time.

The Simple Way

I've been kinda lax in writing recently.  I guess every writer goes through a stage like that every once in a while.

Some friends of ours recommended a book to me several months ago.  It was The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne.  I was taken by the book and the things Shane and his community of believers were doing in Philadelphia.  I was afraid to write too much about what I was challenged by because I wasn't living it.  I mean, Shane has taken the Gospel to one of the roughest neighborhoods of Philly.

Shane is a radical, raised in eastern TN (I already liked him because of that).  He felt called to those without an advocate in the poor section of Philly.  He had attended Eastern University and been impacted by other radicals like Tony Campollo.  He's also gotten his fingers into the Mennonite community because of their theology (but not necessarily their practice) of a simple life.

At Thanksgiving I talked to Ben about Shane and his work and he encouraged me to look them up and go spend some time hanging out with them.  I found the website and began a correspondence with Grace Young and her husband Michael.  They hail from Lancaster County but if I blink my eyes they remind me a lot of the 70's hippies I saw in my youth.

I finally made my first trip down there a few weeks ago and again this week to help them out with some building projects.  They own 9 properties in the Kensington neighborhood of north Philly.  It's street after street of small 3 BR, 1 Bath row houses.  Very tight streets and several burned out or boarded up houses on each street.  I helped Michael with a few plumbing issues the first time but didn't get much time to chat.

This week when I went down to work I was joined by a father and his two college aged kids from Cincinnati.  They came to check out the ministry and volunteer.  The son had read Shane's book and passed it on to his Dad.  They helped me remove some walls in the row house serving as the office of The Simple Way to open up the space and make it more useable for their meetings.  There's a lot more I'd like to do there but I need to find the time.

What is The Simple Way doing?  They are living right among those they are seeking to serve and love.  They have bought up several properties to make available for rentals.  They take in community service workers that have been referred by the courts.  They clean up their street, hang out with the kids, provide food for families that need some help, give clothes to the poor, hand out school supplies at the beginning of the school year to the local kids. 

Yesterday, there was also a group of Jewish kids who volunteered to help clean up the lot where a factory once stood that had burned out several years ago.  In the fire event one of TSW houses was destroyed.  That lot is now converted to green space for others to enjoy.  The lot being cleaned up is owned by the city and TSW is hoping to plant some stuff there to add some greenery to the neighborhood.

Before the volunteers had arrived to the vacant lot I brought over a truck load of debris from the office to be dumped in the dumpster.  As I started to throw stuff into the dumpster a fellow came running down the block yelling to me to get my attention.  He thought maybe I was using TSW's dumpster for my personal trash.  I later met the good neighbor, Manuel.  He is a card and he takes pride in what they are doing in his neighborhood.  He is a positive force in that neighborhood as well.

What do people really need?  Friends.  Ones who will love them, hang out with them and bless their lives.  I blessed the community verbally as I worked there this week.  I blessed the love of TSW group who is there putting a foot in the door of inner city Philly.  They want to impact their world.  They are living simply and loving much.

There's a part of me that could get caught up in what they are doing.  I enjoyed so much the interaction I had with people there in the neighborhood.  I got familiar with finding my way around.  I am overwhelmed by how much needs to be done in the neighborhood.  It takes way more people than I can represent by myself.  But it has to start somewhere.

Pat is having an impact in her classes at Pequea Valley High School.  I'm touching a few in Philly.  Others are impacting children in NYC.  Who are you loving today?  Is there someone you have overlooked that needs some of your attention?  Would you like to go with me to Philly some time?

Oh, by the way, I did get to meet Shane.  He's cool...because he talks with the right accent from TN (not Philly).

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? 

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.