The Familyhood Church

A Way to Pray - Whisper a Secret

2012-01-17T22:40:00.001-05:00

The perfect way to pray is the way you need to right now. Be it praise or lament, ecstacy or liturgy, the words in your heart are the perfect ones to share with your Lord. There is no perfect way to pray any more than there's a perfect way to talk to your Mom. Still, there are a couple things you can do or remember that can make your life on Earth a little easier.

The first one sounds ridiculous, but give it a shot anyway.

Tell God a secret.

I told you it would sound ridiculous.

God being omniscient and all, it doesn't make a lot of sense to "let Him in on" a secret you've been hiding. But I'm not thinking of a secret you're keeping from God. Tell God something you don't want your boss to know. Tell Him something you don't want your wife, your kids, or your Mom to know. Tell Him something you're glad your pastor doesn't know.

Sometimes we're tempted beyond what we notice, and one day our weakness carries us away. Sometimes we wear down under a heavy burden. Sometimes we're afraid. We all have our limits, and very few of us enjoy advertising them, but they are an important part of who we are. Whispering a secret out loud to God is an important part of letting Him love us fully.

Telling God a secret doesn't make the pain go away, but it opens a dialogue. It turns a subconscious burden into a conscious request we can lay at God's feet, and the Spirit accepts all such invitations. I've been happily shocked at how much richer my conversations are with God after I've intentionally spilled some beans. Once you've told God your secret, you'll find the Spirit enables your spirit to pray with it and pray about it with solid purpose and direction.

Set aside ten minutes. See whether you don't find yourself coming back for more.

Negro Spirituals

2010-08-22T21:40:00.003-04:00

I've spent a week distractedly listening to "Let My People Go: Negro Spirituals." And I thought I'd never listen to Jazz. (That's how iTunes classifies the album.)

Conclusion.

The songs use the word, "I," an awful lot, and that sounds pretty immature. They don't sing much about God. Instead, they sing about themselves. Most of the songs could be mistaken for children's songs, or are even childish. And they appear to be the original fountainhead of dozens of musical conventions about which I've complained over the years. They repeat themselves. They seldom seem to engage the mind, but always the emotions. They scream.

Or ...

What if it's me that's wrong.

These are the songs of people who rose from strength to strength and hope to hope and faith to faith while suffering inhumanities I can describe but not possibly imagine. Slavery in the American South was a mixed bag, with some owners dealing honorably with their property as people and others dealing out unimaginable cruelties. The faith of these Africans stood equally strong under both tests.

What's more, when the long awaited blessing of freedom came to these people, they could hardly rise up and call it blessed. Lincoln ended ended some cruelties but Jim Crow Laws ensured the blessings of liberty were yet denied to them and their posterity. In a time before welfare, a time of deep, true poverty I've only seen in foreign lands, these African-Americans continued to declare and live within the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

If it's me that's wrong. If, by some chance it's the fat and happy product of the richest generation that has something to learn about the kinds of songs that strengthen the spirit to face a world where Satan wears a size 11 boot, then I've got much to learn indeed.

I wonder.

For a Helmet, Hope

2010-07-04T14:22:00.000-04:00

Link to first post in this series.

Friends, I really like to put well-thought-out ideas out here, and I'm afraid I can't really deliver these days. There's too much going on. Way too much. But, this Postmodernism stuff is still burning a hole in my pockets so let me put some quick summary guesses out here.

All attempts to stop Postmodernism's "erosion" of our inspired religion are both doomed and misguided. Christianity is not postmodern, but it's not anti-postmodern either. Postmodernism is an informed way of reacting to the world in which we live. Some people are doing Postmodernism in a very ugly way, but others are doing it with utmost sincerity - just the way we did Modernism and Romanticism in our time.

Postmodernism is an accurate reaction to the horrors of a fallen world when the Information Age forces us all to face those horrors honestly.

The question before the house is how Christians react to hardcore reality. For reasons I hope I've already given, we can no longer hide behind "It'll all be worth it in heaven," or "God is ordering everything for the good." Both those statements are true, but we have to face up to facts. Things aren't good now, and Jesus didn't come selling heaven. Jesus meets people where they are, not where we'd like them to be. We need to know how Jesus meets us now.

Over the past 4000 years, there've been many, many times and many, many prominent verses. Luther gave us, "the just shall live by faith." The fundamentalists brought, "The Word was with God and the Word was God," into new focus. I'd like to suggest the verse for our time is, "Jesus wept."

The urge of every youth movement is to assume no one who came before them was as passionate, caring, concerned, informed, intelligent, spiritual, persuaded, committed, or somehow just didn't get it. I know I made that mistake in spades, but I can't do it again. Now that I'm 46, I need to grab hold of "Jesus wept," but to do so without letting go of any of the other words that have come before. "Jesus wept" informs "The just shall live by faith" and "The Word was God." It doesn't replace them; it defines them.

The just live by faith in a Man Who weeps with them. The Word Who is God includes stanzas of mourning.

Jesus didn't weep when He heard His friend Lazarus was dying, nor after he'd died. He didn't weep when He explained to Martha the theology of death, resurrection, and life. He wept when Mary fell on the ground and asked Him why He'd not come sooner. He wept, just like we do, when the pain touched Him. The pain touched Almighty God in Flesh when the tears of those He loved were wept to Him.

Jesus is touched by those things that touch us.

I look out at all the disasters and pain in the world, in my church, and in my family and I'm crushed. I could as soon save those I love as win three tennis matches all at the same time. I might win or lose any one match if I practice and train, but this life shoots too many balls at us. It's hopeless.

Jesus weeps.

I don't know how to make Jesus weeping sync-up with God ever-blessed. I don't know the theological magic it takes to reconcile the God Who declares He brings disaster with the God Who weeps when the disaster strikes, but Jesus is YHWH in flesh and YHWH wept with Mary.

All of which brings us, finally, to the heart of the matter. I've come to believe Postmodernism is a failure of hope. A Christian Postmodernist can muster the faith to believe in Christ and the love to give his lif to God, but he can't hope being a Christian will make any difference. He reads God's promises and hears God declare them yeah and amen, but they don't seem to work in real life. A Christian's life looks an awful lot like a non-Christian's life, minus the sleeping in on Sunday.

Christianity makes sense when Jesus raises Lazarus, but I want Him to raise every Lazarus and He doesn't. He raised one man to make one point at one time. He raised Lazarus to show us Whom He was, but Lazarus died again a few years later and Jesus didn't raise Him again. There are Lazarus's all over this place whom Jesus doesn't raise, and that makes no sense. I'm so happy with Jesus I could bust, but then I'm a Modernist with a deep well of irrational hope from which to draw. What do I tell my children? Where's the hope? What's the hope?

(For this, I have to thank my wife. I flat didn't see where to go next, but she found it.)

Heb 5:7 While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could deliver him out of death. And God heard his prayers because of his reverence for God.

Jesus wept again before He died. He wept strongly and prayed ... hard ... for fear of personal suffering. Jesus even understood fully why He would suffer. It didn't help. Knowing "why" didn't end the tears. Jesus even had the assurance God heard His prayers. He had every benefit we imagine might make our suffering tolerable, and He wept all the same. He died all the same. And so must we.

I would like to hear whether any Postmodernists can find some hope there. Jesus wept for us and He wept for Himself, but the evil still came. He prayed and God answered by delivering Him over to His enemies, but the story didn't end there. A couple days later God delivered Jesus. He delivered Him from death, from shame, from tears. Jesus is not just the Firstborn from the dead, but Firstborn from tears. Jesus wept, but weeps no more, and He will deliver us from our tears. Jesus earned the power to dry our eyes.

Jesus' death has not yet removed evil from this world, but He told us it wouldn't for a while. We weep when pain comes to those we love and we weep when pain comes to us and we pass through the valley, just like our Lord did.

We answer pain with hope, hope founded on the victory of our Forerunner, Jesus the Annointed. His victory was not over pain but through it, and ours will be too. He promised it would be that way, and we need to grab hold of His example.

To do that, I might recommend we grab hold of an example of Americans who've done this before, beautifully and brilliantly. America's slaves learned to hurt and hope through pain, injustice, grief, and unanswered prayers. They composed songs that called out every pain honestly to the Lord and waited on Him for a deliverance they could only expect after death. I suspect the best answer to Postmodernism is going to sound a lot like a negro spiritual.

On this July 4th we'll celebrate our freedom, but maybe we really need to celebrate the hope of some who lived an American Nightmare.

Hope: Where We All Fail

2010-06-20T14:13:00.004-04:00

(Link to first post in this series)

I keep struggling to understand the mystery of Postmodernism. My kids see the world in a radically different way than do I. Radically. Where I keep trying to perceive a coherent tapestry in the confusing threads of pain and joy entangling me, my kids observe, "We're screwed." They think in biological, gritty terms of despair like that, when I never could. I keep seeing hope and they keep seeing reality. It's disconcerting.

I think I've found a clue, though, where we're both wrong.

I saw it first in my younger friends. Paul said God left us with Faith, Hope, and Love. My friends are capable of believing unbelievable things and you can count on them for love. They just can't hope. They can hope for little things; jobs, friends, families. Ask them, though, whether God's goodness can redeem and they'll kind of freeze. Whether they parrot or reject the party line, it seems the comfort of real hope will elude them.

Postmodernism is cobbled together from a thousand little bricks of despair.

Modernists, aka the good guys, look nothing like that. Modernists rest unfailingly in richest hope. Modernists know God is going to make sure everthing works out for the good. Modernists know we're learning more about everything every day, and we're growing stronger, smarter, spirity-er.

Modernists, I'm coming to see, fail by resting on unfounded hope.

We really looked at the Western World's steady progress from benighted medievalism to rationalism to the capstones of democracy and freedom, and ascribe that progress to divine intervention. God was on our side. We're rich and brilliant, aren't we? God must be blessing us. We hooked our faith to the wagon of progress and urged the horses to give it all they had.

When the West ascended to lofty heights we saw the hand of God. We even called it "Manifest Destiny." It was obvious to anyone with eyes in their head that God was going to get us to wherever we needed to be.

Us Modernists have kids, though, who don't think so much of the emperor's new clothes. All that hope in which us Modernists invested smells to them like so many fish tales. We all know what happened to our economy when the Housing Bubble burst, but Modernism inflated a Hope Bubble that couldn't last. Our hope was leveraged out of proportion both to the reality of God's promises and to the realities we live with on the ground.

The answer to both Modernism's hyper-inflation of hope and Postmodernism's recessionary deflation of hope is a correct valuation of what God has promised and what He's delivered. The false overpromises of Modernism won't work any more, but the hopeless fears of Postmodernism won't work either. There's a valid comfort in God's promises rightly valued, and we need that comfort to survive. Even after the bubble a house is really worth the land its on, the materials of which it's constructed, and the neighborhood into which it's joined. The only value the housing collapse stole is the speculative worth it might have had upon resale.

Even so, the Christian life has measurable worth. The relationship it gives to God and people, the growth we experience in the Spirit, and the strength the unified love of His people embodies are true and lasting riches. The false promises of a recipe to make America great, end divorce, and free the subjected people of the world are gone, but the value of knowing God hasn't shaken at all.

Jesus eased the lives of many for the three years of His ministry, but not of all. Health and wealth did not radiate from Jesus in 30 AD into all the corners of Africa, South America, and Asia. He touched the Jewish lives He touched and was content to be limited in that way.

The church today has the same powers and limitations. We can make a difference in our community, and if we do we'll have done what our King could do.

I'll be back to look at this from another perspective.

All Odd Postmodernists are Primed

2010-06-12T23:00:00.004-04:00

(First post in series)

It's an old joke, really, but I'm going to make a point from it anyway. Sorry.

How a mathematician, physicist and an engineer prove that all odd numbers, (greater than 2), are prime.

Mathematician: "Well, 3 is prime, 5 is prime and 7 is prime so, by induction all odds are prime."

Physicist: "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 isn't prime, (bad data point), 11 is prime, and so is 13, so all odds are prime."

Engineer: "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime 13 is prime, so all odds are prime."

I think maybe it's a good thing aspiring theologians aren't told by their professors that God said all odd numbers are prime and then asked to prove it. I suspect their proofs might look a little bit like this:

Calvinist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is ... Who art thou that repliest against God!

Arminian: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, Christ's atonement sufficed for 9, but 9 didn't heed the call of prevenient math.

Pentacostal: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, Oh! Hallelujah oh Lord! We praise you for the mystery of 9. Your ways are glorious and the sight of your glory ... la! la! holelulalalaleboo!

Fundamentalist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 was good enough for Paul, and it's good enough for you! Repent sinner, or face the judgment with factors for 9 that the Bible, the HOLY Bible, testifies against!

Ecumenicist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not a doctrine over which to divide. Sure, some say it has factors, but division over oddness brings tears to the heart of God. Where some would divide we must add, and even multiply! Instead of factoring 9, let it be a factor. ... Ummm. We don't know what to do with 81, but 81's clearly a non-essential.

Postmodernist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, ... Ummm. 9's not prime. Ummm. Neither are 15, 21, 25, 27 .... Hey! Who made up all this garbage!?!

Calvinist, Arminian, Pentacostal, Fundamentalist, and Ecumenicist in concert: Off with their heads!!!

I'm beginning to really feel the plight of the Postmodernist. When the Modernists (and all denominations and non-denominations over 40 years old are modernist) answered the questions of the atheists, higher critics, and apostates of 50 years ago, their answers were merely human. They had the divine revelation in front of them, but they were humans working to parse it out. Their answers had gaps.

Then came the information explosion.

My children heard about God's sovereignty from me. Then they heard about the burning of Falun Gong members in China, the genocide in Rwanda (perpetrated by Christians on Christians), the plight of Muslims in Palestine, the deaths of aborted babies by the millions, the fall of Christian leaders, the weirdness of the bible and how no one can agree on what it should say much less what any of it means, the fact that history is written by the winners, and that everyone who holds power is corrupt.

They are bombarded with information every day that says a sovereign God is either a figment of some oldster's imagination or He's pathetic.

To which Modernists reply, "God has a wonderful plan for your life. You are separated from Him by your sin...."

God has been mocked before. He's been rejected before. He's been forgotten, disproven, and declared dead. Today, He's being called out on His record. The Internet has catapulted "The Problem of Evil" (Theodicy) straight at the heavens and not bothered to wait for an answer. Every evil in the world, and every failing of Christianity in the face of those evils, is published to anyone who cares to subscribe.

Faith seems almost impossible with a high pressure pipeline spewing (honest) bad news into each of our minds, but the church's answers seem stuck in the 1950's. So many churches just keep asserting 9 is prime. God is sovereign. This world is the best of all possible worlds under the loving care of a loving God. God has a wonderful plan for your life.

I can hardly blame my children for rejecting my apparent naivette.

Time has expired for the evening, but the skepticism of Postmodernism seems very honest to me. I don't blame them for digging their heels in and wondering where the real answers are hiding.

Accepting The Challenge of Jesus

2010-06-05T07:27:00.002-04:00

NT Wright, in The Challenge of Jesus, continues to turn my thinking about real life inside out. And he does it in the best way, by splattering my thinking about Jesus.

The first six chapters of the book are a studied attempt to show wrest Jesus from the shaky throne He holds in our minds. Wright doesn't capitalize "He" when using pronouns to reference our Lord, and that's true of the whole book. Wright de-capitalizes Jesus, and unearths an uncomfortably alien Man in the process. Jesus is not a Western man, and we all know that. Many authors fill in Jewish details about Jesus. Wright goes further. Jesus is also not a universal man . Jesus is wholly Jewish. He wouldn't have connected with Postmodern American folk any better than Peter or Paul.

Six chapters of unwrapping what it means to this American to follow a Man (for the record, it will be a while before I quit capitalizing pronouns referencing the divine Man) with limitations more than covers the price of admission for this book. Wright tied my mind in knots as I slowly unwrapped the implications of the kingdom of heaven being Jewish, the sacraments of Christianity being substantive, the crucifixion in light of zealot history, and so much more. Each layer Wright peeled away cleared my mind, and somehow buried all my mental housekeeping. The book left me with years of rebuilding to do.

I don't want to talk about those six chapters. I need to talk about them, but time doesn't permit me to do everything I need to do. I want to think out loud about the last two chapters.

Wright closes this book with a good old-fashioned challenge.

Wright takes a long, hard look at today's mental landscape and acknowledges the valuable contribution of Postmodernism to humanity. The words "valuable" and "postmodern" have never cohabitated in a single sentence of mine before. I'm so Modernist I still believe stories should have happy endings and villians should be punished. Wright looks at Postmodernism and finds the value in their rejection of all things certain. He finds accuracy in their depiction of the fall, in their assessment of its reach, in their ultimate hopelessness facing the world that really is.

Frankly, I'm as unhinged by the frank revelation of the foundational hopelessness of my children and their peers as I am by Wright's reconstruction of Jesus. To say I'm Modernist is to say I still hope "it can all be fixed." I foundationally assume anything wrong can be put to rights and we're all together in trying to find the best way to do it. My children know better. They know we're all screwed, and no one else really even gets anyone else's pain, much less is working together to fix everything. (I wanted to use another word than "screwed" back there, but there's no synonym. It means bad things were done to us that left us crippled, but it doesn't quite mean we're doomed. And crippled is an antiseptic word, where my children mean a very, very septic act has been done to everyone.)

Wright says Postmodernists have forsaken all metanarrative, and after I unwrap for myself what that means, I see he's right. My children don't believe there's a big puppetmaster in the sky making sure it all turns out for the best, but I do. My parents did and all my peers still do. Christian or not, us Modernists believe there's a happy ending out there waiting for us to get to it. My children don't believe. They know. They know divorce happens to everyone and "winning" the Cold War births a War on Terror, and if we win that war we'll need to kill someone else until someone finally kills us. My children know that if there's a puppetmaster out there, he's a .... Well, I won't use the words they'd use, but they don't like him very much.

Wright doesn't challenge these Postmodernists. He challenges me. He tells me to embrace their accurate understanding of the fall. I weep as I type this, because I don't want to live in their world. I don't wish them to have to live in their world, but I certainly don't want to join them there. I don't want to release the metanarratives that've comforted me through these two generations, and certainly not so I can wrap their cold, accurate, crushing view of reality around my terrified heart each night as I go to sleep.

Wright's right. I must.

Before I'm done thinking out loud, I hope to have thought through one of his challenges. Wright applies his sweaty Jesus to the Postmodern mindframe, and it works. The Modernist Jesus Who's simultaneously puppet, master, and bliss-filled guru spoke to us who never really grappled with the horrors of real life. It takes the real Jesus to wrestle real life to the ground and take victory over it (a Modernist reinterpretation of Postmodernism if ever there were one.) The money paragraph for me is where Wright directly applies his sweaty Jesus to guys like me who program computers for a living.

I intend, over the next few posts, to work my way through to a real way of programming within the context of the real kingdom of the real God. I have no idea where this is going, but it sounds like a helpful metanarrative. :-)

The Rooster Crowed

2010-06-04T12:47:00.003-04:00

At that moment the Lord turned and looked at Peter.

Up until that moment, Peter was riding high. He was tracking with his Lord. He was an undercover agent gathering critical intelligence about the events of his Master's arrest and torment. He was lying low and staying close.

He was a hero.

And then the rooster crowed and the bloodied Man Whom Peter loved turned and looked at him.

He'd denied being with the Lord to a servant girl, a servant of the high priest, and some bystanders. Nobodies. Peter didn't look the high priest in the eye and deny Jesus was the Christ. He cunningly kept his cover to servants and bystanders.

Jesus said we'd be judged by every little word said in passing, and here we see it. Jesus valued Peter's response to that servant girl. Denying Jesus to a servant girl was one with denying Him before Caesar. And He didn't brook spying as an excuse. Astounding.

Lord have mercy.

