Parents, Are Your Feet Beautiful? *Post COVID

 Parents, are your feet beautiful? In elementary school my family had a mini-farm… seven acres on the Little Tennessee River near Alcoa - a town named after the Aluminum Company of America and not far from Maryville, or “Murvul” if you are local. I always wanted a pair of boots to walk around the farm in. My dad always had some good boots for hunting, checking on the cow, or “Joe the pony”* (cow is singular, it wasn’t a big farm) or working in the garden. I finally got some boots, some real clodhoppers. I was thrilled. I liked the way they supported my spindly little ankles that frequently turned over. I liked the way they clunked as I walked down the hall at Fort Sanders Elementary School. I liked how warm they kept my feet in the winter. I liked how they helped me climb the hills of my steep driveway on Fox Chase Lane. One day at school, a friend and I were headed down the hall and, for some reason that escapes me, we were unaccompanied by the teacher… My friend's mother was a wonderful teacher to special needs students there and I suppose our teacher, who knew her, trusted us to go down the hall, “responsibly” to the office. However, as sometimes happens at that age when you don’t have the benefit of a teacher reminding you to walk not run, our pace increased from a quick walk to a competitive run by the time we were at the end of the hall. As I turned the corner right there was a lady from my neighborhood who worked in the school office. My oversized clodhoppers were out of control and the toe of my boot caught her right in the shin. She fell to the floor grabbing her shin rolling in pain. All I could do was stare for a minute, embarrassed that I had unintentionally incapacitated her with my size three work boots, wondered why she had gotten in my way, and then I continued down the hall to catch up with my friend, who was wearing tennis shoes that could run much faster. I don’t know what I was thinking, she had clearly seen me run right into her. I had watched her eyes open wide just before the shin-toe contact (not the Japanese ancestor worship, but the cry out, “Oh God,” as we collided). Then I saw the grimace and tears as she fell to the ground. I couldn’t get out an “I’m so sorry!” or a “Are you okay?” or “can I get you some help?”... nothing, all I had was a silent stare. And then I ran off. Needless to say, she never forgot our less than fortunate collision in the halls of FSE. Many years later, long after I had repressed the embarrassing memory, she reminded me that her shin had never been the same, that when it was cold especially, it would still hurt. I and the boots I had loved so much were not fondly remembered by my neighbor and school assistant.

Unfortunately, that childhood experience kinda looked like my Evangelism strategy sometimes… find an unsuspecting unbeliever and kick them in the shins with something that I thought was so wonderful and then run away. I would call them a sinner and judge them without having known anything about them (we all, by the way, are sinners, but calling someone that is not a great way to start the kind of caring relationship God wants us to have with them, before we tell them about Jesus). I would knock on someone's door or approach them in public, collide with their world, then run off and leave them wherever they were, to wrestle with what I had just told them, alone. It was kinda irresponsible, like a kid running down the hall out of control with clodhoppers on. These were real human beings, created in God’s image, worthy of respect and value, each one with a story, and I had just made them the object of my evangelistic effort, sometimes just to be seen as a "good Christian." Ugh! The prophet Isaiah says, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!””(Isaiah 52:7 NIV) As we bring the Salvation of Jesus to people, it comes with good news and peace and good tidings, not anger, condemnation, manipulation, and lingering pain. The Holy Spirit does the convicting, we are called to love them and care about them and care for them, disciple them. Jesus calls us to make disciples not converts. Discipleship takes connection and care. When we belong to Jesus, we begin to act like Him... gentle toward weakness, compassionate for those who are hurting and an agent of redemption and reconciliation. People should be glad to see us coming.

Hang in there people. God is glad to be with us. I’m praying for us all.

*for more on Joe the Pony...https://williampmcg.blogspot.com/2020/08/parents-are-you-being-mean-joe-words.html

Parents, Does Practice Really Make Perfect? *

Parents, does practice really make perfect? In Middle School, my mother thought it was a good idea for me to learn the trumpet… perhaps because this small skinny kid didn’t make the basketball team, and wasn’t big enough for football, or maybe because learning music helps your brain develop and she wanted well rounded kids. For whatever reason, I agreed and dreamed of maybe being the next Chuck Mangione or Louis Armstrong. The first day, I played it 'til my lips hurt. I learned that it takes a lot of practice to develop your embouchure, a fancy word for the way you hold your mouth so your lips vibrate right on the mouthpiece. A good embouchure with strong mouth muscles helps you sound like a trumpet player rather than an angry goose. When the band started, I seemed to do okay and the band director put me in the first chair. As the weeks progressed though, practice took second place to pick-up football, stickball, basketball, bike rides, and tennis with my friends. The thought of 30 minutes alone, sitting still with my trumpet was less than thrilling for my ADHD squirminess. However, my mother required it, saying “practice makes perfect.” I did it, but my heart wasn’t in it. In my mind I was outside scoring touchdowns with my suburban neighborhood sports posse. So, by the time the Christmas concert came around, I had moved steadily down the trumpet row, from 1st chair, to 2nd, to 3rd chair. I practiced, but I practiced missing notes, I didn’t practice the way the music was actually supposed to sound. It revealed that practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but “perfect practice makes perfect.”

In our Jesus following lives, sometimes we do stuff, like go to church, just so we can say we are practicing our faith, but it's more to check the box on the imaginary chart that convinces us we are a “good Christian person.” We feel slightly better about our lives, but we aren’t actually changed. In real life, rather than in our “Sunday-best” church life, we don’t always act like the One we belong to, we sometimes act like we used to before we belonged to Jesus. Peter the apostle, who used to struggle with acting like a Jesus follower sometimes, reminds us all that perfect practice makes perfect. He says, “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.””(1 Peter 1:14–16 NIV) Peter certainly knows that we are still going to mess up and not always act like God’s people, who are set apart to represent Him on this planet, but the expectation is that the more we act like Jesus the more we become like Jesus and the less we act like we belong to the world. The more we perfectly practice acting like the One we belong to, the more we mature and become like Him. The people around us may notice and we have the opportunity to tell them about His wonderful love for us.

Hang in there people. God is glad to be with us. I’m praying for us all.