Wedding Wow!*

When my oldest daughter was getting married, she decided to wear Anita’s wedding dress. Anita and I were honored and thrilled that she would wear the classic gown from 1990. Anita pulled it out of its storage box and had it altered by an incredibly talented seamstress. The puffy sleeves were removed and made more fitting like 2019. The train was adjusted and the bodice was fitted to Mary Allyson’s frame. Just before Mary A was going to leave the Brides’ Room, walk out the door, and down the stairs to the outdoor venue, the bridesmaids stopped and circled around the bride to say a prayer. Her lifelong best friend and maid of honor, eager to join in the prayer, walked around behind Mary A and accidentally stepped on the train.  The 30-year-old fabric ripped loudly at the waist. Her friend felt horrible. Panic was about to ensue because the music had started and the nuptial clock was at T minus 5 and counting.  At that moment Mary A’s hairdresser and friend, Brian, who would also be singing as Mary A walked down the aisle, stepped in with a needle and thread from his “emergency kit.” As he quickly stitched the compromised vintage bridal gown, he calmly and softly sang a hymn, putting the bride and whole party of Bridesmaids at ease. He hid the repair, tied off the last thread and everyone walked down to the venue where the wedding guests had no clue of the incident that could have wrecked the big moment. The tears that flowed that day came from joy and not anxiousness or disappointment. 

The Apostle Paul tells his favorite church at a moment when anxiety was running high amongst the congregation, “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7 ESV) With a calm prayer or calming hymn, God can change our perspective of any situation. When we recognize that Immanuel, "God With Us," is present, a flood of peace and comfort overwhelms us, and the feelings of upset are washed away. It just took one believer in that bridesmaids’ room to bring peace by turning the focus from the distressing incident to the One who is always glad to be with us. 

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

Rhythms of Rest*

There was a time in my life that I had just moved to a new city to become a senior pastor of a church. I had 4 preschoolers. I was preaching 3 times each week, doing all the hospital, homebound, and grief visitation. I was officiating a funeral or two each month and trying to write a newsletter article each week. I had also committed some time for some local pastors to help mentor me a couple of times a month. I joined the deacon’s meeting each month and often helped clean up the restrooms when the toilets overflowed. We had also started a Summer Day Camp to reach the kids in the neighborhood.  During that time, I rarely slept through the night, at least one of the kids was awake at some point and when I would put them back in their bed, I fell asleep on the floor of their room waiting for them to finally get easy. I was often up early writing the next sermon because there was always a sermon needed. To say that I had no rest or margin in my life for those years was an understatement. I had no energy to bring my best self to my family or my church. When I shared my plan with the church board to focus more energy on Sunday morning and mid-week and drop the Sunday evening worship, they replied, “Preacher, we are paying you for 3 sermons a week,” though no one on the board attended on Sunday nights. 

Solomon, the wisest man to live on earth warns, “Over-work makes for restless sleep.” (Ecclesiastes 5:3 MESSAGE)  We can exhaust ourselves in so many activities that we never rest. We can spend our lives in a meaningless race for fleeting temporal rewards that we may make our exhaustion sound spiritual. Psalm 127:2 reminds us, “In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat — for he grants sleep to those he loves.”  Our real sufficiency comes from how much our all-sufficient God loves us and provides for us not from our own endless efforts to satisfy the expectations of the people around us.  As it turns out, rest in our lives is as important as our activity.

God has emphasized a rhythm of regular rest in our lives from the beginning. In Hebrew thought, the day begins at Sundown, so our days actually start with rest. Genesis 1:5 says,  “And there was evening, and there was morning — the first day.” For God to start with evening, means He blesses creation with rest first, then He blesses us to bring our rested self to our tasks during the day. He also gives His people a rhythm of rest each week. He prescribes six days of work and one Sabbath day of rest. God’s rhythms in creation were the best model for us all.  Genesis 2:1-3 (CSBBible) says, “So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed. On the seventh day God had completed his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it he rested from all his work of creation.”  How are you doing with your daily and weekly rhythms of rest? 