Picture Mosaic

2010-05-28T00:14:00.003-04:00

You've probably all seen things like this picture mosaic of Jesus.

In itself, it's really a pretty cool picture of the church. All of us, assembled carefully, make a bird's-eye picture of Jesus on Earth. I post this, though, because it occurs to me the picture only works because some of the shots that make it up are pretty dark. It's impossible to bear the image of God on Earth without bearing the unbearable some portion of the time. He did.

The Sacred Perspective

2010-03-07T08:03:00.008-05:00

Last night Dana and I watched the 2007 clip of Tom Cruise browbeating Matt Lauer on the evils of antidepressants. Dana was blown away by the odd way Cruise sounded. She couldn't put her finger on it, but she really didn't think he sounded right.

Mr. Cruise was conned.

He bought into a very simple con job. He's a good guy (barring a normal dose of sin and a superstar level of narcissism) who really wants to make the world a better place. He cares deeply about things, and L Ron Hubbard's folk told him a shortcut to helping the whole world. On the subject of antidepressants, for example, they told him something like, "You could dedicate a lifetime of study to pharmaceuticals, or you can study what we've already learned about them. You can sift through hundreds of experts' opinions, and spend years trying to figure out which of these experts has sold out to big pharma, and eventually you'll work your way down to the results we've already compiled. Or you can study our results and start helping the world TODAY."

It's a shortcut, and it's an appealling one.

I've been there and done that.

Gene Edwards once told me I was the foremost expert in the world on church history. I'd very much imagine he's since rescinded that opinion (forcefully) but he appeared to say it in complete sincerity. And when he said it, I believed it might be true.

They say you can't sucker an honest man. They're right. Gene offered me a too-good-to-be-true deal, and I bought into it because of my inner dishonesty. He'd written a handful of books and gave us personal talks touting his incredible insights into a grabbag of subjects: family, church, Trinity, missions, child-rearing, psychology, emotional development. One of his core subjects was church history. I could either study hundreds of books written by hundreds of authors on the subject of church history and do the hard work of weeding out all their conflicting errors, or (for the amazing low price of a few of Gene's books!) I could have the world's most complete view of church history.

I placed my confidence in Gene the same way any mark hands his savings over to a huckster. I went all-in, as they say in poker, with a pair of deuces. (For non-poker readers, I gambled everything I owned on the weakest possible pair.)

One day, I took all my cheap brilliance to an Internet News Group dedicated to church history, and floated a couple leading questions their way. I remember asking what they thought the literacy rate was in first century Europe. Those historians answered me in ways I'd never imagined. I learned more about literacy from that one question than I'd learned in all my studies of Gene's work. Those men and women knew their history deeply and widely and verifiably. Gene's pitch was rich in promises and conclusions, but devoid of peer-reviewed data. I walked away from that news group knowing I'd been rolled, and the diploma Gene had spoken to me wasn't worth the air it had briefly disturbed. It was a sick, unsettling feeling, but I owned my loss and started the process of reevaluating my "investment."

What happened to me, and what I'm sure happened to Mr. Cruise, is that instead of learning a single subject from many perspectives, I learned every subject from Gene's sacred perspective. Instead of the humility that comes with learning to respect experts in their fields, I thought I could quickly rise above all the experts in every field because I had the magic feather of Gene's divine insight.

Beware the expert with divine insight into everything, and run in terror from the man who needs your trust. When a man needs your confidence, look closely to what he's offering. All too often that free lunch costs your life savings.

The Soloist

2010-02-07T22:45:00.002-05:00

For reasons that fascinate me but don't belong here, I'm not going to give a full review of The Soloist. You will enjoy this movie as much as you can relate to its subject, homelessness. If you have a schizophrenic homeless person in your life, this movie will resonate deeply with you. If you care about the homeless at all, it will touch you. It is based on a true story, and you feel the reality of it the whole way through.

The moral of the movie is simple. The homeless don't need to be fixed nearly so badly as each homeless person needs to be known as a person, and every person needs a friend. It's a great moral.

Here's the rub of the movie. You can't always fix the things that make a man choose homelessness. Sure, sometimes you can do things that make room for a miracle, but when a person has chosen a life outside of the culture there's always some root cause. We like to think they just misunderstood something or had a run of bad luck, but sometimes it's nothing like that. Sometimes it's nothing anyone can explain, fix, or prevent. The co-protagonists of this movie tried everything to improve this man's life and got nowhere the hard way.

The movie asks a tough question (and answers it to its own satisfaction) that I think Christians need to answer.

Can you be a friend to a broken man, apart from needing to save him?

Where are all the good pencil sharpeners?

2010-02-06T10:08:00.002-05:00

Just whining.

I've not had a good pencil sharpening experience in years, and good pencil sharpeners used to be everywhere. Is everyone completely sold out to "engineering" and "efficiency?"

I wonder where I've sold out.

Nahum

2010-02-04T23:39:00.000-05:00

I don't read Nahum very often. I don't know anyone who does. There's that one little line, "Behold on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news," but Isaiah said it first and that little bit more beautifully.

And come on, what's Nahum really got to say, anyway. Hey! Nineveh! God used you to scourge Israel, but you shouldn't have taken such pleasure in the job. Now you're going to pay worse than you made Israel pay.

It's not the world's most inspirational message. So, why's it there? Why would I say it's there in light of my new thoughts about scripture? Care to take a guess?

It's only 3 chapters, so why don't you give it a little look?

Here're some thoughts to entertain as you read it.

The Ninevites are the children of the folk who heard Jonah and repented.

The Lord opens this book by describing Himself, and never quits. He's defining Himself to His enemies.

In between describing Himself and the things He will do to His enemies, He describes some pretty clear things He'll do for His own people.

He tells them how to wait for Him.

And He makes a great point of making sure Nineveh understands that it's for violence everywhere they are judged.

This is Jesus speaking. There is no difference between the voice of Yahweh here and the voice of Jesus in 2nd Thessalonians or the Revelation.

And speaking of the Revelation, what we see Jesus claim in Nahum is more than passingly similar to what He claims is coming at the end of time.

So paint the picture in your mind. Think of it as a movie, and Nahum happens at about the 1/3 point. In an old time sheriff movie, you might see John Wayne deal with some petty criminal early on. That's significant. You know when the climax of the story arrives the standard he's set. You know that sheriff. You know whether he's kind or cruel, brutal or lax, consistent or creative.

As you read Nahum's pre-history, don't expect to read a roadmap of what God will do. Expect to meet God dressed for vengance and coming to relieve His people of their punishment. Not everything I read in this book sits well with me, but it's all true. It's Who He IS.

A Perfect Circle

2010-01-24T00:05:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, I tried really hard to draw circles. I imagined a circle was a line that bent around smoothly until it met back up with itself. I could draw a perfect circle if I could just bend the line around at exactly the same rate until the end met back up with the beginning. I got pretty good at it even.

And then I took geometry. Did you know a circle is the collection of all points the same distance from a center? That's a completely different way of looking at this shape. A circle is no longer a bendy line over which I have to sweat to make sure it bends just right. Give me a compass setting and as long as I know where the center is, I can fill in little bits of the circle anywhere I want to. They'll always meet up. Understanding "center" makes circles very easy.

It can be hard to tell the difference between freehand and compass-drawn circles, though. They're both just round lines.

Seeing the bible as a novel rather than a theology feels the same. My new conclusions look the same as the old ones. I'm relieved to feel a little surer my theology is round, but I doubt I'm really going to believe much differently. The joy comes when I feel a passage's impact before I categorize it, when I can tell where it fits in the narrative before I think about which theological team might claim it as a proof-text.

Take this earth-shattering promise from Isaiah:

Isa 54:8-10
With a little wrath I hid My face from you for a moment; But with everlasting kindness I will have mercy on you," Says the LORD, your Redeemer. For this [is] like the waters of Noah to Me; For as I have sworn That the waters of Noah would no longer cover the earth, So have I sworn That I would not be angry with you, nor rebuke you. For the mountains shall depart And the hills be removed, But My kindness shall not depart from you, Nor shall My covenant of peace be removed," Says the LORD, who has mercy on you.

This is staggering.

Matthew Henry responds to it like this:

He will not be so angry with them as to cast them off and break his covenant with them (Ps. 89:34), nor rebuke them as he has rebuked the heathen, to destroy them, and put out their name for ever and ever, Ps. 9:5.

Jamison, Fausset, and Brown have this to say:

I am about to do the same in this instance as in Noah's flood. As I swore then that it should not return ( Gen 8:21 9:11 ), and I kept that promise, so I swear now to My people, and will perform My promise, that there shall be no return of the deluge of My wrath upon them. LOWTH, on insufficient authority, reads (the same will I do now as), "in the days of Noah."

Those statements don't sound staggering to me, and that's a problem. They sound correct, but this is a staggering moment in scripture. If you look at this as just another promise about God restraining His wrath or as a prophecy of the end times or as a commentary on God's free will trumping man's free will, it ends up sounding like the 4th line of a 12 line geometry proof. It might be critical, but it sure ain't compelling.

If I were to provide Cliff Notes for this passage, to comment on it as a part of the ongoing story of God's self-unveiling, it'd sound more like this:

What just happened!?

We've known this God for a couple thousand years now, and suddenly He changes all the rules? Yahweh made Eden perfect, then cast out the man who ruined it. He destroyed every living thing when the men He'd cast out of Eden corrupted the rest of His Earth. He flooded it all out. Gone. He only narrowly decided to gamble on His creation one more time and spared Noah. He did vow He'd see this second chance through to the end, but not before He'd shown us His driving obsession with perfection.

We saw it again when He brought His people out of Egypt, then killed all but Joshua, Caleb and their families in the desert. And again when He established a nation, then brought the Assyrians to sweep most of them away. And according to Isaiah, the Babylonians were coming to sweep the rest away soon. Yahweh is not afraid to be angry. He's not afraid to sweep everything away and start over fresh. He's unafraid to fail, but utterly incapable of settling for second best.

And with this one promise He closed the door on Himself.

In this promise He did nothing less than monkey-trap Himself. He promised to hold on to Israel, without ever letting go and without any conditions. All His previous promises had conditions. We spent hundreds of pages learning this about Him. He's a cagey God Who promises the moon to those who meet His conditions, but Who curses the man who tramples on His promises just as enthusiastically.

What's He got up His sleeve?

Who is this Yahweh that He can dare us to disbelieve Him this way?

I want to ask the perfect question of this verse, but I can't, and I hope you won't expect it of me. But there's something at the edge of my mind. What is He planning? Is He excited? Does He feel anything like that rush of adrenaline I feel when I double-down on a bet and put my house up as collateral? Is He showing something like the smug glee of a magician flamboyantly reaching down into his hat when he knows the rabbit's up his sleeve the whole time? Or do we see the confidence of a skilled craftsman turning a lump of gold into a pomegranate?

But who cares if I don't know the perfect question. I'm in awe. God reveals Himself in a new light here.

There are so many layers of mystery in this passage. So far I've only looked at the surface! Remember that it was Jesus Who led Israel out of Egypt, and Yahweh Who walked on Earth. God never changes, only our understanding of Him. There's only one God yesterday, today and forever. The great and mysterious revelation of Isaiah 54 is consistent with Yahweh's wrath at Israel all those generations before and consistent with the mercy of God in Christ. Paul's God of propitiation, sanctification, and manifestation is unchanged from Job's God of fearful trials and burning correction.

No matter what I see in God at any point in scripture, it's there in Him at every point of scripture. That He would leave so many generations to live and die with so little insight into His sacrificial mercy is yet another powerful insight into His nature. He is comfortable with Who He IS, even when we misunderstand Him. He feels no need to explain Himself to anyone. If Jonah mistakes Him for some local god, only powerful in the region of Canaan, and seeks to flee to Tarshish, Yahweh does not lecture him on the true scope of His power. He simply tells Jonah what he needs to know and do, and places him back on the path to Nineveh.

Does the magnificence of God's self-confidence not strike you? Does it not impact you that He promised Israel never to rebuke them again? And does it not floor you that He never made that promise before?!

Do you want to dilute that feeling, or dry it up like a tangerine baked in the desert? Try to solve the mysteries of the millenial kingdom with this verse. Or look for some root principle of sovereign grace that's been eluding you. Talk about all the things God does and will do, instead of Who He IS. The beauty of even the best well-formed proof cannot compare to majesty of God Himself pulling back the curtain and letting us get to know Him.

As I've read through the Old Testament, my ears have been slowing down. The rhythm of my reading is changing. I was raised on critical half-verse proof-texts, but I'm finding the value of whole chapters and books. God gave us a Bible rich with verses that prove nothing, and I've always wondered why. Why bog us down with so much trivia?

I'm starting to believe He's given us all those long passages for the same reason parents talk in front of their babies so much. A lot of it's over our heads, but we hang on His every word. We get to know our Father in heaven by listening to Levitius and Chronicles and Zechariah. We absorb His words and see generations of His acts, and are made ready to talk to Him. I've done my time indexing the exciting verses and ignoring the "unimportant" ones, and maybe now I'm done with it. We'll see.

And when I'm done drawing Isaiah 54 my way, what I have before me is a circle. It looks round to me, but I just don't really know. Does it look round to anyone else? I don't know. I don't think God cares how round it is any more than I cared if my babies said, "Dada," all wrong, but I'd like to be drawing my circle from a true center.

Right now, I am revelling in looking at the Bible in this new way. I feel like a kid rereading books 1-6 of the Harry Potter series for the 4th time and waiting anxiously for that 7th book. There's so much we know know about Yahweh that Abraham only felt. There was so much revealed in Christ that David only suspect due to his own calling and character. It's amazing to think about David succeeding at things because God knew one day He'd succeed at those things Himself. God gave David's victories to foreshadow His own, to unveil Himself.

And it's amazing to know there's yet more to be revealed. As much as was revealed in Jesus' first coming, there's a tome about to be written. The plot of God's novel only seems simple if you ignore the complications of His long-awaited return, Israel's restoration, the holiness of His Name before His enemies, the full realization of His kingdom, judgement and so many other themes.

I'm still unsure how many ways there are to profit by the Bible, but I'm loving this new way.

The Sound of One Bible

2010-01-22T18:47:00.002-05:00

What is the sound of reading the bible as a novel instead of as a complex key to the universe?

Is it not the sound of a wall on which a thousand heads have quit banging?

HT: Larry Wall

Deity Development

2010-01-18T12:26:00.009-05:00

Peter Bodo doing an analysis of Andre Agassi's autobiography said,

This is an extraordinary book on a number of levels, starting with the fact that it reads like fiction. In a good novel, the characters reveal themselves; what you need to know about them is conveyed in their actions and words, without a lot of explanation by the author. Andre's book takes the same tack.

All sorts of things fell into place when I read that quote.

Novels are about getting into the skin of the protagonist, without necessarily even knowing it happened. The protagonist makes a decision, and you know why without being told. You smell the things she smells or do the things he does, and you know exactly what you were feeling while you were there. You don't have to be told about yourself and you don't have to be told what the protagonist is thinking.

I wonder if maybe God hasn't written a textbook, a history, or a theology. Yahweh's given us a novel. And He's the Protagonist!

The many things this means are just beginning to open up to me. Do you want an example? The Bible cannot be Googled. Take Hamlet for example. You can google up great quotes from Hamlet and you can pull up Cliff Notes on it, but you can only experience Hamlet by riding the ride. You've got to strap yourself in and slowly go mad with unrequited jealousy to "get" Hamlet. Google might tell you what you'll feel, but you'll never feel it on Google.

My favorite Bible search engine accidentally insulates me from the Bible!

And theology? It takes on the same role as any other form of critique. It can elevate my opinion of the story, but not my experience of it. I can only know God by experiencing Him.

And that lines up well with my experience of life with this God. There've been no seatbelts on my life, no guardrails at the cliffs, and no way to take His foot off my gas pedal. I don't know which of us has been crazier at some points. I only know He's kept all the promises He made and broken every one my Sunday School teacher made for Him.

This life has been hard.

And so has His book.

I've known the Bible since I was a tiny bugger. There are a lot of men and women who know it a far sight better than me, but I've known it! Those Sunday School teachers told me it was a roadmap that would take me safely to heaven. They told me it'd keep me out of the ditches. Upside down at the bottom of some cliff, though, I couldn't help but wonder from which ditch I'd been saved, and whether I mightn't have been better off with Google Maps.

But what if the Bible really is a novel, and not a roadmap to all places theological and moral? If that were true, then I'd need to ride it more than study it. If it were a novel, then I'd have a chance to enter into what it is for God to be God. I'd know Him, and maybe even His Son Whom He sent.

At the beginning of the novel, I'd form initial impressions of God. Then some twists would come, and I'd learn more from how He reacted. I'd learn from both His tone of voice and His actions. Then there'd be some surprises and outright shocks. Eventually, I'd decide how to relate to this God. I'd enter into His story, or I'd reject it. I'd be feeling what He feels, or I'd be bored.

To call this increasing flavor for God, "character development," seems a little profane, but that's what it is. God is slowly unrolling His character to us in scripture. I'm going to call the process, "Divinity Development." From before the first word of creation until after the last prophecy is fulfilled, Yahweh IS but our sight of Him changes with every word.

I'll try to give a flavor of the way the Bible reads in my next post.

What you do with good ol' boys like me?

2010-01-09T11:43:00.005-05:00

I've shared this before, but I had new thoughts about it today:
...but I was smart
and I could choose
learn to talk like the man on the 6 o'clock news
When I was 18 I hit the road
but it really dudn't matta how fa' I go'd ...

The singer crawled his way out of his backwoods heritage, and made something of himself - only to find his changes didn't change him a bit. He wanted to be something, something special, something worthy of respect. In the end he says ...

I can still hear the soft Southern wind in the live oak trees
and those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me, Hank and Tennessee
I guess we're all gonna be what we're gonna be
But whadya do with good ol' boys like me?

I've resonated with that song all my life. I grew up hick and always will be. I rose to soldiering and then to mechanicing and then to white collar success as a programmer, and I did it in a lot the same way. I listened and watched and Googled my way to grasping things that were above me.

I tried to do the same thing with God.

I figured out how to talk like the man in the pulpit and on the radio and in the books and on the blogs. I can define the Trinity just like Matthew McMahon and actually understand what I'm saying. It feels almost like being someone.

But I still hear the soft wind of real life. I'm not really that man. I'm me. And I wonder what God does with merely human men like me.

I wonder if maybe God didn't wire me never to understand the Trinity. I wonder if maybe perichoresis is *supposed* to be beyond me. But I think being me is maybe within my grasp. I'm supposed to be transformed, but transformed into simple old me with Christ and without sin. I'm not a hero. God is the Hero.

Life may be as simple as loving the people I love, richly.

I vaguely see an outline of a new life in which the old man of my theology is dead. I've been hungry for him to die for a long, long time, but I think maybe I'm beginning to see scriptural evidence God doesn't care much for that man to live either. And I need scriptural reassurance to make such a big change.

It's all well and good for people to applaud populist rants like this one, but I need good theoretical underpinning for releasing my theoretical underpinnings. Go ahead and laugh, but it's the truth. I need to feel assured solid theology says solid theology is unnecessary. And I need to check three time to make sure I haven't checked three times to see whether I turned off the iron, too. The only way I know to get over OCD is exercise constant vigilance. :-)

I may blog about this from time to time. If I do, I think I'll call it Divinity Development.

God IS

2010-01-09T11:21:00.002-05:00

Codependency is tremendously misunderstood. It's thought of as enabling addiction, but that's only codependency's shirttail. If you dig a little deeper, you find something much more complex and harder to nail down.

Codependency is understanding yourself through the eyes of another. In the classic case, it's a wife measuring her worth through her husband's eyes. When he sees her rescuing him from his drunken blunders he sees her as an angel, and on the strength of his worship she can continue with him for years. Of course, when he sees her as a conniving shrew, she shrivels and dies.

