Pixie Sticks and Schadenfreude!*

 Hot Summer days spent by the pool with 50 other kids in embarrassingly small swimsuits… miles of Pixie Stix consumed six inches at a time from a paper straw, unless you had the supreme sugar rush inducing 21 inch Giant Pixie Stick from a plastic tube, or the cheapskate version of sweetened Koolade powder eaten right from the sleeve… giant dill pickles from a giant pickle jar… sunburn, sunscreen, and near sun stroke… semi-soaked, then sun dried towels that smelled of chlorine, sweat, pickle juice, and Pixie Stix… hair bleached by the Sun with a tint of green from the pool chemicals… the excitement of cheering on a team member in a close race, the thrill of victory and agony of defeat… of course, I’m describing Summer Swim Team. For many Summers of elementary school and pre-teen years my sister and I swam with neighborhood friends for the University of Tennessee Faculty Club, The Senator's Club, and for the Fountain City Lions Club swim teams. Every morning we headed to the pool to practice, grow stronger, and learn more about fast starts, flip turns and best ways to breath between strokes…if we were listening. Our parents worked the ribbon tables, stopwatches, and served as water-cat herders to get kids to the blocks for their events. They tirelessly spent hours and hours at the pool for practice and meets to watch us swim events that were typically less than 1 minute long. Many of us were mediocre athletes, but it kept us active, gave us a group to belong to, and friends to cheer on. I still have glad memories of time spent with friends around the pool. Swim is one of those team sports that is mostly competed individually, but scored as a team. We had to figure out how to compete against a clock, to get a faster time than our last swim, rather than considering others that we raced against as our “enemy.” Schadenfreude can come easy when we are competing… we may be glad when someone else has a bad race, so that we do better. We may even begin to hope for someone else to have a bad race so we can defeat them, and blue ribbons can become more important than good friendships.

The church can sometimes become a place where Schadenfreude can come easy too. We may think of our faith walk as a competition as opposed to a team sport. We can begin to think that because we may have more Bible knowledge, think we are morally better, or think we are outserving others, that we are superior to other people, and we can get a little feeling of satisfaction when others don’t know as much, or they mess up, or they don’t do as much as we do “for Jesus.” Apparently the early church was struggling with some of these things too and Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, had to remind them that belonging to Christ and each other is more important than being the best. He says, “ For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” (Romans 12:3–5) I am challenged to remember that Christ came for our victory in relationships. First, he came so we can have relationship with God the Father for all eternity. He also came to connect us in healthy ways with all those people He loves (everyone). Jesus didn’t come to make us a better version of ourselves or even better than others, He came to make us a new creation that acts like Him, connects with Him and loves people well. If we have been gifted in certain things, we hafta remember that our gifting is a tool to build up other people, not put them down, or humiliate them when they fail. Our world places value on the being the best, the fastest, and the strongest, because the world’s economy is based on the predatory model of “survival of the fittest,” exploiting the weaknesses of others for our own benefit. God’s self-sacrificial plan is a plan to rescue people, change their lives, protect them in their weakness, build them up, and love them forever and teach us to do the same.