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

Personality Traits Made New!*

 As a sociology major in undergrad, personality inventories have always been interesting to me… Meyers-Briggs, DISC, MMPI. Though there are nearly infinite possibilities of personality traits, we humans seem to want some handles on how people typically behave or misbehave, act or act out in our world. We all have positive traits, but our negative traits can quickly reveal our fallenness. I took an inventory one time that put me into a category called the “The Enthusiast.” Apparently, as we “Enthusiasts” respond to the challenges of our world by attempting to spin everything toward the positive, make everything fun, and keep people happy.  We want people to see and experience the “upside.” We also, apparently avoid negative feelings like the plague by running away to try as many fun new experiences as possible. One famous “Enthusiast” is children’s author E.B. White, who wrote Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little among others. He is quoted as saying, “I get up every morning determined both to change the world and have a (expletive) of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.” Supposedly we enthusiasts are consistently inconsistent as we try to change the world for the better and have fun doing it. Sometimes it's hard for us to focus, because we are endlessly scanning the horizon for the next new exciting thing, leaving some projects unfinished that are no longer exciting to us. Like gift wrapping jello, we can be hard to pin down… as you can imagine, education or situations that require focus and putting our nose to the grindstone and finishing a task can be a challenge (though somehow by God’s grace He ushered me through three academic degrees, though for one of them, I took a semester off to have fun and work at the World’s Fair in New Orleans). I’m so grateful that God makes us a new creation and changes us when we become “one of His.” He takes the worst traits of our personality and makes us into new whole creations, redeeming us for His great work as ambassadors for His Kingdom. As God continues to change me, He reminds me that a consistent committed relationship with Him brings stability and peace to my life. He is sufficient for me. 

Regardless of what category an inventory puts you in, God loves you and sees you for who you really are, better yet, for who He created you to be in Christ. When we are redeemed, He sees us as untainted by our sin, shortcomings, or our feeble attempts to respond in this fallen world. Paul reminds us of who we now are… the best expression of the person God made us to be, without the negative manifestations from our sin nature. He says “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come! Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” 2 Corinthians 5:17-18 (CSBBible) In difficult times we can be tempted to self-protect and respond to this world from the worst of our personality traits. However, we need to let God’s Spirit and His Word remind us of who we really are in Him

.

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

Hang on Tight!*

Photo credit: Lakeside Water Sports

Last week, I was taken back to my teendom in my mind. I was privileged to go “tubing” behind a boat, something I hadn’t done in several years. I had great fun on this large inflatable sled tied to the boat as the boat driver zigged and circled, up and down the lake, bouncing the two other riders and me into the air and skipping us across waves like a rock skips over the water when thrown just right. As I was slung off the tube by centripetal force and a large wave, I had to check to make sure my britches were still on! I was whisked back to my teen years in my head, when we used actual old tire inner tubes with an old rope tied to them. As a teen, I also had the privilege to be the boat driver for tubers (what were my parents thinking?). The object of tubing was to try to get the rider off the tube in some spectacular fashion, including, but not limited to, flipping rider off the tube in a wild spin across the top of the water and/or a spectacular airborne body launch caused by the tube hitting a large wave sending the rider flailing into the air and splatting on the water. Some tube riders would hang on even when the tube flipped! The driver I had last week was a masterful tube driver who has been known to get a rider off the tube within the first 30 seconds of the ride. He had mercy on me as an old man and gave me and my two other tube-newbies a good long 10 minute ride before ejecting us from our air-filled raft with precision skill.  Drivers are the ones who decide when it was time to let his next victims/riders have a try. I was like the carnival ride operator who decided when the “tilt-a-hurl” ride was over, even though someone was screaming to get off and about to lose the corndog they just ate. Everyone on this trip though, came off the tube with a smile on their face.  A great time was had by all, but I am a little sore from being flung gleefully around the lake. 

Sometimes in our spiritual life, it feels like all we can do is hang on when the temporary ruler of this world is trying to get us to let go of God. The Apostle Paul was reminding God’s people to hang on to Jesus, because Jesus is hanging on to us, ensuring our safe arrival to heaven when our ride around the Sun comes to an end. Paul says,  “...I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:12-14 NIV11) When the evil one is trying to get us to fail spectacularly and let go of our faith, we can be reminded to keep hanging on because Jesus has a hold of us. He promises, “no one will snatch them out of my hand!”

Hang in there people! 

God is Glad to be with us! 

I’m praying for us all!  