Codependency festers in hundreds of avant-garde hidey-holes, too. It's the man who whithers when his boss misunderstands one of his decisions. It's the child who crumples when she gets a B in advanced calc. It's the alcoholic who swells with hope when his wife reminds him how she still sees him sometimes.

Codependency is the engine of failure. There's no success in codependency because we can't control how other people see us. When they see us better than we are, we're set up for the failure pride brings. When they see us worse than we are, we're bled dry of the hope we need to take the hard steps each day demands.

It amazed me to realize God IS.

God's knowledge of Himself is accurate and complete. If I despair and vent my exasperation on Him, He realizes He is faithful. If I "feel lucky" and swell with assurance He's going to work some miracle for me, He knows He's the God He is, not the One I wish He were.

There's a quiet manipulation we all work on each other. We praise and correct each other to shape the way we're treated. God is not shaped by our praises and corrections. God IS. Amazingly, neither does God manipulate us. He very directly tells us Who He is, and whom He is willing to make us. He tells us what we can do for ourselves and what we can do for Him.

God IS, and that makes relating to Him the simplest thing we'll ever do ... once we figure out how to relate to such confidence.

Red Letter Old Testament

2009-12-06T23:12:00.000-05:00

If they made a red-letter version of the Old Testament, the book would glow in the dark. God speaks constantly throughout the entire Old Testament, and in a variety of moods. That's been very special to me.

Each month some new aspect of Yahweh unwraps itself before my eyes. Really seeing that Yahweh is Jesus, that He kept every promise He ever made, that His attention was wholly and fixedly and powerfully on His people, that He bled with them long before He ever came to Earth. It's been an amazing journey.

This month's amazement is how very much Jesus revealed of Himself by His words before He ever revealed Himself in flesh.

Frankly, the gospel authors were stingy compared to their Old Testament examples. Mark actually went to the bother of reporting that Jesus was preaching the Word of God, without recording a tittle of what He might have said. Can you imagine having the chance to hear Jesus directly expounding His very own Words?! Mark gives Jesus' sermon a half sentence.

God pours out His heart in every book. He dies a little every time He tells Moses what (H)his people are going to do after they enter Canaan. He soars with love when He describes how He attends their every move. He describes just how each detail of their fellowship should be prepared. He sounds just like a bride's careful mother as she dispassionately enumerates every decoration of her daughter's wedding chapel and reception hall. His meticulous intensity over the dullest detail is fueled by fiery passion, not myopia. He wants everything to be perfect beause of His ardor.

Jesus frankly gave us a lot more words before His birth than after. And in that ocean of words, His character is revealed. The New Testament cannot replace the Old's unveiling of Yahweh's passions. The thought occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, if all His words were red, people could warm up to them just a little bit more.

I'm just a few more months away from Matthew, and I expect to be astounded again. Hebrews tells us Jesus is God's best and final Word to the world. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing Jesus in a wholly new light now that I've heard Him cry His heart out for 1,000 pages.

Meme 2: The Bible in Another 15 Words

2009-12-03T23:52:00.002-05:00

Our enemies filled the land
Joshua conquered with Israel
Gideon took 300
Jonathon's shieldbearer
Jesus

Meme: The Bible in 15 words

2009-12-03T12:09:00.003-05:00

Trust
Or die
Righteousness can save
But won't save you
Life is in Jesus - Trust

(Meme explained at Clayboy
Hat tip to Lingamish)

The Smallest Grain

2009-11-04T22:33:00.002-05:00

You know, get out of the blogging habit for more than a week or two, and BOOM. It's just gone. :-)

Anyway, I recently spent some time in the book of Amos, and was astounded. With wedding planning and all, I don't have time to tell all that inspired me, but I'd like to focus on one amazing contradiction.

God, Yahweh, the very personal God of all the world and of Israel in particular, is finished with Israel. He spends the first chapter and a half explaining He'll repay everyone to whom justice is owed, but then 7 chapters explaining exactly what Israel (as opposed to Judah - Israel is the "10 tribes" and went into captivity 120 years before Judah, never to return) has done to deserve His wrath, and exactly what His wrath will entail.

In chapter 3 He explains that if He's once roused Himself, everyone who hears Him should know they are doomed. In chapter 5 He details their adulteries. In chapter 7 He allows Amos to reduce the pain they'll feel in their doom. But then, in the terrifying final chapter, He declares how He'll hunt down every member of Israel even to hell itself and slay them.

In the books of history, I read God's purpose and dependability. In Amos I see His wild eyes and His hair whipping with the passion of His declarations. God is furious, but coldly and calculatingly furious. His passion floods the banks of His patience. I've always heard the phrase, "wild-eyed prophet." That phrase sells God short. Those prophets were wild-eyed in a vain attempt to communicate the terror they'd faced, and they told the story because they had no choice. When one hears the fury of the living God, one doesn't go home, light a candle and center one's self.

After 8 1/2 chapters of fury, God says this:

Amos 9:8-10 "Behold, the eyes of the Lord GOD [are] on the sinful kingdom, And I will destroy it from the face of the earth; Yet I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob," Says the LORD. "For surely I will command, And will sift the house of Israel among all nations, As [grain] is sifted in a sieve; Yet not the smallest grain shall fall to the ground. All the sinners of My people shall die by the sword, Who say, 'The calamity shall not overtake nor confront us.'

Wow.

In His fury He can make this promise. He will sift out His people among the nations, but He'll not lose one single grain. He'll slay the sinners, but He'll not allow one of His own to be mislaid, much less killed.

In the Old Testament I've been finding my every concept of God shaken. He is very much not Whom I imagine Him to be. He is entirely Who He Is. He holds fury and tenderness equally firmly, and never fails. His Word never goes forth, except it happens. Leviticus 26 continues to ring in my ears since I first heard it a few weeks ago. It took 1200 years for that chapter to be fully realized, but not one word of it fell to the ground.

Amazing.

Codepoke to be Wed

2009-10-11T23:02:00.004-04:00

There are several praises about which to be thankful today. That Dana said, "Yes," is the first and greatest. (So as not to create unnecessary suspense, the second is that I'm gainfully employed - praise the Lord indeed. The third must remain unspoken and it's not yet an assured thing.)

I love how life doesn't do what we expect it to do. I expected to be deliriously happy, and I am. I expected to feel like I'd reached this decision only after giving due consideration to every angle, and I have. I expected to feel both doubt and confidence, and I do. What I didn't expect was to feel so deeply humbled.

It's a strange thing. I feel like I've got so much more understanding than when I first married, but I still feel more like the fool of Proverbs fame than ever. Solomon talked about the wise man, the evil man and the foolish man. The foolish man was more naive than evil, and that's how I feel today.

The cliche artist in me rushes to rejoice I've found the trailhead to wisdom, but the bruised 45 year-old man in me looks at scripture and history and the great cloud of witnesses who have believed before me and mutters something about shutting up and getting on with it.

The Lord has blessed me with the love of a precious woman who treasures the same things I do, in a completely different way than I ever could. I love her joyfully and thankfully and look forward to a life of many mistakes as we start all over again from the middle.

Thank you Lord Jesus.

Thank you, my friends, for supporting me over the years. You made a rich difference.

The Flaming Sword

2009-10-05T13:06:00.002-04:00

The age old question of whether we should pray for healing, or pray for healing if it's God's will, came up in Sunday School. The specific question was why God could will not to heal us.

It's always a tough question.

There are too many wounded people whom I love too much to answer that question lightly. The teacher was gracious enough to actually allow some silence after asking the question. I am often impressed by her, and this was one of those times. Anyway, in the silence I ran around the mulberry bush a few more times, but the way the question was asked brought me to a new place.

Could God will that we not be healed? It is actually His will that we die. There's a tree somewhere on this planet named the Tree of Life, and that tree has an angel standing in front of it with a flaming sword. That sword is there by the will of God, and it's there to make sure we die.

Genesis 3 is not really explicit about why we should not live forever, but it is explicit God will not allow it. It might be because He's too merciful to allow us to debauch ourselves and destroy ourselves for any longer than 70 years. It could be to preserve us from His wrath. It could be to preserve His glory. The one thing of which we're certain is our pain comes as an outflow from Adam's sin. God is handling the introduction of evil into our world in the most merciful and loving way possible. Maybe sometimes we underestimate the terrible power of the unholy, but Jesus paid a terrible price to cleanse us.

Yes, God might will us to remain wounded. If He does, He does so tenderly and with love, like a good mother helping a child to throw up so it can all be better in the morning.

Whatever might happen, our Heavenly Comforter stays with us all through the night.

You're OK With Us

2009-10-04T16:06:00.003-04:00

That's the motto of AMSCOT, a local predatory lending chain. It's also the starting point of many a lost young person's descent into drugs. And it's the call of the highest minded voices in our land. Black, white, muslim, buddhist, male, female, gay, straight, rich, poor, brilliant, challenged, native, foreigner, poet, worker, blue collar, white collar, red state, blue state.

America means, "You're OK with us."

Should that motto work for the church, too?

Scarred for Life

2009-10-03T14:59:00.003-04:00

I have no patience these days with the Nietzschean cliché, 'That which does not kill us makes us stronger.' I’ve found that the deepest pain holds no meaning. It is not purifying. It is not ennobling. It does not make you a better human being. It just is.

All the worst pain does is reduce us to our most primal animal. We want it to stop. We want to survive. It short-circuits any sense of self, diminishes us to a bundle of biological reflexes.

NYTimes blog by way of the Fibromyalgia Blog.

I'm ashamed to add words to such a statement, but I've felt pain too. I've felt pain just like that - not recently, but those feelings. Since those days I've said, "That which does not kill us scars us for life."

And I'm scared to say anything about these words because there are those I love who are in that place right now. How dare I speak words into their pain that they cannot feel now? But I do remember. Really, I do. I remember and I think I would have wanted to hear both the words I've quoted above and the words I add below.

You're alive.

Ecclesiastes says a living dog is better than a dead lion, and pain taught me how right Solomon was. I wanted to be a noble lion in noble pain, but I survived because I realized I was a humble little mongrel held in the hands of the Living Lord. He preserved me because He loved me, and I lived because I finally found that grain of trust in His love.

I bear scars I'll nurse until I die, but only that long. There is a glory of life and trust, a love of God and man, my pain taught me and by which I'll be carried through all eternity.

Surviving such pain cripples us. Finding God scarred exactly as we were scarred, exactly because He loves us, metamorphosizes us. Pain cripples, but love transforms. The work love does with pain is divine.

Cry out to God and believe. His love for you is stronger than your agony. It is.

Jesus is.

2009-09-22T11:58:00.001-04:00

Honesty

Exd 33:3 & 4 "Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way." When the people heard these distressing words, they began to mourn and no one put on any ornaments.

I recently read an article commending speaking everything that enters your mind to everyone. The journalist reporting on his experiment told about the thrill of his initial experiments. He explained how it was frightening to tell his boss he didn't like an assignment, his girlfriend what he thought of a story, and his interview subject what he thought of his whole life. He also explained how powerful it felt, too.

That's a power some of us never feel.

Yes, there's a danger in speaking the truth hurtfully and inappropriately, but there's an equal danger in being unable to speak a truth in time of need. Some of us would rather lie to ourselves than tell the truth to anyone who might overwhelm us. That is the message of my movie, Lucie's Prayer. Lucie was lying to herself, telling herself that she was the one who needed to change when she was being abused. The first person with Whom we can begin to build a foundation of truth again is God. At the end of the movie, Lucie finally hears God wants to deal truthfully and He's not afraid of her problems. Lucie began the slow, difficult process of learning to tell the truth. As she's learning to tell the truth to God, she'll also have to learn how to tell the truth to her friend Julie, and some day she'll even be able to tell the truth to Billy. On that day, she'll feel the power of truth.

That's a power God always has.

Yahweh tells the Israelites they're a stiffnecked people, and He casts them into mourning. There is no remorse in His words, because there's no ill-considered rage in His statement. Whenever you read the words of God, you should read them out loud, and you should give thought to the tone you choose. Try reading Ex 33:3 & 4 in some different tones.

Sweet Jesus
Go up to the land I've promised you. I have a wonderful plan for your life there, and I want to be the bridge across the gap between here and there. I will turn a kind eye to your imperfections, and hide myself from your learning experiences.

Suffering Jesus
Go up to the land I worked so hard to prepare for you. I want to take the journey with you, but I can't when you're stiffnecked and stubborn. It kills me to love you so much, and for you to keep hurting yourself by not listening to me. I hope you can enjoy your blessings without Me.

Stern Jesus
Try to get to the land flowing with milk and honey without Me. You will never get there without me, and I won't go with you because you've forgotten holiness.

Scientific Jesus
I wonder how many of these people will go to the land flowing with milk and honey. I've repeatedly set good advice in front of them, and at each proving they've chosen against my recommendation. Let me back off and observe their performance.

I've modified the words to emulate various tones, but we each hear some consistent tone in God's voice when we read His word. An addict, a codependent, a narcissist, and a passive-aggressive will all inflect God's text differently but ascribe their inflection to God without a second thought. Part of the Spirit's work is to inflect the word of God more accurately to us, to let us hear God's words the way He meant them to be heard. That's also a big goal of our work in studying the scripture. We must labor to see how God reacts to real people doing real things right and wrong. Then we can adjust the inflection we impose upon His voice to match the reality we see in His stories.

Inflect Yahweh's pronouncement here as powerful, accurate, and unflinching without adding any inflection of dependency, shame, rage, or worry.

Exd 33:3 & 4 "Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way." When the people heard these distressing words, they began to mourn and no one put on any ornaments.

And now that you've heard these words with an accurate tone, do you hear love in them?

No Buddhist koan can top that question for mind-breaking complexity! The sound of one hand clapping? A mere trifle. Trees falling in the forest without anyone to hear them? A child's illusion. Can Yahweh reject Israel lovingly? It's an impossible question. No matter how you define love, the concept of rejection has no part in it. And yet God is love, no?

Maybe this isn't a rejection? But no. It's too hard to defend that thought, when He goes on to ask Moses for permission to destroy these people and start over with a people from Moses.

Maybe this is tough love? Um. Maybe, I guess.

Whatever it might be, it's devoid of any attempt to manipulate. It's a simple declaration of simple truth. Yahweh never threatens to resent His people's acceptance of His gift. He offers no carrot. He doesn't promise them one last chance to do the right thing, and then He'll go with them. There's no sugar-coating and no exaggeration.

I call it honesty.

It's a powerful thing, and it's the only way God knows to deal with us. May we learn to be like Him.

Skilled Builders

2009-09-20T16:01:00.005-04:00

Exd 31:1-6 The LORD also said to Moses,"Look, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, grandson of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. I have filled him with the Spirit of God, giving him great wisdom, intelligence, and skill in all kinds of crafts. He is able to create beautiful objects from gold, silver, and bronze. He is skilled in cutting and setting gemstones and in carving wood. Yes, he is a master at every craft! "And I have appointed Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan, to be his assistant. Moreover, I have given special skill to all the naturally talented craftsmen so they can make all the things I have instructed you to make:

1 Cor 3:10 According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon.

Moses tells us Bezalel and Oholiab were gifted builders working on the tabernacle in the wilderness. Paul tells us there were other builders of the church in Corinth. There's a very strong analogy between these two groups of builders. The tabernacle and the church are both the dwellings of God, one temporary and the other permanent. The tabernacle was an image of the way God dwells in His kingdom and the church is a foretaste of the kingdom itself. Both come, "some assembly required."

Spurgeon pointed out in Morning and Evening the other day that even the most wonderful bare foundation provides very little comfort during a storm. You need the building as well! The building needs a foundation, but you need the building as badly as a foundation.

Bezalel was a builder. A literal one. Earlier in Exodus Moses appointed judges over 1000's, 100's, 50's and 10's. Bezalel probably was not one of those. He was probably one of those guys who who took his gripes to Joe who was in charge of 10. And Joe might say his gripe was a tough call and tell him to bounce it up to Frank who was in charge of 50's. Bezalel was just a guy in the tribe of Judah. He happened to have a knack for hammering gold, and the Lord called him to service in the tabernacle.

And the Lord filled Bezalel with the Spirit of God.

To make a lampstand?

Yes. To make a lampstand.

And to carve a pomegranate.

The judges over 1000's, 100's, 50's and 10's weren't filled with the Holy Spirit, but Bezalel was. That's dramatic. The Lord ignores the men given power, and fills those skilled in crafts. The Lord pours out His Spirit on Bezalel as truly and as purposefully as He does on Moses, and not just Bezalel: Moreover, I have given special skill to all the naturally talented craftsmen so they can make all the things I have instructed you to make

Can you begin to imagine all the things there are to be made in the house of God that you attend every Sunday? I'll start, but I'm sure together we could come up with many more.

First, did you note from the Corinthians passage the church was not founded by Christ? Paul laid the foundation of Christ, not Christ Himself. Jesus is the Stone and the Cornerstone, but He deputizes stonemasons for the work. Even the most fundamental work in the church is done by men with the filling of the Holy Spirit.

Others built upon that foundation. Floorplans were designed, walls blocked out, doorways, roof-lines, windows all needed to be built for strength and function. Provision had to be made for cooking, cleaning, and disposal of all the kinds of waste life creates. But then the stuff actually needed to be built. Mistakes needed to be corrected. The walls needed plastering and painting. Trim needed to be fitted. Doorknobs and shelves and countertops needed installation. Pictures needed to be picked out for the walls, and flowers for the entrance.

The church is like that.

Money needs to be safely gathered and handled. People need to know how to reach each other during the week. The sick need to be remembered and supported. The lazy need to be chided. The young need to be kept happy and the young in the Lord need milk. The old need to be visited and the mature in the Lord need to be employed in His service. The observant need to heard and the unpleasable need to be singled out. Almost every small gathering needs food and drink, and everyone needs a chance to tell someone how their week is going. Everyone needs a little advice and everyone needs a little coaching in how to receive it graciously (especially when it's poor.) The young singles need to feel included. The parents of young children need to feel included. The older couples need to feel included. The older singles need to feel included. The new people need to feel included. The steady dependables need to feel included.

And you are skilled at one or more of these things. Bezalel was skilled in all of them. Oholiab was skilled in one or two. Both were filled with the same Spirit toward the same end - building the tabernacle of God.

The tabernacle was wild with incredible variety, and every bit of it was executed by skilled craftsmen filled with the Spirit. Did you know there were a dozen or more pomegranates of blue, purple, and scarlet embroidered around the hem of Aaron's vestments? Or the lampstand with its almond blossom lamps was entirely beaten from a single piece of gold? Or that the Lord specified this because it mattered to Him? The construction of the tabernacle was spelled out in painstaking detail, and showed just how many jobs the Lord's builders performed.

These littlest things matter to Him, and He's naturally gifted you to add some little thing to His church - to your church. He's ready to fill you with the Spirit. Are you ready to build? Your church will profit greatly when your gifts are employed in His service.

Fixing It

2009-09-19T22:03:00.003-04:00

There are millions of Christians in America, and I could not begin to count how many of them are trying to fix the church right now, even just as I'm typing this. However many it might be, it's a huge number. And here I am, adding my name to the list again.

And all those people with fixes are right.

The ones complaining the church is too effiminate and drives men away are right. The ones complaining the church is too patriarchal and drives women away are right. The emergent church is right and those pressing for more commitment to the churches we already have are right. Insightful saints are recommending we correct our doctrine, our worship, our practice, our preaching, our prayer, our evangelism, our methodology, our spontaneity, and our focus. And they're all right.

The focus of this blog has been to correct how distantly we live from our churches so we can spend time with each other more easily. I'll even allow as I've been right, too. Why should I be any harder on myself than on millions of my brothers and sisters?

And the status quo of millions of Americans questioning the status quo is more or less working. By and large, Americans feel at home in that kind of melee. I believe there are cultures out there that like to complain without being inconvenienced by real change. Americans are a couple shakes and a wiggle more comfortable with change than some, so we see a certain (smallish) amount of change in our churches and feel pretty good about things.