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

Does It Have Any Value?*

 When my kids were young, we tried to have a family adventure each week, like trips to a local attraction, the YMCA pool, fishing in the pond, or a family bike ride. We had our plates full: Anita had 4 preschoolers all day and I had the shepherding responsibilities of a mostly aging flock: 3 sermons a week, hospital visits several times a week, and a funeral or two every month. We had finally bought, collected and repaired enough bikes, and bike-baby seats for all 6 of us to ride on the Shelby Bottoms trails in East Nashville, including one bike that we had to recover from the creek after being stolen off the back porch of the parsonage. (East Nashville has since returned to its former glory, but at the time in the early 2000’s, it was still kind of the “hood,” with gang activity, a 90% high school dropout rate, and nefarious characters sometimes roaming the streets at night. When I first arrived as pastor, I wondered why there were bars on the parsonage windows, then a young man in the church told me my family needed to be aware of our surroundings, he had been shot in the church parking lot a few years before). After an hour of pumping tires and tightening chains, sliding handles back on handlebars, I was ready to load all the bikes on the bike hitch and put the bike trailer that would carry our picnic basket and cooler into the Minivan. Anita piled the helmets and kids inside, buckled car seats and we were ready to go. Once at the parking lot, which was less than a mile from the parsonage (there were no sidewalks to ride from the house), we were quite the spectacle apparently. People stared as the kids seemed to keep piling out of the van like a VW Bug stuffed with clowns at the circus. We sunscreened, sunglassed, and helmeted all the kids, put two on bikes and two in bike-baby seats, attached the trailer to my bike with our picnic basket inside and we were ready to roll. Our son, the oldest child, was eager to go fast and explore, so we had to signal for him to come back closer to us with a loud curled-lip-whistle when he was about to get out of sight, which, to this day he recalls, was frustrating to his budding adventurous spirit. He did seem to understand we needed to stick together as a family and not everyone could pedal as fast as him. We finally made it to our picnic spot with a picnic table, swingsets and monkey bars. The kids ate their pb and j’s and deli sandwiches, whale-crackers (which were the cheaper, Aldi knock-off version of GoldFish), sliced apples, cheese sticks, sectioned oranges and juice boxes. Then they played for a while. The youngest seemed to be enthralled with the idea that there was a cinder block bathroom painted white, right in the middle of the park with one side for boys and the other for girls. We knew that we had to save some energy for the ride back, so after several minutes it was time to head back. With only a couple of minor injuries, tears, and tantrums (a few of them being my own) we made it back to the van. We were covered in a thin layer of the mud cake that forms with the mixture of sunscreen, sweat, and Nashville pollution, which consisted of traffic grime, wind blown Steiner Lift scrap-metal yard, rust-dust, glitter particles, and then add some playground dirt. This mixture is then dried onto our skin in the bike breeze like a janky mud beauty treatment. We reloaded everything for the short van ride back, and in spite of the short ride, our youngest was asleep (my daughter-in-law now calls this “carcolepsy,” like narcolepsy, but involves falling asleep anytime you ride in a car). We get them home, splash and wipe them down with a washcloth, which, by the wipedown of the fourth child looks like it was washed in a mud puddle. Even after the cloth is rinsed and wrung out, the last kid’s dirt just gets smeared around a little and it makes them look like they just got a bad spray tan on their lily white Euro descended skin. Exhausted, we put them down for a nap and offload the bikes and gear, clean out the van, cooler and picnic basket. Then we take a short nap, wake up and order pizza for dinner. Sometimes I wondered did this have any value? Was it worth all the effort to get us all together for a family activity? Was it worth the sweat, mud-cake baths, and tears to try to make some family memories that would help define our family, and remind us that we belong to each other, look out for each other, and that it’s important for us to have fun together. I have since learned that healthy growth and maturity emotionally and spiritually requires having the joys of belonging and having fun together, not just the “thou shalt nots.”

The early church was struggling to know whether it made a difference to keep acting like Jesus and keep doing good. The society around them didn’t always seem to care that they treated people differently than most, nor did they seem to care that because they identified as those who belong to Jesus, that they were kinder, did good deeds and loved people like no one else. The apostle Paul reminded them that it does matter that we keep on doing good, that even if we don’t see any noticeable results right now, it will have an impact in the long run. He says, “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6:9 ESVi) As people who belong to Jesus, it is what we do, it is how we act, it is in our character to keep doing good for our family, for our community, even for those with whom we don’t always agree. I am glad that now our adult children want to “be there” for each other, do good for others, and have fun together whenever they can. I screwed parenting up more than I got it right. I was especially bad at it when I was exhausted… which was most of the time, but God always sent His people from church at just the right moment to help my kids keep growing. They also encouraged me: to keep acting like Jesus, keep on loving, keep on having family adventures, keep on parenting, keep on doing good, that it will all make a difference in the long run. Just don’t give up!

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