The Gift of Overshare!*

 I don’t know if you’ve ever had the gift of “overshare,” but for some reason I seem to always have the urge to give TMI (Too Much Information). As a kid I was rarely able to keep myself from saying what would better have been left unsaid. The only time I received enough demerits to earn myself Thursday School detention after school was when I couldn’t stop talking in the Library. To my shame, it would just spew out of my mouth like a loose water hose spraying anyone in range of the loud and sometimes embarrassing deluge. This trait made me a bit vulnerable to anyone who wanted information. All they had to do was pull the string and I would talk like a kids toy from back in the day before they discovered that a string was a hazard to children. (Think Woody on ToyStory). I was also prone to ask questions that might make someone uncomfortable without considering the impact. This part I got honestly from my grandmother who once asked the very tall check out clerk at the grocery if she was standing on a box. Even I blushed right along with the clerk when she said it. As an adult I’m still fully capable and apt to say something embarrassing to which my adult kids cringe. A friend of mine, 90 year old, Lucille is quick to say that her ex husband who was a doctor said she had diarrhea of the mouth, but that was not a medical term. I’m glad to know there are others who talk a lot too, however, it is often accompanied by much regret especially when intensely discussing a disagreement with my wife.

King David wisely requested that God help him not say the wrong thing or say anything at all when he shouldn’t. He prays, “Set a guard over my mouth, O LORD; keep watch over the door of my lips.” (Psalm 141:3 NIV-GK) Maybe this should had been my prayer from way back. Oh well, I can at least pray it now! What about you?

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

Frankie Heck it! Rewrite*

 Did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in? Anita and I used to enjoy watching the sitcom “The Middle.” Many of the middle class, middle America situations that the producers built their comedy around were situations that we were living through in our own home with our own kids, so much so that we sometimes felt there must have been secret cameras capturing the everyday drama of real life and rewriting it in sitcom form. One particular episode that lives on in our home is when Patricia Heaton’s character, Frankie Heck, had a computer problem. Everything she tried to make the technology work correctly and recover the files of pictures she reluctantly saved to the computer never yielded a good outcome. So, after an emotional meltdown she dramatically unplugged the computer, counted the magical "10 seconds" and plugged the computer back in. She did this repeatedly (not recommended). Eventually, miraculously the computer worked again and the photos were found. This still happens with the technology around our house now. When the Wi-Fi is being wanky, we ask, “did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in, Frankie?” Most times the Wi-Fi comes back up. We do this with smart TV’s, laptops, smart phones, and anything else that we feel technically unfit to fix. 

When life is going nuts and things just don’t seem to be right, sometimes we need to unplug a moment and then plug back in. When I do pre-marriage counseling, I tell couples when they become angry or frustrated to the point of engaging the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response in their brain, it typically takes the body 30 minutes to calm down from this God-given protection response. The chemicals in our brain are triggered in such a way that we become self-protective and even aggressive if we feel threatened or unsafe. The part of the brain that reminds us who we really are, how we really act in this situation has shut down. If we don’t recover, we continue to act in fear instead of joy. And that means I have to win at all costs and everyone else has to lose… so then we all lose. God reminds us through Paul that if we let emotions control us, we quit acting like Jesus and we start acting like the Evil One. Paul says, “‘In your anger do not sin’: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.” Ephesians 4:26-27 (NIV) So, when something triggers us we need to do a “Frankie Heck restart,” and take some time to return to joy by plugging back in to Jesus, and then plug ourselves back in to the relationships with those around us. We can start acting like our “Jesus self” again.

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

Grab the Bull by the Horns!*

A friend at Southwestern Seminary had invited me out to the ranch where he was living and taking care of the owner’s Longhorns. I was excited to see these massive creatures up close. He asked if I wanted to help feed them. Always up for an adventure, I said “yes.” He demonstrated how to take a bale of hay through the barn door and scatter it in front of these docile but extra-large hungry beasts. So, I grabbed a bale by the twine and as I was about to get out the barn door the twine snapped, and the hay exploded just inside the door. Well, I learned that hungry longhorns don’t understand that they are not allowed in the barn even if there is food on the ground. So, in my ignorance, I literally grabbed the cow by the horns and headed it back out the door. Surprisingly, it stayed just outside the door as I kicked the hay toward him and his herd mates. My friend said, “I can’t believe you just did that.” He knew that the cow could have easily slung me into the loft if it was so inclined, without even trying. I guess I was just lucky he was hungry and not hangry.  They say ignorance is bliss, unless of course it is just ignorance.  What you don’t know can hurt you. 

The Apostle Paul was worried about the early church and reminded them that he and his friends were praying for their knowledge and wisdom of spiritual truths. He says, in Col. 1:9-14  “ For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. 10 And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11 being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully 12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. 13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”  So before you take the “bull by the horns,” pray for knowledge and wisdom so you can “live a life worthy of the Lord.” 

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