It's Friday, But Sunday's Coming
Pain. I hate it. I hate discomfort. I take allergy medicine daily, yet my allergies occasionally flare up. Nothing debilitating, simply uncomfortable. Still, if I'm not careful, I moan and groan and feel sorry for myself. And we're only talking about agitation, much less pain.
I fortunately have experienced very little pain compared to other people. What little I have experienced, though, I have noticed how much God has done with it in terms of spiritual formation. I wish I was conditioned to grow spiritually during prosperity. Regrettably, I typically grow the most during adversity or crisis. I have found many, if not most, people to be the same way.
If economic indicators and the media are to be believed, this year we are going to have a lot of people hurting. Because of this, I think more unchurched people will be open to the Gospel than have been in years. Unfortunately, many Christians will probably be sucked into the vortex of this economic tornado as well.
What if we could become proactive and prepare ourselves for the possibility of pain? And then, being prepared, what if we could build a bridge with our pain that connects us to the heart of our unchurched friends?
I recently completed reading the novel The Shack by William P. Young. If you are not familiar with the story, it is about a man who grew up abused. As an adult, he discovered his child was murdered by an abuser. What ensued was a spiritual journey that he experienced while confronting his pain.
The author's concluding chapter intrigues me as much as the story did.
Young tells how he drew upon his abused childhood in writing this story. The novel so connected with people, that literally enough copies could not be printed or published to keep up with the demand. Here was the case of a man taking his pain and allowing it to bless the lives of other people.
We have a couple in our church who, several years ago, experienced a miscarriage. The tragedy hurt them deeply. They had choices. They could have buried the pain and ignored it. They could have blamed God. What they chose to do was to draw from this experience to minister to other couples who suffer miscarriages.
To many of us, this seems strange. Paul looked upon his suffering in prison, and the slander that other preachers inflicted upon him while communicating the Gospel, with an attitude of great joy. To him the greater goal was preaching the good news.
What if we could truly reach that point? What if we could truly internalize the idea that any pain that we suffer can advance the Gospel? And what if we could reach the depth of spirituality where our attitude is: nothing gives us greater joy than to see the Gospel communicated to people?
Facebook
A few weeks ago, I wrote on my blog that I had joined Facebook. This morning, a couple of people mentioned at a staff meeting that they had read an article saying that the younger people are now looking for an alternative to Facebook. I know what happened. Word got out that I had finally joined, and the universal agreement of the young was, "Great! There goes the neighborhood."
My cover is so many baby boomers are joining Facebook that it is driving out the younger people. But I don't know.
Like a Rolling Stone
I'm finally receiving my issues of Rolling Stone again. I have been reading the biweekly magazine for the past few months. I like to say it is my version of studying a scouting report on the people of the world.
There is a reason why is it significant that I'm getting my issues. That is because for several weeks, they ceased coming. I must admit that I got quite irritated. I called Rolling Stone and they said they had been sending them all and for me to check with the post office. I did just that.
First, I went to the post office on Broadway Street, which is near downtown Tyler. This is the branch that default delivers the mail to our church office, which is where I was having the magazine delivered. I arrived on a Tuesday afternoon about 4: 45. I waited in line for 15 minutes. Finally, I realized that I was not going to be able to pick up my daughter from basketball practice if I stayed any longer. So I left without talking to anyone.
The following day I arrived again expecting to receive some answers. Silly me! After waiting in line 15 or 20 minutes, they kindly informed me that I needed to go to an obscure site on the south part of town. I drove and arrived about 20 minutes later, following the directions that I had been given. It included passing the mall, driving past the stores of a shopping center, circling around those stores, and parking by a loading dock. After parking, I was to go to an unmarked door, which was locked, and ring a bell. For a moment, I thought I was participating in a movie about the Mafia.
Finally, a very nice man came out, who was indeed an employee of the post office. I explained to him my story and even showed him an issue of Rolling Stone. Another employee came out to investigate. Finally, they shared with me the dead honest truth.
It seems that the regular postman had become ill and was out for a while. Substitute workers were delivering our mail to the office. Evidently, these substitutes each made a moral judgment. When they looked at the copy of Rolling Stone, addressed to me, with the mailing address of our church building, they concluded that there is no way an employee of a church would subscribe to this magazine. So they kept the issues and return them to the post office.
I admit, this was news that I did not really want to hear, but I did appreciate their honesty. I laughed and told them, "Well, I'm glad it was not Playboy Magazine that I subscribed to. Else I would've never seen it!" They did not laugh. I think they wondered if I was being serious.
At any rate, most of the missing issues were sitting at that weigh station, while they're trying to figure out what to do with them. And now I have been receiving them again at our church office.
Let this be a lesson to you. Figuring out what the world is up to is pretty hard to do sometimes.
Interesting Videos on YouTube
My old college roommate and current blogger extraordinaire, Tim Archer, told me recently about a phenomenon on YouTube. It was a short video produced by a team from the Southern Hills Church of Christ in Abilene Texas. It's called "Stethoscope." It only last a couple minutes and I'm not going to recount it for you, when you could watch the whole thing in about the same time you can read my description.