And by and large, our little changes make some things a little better and some things a little worse. We have churches that preach a little better, worship a little better, practice a little better, and perform a little better. The status quo of complaining about how things could be better continues and the little changes continue and things get a little better and people seem to stay about as happy as they want to be.

So how does one little Codepoke swim in that mighty river of status and quo?

For starters, I wonder if just maybe my little blog won't be able to fix the church in my lifetime. (Saying that kind of hurts, "right here.") (Point to any of the usual places, and you've probably guessed right about where it hurts.) I'm disenchanted with social media as a whole (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, IM, game consoles, iPod, etc.). In fact, I'm really learning to fear social media. In deeper fact, I'm even tempted to try to fix the church by arraying her as a mighty army against social media, but maybe I know one half-nutty voice can't save the world. Or maybe the irony of blogging against church blogging stops me. Who knows?

Here's what I know.

The Lord did not send me to fix the church, as badly as I wanted that sending. I pretty confident He's sent me to add a blessing or two to the little church where I hang my hat, and maybe given me a couple thoughts to share with people who visit this little blog. I'll enjoy doing those two things.

Today my heart is to blog a bit about Jesus in the church, and I hope to do that for a couple weeks. Jesus is more real, bigger, holier, and more loving than we can hold in our minds for more than a few minutes. I'd like to blog a little about how the church can appreciate Jesus in her midst a little more. The love of our brothers and sisters should make tangible the reality of Jesus, and anything we can do to make that happen is a good thing.

May the Lord bless and have mercy on this little series.

Digestion and Aging: Enzymes to the Rescue

2009-09-18T23:50:00.003-04:00

Yep, this is a post about old bowels. Sorry, but someone might find it useful, and that's my criterion for "post-worthiness."

I've been under a small freight train of stress these days, and it's been starting to show in a number of ways. One of them has been failing digestion. For the last couple months, I've been having a hard time digesting normal meals. I've actually been tempted to eat less, which makes no sense given the workload I'm under. And when I've given in to that temptation, I've had to cut back on the things I'm doing.

I'm getting older, right?

Then I was hammered with an allergy to wheat. Every time I'd eat wheat, my mouth and throat would begin to swell, and I'd have indigestion all day. I carefully eliminated all other changes to my diet, and yep, the staple of my life was suddenly poison to me.

So I cut out wheat. My problem did not go away. The swelling was gone, of course, but the weakness and indigestion were still there. The wheat thing appeared to be more a symptom than a cause.

I researched. I had an idea what I was looking for, so when I found it I was not surprised. As we age, our ability to make/use/whatever enzymes weakens. This is significant because enzymes are the doodads that break proteins up into usable thingamajigs. My body was running out of thingamajigs, even though I was eating plenty of good stuff.

Long story short, I went to my local health food store and bought the best enzymes I could find. 4 days into the new routine, I'm on the tennis court again and feeling pretty solid all around. I'm going to give it another week or two before I man up to trying wheat again, but the turn-around for my health was dramatic. Everything I eat feels well digested soon after I've finished.

Give it a try if you find you're experiencing age-related digestive problems.

Lucie's Prayer

2009-09-11T17:29:00.012-04:00

HT: GlenScriv linked to these two hilarious videos

(Interesting. I cannot see the "comments" link on this post. Here's a manual link to comments)

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

2009-09-09T14:37:00.000-04:00

What are they?

It's a trick question. I'm not sure there are any highly effective bloggers. ;-)

OK. I might possibly concede there are some effective bloggers, but I think there are a lot more successful, ineffective bloggers than there are effective ones.

So what's the difference? If effectiveness is having a lot of subscribers, then there are a lot of effective bloggers. If it's having a bevy full of commenters who disagree with you, then there are a lot of effective bloggers. If it's richly expressing yourself, then there are a LOT of impressively effective bloggers. I applaud all those things, but in my opinion those are measures of success, not effectiveness.

An effective blogger is one who has achieved synergy with his/her commenters. Together they are meaningfully wiser and more capable than they could be apart.

Now, I know that sounds easy, but it's not. Covey's 7 Habits was a smash hit, and for good reason. It sets a high and useful bar for the idea of what's effective. I might be wiser because of a comment on one of my posts, or a reader might be wiser because of something I said. Those are certainly effective moments, but moments like that fall way short of synergy. Take a look at Covey's habits 4-6:

+ Habit 4 - Principles of Mutual Benefit: An attitude whereby mutually beneficial solutions are sought that satisfy the needs of oneself as well as others, or, in the case of a conflict, both parties involved.
+ Habit 5 - Principles of Mutual Understanding: Covey warns that giving out advice before having empathetically understood a person and their situation will likely result in that advice being rejected. Thoroughly listening to another person's concerns instead of reading out your own autobiography is purported to increase the chance of establishing a working communication.
+ Habit 6 - Principles of Creative Cooperation: A way of working in teams. Apply effective problem solving. Apply collaborative decision making. Value differences. Build on divergent strengths. Leverage creative collaboration. Embrace and leverage innovation. It is put forth that when synergy is pursued as a habit, the result of the teamwork will exceed the sum of what each of the members could have achieved on their own. "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

These are the "Independence to Interdependence" habits and build on the "Dependence to Independence" habits. I think blogging really suits the first three habits wonderfully, and maybe the 7th habit, but I don't think many bloggers have really achieved interdependence. I'm not sure they can.

I can imagine interdependence working in the blog world, but not very easily. It takes my most optimistic and idealistic dream state to really picture it. I'm sure opium would help with that. But opium or not, I don't think imagining it is going to make it happen (no apologies to John Lennon - the dude was way wrong.)

We bloggers are too ethereal to support deep relationship - strong relationship sometimes, but never full-bodied.

You never have to put up with my bad breath. You can skim/ignore my tennis posts. You can ooh and aah when I get something right and quietly ignore (or loudly protest) my errors. You can picture me with red hair or a pleasingly Benedictine demeanor. Whatever images drift lazily across your consciousness as you read my words, they mean only what you perceive them to mean. I relate to you as whatever your subconscious assumes me to be, and it's impossible for you to see me any other way. You're kind and optimistic people, so you almost certainly see me as better than I really am (and I appreciate that) but I am assuredly different from your subconscious picture of me. Only a handful of verbal slivers of Kevin Knox are real to you, and the more we attempt to overcome that unreality, the more we're just spray-painting a ghost.

I cannot commit myself to people who vanish simply the moment I unsubscribe from their blogs and delete their emails. I can only commit myself to people who are still there, week in and week out, no matter how badly they frustrate me. It's only in the daily grind I can really learn whether they're trustworthy. Via the Internet I can share a mutual commitment to Christ with anyone in any corner of this wonderful globe, but I can only interdepend with people who've seen the real me - with people who will soon have to forgive me, because they can't just change the channel and make me go away.

It's only the church, concrete and frustrating, that can be effective.

Engage!

2009-09-06T14:00:00.001-04:00

How many people have you had over to eat in the last two weeks? Or, if you're an introvert, the last four weeks?

Yeah. If you haven't, you're not alone.

Have you given any thought to why?

The human brain is wired to need social connection, but getting people together is a tough job. We're wired with lots of needs and connection is one of them. We need social connection just like we need food and sleep. Food and sleep both require their own share of work, but they are very loud needs and motivate us directly. Shopping and cooking are mildly painful experiences for most of us, so we pay good money to have other people do it. Many of us wish we loved cooking, but most of us simply tolerate it because being hungry is worse.

Eating is easier! We didn't become the most overweight nation ever by hating the eating part of the equation. No, eating is the pleasure while cooking is the pain, and hunger is the bridge between the two. The pleasure of eating might convince some of us to cook, and the desire for energy and health might persuade others, but hunger is the first alarm system and almost all of us find hunger persuasive.

Imagine your life without hunger. Imagine you still needed food, but you would never feel hungry again. I'd probably still cook the occasional special meal or maybe enjoy my favorite food once in a while, but there's no chance I'd eat enough of the boring foods that keep me going. I'd find myself losing weight. And soon I'd be losing too much weight. And eventually I'd lose so much weight my body would begin to fail. It would not take long before I'd wish I could be hungry again!

Ditto for sleep. We only stop the fun and lay our bodies down because tiredness is so intolerable. If we found ever a cure for feeling tired, we'd quit sleeping entirely. Soon we'd be suffering from inexplicable pains, poor judgment, and long term memory failure, but we wouldn't feel tired so at midnight we'd still be rearing to go. Midnight works great for curling up with those systematic theologies! Within a year or two we'd all be educated theologians. Or just maybe dead. We need sleep, and tiredness is the first alarm that tells us we're not getting enough sleep.

The feeling of hunger is different from our need to eat, and the feeling of tiredness is different from our need to sleep. If we were to cure the feeling without curing the need, we'd be in an awful fix.

I have the thought that the church is in such an awful fix because we've cured the feeling that once drove us to connect with each other.

It's hard to nail down exactly what that painful feeling might be, but we're not feeling it any more. I think of it as a mysterious mix of purposelessness, isolation, disconnection, and/or loneliness that once drove us to seek out relationship. Maybe we've lost the ability to clearly distinguish between all those feelings, but come 9:00 PM we sit down and "see what's on."

We're bored.

But we don't stay bored long.

At the first twinge of boredom, we surf our TV, Facebook, and the blogosphere. We've got DVD's, iPods, and XBoxes. We're IM chatting about youtube videos and Tweeting and Retweeting everything. Maybe the boomers shy away from Twitter and the teens hardly know what Network Television used to be, but together we unwind in front of channels, sites, videos and email before the pain of boredom has a chance to settle in.

We'd never try popping a No-doze every time we were tired or a Red Bull every time we were hungry, but we'll kick on the tube without a second thought. Give us 5 seconds without an entertaining idea, and the lure of easy entertainment ropes us in. We don't even have to be seduced any more. We'll set up auto-payment to our cable provider to make sure we have our fix. The scary thing is that advertisers pay entertainers very well to help us quit feeling our pain, so our entertainment is pretty cheap in the end.

But boredom is a blessing! We need more boredeom! Boredom is as important to our lives as hunger and tiredness, but entertainment painlessly melts boredom away. Oh sure, TV's not perfect. "There're 400 channels and nothing on," but maybe that's a sign of our problem. Perhaps we are so deprived of [something] that normal antidotes for boredom don't work any more. After a week or two without sleep, No-doze is worthless. What if normal entertainment loses its effectiveness when we're freakishly over-bored? Maybe we're so deeply bored we have to be twittering while watching a movie and planning the review we'll give it on Facebook to just feel normal?

To what might God have designed our boredom to drive us?

Hunger and tiredness drive us to nutrition and sleep. Red Bull can cure hunger and No-doze can cure tiredness, but neither can provide the things nutrition and sleep give us. We ought not to cure hunger or tiredness flippantly ... nor boredom. The objective of hunger is to drive us to prepare food and the objective of tiredness is to drive us to stop the fun and call it a night. What's the objective of boredom?

Engagement.

Our God created us to engage with life, to grab hold of its highs and lows, and to grapple with its possibilities. We were created to create. We are loved that we might love. We're steady so others might rely upon us through thick and thin. But the boredom that once drove us to engage life is systematically being anaesthetized. Entertainment is a huge industrial complex, and the most brilliant American minds are thinking and experimenting and sweating to make sure we're entertained as often and as deeply as possible. The promise of American advertising is that we need no longer suffer the painful labor of engaging with life, with each other, and with our own demons. We can check out a fun youtube video any time we need a break.

My problem is not with social media. I blog (obviously enough) and some day I'm going to Facebook (I see it coming, like a thunderstorm on the horizon.) A mature, spiritual, and complete person can engage with life and others using Twitter. My problem is I'm not mature, spiritual and complete. I'm human and easily drawn aside. Given a way to eat without the drag of cooking, which of us doesn't eat out too often? Given a chance to relax in front of the computer instead of shutting it down and going to bed, which of us doesn't blog a little bit longer? Given a chance to watch a movie a friend recommended instead of visiting them and listening to what's been happening in their life, which of us doesn't stretch out on the sofa?

The body of Christ is out there. You can reach out and touch your brothers and sisters - they need it. You can see their eyes light up or darken. You can hear the rhythms and intonations of their speech. You can smell their griefs in a hug. You can share a meal.

We are creations of this Earth, wired to engage with all 5 senses, not images alone. We were made to make and keep covenant with each other, to promise to be there for each other through thick and thin, and to seal that promise over roast beef and mashed potatoes.

Our brothers and sisters need meat and potatoes love from us. They need to see our eyes and feel the warmth of our skin when we say we'll be there for them. Promises on a screen vanish with a keystroke, and deep down those brothers and sisters know it. We know it, too. We need the same gift back from them, but getting and giving solid, earthy love is going to require the work of engagement from us. We're going to need to let ourselves be bored, and then let that boredom drive us to the work of connecting to the body of Christ.

If we're not careful, the church in America won't end with a bang, but with a punch line. We're long on jokes, but short on the ties that bind. Those ties require work, and eating together is a great place to start.

Drill and Ceremony

2009-08-23T23:34:00.000-04:00

A little lad asked me the other day why the British soldiers all stood in a line to be shot during the American Revolution.

It's a much better question than he knew.

The answer is rooted in that least coveted of human emotions, fear, and that dodgiest of human studies, history.

Some several hundred years before Christ was born, some Macedonians conquered the world behind the phalanx. The phalanx was an amazing military invention (invented several centuries before Alexander, but certainly employed brilliantly by The Great). It was a juggernaut made of people. Each man carried an 8 foot spear and a shield large enough to protect his entire body. He stood elbow-to-elbow with the man on his either side and several rows deep. They advanced on the enemy relentlessly.

In every decisive ancient battle you see a radically lopsided casualty report. Alexander's forces lost 500-1,000 men at Gaugamela, for example, while Darius's forces lost 50,000-90,000 of the 100,000 on the field. The reason for this discrepancy is fear. During the height of the battle each side might be losing hundreds of casualties equally, then comes the breakthrough (yes, that's where that word comes from.) Alexander employed some daring tricks to create a weakness right in the center of the enemy lines, attacked it in force, and broke through to the soft underbelly of the Persian army.

As soon as the Persians knew the Greeks were behind them, they panicked and lost military discipline. Fear started making their decisions for them. Up until that moment, the Greeks had probably lost 500 men and the Persians 1,000. Given that the Greeks were outnumbered 2 to 1, that was survivable. But from the moment of panic the Persians were helpless babes in the woods.

Ancient armies won battles by overcoming the urge to panic and lost battles when it overcame them.

Every human's heart is gripped by icy fear. No one has so much courage as to be immune to panic. Alexanders soldiers the bravest men in the world and he didn't teach them some secret courage meditation. Winners and the losers both go to war with the men they have, not with the superheroes you read about in the books. No, the Greeks overcame fear with discipline and trust. They taught their men to stand in a straight line, to fight in very close proximity to their support, and to trust both their leaders and the men standing at either elbow. The Greeks were better trained and better led, so they were rewarded with the breakthrough. They overcame panic by relying on each other and obeying the commands of trustworthy leaders.

All ancient war was fought by men standing just as close together as possible. Roman soldiers were trained to use their swords as stabbing weapons, not hacking weapons, because then they could stand twice as closely to each other without sharp objects flailing around wildly. This made them four times as effective because they had more "firepower" concentrated on a smaller part of the enemy lines and because standing more closely to their comrades gave them courage.

The British stood in close lines, not because they wanted to prove they were brave, but to make themselves brave. They wanted to concentrate their firepower and courage most effectively. Against similarly trained European armies, the British forces were terrifyingly courageous. Their reputation for steely determination under fire was legendary, and terrifying. You now know it was courage born of discipline and trust.

What you may not know is that the American army could not have won the Revolutionary War by shooting from behind trees. We eventually needed to field conventional armies and fight conventional European battles to win our freedom. The rifles of the time fired too slowly and too inaccurately to panic a trained army. Decisive military actions were won by the bayonette, by achieving a breakthrough, and by causing panic in the enemy. We beat the British because we learned just enough discipline to defeat the small army they could spare to put down our rebellion. They were fighting on too many worldwide fronts and could not send enough soldiers to do the job they were given. The smallness of the British army arrayed against us and the arrival of Baron von Steuben in America to teach us Prussian "Drill and Ceremony," are what ended our tenure as loyal British subjects. (The US Army still refers to von Steuben's "Blue Book" of drill and ceremony to this day.)

The good Baron taught our troops to march in disciplined lines so we could maneuver enough to beat the British. He taught us to mass our firepower while still remaining mobile. And in so doing, he taught our soldiers courage. He taught them how to stand closely enough to each other while maneuvering under fire to give each other the bravery to survive against professional British armies.

It wasn't until the machine gun and WWI this equation changed, but even then it only changed in appearance. American soldiers "stand" closely to each other on radios, and we mass our firepower in other ways. We still survive and thrive on the modern battlefield by overcoming panic through discipline and trust.

Anyway, all that was fun to talk about. The little lad enjoyed hearing how battle worked, and I enjoyed reinforcing to him over and over that courage is something we gain from discipline and trust, by standing side-by-side with other men, not from some internal miracle of will. Hopefully, it will help a little bit some day.

But surely you sense the parallels for the church flying through my mind now?

The church reminds me of a bunch of Virginia farmboys wondering why the Brits don't run back to England after they've sniped a few Redcoats from the woods. I suspect we're looking for "a few brave men," when really we need to learn to work more closely with each other and trust our leaders. Courage doesn't come from "want to." Courage is a measurable, reproducible fruit of discipline and trust.

I suspect the church needs Drill and Ceremony.

Comfort For Human Parents, Well Odd Human Parents

2009-08-18T23:58:00.001-04:00

Well, this odd human parent takes comfort from this passage. Your mileage may vary.

Num 14:30-33 Doubtless ye shall not come into the land, [concerning] which I sware to make you dwell therein, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun. But your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised. But [as for] you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness.

My kids are both grown. They're out in the world making independent decisions using the tools my ex and I gave them, and the tools they found on their own, and the tools they've made up along the way. All of their decisions make sense. They make sense for the kinds of people they are with the kinds of background they have, and they make sense in light of my mistakes as a parent.

For the record, both are really interesting and fun people, and one is really doing well by all objective measures. Both have rejected Christ, though, and that's where my stomach just ties up in knots.

I find a thin gruel of comfort in the truth the Lord spoke to Ezekiel:

Eze 14:12-20 ¶ The word of the LORD came again to me, saying, Son of man, when the land sinneth against me by trespassing grievously, then will I stretch out mine hand upon it, and will break the staff of the bread thereof, and will send famine upon it, and will cut off man and beast from it: Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver [but] their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord GOD. If I cause noisome beasts to pass through the land, and they spoil it, so that it be desolate, that no man may pass through because of the beasts: [Though] these three men [were] in it, [as] I live, saith the Lord GOD, they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters; they only shall be delivered, but the land shall be desolate.

Or [if] I bring a sword upon that land, and say, Sword, go through the land; so that I cut off man and beast from it: Though these three men [were] in it, [as] I live, saith the Lord GOD, they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters, but they only shall be delivered themselves.

Or [if] I send a pestilence into that land, and pour out my fury upon it in blood, to cut off from it man and beast: Though Noah, Daniel, and Job, [were] in it, [as] I live, saith the Lord GOD, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter; they shall [but] deliver their own souls by their righteousness.

There are things beyond the control even of such men as were commended by God. Maybe such men as me cannot be expected to deliver their own children. Maybe it's no surprise that there are so many of us out here, parents whose children have walked away from the truth. Maybe this disaster is not because we're all Eli's who turned a lazy and blind eye to their children's works.

It's thin comfort and discouraging hope, but as I collapse before the Lord it speaks to my heart. Maybe there's a thin hope the Lord will not reject me for my parenting.

