Send Relief!*

 My day started as usual: Quiet solitude with God, which usually includes a cup of Jehovah Java (coffee), prayer,  and the Word of God. This day was a little different though. I was in Thailand with a mission team that was not yet awake. My mind and body had awakened early trying to figure out the 12 hour jet lag from ATX. The rest of the team would be going for the next couple of days to encourage, teach, and bless a group of 70 ladies in an International Women’s Retreat and I would be spending time with a local missionary.  As God would have it, the ABC church staff has been reading through the Bible together this year since January 2026. We are reading Genesis to Revelation in Biblical order. This particular day of reading I was in the 11th chapter of the Book of Acts. As I read, I found that it had been prophesied that there would be a severe famine in the Roman world. And picking up in verse 29 I read: “Each of the disciples, according to his ability, determined to send relief to the brothers and sisters who lived in Judea.” (Acts 11:29 CSB17) As only God can do, later that morning, I received a call from the missionary I was to spend the day with.  He said there had been a change of plans, that we would now be spending the day with another missionary who led the SendRelief mission in that area. SendRelief is a mission agency of the Southern Baptist Convention that provides food, water, medical care, rescue, and many other resources in major crises worldwide, things like flooding, tsunamis, earthquakes, drought, wars, and famines all in the name of Jesus. If you have heard of a crisis in the news the last 30+ years, SendRelief has been there on the ground ministering in real ways to hurting people in devastated communities.  The agency also helps underserved communities around the world even when there has not been a major recent crisis.  This day we would be giving out 2000 lbs of rice and going to check on a youth hostel, one of about 40 that the SendRelief office in that area helps on a regular basis to provide food and safe lodging.  The hostel we visited housed 36 young students whose families lived in the remote hill country, hours from the city. They were living in the hostels so they could attend government schools to get an education and learn language and skills that are not available in their remote villages. With this education their parents hope they can escape poverty and protect themselves from ending up in the human trafficking industry. The three of us drove about an hour, hearing stories from the director of his missions of rescue and mercy around the world for the last 3 decades. He was a kind, brilliant, God-and-people-loving man with a thick Louisiana accent.  We arrived and found a godly house mother and her staff in a covered outdoor kitchen preparing to feed the 36 kids aged 6-18 after they arrived from school. She offered us some really good tea and smiled and talked excitedly about the kids and staff the whole time. We prayed with her and went to look at the boy’s “dorm,” which was a large one room building with open windows and doors. Each of the boys had a locker with 3 school outfits and one towel (they had just gotten new towels that someone had donated to replace the years old threadbare towels that wouldn’t dry them, just move the water around on their skin until it dried). They all slept on a large wooden platform on their own bed roll. The bathrooms out back had ramshackle doors that were falling apart. I learned that the missionary’s home church in Louisiana would be coming to paint, build some doors, and help improve the living conditions for these boys, who were all just happy to be there. 

After a long day of observing God’s amazing work in the lives of so many people, I couldn’t help but think of how much He loves us all. He sees each of us and loves us and cares for us in the ways we need it most. When we belong to Jesus we are encouraged to do the same thing for others. James tells us, “Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.”(James 1:27 MESSAGE)

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

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!