What is fascinating to me is this video has been viewed almost three million times. While we can be virtually certain that this does not mean that three million people saw the video, neither do I think that it was two people watching the video 1.5 million times apiece. A lot of people all over the world have watched this work of art created for a spiritual purpose.
I'm struck, yet again, by the fact we have never had an opportunity to affect so many people in the world for so little cost. I hope more creative Christians will post their videos on YouTube. I would especially love to see a team of gifted people from our congregation do so.
Hats off to my old college church -- Southern Hills.
A Good Read
I had a chance to read Mark Buchanan's book The Rest Of God last week. I was reading it in preparation for a sermon that I was doing that included a passage on the Sabbath. I think you would like the book. McKinnon is not one of these guys that drives around with the bumper sticker on the back of his car that says "Jesus went to church on Saturday." He understands how difficult it is to live in the 21st century world and pondered the principle of the Sabbath. He views the Sabbath as not just an attitude, but also an orientation. I was under the impression the book was more conceptual, but it is instead very practical. Still, Buchanan uses many illustrations, and I think it would be a fast read for most people. A number of illustrations were done so well that I noted them in the back of my copy. The following paragraphs are my summary of one of these illustrations. It is about the grandmother of Mark Buchanan's wife:
Grandmother lived in a beautiful area in British Columbia in a small town called Enderby. A lot of people were known to have moved to the rivers and creeks around that town because of the rumor that gold was present. Grandma never bought into that rumor.
One day, she made a major decision concerning her backyard. There was a large boulder in her garden and it was too big to move. So she decided to polish the stone. Her logic was that since she could not get rid of it, she might as well make it beautiful. So she took sandpaper and began to polish that stone.
As she was sanding, she noticed a thin sifting of gold colored dust gathering on the stone. She pressed the tip of her finger into the dust. She pulled up her finger, and her heart began the race. It wasn't just dust, it was gold dust. She sanded the big rock harder. The more she sanded, the more gold that appeared. Now she was sanding the rock with everything she had. And the gold began to accumulate rapidly.
By now grandma had caught the disease. She understood why all those people had given up everything to come to Enderby and look for gold. She had the fever now -- gold fever. Grandma sat down to rest. She knew she was going to be rich.
While she was resting, she wiped her brow. Then she noticed something was wrong with her wedding ring. The top part was normal, but the underside, the part that nestled in the crease where her finger joined her palm, wasn't normal. The band was as thin as the end of a cheese slicer wire. It looked like a filament. Then she realized what had happened. She had nearly sanded her wedding ring off. All that gold she had seen inside that boulder were merely filings. It was the remnants of her precious wedding ring. She was reducing her treasure to dust. It was all fools gold.
If we are not careful, we do the same thing. Not with our wedding rings. But we can squander treasures in the pursuit of dust. It is so easy to pass up the treasure, in order to pursue the dust. The dust is called "hurry." Hurry is the great enemy of the Sabbath.
Friendship with God can be lost in a hurry.
Fair and Balanced
You have read previously that I have enjoyed reading the book Searching for God Knows What. Can I share with you something that I have read from that book with which I disagree? In his chapter on morality, Donald Miller tries to make the point that most Christians who are conservative, overemphasize abortion and underemphasize other equally important issues such as social justice, and helping the poor.
I respectfully disagree. In conservative Christianity, and I'm using the term broadly, I see a tremendous emphasis on serving the poor and oppressed. Rick Warren has become famous now for his and his wife's call to minister to the poor of Africa, especially to those who are suffering from AIDS. Other Christian groups such as Samaritans' Purse have become well known for their ministry to the poor. I personally know a number of Christians who have traveled to New Orleans to minister to people there, who had been victimized by hurricane Katrina.
And when it comes to social justice, Chuck Colson has been recognized by Queen Elizabeth herself for his leadership with Prison Fellowship in ministering to prisoners all over the world. It was Christians who were among the first to call the world's attention to the devastating civil war in Sudan. Christians have been very active in seeking to shut down the sexual slave trade in Asia.
All of this is good. I support all of this. However, as I have written before, what could be more tied to the cause of justice than the protection of life?
You know when you think about it, we human beings are part of a very exclusive club. What could be more discriminating than to tell a human life not to enter into our world?
Have you ever wanted to join a fraternity or sorority or a social club and not get voted in? How did that make you feel? Rejected? Angry? Left out?
For good reason, we are angered when we hear that someone is barred from joining a country club because of his or her ethnicity, gender, or culture. What does it say about us as people when we, who are alive and functioning outside of the womb, say to a human life, "No, you cannot enter into our world." No matter how small the child, if the clock has started running, she will be ultimately joining us in our world. She will be joining us--unless, the consequences of a fallen world strike her with disease or accident, or, unless we who have progressed past the womb vote no.
Do we need to be strategic? Yes. Do we need to be winsome? When at all possible, yes. Is the Christian community speaking out too much on abortion? That would be a goal hard to accomplish.
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