The Israelites, though, they received golden words of comfort from the Lord Himself. Oh sure, the nuggets of gold were wrapped in images of their rotting carcases left unburied in the wastelands, but the gold is there. The Lord promises to His failed, rebellious, bitter children that their children are still in His hands. They will suffer 40 years of wandering they should never have known, but they will inherit the land and the blessing. And their children will grow up in a fruitful land, abundant in the presence of the Lord.

I no longer feel superior to those Israelites who grumbled in the desert. I once did. I was wrong. I sit here now, after decades of the Lord's care, and wonder whether I'll have meat to eat. I've never seen the heavens rain down manna, but I've seen the Bread of Heaven come down, broken, and raised again. I know the grumblings of those Israelites are less shameful than my own. I also know I failed to give my children all of the good gifts of the Lord, even merely those good gifts from the Lord which I received.

This is not a post about my failures, and I don't want anyone to tell me I "done good." I did and I didn't. I don't judge myself when there's a Judge Who will one day separate the works of my flesh from those of my soul and my spirit. I will learn from Him all the many things His grace covered. I don't know in what I failed or didn't, but I'm not seeking affirmation. I know there is much to regret.

I find comfort because Numbers 14 tells me my failures will not drive the Lord from my children. They may unnecessarily wander 40 long years on my account, but He will receive them. He is faithful. It's one thing to know it, but it's a comfort to read His unwavering promise.

He is our only foundation.

Amissional

2009-08-15T13:19:00.000-04:00

I'm not much of a "joiner," so it's not a big surprise that I'm not on the "Missional" bandwagon.

I understand Missional to mean every member of the body of Christ living as a local missionary to their own community. Wikipedia offers this quote:

"No one can say: ‘Since I’m not called to be a missionary, I do not have to evangelize my friends and neighbors.’ There is no difference, in spiritual terms, between a missionary witnessing in his home town and a missionary witnessing in Katmandu, Nepal. We are all called to go—even if it is only to the next room, or the next block.”"

These arguments do nothing for me and don't really even interest me, much less convict me. They are founded in philosophy, not scripture, and the philosophy doesn't move me.

God told Abraham:

Gen 12:1-3 Now the LORD had said to Abram: "Get out of your country, From your family And from your father's house, To a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you And make your name great; And you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

And

Gen 17:7-8 And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you. Also I give to you and your descendants after you the land in which you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession; and I will be their God."

No one in Abraham's family was called to be a missionary - not one soul. For all pragmatic purposes, there was just one saved family on the Earth making every other living being a mission field. God sent Abraham into that completely virgin field there in Canaan, and didn't ask Abraham to preach one word of the Truth. God DID command Abraham to "go," but never said a word about evangelizing. That's a pretty significant omission if we're all "sent."

God did, however, carefully command Abraham to sanctify himself and his household.

He didn't tell Abraham to spread the Truth at all. He told Abraham to surgically mutilate himself and every other man in his household, but God didn't say a word about preaching anything.

Gen 17:10-11 This [is] My covenant which you shall keep, between Me and you and your descendants after you: Every male child among you shall be circumcised; and you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and you.

Circumcision was a physical act of sanctification, of holiness, of setting one's self aside for relationship to God. Abraham was commanded to holiness, not to missions. And Abraham was promised that by keeping the covenant of holiness, all the nations of the world would be blessed.

The kingdom needs missionaries, men and women gifted by the Spirit to the work of outreach. And every healthy church will grow missionaries in due time. An old pastor once said the purpose of preaching was to humble the sinner, glorify the Savior, and promote holiness. If we do these three things, in this order, missionaries will spring up in a healthy body just like feet in a healthy infant.

If we decide we are "missional" churches, we'll be no healthier than a body with 200feet and no hands, eyes, ears, noses or sense.

Pink and Blue

2009-08-10T00:05:00.000-04:00

Women, throughout history and throughout Christian history have had it rough. If you think they haven't, take a minute to check out, "Women's Work," one of the most deeply moving videos I've ever seen. I link to it every year or so, and keep a copy on my desktop just in case it's ever not there when I go back. I've never watched it without tears.

The video does an interesting thing. It shows women. It doesn't show women "being" anything. It just shows women. Most of them are happy. Some are lost in thought. All of them are beautiful. A few of them are beautiful in ways of which Mark Driscoll and cosmetic ads would approve, but all of them are letting themselves shine through unguardedly, just as God created them. They're beautiful.

I believe beauty's important, and I believe egalitarians are in danger of mislaying the purpose of beauty in our quest for equality. We've started talking about gender-neutrality where gender-equality is the goal.

I offer this link not as an egregious example of some horrible mistake, but just as the little thing that made me sit down and write. CBE asks, "Are Men and Women from Different Planets?"

Evidently, at a recent conference one of the speakers wowed the crowd by showing how Christian bookstores are marketing differently to boys and girls. The impression I received from the article was both that the marketing portrayed girls as inferior and that marketing differently to boys and girls was in itself wrong. I left some comments to that effect, and was courteously received. My point was that girls wear pink and boys wear blue because of cultural conditioning. Commenters countered that girls wear pink and boys wear blue because of socializations.

That amused me.

I and my esteemed sisters at CBE agree that pink and blue are socializations. We disagree when they believe they are awful socializations while I believe they are wonderful socializations. I support pink and blue. I support pink and blue even as I oppose the abuse women have suffered over the centuries and continue to suffer over the last 25 years I've been paying attention to the issue.

The video above shows beautiful women, in all their individual and unique expressions of beauty. My question to my sisters in the struggle for equality is who doesn't want the bride of Christ to be beautiful? Christ, Solomon, and Paul certainly do. Beauty is a distinctly feminine thing, and a distinctly desirable thing in the bride of Christ. Why, in order to have equality, do we have to call femininity into question? What power is stripped from a woman because she is feminine?

Does a woman who is culturally feminine have to be irrational? Does she have to be less competitive or goal-oriented? Then let's fix the culture, but history and experience give plenty of examples of feminine women who were rational and effective. American advertisers falsely tell us femininity is a matter of appearance, but why does the egalitarian church agree by becoming unfeminine, gender-neutral?

When the culture says a Barbie figure and $200 hair are the defining characteristics of femininity, why do we flee into the arms of political correctness? Why do we answer their lies with "gender-neutral" toys and games? God did not create us gender-neutral, and He goes out of His way to emphasize His own assessment of the desirability of the feminine.

Gender-neutral is a path to nowhere, and I'll rejoice when the good folk earnestly pursuing gender-equality abandon it.

Which Came First

2009-08-07T23:00:00.003-04:00

Respect in marriage.

Eggerich says the woman must respect her husband. I like that idea in theory, but I've known some evil husbands. When it becomes clear that the man is placing his own convenience ahead of the needs of his wife, she'd have to be a pathological self-liar to respect him. That woman must not respect her husband.

In a marriage between two decent people, though, I'm willing give Eggerich his due - after all, he is quoting scripture.

Imagine, though, the situation where a basically decent guy does something that obviously demonstrates his own convenience is more important to him than his wife's real needs. That man creates a chasm across which no healthy woman can easily cross. Asking any God-fearing, self-disciplined, wise wife to respect that man is asking her to violate herself. And yet, respect is necessary for marriage to work. What's to be done? Who's to do it?

Which comes first? The chicken or the egg?

Does the "chicken" of the man repenting of his sin come first, or is it the "egg" of the wife's mustard seed of respect freely given to a man in need of grace? Does the responsibility lie with the woman who is directly commanded by God to respect her husband, or does the responsibility lie with the man since some call him the God-ordained leader in the home?

The theoretical implications of that paradoxical connundrum could unman the bravest theologian. Philosophical finaglings and findings of falacy fool the poor guy who thinks it can be figured out.

Fortunately, the Lord doesn't care what we figure out.

If you've got chickens, make eggs. And if you've got eggs, grow chickens. Upon whomever the Lord has given the grace for a given need, is the responsibility for giving that grace laid.

I'm an egalitarian who believes there really is something to the idea that men and women have different gifts and needs. Those different gifts complement each other, but either can initiate the flow of God's grace into a wounded relationship. Whoever can give first, must.

Endless Possibility

2009-07-15T12:51:00.000-04:00

I avoid meme's pretty religiously, but this is a special occasion. This is a celebration of the return to the Web of Rich Pearce and Ken Story's Realm of Possibility. If you don't know about the Realm, let me just tell you they're a couple of the most delightfully playful people I know.

So, out of the pure overflow of joy, here are Kevin's meme answers.

1) Movie theater Junior Mints vs. Movie theater Goobers
Dude! At those prices? You can't be serious!

2) Trip to the Beach vs. Trip to the Mountains
For hours, the beach. For days, the mountains. The beach is more fun to play on, but the mountains let me think.

3) Elliptical Machine vs. Treadmill
Clearly the elliptical. The treadmill pounds my knee joints and the elliptical puts my heart rate about 20 beats higher without feeling like I'm working any harder at all.

4) Spring vs. Autumn
Spring. I used to be an autumn person, but I'm really learning the optimism of youth. (I'm 45, so it's about freaking time.)

5) Milk Chocolate vs. Dark Chocolate
Dark. Intense beats mellow.

6) Interstate vs. Scenic highway
Interstate. When I drive for pleasure, it's no more than an hour. If I'm headed somewhere that could call for an interstate, it's because I want to "get there."

7) Savage tan vs. SPF50
Oh, SPF50. I don't spend enough time in the sun to maintain a tan. I'd burn every couple weeks.

8) Being sad vs. Being scared
Sad. I've learned to manage sad, but being scared shuts me down.

9) 2 ten dollar bills vs. 1 twenty dollar bill
1 Twenty. It's that little bit harder to spend, and I'd rather hold money than spend it.

10) Birkenstocks vs. Crocs
Birks. Plastic shoes make no sense to me at all.

11) Bad odor vs. Bad taste
I'd rather wear unstylish clothes than smell bad, if that's what you mean. If you're asking about food, man, I'll eat it if it won't kill me.

12) Ripped pants vs. Wet shirt
On whom? And how many jokes do you really expect me to overlook here? Anyway, as a Floridian tennis player I'd better be OK with a sweat-soaked shirt, so I'll go with that.

13) Belching vs. Flatulence
My ex gave me a life-long terror of belching, so I'd best go with flatulence.

14) Chicken salad sandwich vs. Tuna salad sandwich
I'd never willingly do that to a chicken, so tuna it is.

15) Classic styles vs. Trendy styles
Classic is my only hope, since I'm still catching up with the trends of the '70's.

16) Old friend vs. New friend
Hmmm. Worn gold coins or new gold coins? Give me proven friend.

17) Dolphin vs. Porpoise
I know dolphins are learning evil from humans, so maybe porpoises?

18) Water slide vs. Roller coaster
I last did a water slide; it was a blast.

19) Jules Verne vs. Robert Louis Stevenson
I've only read Stevenson. I like humanity in my stories, and I enjoyed the humanity in his.

20) Goatee vs. Soul Patch
Never versus absolutely no way on the face of this planet. I guess the goatee.

21) Being the recipient of a thoughtful gesture vs. Being the recipient of a compliment
Give me the relationship that led to either.

22) Nap on the couch vs. Nap in a hammock
Hammocks are surrounded by interesting stuff. I have never successfully slept in a hammock.

23) Holidays vs. Vacation
Holidays. Vacations are scary to me. They're huge setups for failure. So are holidays, but I feel like they're the devil I know.

24) Aisle vs. Window
Window. I want to see the world roll under me, and don't ever really need to get up.

25) Slapstick vs. Wit
Wit. Slapstick usually makes me uncomfortable.

26) Logic vs. Emotion
I neither trust nor am comfortable with logic. Emotion is real. Logic is put on.

27) Whipped cream vs. Cool Whip
Whipped Cream is food. Cool Whip is a chem experiment playing out on a planetary scale.

28) High School Reunions vs. Family Reunions
Family reunions. I've never attended my high schools reunions and never intend to. School was one huge steaming pile of embarassment for me, and I don't ever want to face it again.

29) ALF vs. ET
ET, since I never saw Alf.

30) Canadians vs. Australians
Aussies owned tennis for decades, and I love their sporting mentality. I've never seen the joy of hockey, though I've been at live pro games.

31) Gifts vs. Gift Certificates
Gifts. I'd much rather win or lose at choosing something that says how I feel than try to say how much the person is worth to me.

32) Jet skiing vs. Water skiing
Water skiing. If it ain't hard, it ain't worth doing.

33) Yardwork vs. Housework
Housework. I live in the house, not the yard, so everything I do in the house feels like it pays off.

34) Ostentatious vs. Precocious
? Showy verses talented beyond his years? Um. Let's go with Precocious.

35) Phone call vs. Email
Email. A phone call stops me from whatever I'm doing. Email lets me answer more quickly and when I'm available. Hence, I really love to text (SMS) the message, "Call me when you get a chance to talk about ...." and supply sufficient details that the person is prepared for the subject.

36) Winning the lottery vs. Finding buried treasure
Finding buried treasure. It's much more realistic and dependable.

37) Sweating vs. Shivering
I do both without much noticing.

38) “Oh no, you di-unt.” vs. “Don’t even go there.”
Do these sound like sayings from the '70's? I don't THINK so!

39) Blue ink vs. Black ink
I'd love to use blue ink, because it stands out against black toner, but somehow, something always makes me remember why blue ink doesn't work for me. I wish I could remember what it was, because every 3 years or so I have to get myself a blue pen and toss it after a couple weeks.

40) Ukelele vs. Bag pipes
The PIPES! The pipes are a martial and religious experience evoking passion, terror, patriotism, grief, and pride from the first sounding of the drones! A ukelele says, "What are you doing awake? Come back out to the beach at sunset and we'll drink the night away."

41) Rainbows vs. Sunbeams
Either can make me cry.

42) The sound of your own voice vs. The way you look in photos
I'd rather hear my voice. At least I can focus on what I was saying. When I see myself I just wonder why God made everyone else look at that.

43) Extremely firm handshake vs. Extremely weak handshake
Extremely firm. When a thing is so easy to do right, it scares me that a person would decide to do it wrong. When a person is overly firm, at least I know they know they game and are trying to play it in some way. An overly weak handshake tells me I'd best not invest any trust in that person.

44) Runny nose vs. Nagging cough
Runny nose. A runny nose doesn't feel like it's going to pull rib muscles or blow the top of my head off.

45) Packing vs. Unpacking
Unpacking. How I wish I could do it. 90% of the 33% of the things I was able to keep and move have been packed for 6 months now.

46) A hole in the toe of your sock vs. A hole in the seat of your underwear
I can repair a hole in my socks. The underwear's got to go.

47) Zoos vs. Botanical gardens
You know? I like animals much better than plants, but I'd rather go to the botanicals. I wonder why?

48) Trip to the dentist vs. Tax day
The dentist is no big deal. I had full braces and headgear for 5 years, so no cleaning or root canal or crown is upsetting to me.

49) Awkward comment vs. Awkward silence
Awkward comment every time. I fill in blanks much more negatively than I should, so an awkward comment is invariably and vastly less disturbing to me than a silence would have been.

50) Too much Rich vs. Too little Rich
I've done too little for a couple years now, and am pretty jazzed about trying out too much. :-)

The Next Time you Watch a Tennis Match

2009-07-09T12:58:00.000-04:00

35 years playing this game, and I just learned an absolutely fundamental point. You can hit inside-out, inside-in, or straight, but you cannot hit outside-out consistently. I watched a couple matches at Wimbledon with this in mind, and it enriched the matches unbelievably. It helped me win a match the other day, too.

It's easy to explain, but this video may be even easier to understand.

An outside shot is one that crosses your body as it's on its way from the opponent's racket to yours. It's called an outside shot because the ball is moving away from you as it reaches the strike zone. An inside shot is one that is moving toward your body as it's on its way into your strike zone. Hitting "in" is hitting across your body, and hitting "out" is hitting away from your body.

So, if you have two right-handed players, when they're hitting forehand to forehand, they're both hitting outside-in shots. And when they're hitting backhand to backhand, they're still hitting outside-in shots. If Player 1 hits his backhand down the line instead of crosscourt to Player 2's backhand, the other player is going to be hitting an inside forehand. If he hits his forehand crosscourt, then he's going to be hitting inside-in, which works. If he goes back at Player 1's backhand again, he'll be hitting inside-out, which works.

The situation that bites most of us is when Player 1 is standing deep in his forehand corner and hits a ball down the center of the court. Player 2 will take that shot on his forehand side, and be tempted to hit it to Player 1's open backhand court. That's an outside-out shot and it doesn't work.

I had no idea!

The magic here is that it's not the ball's relationship to the court that matters, but the ball's relationship to your body.

The simple rules are:
+ Never change the direction of a deep inside shot. Hit it back where it came from.
+ Usually change the direction of a deep outside shot. If it came from the backhand, hit it to the forehand.
+ Hit a short ball straight down the court to minimize risk, instead of hitting for lines.
+ If you're standing in your backhand corner, use the inside-out forehand as a weapon.

When you hit "in" across your body, you're using the natural rotation of your body. When you hit "out" away from your body you're working against the natural rotation of your body, so that's always a less safe shot. When the ball coming toward you is an extreme "inside" shot it will naturally come closer to your body allowing you to rotate through an "inside-out" shot naturally, so you can use the inside-out forehand as a strong and safe weapon.

So, the next time you watch a match you will be amazed as you watch the pros follow these 4 simple rules. And you'll be even MORE amazed as you watch them break them ... and be punished! You've heard players described as "steady" or as "gamblers". It all boils down to how often they try to hit an outside-out shot to the open court, and more often than not I watched the pros who tried to go outside-out miss.

I expected Federer would break these rules constantly, but he actually followed them more closely than anyone against whom I watched him play. He hit the ball where he should and with conviction over and over until his opponent decided he had to gamble.

I was awed. I hope you will be too.

Highlight videos are not really good for seeing the normal flow of play, but this one is interesting. The first 3 misses off ground strokes by Soderling are 2 backhands and 1 forehand attempting to hit outside-out to the open court.

The Narrator

2009-07-07T13:17:00.000-04:00

You may have heard Roger Federer played a little tennis this weekend against Andy Roddick. After knocking the ball around for 4 1/2 hours, Roger had more little numbers on the scoreboard than Andy, and that difference was worth an extra 425,000 British pounds (which is like $70,000,000,000 or some such after applying the exchange rate; I don't know) and a chunk of history because it was the 15th time Roger has won one of the big 4 tournaments. Nobody's ever won the last point at a major tournament so many times.

The match, though, has given us, "The Narrative." For a prime example, see this article by Boris Becker, "Roddick Stopped Believing.

Boris was a brilliant if unstable tennis player and the youngest Wimbledon champ ever. I listened to his commentary on the BBC broadcast of several matches and found his commentary misleading over and over again. This article is no different. And in the scheme of things it doesn't really matter, but if you happen to bat the tennis ball around for a hobby commentators like Boris Becker can ruin your day.

The Narrative goes like this. Roddick never believed he could win that match, and he revealed that deficiency over a 3 minute span toward the end of the second set. He built up a 6-2 lead in the tiebreak, and only needed to hit one more good shot take a 2-0 lead in sets against Roger. But, you see, Roger has beaten Andy 19 of the last 21 times they've played, and Andy's 2 wins were in relatively unimportant tournaments. On this big a stage, Andy knew deep down in his heart he never had a chance.

That deep inner doubt is why, when Roger hit a duck of a high forehand at 6-5 in the tiebreak, Roddick shanked away his chance at greatness.

Wrong.

Wrong because it's a narrative after the fact. Wrong because that thinking won't help Andy win the next match. Wrong because it misses the point of what was really happening out there. Wrong because when us average Joe's get out on a tennis court and try to win an important match all we're going to remember is that we have to believe to win, and that's a lie. The truth is more complex, but TV commentary can't really do complex.

At 6-2 Federer pulled Roddick wide to the forehand and Roddick replied with a flat shot down the line. That put the ball on Federer's side of the court very quickly. In fact, Federer received the ball while Roddick was still standing about 15 feet to the right of where he needed to be to continue the point successfully. Federer simply hit the ball 30 feet to Roddick's left and the score went to 6-3.

The commentators (Becker not among them) praised the brilliance of Federer's backhand shot. I don't want to take anything away from Federer, but once Roddick went down the line, the "winner" was a routine stroke. No brilliance was required. Literally, any of 100,000 top club players could have won that point from that position. Maybe Federer used some special sauce in hitting the simple winner, but Roddick gifted him with that point. (See for yourself at the 5:00 mark of this video The Tiebreak.)

The correct shot was crosscourt, but Andy hoped to surprise Federer with the unexpected gamble. He figured he could "beat him down the line," but actually Roger was in control of the point. Andy brain-cramped and paid for it.

Roger then hits two good serves. After the poor play he demonstrated at the beginning of the tiebreak, it was about time he hit a couple good ones.

At 6:30 in the same video, you see Andy hit a second serve that Roger returns passively. Andy decides to attack the net. He hits the right shot and he hits it adequately, then Roger tries to go down the line with his passing shot when crosscourt would have been a better decision. Federer's forehand is mishit and goes much higher than he really intended, putting Andy in an awkward predicament. The high backhand volley is one of the hardest shots in tennis and Federer's ball may be going out. Andy's in the driver's seat, but he's not sure where to go. He decides the ball is probably going out, but that he'd better hit it anyway. That's always a tough decision.

When you swing at a ball you believe is headed out, it's almost a guarantee you're going to hit an inferior shot. Roddick pushed his backhand volley wide. It happens to the best of them, and in fact it did just then. You can rewind it and watch it happen over and over and over again. I'm sure Andy is not doing that, but the commentators have all christened that the stroke that decided the match.

Yes, that mistake was unfortunate. If Roger hits a better pass, I'm betting Andy hits a better volley. But tennis is like that.

Under pressure, Andy reverted to his most natural game. He'd been playing a new style all day, and doing a fantabulous job of it, but in the pressure of a tiebreak he reverted to his old style. The knock on Andy has always been gambling too soon and being afraid to move up to net. He gambled badly at 6-2 and he lost his feeling for the net at 6-5. Andy played a brilliant match to get himself to that point, and to give himself the chances he did. Andy played the right match to get to where he was, and it was not a natural style for him. What he'd done to get to 6-5 in the second set tiebreak was nothing short of amazing.

So what happened to end the dream?

There is a magic juice in tennis. If you've got it, you're going to win the point and if the opponent has it, he's going to win. That juice is called focus. Focus is what allows a man to return a 140 mph serve. Literally, between the time a 140 mph serve leaves the racket and the time it whistles past your ear, you cannot blink twice. In order to put a tennis racket in the path of that ball, at the exactly angle required to make the ball travel back into the far court, you must have focus. It's an almost inconceivable degree of connection between the eyes and the hand, leaving the brain almost entirely out of the picture.

Focus consumes energy like like a Rottweiller eats Scooby-snacks ... and you only have so many Scooby-snacks in your lunchbox. When you start a tennis match, you have a level of energy. Burn it too quickly, and you'll find yourself out of gas. You can tell when a player is out of gas, because he takes unjustified risks and misses. You can tell when a player is focused, because he does exactly what he should do and does it with a margin of safety, even when it's almost physically impossible.

Roddick showed every sign of losing focus in that tiebreak. He brain cramped at 6-2 and he shanked a makeable volley at 6-5. At 6-6 he dropped the ball while bouncing it prior to his second serve, approached on a weak shot, and missed a slightly difficult half-volley. At 6-7 he drove a backhand long. Federer, on the other hand, displayed perfect focus in the second half of the tiebreak. He did nothing amazing, and he did everything with a margin of safety.

Certainty that you are hitting the right shot can increase your focus. Fear that you might be making a mistake can dispell focus. The confidence of having beaten a man 19 times can increase focus. Having tasted defeat at your opponent's hands pressures your focus. Having a voice in your head narrating the hideous, secret, real reason you're making human mistakes can bleed focus dry. All those things were weighing on Roddick, but he was managing them successfully. Clear up to 15-14 in the 5th set tiebreak, Roddick managed all those things. The one thing Andy could not manage was fatigue.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all (Lombardi and Patton), and Roddick was significantly more fatigued than Federer. On Wednesday, Federer demolished Karlovic. On Wednesday Roddick poured his heart into a 5 set match against Leyton Hewitt. On Friday Federer embarassed Hass. On Friday Roddick played 4 crisis sets against Andy Murray and all of England. Federer came into Sunday's match with a full tank and a reserve of confidence Roddick could not begin to match.

The Narrative is that Roddick choked at the threshold of greatness. The reality is that fatigue caused him to lose focus. The man's problem was being human, not some intangible lack of belief or cowardice. The difference that distinction makes on the court on July 5th is nill, but come the US Open the difference will be massive. If Roddick believed The Narrative (he won't), he'd go out on court and at the critical moment there would be one more burden on his shoulders as he struggled for focus. He'll already have to fight fear, fatigue, and pressure, but The Narrative adds to that already herculean burden the special fear that he must be a choker. If, however, he believes the truth, that he fought to the limits of human endurance over 5 days and almost pulled off the upset of the championships anyway, he'll head into Flushing Meadows with an increased confidence that might actually sharpen his focus at just the right moment.

Life is like that. We all have a Narrator in our heads, the Boris Becker of our minds. When Roddick drops that ball at 6-6 just before serving Becker exclaims, "Oh my God!" We've all heard that frightened, little squeal in our minds over nothings. The Boris in our heads is misleading us, and when we follow him it's down the path of our own failure. At the moment of truth, his voice can be the thing that finally blurs our focus.

This little game we call Life is played with people's hearts, and every mistake costs someone - sometimes dearly. We need that focus every time we struggle to love an annoying relative, to overcome a besetting addiction, or to give when we'd much rather grasp greedily our gifts.

127 men lost Wimbledon, and I think most of us lose at life, too. It's just a matter of degree. Roddick lost after winning 6 rounds, and he needs to remember his success. When we lose, it's important to hear the Spirit's healing voice in our ears, because every time we lend our ears to our inner Boris, and thereby expose our hearts to Satan's lies, we weaken ourselves against the next match.

Today's lesson is that we need to make sure we're not misled by the Narrators all around us, and especially not by that one in our head.

May the Spirit guide you.

Bragging Rights

2009-06-05T23:58:00.001-04:00

I serve a King. Sure He's invisible, but I know He's real because He keeps His promises.

Perfectly.

To the letter.

My King once promised Daniel there would be 4 kingdoms to arise, the 4th would be different, and then a tiny little stone would end all kingdoms and grow to fill the Earth.

The Babylonian Empire was displaced by the Medo-Persian Empire. The Persians were displaced by the Greeks. The Greeks were replaced by the Romans, who were strong but who mixed Republic and Empire within one government.

My King, the Stone Cut Without Hands, came to Earth during the Roman Empire's power and ended it. The little Stone that smashed the feet of the pagan empires grew from the day the Spirit took residence on Earth, and grows still. The empire of Christ grows, even as its members struggle daily with confusion over what it means to be an empire not of the this world and yet in it. The rise of the British Empire or the Ottoman Empire or China as a vast world power cannot stop my King. He has promised to fill the entire Earth, and He will.

I don't know what that means, but I know it's true.

I'm proud to be a thrall of this great King. It's an honor to serve Him and to be loved by Him and to love Him in return. I am thankful that He counts my service with grace, and that the little things I do might increase His reign in some way.

And my King has kept His promises to me.

He promised keep my heart and mind, and 45 years down the road He's done so.

I've watched other brighter, stronger, better equipped men stumble and fall at trials that merely tested me sorely. My King and His loyal subjects preserved me in my darkest hours. Apart from Him, I'd be addicted, insane, and/or dead at my own hand. I've seen my life lived out by others who would not call on my King, and I've seen where I'd be today without Him. I was a lesser man than these, and I was carried in mercy by the King Who promised He'd always be there.

I am a happy man. I am blessed as my life continues down this new road and new adventure. I'm sorry I have not been much of a blog friend lately, but it's been a hard, tiring, stressful, confusing, draining few months with enough moments of true exhilaration to keep me glad I'm going the way I'm going. There's been precious little time, but there've been a lot of joys. Thank you for being here to read this and keep up just this little bit.

I'm still out here. I'm still happy. And I have a lot of which to boast. It just happens none of it is anything I've done.

Willpower

2009-05-10T23:09:00.000-04:00

Deu 31:7-8 Then Moses called for Joshua, and as all Israel watched he said to him, "Be strong and courageous! For you will lead these people into the land that the LORD swore to give their ancestors. You are the one who will deliver it to them as their inheritance. Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the LORD is the one who goes before you. He will be with you; he will neither fail you nor forsake you."

...

Deut 31:16-18 The LORD said to Moses, "You are about to die and join your ancestors. After you are gone, these people will begin worshiping foreign gods, the gods of the land where they are going. They will abandon me and break the covenant I have made with them. Then my anger will blaze forth against them. I will abandon them, hiding my face from them, and they will be destroyed. Terrible trouble will come down on them, so that they will say, `These disasters have come because God is no longer among us!' At that time I will hide my face from them on account of all the sins they have committed by worshiping other gods.

You are amazing, God.

You knew, as You sent Joshua to lead Your children into Canaan, that they would whore against You.

You had a choice.

You knew they would fall away in Canaan. You knew as each judge rose and passed in Israel, they would fall away all over again. You knew as You anointed the many kings, even the ones after Your own heart would lay a frail foundation. You knew Israel would end up on the high places and in the groves, worshipping anyone but You.

You had a choice.

You could choose whether to lead them into Canaan or not. You could chose to wash your hands of them all. You could chose to leave them an alimony gift, and walk away. You'd have spared Yourself centuries of struggle and frustration. You decided to lead Joshua into Canaan.

You didn't lead Israel in false hope, either. You knew before You gifted Joshua and emboldened him to his task that he would succeed, and that his success would bring Israel's downfall. You knew if they failed Israel would not be a nation, and if they succeeded they'd be a nation set against You. They would reject You either way, but only one way would You have to suffer.

And You led Israel into Canaan.

You did it all. You went the whole way with them, from Deuteronomy to Malachi.

And still You had a choice.

You went even further in Matthew. You've come in flesh and been a King to us here, on our own Earth. You've been and gone and left the Spirit in your absence, and You've kept your prophecy never to grow angry with Your people again. You've been satisfied in Your work of perfect redemption.

We've done no better than Israel. With so great a revelation, greater than the plagues of Egypt, greater than conquests of David, greater than the building of the temples, we're a struggling church, and struggling more against each other than against anything else.

You've kept your promise, stood by Your choice, loved against all hope. We're people of unclean lips, but You circumcised our hearts.

Nothing has changed, even now. May Your Spirit work in my heart that I not fail You, but even at that I know I will.

May Your Name, the All-Giving, be honored in the Earth. May it be honored on this blog. May it be honored in me. And may the kingdom You tried to give to Israel so many times finally come. May the the people of this Earth hear Your testimony and honor You as their sole Friend. May they know Who is their King, and embrace the love You've struggled so flawlessly to pour out on us. May Your will be done in this place, as enthusiastically as it is in heaven.

You have provided everything for us, and we cast ourselves on Your providence. It is in You we find our every need met. We come to You as a token of our dependency and ask for Your gifts. Please forgive us of every way in which we fail to believe in Your goodness and power toward us. And we forgive those who fail us.

Keep us from any disaster which would overwhelm our feeble faith. And protect us from the enemy that would destroy in us the spark of Your life.

You are beautiful in every way, and we love you.

Thank you.

The Lord's Floss

2009-03-15T14:57:00.000-04:00

I floss every night. There's 30 slots between and around my teeth, and I hit each one every night.

OK. Now that I've confessed it, let me tell the story of that particular descent into properness.

When I was 18, I was properly disdaining of all flossers. When I was 22 and joined the army, I was properly disdaining of all flossers. I ignored all attempts to educate me, and continued along on my merry way. When I was 32 I was a happy computer geek, and ignored the call of the floss propagandists.

And then, long about 35 it happened.

I got a toothache. More properly a gum-ache. My teeth finally dragged me back to the dentist, and I got a cleaning. There was talk of antibiotics and other such vague threats, but the bottom line was that I needed to floss. But this time they explained why I needed to floss. I'm a big, "Why?" kind of guy, so that changed everything for me.

Flossing is about killing little microbes that live beneath your gumline, especially between your teeth. The thing is, those little suckers need a stable home to thrive. You don't have to fish them out to kill them. You just have to disturb their peaceful abodes so they have to start building all over again.

I used to get frustrated, because I felt like I was just pushing muck down under my gumline when I flossed. That seemed ridiculous to me, so I gave up. It turns out, all I really need to do is squish the muck around, and the microbes have to start their whole neighborhood corruption program all over again.

It's pretty easy.

I still failed to pick up the habit. 30-some-odd years of happily brushing and going to bed is pretty easy not to change when all you're missing is the excitement of flossing. Somehow I found it in myself to let the flossing go.

And then I got another gum infection. Age really does play into this. When you're young, you can get away with a lot, but as you age the immune system becomes a little more inviting to pesky buggers of all kinds. Mouth microbes are no exception. I dug out the floss again, and attacked the infection. At first I flossed too hard, but eventually I figured out I was only trying to kill the little buggers, not my gumline. And within 3 days or so, the infection cleared itself up. It didn't inflame and get worse and cause the dentist to tut-tut at me and talk about antibiotics. In fact, I didn't need to darken his door at all, and that's worth a little flossing in itself!

Now, I can tell pretty quickly when something needs a little attention, because the flossing itself is a little painful in just the place a problem is growing.

I've come to see the Lord's Prayer in the same light.

Jesus taught us 7 petitions, and they're just like those 30 gaps between my teeth. I run a little prayer down into each of those petitions, and if one of them feels a little sensitive it's a warning.

If I'm speeding past, "Thy Will be done?" or hesitant to ask for help in avoiding temptation, maybe there's something up in my life.

When I was younger, I focused exclusively on the big stuff, avoiding the wrong music and crowd. That's the "brushing your teeth" stuff. It's a good start. But as I've grown older, it seems like it's the little microbes of sin living just below the gumline that get to me.

I think I've always wanted to pray a little too aggressively. I think I always wanted to see big changes, pray big prayers, feel the passion every time. Really, though, I just need to mess with the cozy little homes of my little sins. I just need to stir them up a bit with a call to my Father. A quick call regarding His name, another of His kingdom, His will, His providence, His forgiveness, my forgiveness, and my weakness before my enemies.

It takes a minute or two, but the infections it can prevent are worth every second.

Dating Bells are Ringing

2009-03-10T21:04:00.001-04:00

Hello All!

What a crazy, crazy year it's been.

Only a couple of you know this, but I'm the happiest I've been in years and years. I'm well and truly in love with a delightful lady. We've been on this journey for well over a year now, and we've done loads of safeguarding each other and checking our hearts and all the lights look green. We haven't reached the point of proposals yet, but we've reached the point of relocating this Codepoke over to her neck of the woods.

I'll be moving several hundred miles (and a new job) down the road.

Her name's Dana, but I'll ask you not to try to guess whether you've seen her out on the web anywhere. I'm going to leave comments closed on this post, but feel free to shoot me a happy (or concerned) email using the email address in my blogger profile. (In fact, that's going to be my only email address as of March 15th.)

If you've noticed me posting about 1/100th as much as I once did, I think it's a definite symptom of love. It's impossible to burn as many electrons firing emails and phone calls back and forth as we have, and not fall a little behind on the blogging. :-)

Thanks to everyone who's stuck around through all my silences (and my speaking, too.)

Should Dana and I reach a final destination, I won't keep it a secret.

Thank you, Lord!

And thank you brothers and sisters. I'd be a lesser man without you.

Cooking on 4 Burners With Gas

2009-02-15T22:21:00.000-05:00

Gene Edwards' books and tapes are visionary. And beyond having a vision, Gene is able to help people tap into their own vision of living in deeper relationship with the Lord and other believers. On the strength of Gene's leadership, an awful lot of people have bled heart and soul out to realize their dreams. In fact, when people give up on Gene, no matter the reason, they seldom give up on his vision.

I have given up on Gene's vision.

I'd obviously refer you to Gene's writings and tapes to understand his vision, but let me summarize it enough to explain on what I've given up. This will be no attempt to downplay or insult it. I'm sure to do it injustice, but only because it's so immense.

I characterize Gene's vision as vastly-encompassing. There is nothing in Christianity Gene omits from his dream. Starting at the relationships within the Trinity before time began, Gene reinterprets everything about heaven and Earth and the boundary between the two that we call "the church." He frames the Christian life as God's Life come to Earth. Seeing church experience from his perspective changes everything.

When a church comes together, Gene portrays the meeting happening in the heavens as much as on Earth. The church loves God with the same love they receive from Him, and it's through that love that God's purpose is realized. The church, meeting at the boundary between heaven and Earth, loves God in Spirit and in Truth as much as in body and voice.

Practically, this foundation results in a uniquely unique church. That church is both more creatively expressive and more mystically quiet than others. Gene teaches the church to be led by the Spirit through its members. As such, its members plan and execute every meeting. Those meetings might be mapped out for spontaneous praise or spontaneous silence, shared meals or shared fasts, unscripted prayers or a whole scripted liturgy. Anything is possible.

And the church is more than the meetings. A lot of the above might happen as easily over dinner as at any set gathering. The members of Gene's churches live near enough to each other to help each other in physical and spiritual ways. The members pray together, too. And that prayer is as uniquely unique as the church itself. It's a church-wide implementation of the lectio divina or contemplative prayer. It's silence as a way of touching God on a church-wide scale.

And Gene presents all this beautifully.

A conference attendee first hearing and seeing Gene deliver this message, then talking face-to-face with brothers and sisters living the vision, quickly falls in love. The testimony of hundreds of conference attendees over the years absolutely confirms that experience. Very nearly everyone who attends one of Gene's conferences is overwhelmed at the beauty of his spoken vision, and of the physical vision the churches live out.

Very few people who make it as far as a conference leave disappointed.

Some want home church. Gene brings a church that meets at the boundary of heaven and Earth ... in a living room. Some want the end of the clergy and hierarchy. Gene makes every member a conduit of divine Life ... and gives them all a degree of authority. Some want a church based on relationship. Gene makes every relationship an outflow of the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son ... and everyone lives near enough to each other to foster practical love.

Gene's vision answers every particular. It's a living piece of art. Like all art, it has its imperfections and flaws, but for the person who appreciates the picture the flaws only enhance its beauty. For the star-struck church-lover, an overly large personality or an occasional fuzzy doctrine only brings the core beauty of Gene's vision into more perfect focus.

I was that deeply in love 20 years ago today, and I still think that vision is beautiful. I've found a lesser one vastly more satisfying, but it's surely beautiful.

I have no bone to pick with anyone still committed to that vision, theoretically even including Gene. I can't say with certainty I'm right about the parts of that vision I've rejected, and I admire anyone still pursuing their relationship with the Lord down that path. We're all in this Christian life together, and I'm the first to point out I've been wrong before - in big ways. These are my thoughts and insights on the 20th anniversary of joining myself to Gene Edwards' vision.

Cooking on One Burner
There's an old saying, "Now we're cooking on both burners with gas!" For those of you who've not heard it, it means things are moving very quickly indeed. All the obstacles have been removed, and everyone's putting their heart and soul into getting to where they're going. Excitement is running high, and the job is being finished lickety-split. I think the saying might match up to the more modern, "He's on FIRE!"

My beef with Gene's vision is simple. Even cooking on both burners with gas can't keep up with it. His vision only cooks with all 4 burners cranked to high.

It's too much.

A romance goes through a number of stages. There's courtship, engagement, new marriage, new kids, kids moving out, etc. During the run-up from courtship to marriage the relationship advances from low to very high heat, and that's good. But then it ramps down again. It has to. Even those people who've got marriage down pat, and who continue to report passion daily in their marriages, have ramped down from those first burning months.

Life functions best for most people the same way most cooking works best, on one burner and medium heat. Everyone likes a little "four burner" time in their lives, but most of us need things to be normal more often than not.

I'd like to compare some four-burner ways of doing church with single-burner alternatives. I'm experimenting with all these, and am happy with things as they are. I'm still learning, though, and finding new things every day. The single-burner way is not as exciting, but I've found my life isn't scorched on the bottom and raw in the middle these days.

Relocating
Gene describes church life as so amazingly rare as to make it unthinkable that it could possibly exist for long wherever you live. To be sure, he teaches church life springs up spontaneously everywhere, but he warns that it doesn't last. If you want church life, you'll need to relocate somewhere a real church planter has established a church that will live.

If Gene is right, then there's no alternative to relocation. And relocation is a serious four-burner life event. It's stressful and exhausting, and leaves a person unrooted from family and networks they've spent a lifetime establishing. Americans relocate an awful lot, so it's not an unthinkable burden, but it is a major stress.

If Gene is wrong, then it's an unnecessary burden. If church life can be living and edifying on a single burner, then this call to relocation is a sacrifice without cause. It's been my experience that churches are full of Christians, and we share the same life of Christ. Sharing my worship and my life with them has been a beautiful and rewarding thing.

Living Close to One Another
Living close to believers whom you trust and with whom you can share everything is a joy. We need it and everything about the idea is commendable.

Gene ups the ante by asking anyone who would experience church life to intentionally live as closely together as possible. It was educational to watch the experience of living close to believers unfold in Atlanta. We all needed time with each other, but we gave varying amounts of our time to actually doing it. Single saints spent more time with others than married saints who spent more time than couples with babies who spent more time than couples with older children. Similarly, the younger a person was, the more likely he or she was to spend a lot of time in the homes of others.

We need that closeness, but there's a slower, quieter way. You can get out and meet the neighbors you have now. There's a pretty good chance you can find two or three Christian families within a block or two, and I've seen the benefits of Christian community work well with just three families.

Being With Christians of Like Mind
One of the most attractive things about joining a group as focused as Gene's is being on a long, hard, meaningful journey together with people of like priorities to your own.

Your closest Christian neighbors, though, are also on a long, hard journey, and if you take the time to get to know them you'll find it's meaningful. They may not be of like mind on how the church should look, but it's Jesus they're wanting to serve. You can feel pretty sure they're struggling with real issues, and the Spirit is speaking in their hearts exactly like He is in yours. Everyone's fighting for their lives in this place, and everyone's searching for connection to eternity.

You will find that other people trust their pastors and distrust some author they've never heard of. And you will find that their pastors are Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Vineyard folk. You may find it takes time to get to know them, but you'll find in them the mind of Christ. You won't find in them any burning commitment to your expression of the church, but you'll find the Holy Spirit. Share a couple meals, move a little furniture, watch a movie and trade your testimonies and you will probably find you can lean on them a little bit when things are rough. I have.

Ending the Clergy/Hierarchy/Leadership
Jesus commanded his disciples not to allow themselves to be called rabbi, father, or teacher because they already had brothers, a Father and a Teacher. And yet we call men pastor, elder, or reverend and give them authority over others. This is a big one to an awful lot of saints. It was huge to me when I started down the path that brought me to Gene's church, and I still rankle to call a man by anything but his name.

The organized church's hierarchy, based as it is upon college degrees, is disappointingly pragmatic. I'm sorry it's come to that. But leadership is a fact of human existence. Jesus clearly intended there to be leaders in His kingdom, and He clearly was happy for there to be servants leading servants in His household. Being in Gene's leaderless churches was a four-burner adventure, and I loved it, but Jesus, Paul, Luke and others make it clear some kind of leadership is a part of being a worshipping body of believers.

There might be an ideal single burner alternative to church leadership, but I'm not going to spend a lot of energy looking for it. I've treated the pastors under whom I've lived since leaving Gene as human beings, and found they warmed to the idea quite quickly. It turns out that people who give several years to qualifying for the ministry are often really neat people with a sincere heart for the Lord. It's been a privilege to know them as brothers. I know this barely holds a candle to the four burners Gene offers, but I'm OK with that.

The Church Planter Must Leave
Ah yes. I wonder what this would look like if it ever happened?

This was a key foundational point in Gene's teachings, but a confusingly implemented one. He never was an integral part of his early churches, so he could not properly have "left." And then when he was a real part of his later churches, he didn't really leave. Either way, the concept was key to the upbringing of the churches and shaped our character very directly.

The single burner alternative to this is understated. If a man has work to do, he should go do it. Full stop. I like work, and I'm in favor of men standing up and getting it done. But turning every day spent with a church into a melodramatic, extended goodbye is gratuitous. Paul left Antioch-Pisidia to work in Iconium, Iconium to work in Lystra, and Lystra to work in Derbe, but we have no reason to believe he made his impending departure the emotional centerpiece of his ministry.

I recently lost a pastor when he left to start a home church. It was a refreshingly touching time, and was constructive for everyone. It just wasn't hard. He was with us while was with us and he left when he had to leave.

Home Meetings
Again, home meetings are great. Participation by every member of the body is great. Everyone planning together, preparing in private, and delivering their best is a wonderful thing.

Making the home meeting the only meeting is not wrong; it's just cooking on four burners.

The single burner alternative is not really better so much as doable. Of my church of 80, about 10 of us meet weekly in a living room. It's a lot smaller than Gene's vision, and it's very happy. We don't try to do everything with the pregnant power of eternity, and somehow we touch each other and the Lord anyway. It's satisfying.

Learning from Old Christians
Not everyone is ever going to read books on being Christian. That's tragic to me, but it's a reality I can accept. The question is not whether everyone will read, but will the people who do read do so from books outside of Gene's genre? 2000 years of Christianity have brought an awful lot of glory and insight to the church. Limiting a church's input to Gene's books plus his highly edited reading list, was a weak thing. Reading wider and wider outside of Gene's publishing house has been a settling thing for me over this past decade, and I recommend it.

Why Cook on Four Burners?
10 years ago I'd have asked, "Why settle for one burner?"

My how things change.

Why would a man build an entire ministry on intensifying Christianity? Gene did not haphazardly stumble into this habit of choosing the fieriest expression of the church. He reminded us frequently how lucky we were to be blessed with a leader who knew how to keep the fire on high.

10 years ago I'd have said it was because Gene had "The Vision," and it drove him both to the fire and by it. I'd have said Christianity was meant to be that way. Today, those words ring false. Gene's promises consistently hurt people in the long run, and there's always a reason for things that happen consistently. His churches burn through people like a steam engine burns coal, and he keeps shoveling people into the fire. He relies on his book, tape, and conference ministry to keep a steady flow of people pouring into those churches. And when they're used up, the ashes don't even have to be shoveled out. We go away on our own. Gene just teaches the new wave of devoted souls how precious the vision of the church must be.

When a man courts a woman too insistently, with too many flowers, with too many words of flattery, with too many gifts, her friends say, "It's too good to be true." The subject of his ardor always objects, saying, "You just don't want me to be happy!" When it turns out it really was too good to be true, though, the outcome is tragic.

So here we are, believers who have experienced Gene's vision of the church and now need to decide what to do with it. Should we discard the whole thing? Should we keep it, but look for a better man to tend it? Or is there some middle path?

I've answered for myself. I decided 4 years ago the organized church was where the Christians are, and I was going to where the Christians are. I've wondered about my decision from time to time, but I'm so happy there I'm going to stay for the forseeable future. The brothers and sisters in my little church are as dear to me as brothers and sisters can be. They carry the Life of Jesus within them, and they share it with me. There are very few four burner moments, but an awful lot of good happens on a single burner.

You'll answer for yourself, and may the Lord bless your decision.

We're Only as Sick as Our Secrets

2009-02-08T18:38:00.000-05:00

I learned something last weekend. I learned why I hardly ever hear from old brothers and sisters from my time with Gene Edwards. I gave my life to them and to Gene for 10 years, and somehow I seldom even hear from them. Oh, and I also learned why they never hear from me. And I think I figured out how to stop some of the bleeding.

Step one is to realize most of us are bleeding.

A couple hundred lovers of the Lord in a dozen or so cities across America and Europe stepped into the glorious unknown. We all hoped to advance the glory of Christ by restoring the testimony of the church. We wanted to work together to bring a deeper, truer, simpler way of fellowshipping with each other and with Christ. We wanted the Christian life to move into our living rooms, where it was so sorely missed. Gene Edwards gave us a vision, and we fell in love with each other pouring out our hearts and souls and climbing that highest mountain. Gene welcomed us into his plans and in turn, we embraced him and each other whole-heartedly.

All those churches died under Gene's tutelage. Their deaths and our wounds were ugly affairs, each stage-managed by Gene personally. Each of the deaths had a unique fingerprint, but I've noticed one consistent outcome. Nobody knows what happened. Nobody knows what happened to the other brothers and sisters. Nobody knows what happened to Gene. Nobody knows what happened to the brothers who were supposed to bail them out. Nobody even really knows what happened to them. Everything that mattered was a secret.

John and Jane Doe were members of a church in Jonesville, and they know how that church died, but they don't know what really happened. They know about "The Incident" and the "Emergency Meetings" and "Who left first," but they don't know "Anything that Matters."

John and Jane don't know why Joe and June quit talking to them about anything that mattered. They don't know why Jim and Jody were always Gene's favorites, or why Jack and Jan thought Gene hated them. They don't know why they don't hear from anyone any more, and they don't know why they think about calling but don't quite pick up the phone.

Secrets work like that.

We need to tell our stories.

We need to hear each other's stories.

This weekend I heard a couple stories, and things that plagued me for ten years melted away. In one evening and an afternoon, ten years of loneliness made sense. I began to feel reunited to my brothers and sisters. I did not hear what I wanted to hear, and it was still healing. In one case, I heard almost the opposite of what I wanted to hear, but I heard the truth and it was perfect. I heard what actually happened. It was just the truth, but the truth changes everything.

Gene taught us to hide the truth.

That was all well and good while I believed he was trying to protect people who deserved a second chance, but I don't believe that any more. After all these years, and after talking to the people who were there, the only thing Gene ever deeply cared about protecting was his work.

That explains why Gene never told anyone the truth, but it leaves an open question about why no one else told what they knew of the truth. We were all silent about the things that mattered. What did our brothers and sisters think as they were bleeding? Or as they watched others bleed? And why did they do what they did? None of us knows because no one talked, and that's no accident. Gene repeatedly and forcefully indoctrinated silence into us. He taught us that speaking of anything that matters is undermining the worker, and that undermining the worker was a grave sin.

Gene once told us, "I consider you to have neither honor, nor integrity, nor honesty, nor trustworthiness if you in any way undermine another man's work. Nor can I personally extend my fellowship to one who does."

We learned this lesson well.

We honored Gene and we honored God to the best of our abilities in refusing to undermine Gene's work. When we doubted, we spoke to no one. If one of us disagreed with any brother, even the most or the least disagreeable brother, we'd wrestle through to a satisfying conclusion. We grew close that way, and it was beautiful. But you could tell right away when a brother started disagreeing with Gene. He'd grow agreeable. He'd start going along with anything, and grow silent. He'd start having secrets. Then he'd announce he was leaving, and reserve the reason why. We'd all mollify each other with kind words and friendly smiles, and one day we'd help him pack and he was gone.

Gene warned us repeatedly of the power of words to destroy, and that only silence could glorify God. Only in silent suffering could a man not undermine the work of God. Only in silent suffering could the man with authority know how the Holy Spirit would measure his work. Only in silent suffering could the man without authority know the Holy Spirit would guard him. If a man spoke, he was hindering the Spirit. Gene taught us it was the Lord's church, not ours, and the Lord would defend it.

Silence, he told us, was the route to safety.

But that was all a smokescreen.

It was a lie.

Gene, himself, did not practice silence. I know it for a fact.

I sat and listened as Gene lied about practicing silence in the middle of a church crisis. I listened to him tell the leading brothers of a church he would never defend his work with words. Hours earlier I'd I heard him plotting and describing to us how he would defend his work with words. His promise to not defend the church with words was one of the things he'd told us he'd say to defend his work in that church. I listened while he patted himself on the back for his own cunning.

Three times I was personally ordered by Gene, face-to-face, to find a way to get three different churches to quit listening to three different brothers in those churches. Gene perceived a threat from them, and he told me to take them out. (In Scotland, Romania, and Florida. If any of you brothers wonder what I did, just ask. Gene rated me a failure all three times.)

In Gene's books and personal appearances he always advocated silence, but behind closed doors he undermined his own words. Why would he do this?

It's a pattern familiar to any woman or child who's suffered abuse.

An abusive husband relentlessly presses for control of his victim (don't call her a "wife" - that's a dishonor to the word.) Whether he gains control through seduction or battering, through flattery or belittling, through bribery or deprivation, he will have control - whatever the cost. The first thing he must do to win that control is isolate his victim from anyone who might help her.

We who gave our lives to Gene were already well isolated. To varying degrees, and sometimes to a great degree, we were isolated from families, from outside friends, from Christians who didn't follow Gene, from leaders in other churches, and even from great Christian writers and thinkers who had the misfortune of not being promoted by Gene.

Gene was isolated, too, but in a different sense. Gene reported to no one, except his secretaries and his wife. No one knew the whole counsel of Gene's heart and no one could speak with gravity into his life. Gene consistently claimed to be under the oversight of someone, but who that was changed on a regular basis and I never heard of that oversight making any difference in his plans. For a brief period my name was on that list, and I can certify he never heard anything from me that made him change his mind about the least thing. Maybe others fared better.

So far as I know, there was only one thing that impinged upon Gene's total control over his churches - those same churches.

Individuals in the various churches sometimes had opinions of their own, opinions that could spread and create tension and raise difficult questions . And Gene was never happy with difficult. If a brother in Timbuktoo loved everything Gene said and loved Gene, but questioned whether there might be a better way to do some little thing, Gene would shut him down.

An accountant in our church once recommended Gene let us handle our donations to him a little differently, so as to make our tax records more audit-proof. His suggestion was good for Gene as much as for the churches, and as we all listened to him we were all impressed and happy. All but Gene, that is. Gene came down on that brother like a cornered animal. He fired that brother from all responsibility in the church, and did everything in his power to discredit him to us. We were not to tell that brother anything; we were to treat him as someone who had a hidden hatred for Gene. He made our rejection of that good brother a measure of whether we loved God's work.

We were already isolated from everyone on Earth, but Gene still needed to isolate us from each other.

Over the years, Gene did two things.

1) He invented the doctrine of silence.
It's not quite true Gene invented the doctrine of silence, of course. Search for "code of silence" and you'll find it's been around for a long time. You might just notice it's been polished and perfected largely by two classes of organization: the mafia and cults. One thing is sure, though. Gene's idea of silence was invented by someone, because it was never revealed by God in scripture. It's not there.

2) Gene made sure we always were afraid of each other.
I was not the only brother sent out to "take down" another brother. Whenever Gene felt a threat from a young brother, one thing would not happen and another thing would, just like clockwork. Gene would NOT talk to that brother at all, and he would send another man to teach the church to distrust that brother. It was brilliant, because it didn't just isolate the brother Gene found threatening. It also isolated the man obeying Gene by doing something we all found frightening and questionable, and it isolated everyone by creating an environment of distrust in each other.

When Gene put a knife in one brother's hands and required him to use it on another brother, everyone was wounded, the brother who felt the cut, the brother who dealt the cut, and the brothers who knew their day would come. He isolated all of us. It was a double bind. We knew any man who respected Gene could not be trusted, and any man who did not respect Gene could not be listened to.

It's also good old, traditional, spiritual abuse 101, and we bent our minds like pretzels trying to make sense of it.

Gene was either practicing something so holy that his methods were justified, or the thing to which we'd given our lives was a garden-variety cult. From here it looks like an easy decision, but when you've sold everything and fallen in love with brothers and sisters, even brothers and sisters with whom you are sharing terror, it's a big investment. It's hard to walk away from that investment. Still, given what I witnessed while I was allowed "behind the curtain" my doubts eventually became certainties. Following Gene was a corrosive force on every life I knew.

Gene's work is most destructive to those saints who most give themselves to it. It has to be, because his work is glued together with lies and manipulation. Truth would bring his house down. The day that truth "undermines another brother's work" is an ugly day indeed.

I am not breaking silence to bring Gene's work down, though. Gene's already done that himself. A thriving community of a dozen churches has been reduced to a single church diminished by splits. I'm breaking silence because this weekend I saw a little healing come to some of brothers and sisters, and I felt a little healing myself.

For ten years I've wondered what really happened when I left. I've wondered what damage I did when I followed Gene's orders. I've wondered whether the brothers and sisters I loved back then could still love me after all the water under the bridge.

Gene's teaching of silence isolated me for ten years in his church and for another ten years after I'd left, but this weekend I ignored that teaching. For the first time, I sat face-to-face with brothers and sisters and heard little bits of their stories and told little bits of mine.

It was good.

A few pages up I said I have an idea what we need to do to heal.

We are isolated because we were systematically taught to isolate ourselves. We all loved the exciting, deep, and happy bonds we formed with brothers and sisters, but there was one area in which each of us was isolated. On any question of Gene's control, we each stood and bled alone.

If we're going to heal, we need to break the silence. We need to tell and hear each other's stories.

I don't think there's a formula for how it has to happen, but an awful lot of us need it. Face-to-face, email, phone, or web posting all work for me, but I know they don't all work for everyone equally. Let's find something that works.

It's been a long time. I think it's time we stopped bleeding and told the truth.

Kevin Knox
(Email Address in Profile)

All Consuming Fire

2008-12-24T23:53:00.000-05:00

2 Ch 5:13 & 14
It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and singers [were] as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the LORD; and when they lifted up [their] voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of musick, and praised the LORD, [saying], For [he is] good; for his mercy [endureth] for ever: that [then] the house was filled with a cloud, [even] the house of the LORD; So that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of God.

The Lord appeared as a pillar of fire and a column of smoke to the people of Israel. He covered all Mount Sinai with clouds and thunders and lightnings. He filled the tent of meeting, the tabernacle, with this cloud.

... And not again in the 300 years prior to this event!

300 years ago, in 1708, George Washington had still not been born. America was still a dark continent. Austria had still not annexed Hungary. The Great Alliance bested France in some war I've never heard of. 300 years is a long, long time. Most of us can barely read English written 300 years ago.

Generations had lived, loved the Lord, and walked away from Him repeatedly. Canaan had been occupied. The judges had come, ruled, died, and been replaced with new judges by God because His people could not curb their lusts without a judge over them. They'd grown tired of judges, and begged for and received a king in Saul. Then God provided better in David. Their government had completely changed several times, and been transferred untold times.

They'd been gathering 3 times a year (or failing to do so) for as long as anyone could remember. They'd been watching the annual sacrifices and hearing the readings of the law. They'd been tithing and resting on Saturdays for generations. Their religion was set in concrete.

And then Solomon started his building program. I don't know how long it took, but if you read the previous 5 chapters of 2 Chronicles, you'll see the immense scale of the temple. The "bath" at the front of the temple held 24,000 gallons of water. The Holy of Holies alone was overlaid with 45,000 pounds of pure gold. The place was a monster.

And the response of Israel was equal to the task. They poured out their hearts and pockets into building this place. Everything about Israel was utterly consumed in financing and enabling this house David had envisioned. Again, read the previous chapters to see what it looks like when God's people become excited about building God's house.

When the time came, the priests led the people in united praise. The band struck up a song, and everyone overflowed to the Lord.

And the Lord overflowed back.

The people were stunned.

They'd heard of such things happening, but they'd never remotely even felt a quiver of nervousness by imagining that such a thing might happen to them. God failed to warn them that He might actually dwell visibly in the house Solomon was dedicating.

Their unexpected Guest arrived.

2Ch 7:3 & 4
And when all the children of Israel saw how the fire came down, and the glory of the LORD upon the house, they bowed themselves with their faces to the ground upon the pavement, and worshipped, and praised the LORD, [saying], For [he is] good; for his mercy [endureth] for ever. Then the king and all the people offered sacrifices before the LORD.

When God breaks in upon His world, everything changes. Problems fade and invisible things grow solid. Daily bread stales to mere distraction. The will of God grows savory. It's God. And He's here. And I'm seeing Him fill His house right in front of my eyes.

If a celebrity even just a cute girl gives me a second glance, I'm flattered. If God comes in response to my work of building and my praise, I'm flummoxed. Israel planted their faces on the pavement because the Spirit was moving in their hearts. They worshipped from love. They siezed the honor the Lord bestowed on them, and returned it with fiery love.

They were stunned.

Stunned the way a humble guy is stunned the first time he realizes "that" girl is looking at him with real love. It feels misplaced. Inappropriate. Impossible. For God to honor their sacrifices and inhabit the dwelling they'd made for Him with their weak hands loosened their knees miraculously.

2Ch 6:18
But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!

And Solomon was right. God could not dwell in that tiny little house. It constrained Him.

So He took it upon Himself to be born of a virgin.

God traded in that house on a single, not-so-beautiful, human body.

But the glory that filled the house and brought all Israel to her knees was exactly the glory that filled that Man. It was God Who inhabited the temple, and it was God Who inhabited the temple on Earth.

The people followed Him, even though the veil was firmly closed and the fire of Divinity was hidden deeply within Him. They sensed something, and they were stunned at the wisdom and authority that flowed from His mouth and heart. The dove's descent onto Jesus was about the best clue most of Israel ever had that the Shekinah Glory had filled the temple once again.

That, and Jesus' announcement He would destroy that temple and raise it again from nothing in 3 days.

The Man Jesus contained all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, but God wanted more. It was God who decided to tear down the temple of His own body, leaving not one stone atop another.

And it was God Who raised that temple again, but this time not a single body. The temple had once been a badger skin tent. Then it was gold overlaying cedar and stone. Then it was a single human body. And when Christ rose from the dead, the temple grew larger than David or Solomon might ever have have dreamt. The temple grew into the glorious spiritual gathering of bodies that is the church.

At Pentacost, the Lord descended again to take residence in this new temple. He filled it with the fire of His presence. Moses and Solomon presided when the Lord descended in a cloud of smoke into the first temples. The Spirit presided when He descended like tongues of fire and sat upon each of the people in that upper room, filling them with His life and word.

Strip away the glitter of the Christmas the world tries to sell you.

Strip away the family bonding and sweet traditions.

Strip away even the manger story with its wise men, angels, and Mary.

What remains is the reason God was ever wrapped in swaddling clothes. Before He could be Christ in us, the hope of glory, He needed to be Christ the Seed sown in death for us.

Every single object described in the temple corresponds to an equivalent office in the church, filled by someone who loves Jesus Christ. And when the people give their gold and jewels to the building of the body, and when they give their hearts to praising His glory, the Shekinah Glory fills the temple because the Lord is good, and His mercy extends forever.

May your Christmas be rich in the stunning power of the invisible.

Honest Abe

2008-12-22T23:19:00.000-05:00

There are those who insult Lincoln as America's Julius Caesar, who overthrew the Republic of Rome to make himself emperor, and accuse him of railroading America for his own fiendish purposes. They powerfully inveigh against his deconstruction of the Constitution, and the bloody war fought to satisfy his need to dominate the honorable men of the South. And those people are not defined by the fact they were raised Southern. They're dedicated Christians from all over the country.

You can find some of them here: http://www.theamericanview.com/

Just search for "Lincoln."

The argument is essentially this. America was formed as a union of sovereign states held together by a Constitution. In fact, the essential sovereign unit of American government was the state until Lincoln's power grab. When the South looked up and saw that their right to sovereignly rule themselves was being imposed upon by a self-important North, they resisted. They would not see the union, as orginally conceived, torn apart by Northern self-righteousness and arrogance. And Lincoln merely used those Northern vices in imposing his own power lust on the nation, and in sending many thousands of good American boys to their deaths.

The argument is disingenuous.

It ignores a handful of key points in building its airtight case. Actually, most arguments truly are airtight when seen from one perspective. The question, of course, is what one's perspective is, but that's the actual subject of this post and we'll get to it a little later. The history on this topic is of interest to me, so I'm going to carry on with it a little longer.

I was raised to believe that at times the American government was my enemy. I married a woman who sometimes believed the American government was our enemy. I buy food from a guy who believes the American government is sometimes our enemy. And I had immediate sympathy to this Lincoln as Caesar argument from the very first time I heard it back in the late '80's.

It was interesting to read an impassioned defense of this argument against Lincoln.

Then read 14 of Lincoln's speeches.

His arguments against secession went like this:

OK. Secede if you must. Just do it the right way. Don't do it by force of arms, but by force of election. The ballot formed the country, and only the ballot can splinter it.

Furthermore, it is right to give the entire country a vote on the secession of any part of the country, and that for several very good reasons. First, is there any contract which once formed can be broken by any one party at any time? The states have severally entered into contract together, and have profitably enriched one another in many ways. For the seceding states to take the wealth gained from the other states without compensation is theft. For the seceding states to close off the possible benefits of the contract from the remaining states is painful. They must honor their contract, even as they seek to end it.

Furthermore, there is no way to divide the nation that doesn't result in the overall impoverishment of each part. No matter how the country might be split, the states will have to deal with each other and the fallout of any separation. The final, resulting nations will be poorer for the division. So why divide with blood? If there must be division, why not equitable, legal, ballot-driven division.

Lastly, it is unthinkable that all of the states should decide to evict just one, and yet what is the difference between every state seceding from the one and every state agreeing to kick that one state out? The mean, selfish kind of a freedom demanded by the Southern states was an unjust freedom. The selfish acts of one member of a family have a depressing effect on every member. Sovereignty is not the same as freedom from obligation. When one member secedes from a marriage, it is not a simple and detached act of personal freedom; divorce is a devastating blow dealt to every member of even the extended families involved. The states are obligated to deal with the honest effects of their attempted secession.

These are reasonable arguments. To compare Caesar, who made himself Rome's destroying savior by marching his army into Rome and conquering the capital, against Lincoln who worked with the Congress and left the power of legislation in Congress' hands throughout the rebellion, is too much.

Lincoln made mistakes, and did things that caused questions in his time and ours. His suspension of Habeus Corpus is still talked about among people who talk about such things, but even at that it was only for a time and then Congress was given the reins. Lincoln was a man and not a god, and it showed in his mistakes. He was given a hard road to walk, and he walked it as honestly as I believe any man could. He took brave steps over and over and he saw the job through to its final stages.

But there are those who are not content for him to be a man. They need him to be an American Satan.

Why?

I believe it's because of their own desires. They desire their states to be free today in way they never will be again. Fair enough, but if they get their way in this will they be done? Or will they then want sovereign counties, and cities, and homes? (I'll tell you one thing. They'll love quoting that question within their own contexts.)

These are big questions. Where to place the dividing line between personal sovereignty and community good is contentious.

What I find interesting is that in 1861 this line was drawn by men who wanted to hold other men as slaves. The cry is loud and long that slavery was never the issue, and I hear that cry, but I cannot respect it.

In the end, Lincoln did not fire the first shot of the Civil War. The secessionists fired first on Fort Sumter. Lincoln had promised that he would not march on the South, and he never broke that promise. He proposed compromise after compromise, but the South would have none of it. They wanted the right to do what they wanted to do, and it cannot escape me that what they wanted to do was inarguably evil.

The first intended use of the lofty freedom for which those men of the South died was the continuance of a great evil.

And I believe I find a pattern in that. We are most usually willing to "fire the first shot" when we are protecting our right to do some evil after which we lust.

Having read Lincoln and his detractors, I am more impressed with Lincoln's character, courage and ideals than ever before.

My point of view has moved a lot in the last several years.

=========

I'm about to take a bit of leap, so be sure to come with me.

I believe this was my mistake in trying promote the home church. It was not enough for me to want to see the church done differently. I needed the steeple-churches to suffer demolition. Following Luther's example, I wanted to secede from all Christian organizations and I wanted their hierarchies blown to smithereens.

My point of view has moved a lot on the church, too.

I find myself wondering how many of the men manning pulpits under gaudy steeples are men for whom I'd have the utmost respect, if I only knew their story. Instead, I only know them by a single doctrinal stand they've taken somewhere along the line, and that as framed by their enemies.

May the Lord forgive my ignorance. And may He bless the men who stand for Him as well as they know how.

The Body of Christ

2008-11-30T14:21:00.000-05:00

I was reading in Scientific American today about HSPs - Heat Shock Proteins.

The Wikipedia article is pretty technical, and the SciAm article is only slightly less so. I'll save you the trouble of reading them and then jump to how it amazed me again at what the body of Christ truly is.

An HSP is charged with helping other proteins do their jobs. There are proteins specific to every cancer cell. The HSP cannot fight cancer, that's the job of our T-cells, but it can snag a little signature of that protein and take it to a T-cell, for example. Another protein might need to be folded up like a pretzel to work, and be having a hard time growing into its mature shape. HSPs make that folding happen. They can't do what the protein needs to do, but they can help that protein get itself folded into the right shape.

(And, BTW, to enhance the benefits of HSPs in your mortal body, exercise. Their rate of production is increased under sufficient stress, and heating up your core temp with exercise does the trick, according to a SciAm side-blurb. I'd love to think of how that applies to Christ's body, but not today.)

Everything the body does, every single little thing from digesting food to fighting disease to kissing a baby on the forehead, requires the interaction of millions of entire subsystems. Even something as simple as a bone cannot do its job without systems on top of systems and within systems. And what's more, almost everything in the body does more than one thing. It does its thing, but it makes sure other things can do their thing, too.

The finite but immeasurable complexity of our Creator's work astounds.

The connection between our bodies and the body of Christ is almost unavoidable, so I'm not going to belabor it. The least, most hidden member of the body, when functioning correctly, could be that perfectly tailored HSP for someone. Without ever being able to fight off a cancer, the quietest soul in a congregation might touch someone in a special way that makes him confident enough to resist evil. We need each other in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

And that's what I want to belabor.

We just found out about HSPs in fruit flies in 1962. It was 1977 before anyone realized that what happens in a fruit fly happens in mice, too. It was another pair of decades before they began to see just how remarkably versatile the lowly HSP really is. I could rattle off story after story of science's amazing discoveries that things they considered completely unimportant are actually keys to our very existence.

It turns out HSPs have one other little function. It's of some moderate importance, I imagine.

HSPs keep us from being mutated genetic freaks.

Seriously.

Micro-evolution happens every day of our lives, in every living being, and every living species. Most mutations are highly negative, but somehow we don't die. That somehow is tied to these HSPs. No has figured out just how yet, but somehow HSPs buffer and suppress poor genetic guesses in our bodies. It's these lowly, unknown, functionless HSPs that keep us from spinning out of control.

Again, the parallel to the body of Christ is amazing. Think of it the next time that bunch of old ladies in the corner is keeping the church from doing something that would otherwise be really exciting. They may just be keeping your church from mutating beyond repair. :-)

Here's the thing that floored me. Scientists are only just now beginning to see how very complex the human body really is, but I think they might be light-years ahead of Christians who think they have an idea how the body of Christ works.

I've done home church. I've done pentacostal revival. I've done presbyterian accuracy. I've done random gathering. And EVERY ONE OF THEM has profited me. I've been blessed by the body of Christ every time I've joined myself to her, in every form.

I've argued with passion that every church building should be burnt to the ground and that every pastor should be made to get a real job. I've argued for the freeing of every member of the body to serve their function, without mediation by some hierarchy. And I've argued for one hierarchy over another. And I've argued against the anarchy of home church. (No, these are not in chronological order.)

I've arrived, through all this mess, to the place I'm almost unwilling to argue against anything. (I'll still argue for lots of stuff, though. :-) )

The body of Christ is too complex and wonderful for me.

She responds very well to leadership. She responds very well to freedom. She responds very well to anything around which her members can unite, which is to say anything that does not inherently create confusion. And somehow, when placed in swirling confusion, she can create some amazing and beautiful order.

She can also be crushed by leadership. She can also be starved in freedom. She can also fail in the middle of the most unity-centric, ordered care imaginable.

Whatever else she may be, the body of Christ is far, far beyond mortal understanding. I suspect the bio-spiritual dance of the children of the Living God demotes the mystery of HSPs to elementary school levels. And I used to think I had it all on a string in my 20's.

Wow.

The best I can do is prepare myself to behave properly within her, give my best to her, nourish myself on the purest milk and meat I can find, and then love her wherever I may find her.

Anything else is certainly beyond me.

Child's Play

2008-11-15T16:35:00.000-05:00

I'm refering to Calvinism and PreMillenial Dispensationalism and Ecclesiology and all their brothers, sisters and cousins.

It's just a feeling I have right now, and not really a definitive thought, but I thought I'd articulate it anyway.

There's a chance I could be investigating a new church in a few months. My current church is wonderful, but my circumstances might make such a move practical. You know how I am about attending the church closest to my home.

As I considered what this might mean, one of the things that crossed my mind was that the new church I'd most likely consider is anti-Calvinist. This little detail reminded me of the awkwardness of starting at my present church in 2005. I awkwardly explained to the pastor that I was a Calvinist, Amillenialist, and home-churcher. I was happy that he was willing to let me be all those things in his church.

Doing that all again was unappealling.

And then I thought back on all the problems my Calvinism had caused in my present church. There was ... Well, really there just wasn't. Aside from the fact that I'd mentioned my Calvinism, it had never caused a single problem. I'm at peace with each person's need to choose God, so it doesn't trouble me when people use that form and formula for describing conversion. I think they need to believe God holds them by His unfailing choice when troubles crash in on them, but they are usually happy to believe that, too.

And so it happened that I had the thought that maybe I'm not much of a Calvinist any more. I still believe Calvin was right in most of what I've heard he said, but that doesn't make me a Calvinist. I still believe the key points of Arminius' disagreements with Calvin were in error, but that belief doesn't define my relationship to anyone.

When I call myself a Calvinist, I don't mean to separate myself from anyone but I absolutely do define my relationship to them. I commit us to starting our acquaintance adversarially. And that does not seem like a good idea.

So, I thought some more. It would be awfully convenient for me to find an excuse, any excuse really, to hide my true beliefs. That kind of dishonesty calls for deeper rationalizations. :-)

I thought about my current small group in this church. We meet weekly, and I'm not sure I've ever felt the need to make a specific point of my beliefs on Christ's return or how our hearts first learn to trust God. That's a lot of weeks and a lot of arguments and a lot of not once needing to base my contributions to that group upon the fact that I'm a Calvinist. It turns out, week after week the most important thing is knowing Christ and knowing my brothers and sisters and speaking and hearing wisdom as best I can.

(Maybe I'm becoming a Peoplist?)

I would not trade my knowledge of doctrine for ignorance. I just think maybe doctrine's a good thing to "do" in your youth. A real understanding of what God does and why is a great foundation and launching point for life. Knowing that God saves and then we are saved has been a tremendous comfort and compass for me. And I gleefully admit that I don't have a lock on any doctrine. I could be wrong or right for the wrong reasons, and I'm certainly lacking a lot understanding even of the things I know. Still, I have the basic comfort and compass of knowing the broad outlines of God's motions through history, and my part in them. That knowledge of the Eternal One has been a timely salvation for me over and over again.

It's just that I'm not cut out for dedicating my whole life to such knowledge. I'm cut out for caring about people, and giving my life to the Lord through them.

The most important thing a baby lion can do is play. One day that play will enable him to lead a pride and hunt massive wildebeests and elephants. Even so, my play at doctrine in my teens through thirties taught me to use the scripture as a man - to edify and heal. The people who taught me to make war with doctrine did me no favors, mind you, but the ones who taught me to seek the mind and ways of God showed me the way forward into His mercy.

Doctrine was life to me, just like play once was. I still play and I still study doctrine, but I seem to do both less and less.

I think it's a good thing.

The Portal of the (Candidate's) Soul

2008-10-29T07:42:00.000-04:00

There's an old anecdote:
It is said that Abraham Lincoln, when he was President of the U.S., was advised to include a certain man in his cabinet.
When he refused, Lincoln was asked why he would not accept the man. "I don't like his face," the President replied.
"But the poor man isn't responsible for his face," responded his advocate.
"Every man over forty is responsible for his face," said Lincoln.

As I look at this election, I care that Obama looks like a bit more of a socialist than McCain. But, I still remember the days when Republicans everywhere rejected McCain as a liberal socialist, too. And I care that McCain has some gravel in his gut that Obama won't have for a few more years. But, I know the job just might forge Obama into something great, too.

I know everyone's up in arms about having two such terrible candidates, but I really think these are two of the best candidates we've had in a while. I think there's a real chance either of these candidates could really make a positive difference in their areas of concern. I do like McCain's areas of concern better than Obama's. And I have a definite leaning to the right, anyway.

Still, I had my doubts.

Watching these videos was an, "Every man over forty is responsible for his face," moment for me, though. These videos moved me past my doubts. Obama ain't funny. Oh, his jokes are cute, and he has a presence, but given the opportunity to have some fun he takes no risks. Given the opportunity to join in play with his audience, he plays along instead. McCain jumps in the mud and starts slinging it. As I watched these videos, I really, really liked McCain's face. I'd love to see that man leading this country.

Watch these videos and tell me whether you see him differently. Or whether you just think it's silly to make big decisions over little things.

Obama Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EF_QNJAYxg

Obama Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SkFjTCscM4

McCain Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdWeqiyn3zQ

McCain Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1Ishs8QSUM

Oh, and I'm really sorry I'm not really blogging any more. Some months life just gets a bit busier than others.

We Shall See Him As He Is

2008-10-19T15:31:00.000-04:00

One day we will see Jesus face to face. All our dreams will come to fruit, and we stand right there in front of Him.

But oddly, it will be a human-sized experience in some way. It will be the opposite of a dream that can keep changing with every new thought. Jesus will be Jesus, and He'll never change. He'll be there in a body, just like our new one, and He'll definitely look like something. It's an odd thing, but He'll no longer be an amazing million possibilities. Jesus will be Jesus, and when we pass Him on the streets of gold, we will recognize Him.

In a sense, that might be a little odd. Imagine meeting the girl of your dreams for the first time. 999,999 possibilities drop away in an instant when you see the real thing. You could almost mourn the 999,999 girls that will never be, but then you can finally begin knowing the girl that's really there.

Getting to know the Jesus that's really there just might be like that. We might first have to mourn the Jesuses we imagined before we can love the Jesus Who's standing there in front of us. I think that will feel good and right.

And when it happens, I suspect an amazing thing will happen. We will be shocked to discover that we already know Him. We'll be shocked at how few surprises there are for us, because have already known each other. Jesus will reach out to us, and we'll know that gesture because Bob and Dan were just like that. And He'll laugh with us, and it'll be just like Charleen and Linda.

I think the biggest surprise of meeting Jesus will be the degree to which we are not surprised by the beauty we see in Him.

It's an exciting hope.

The Eight

2008-10-08T17:00:00.000-04:00

If you're over 40, you like the old songs. A lot. That's why there's so many oldies stations.

I noticed that this morning. I don't listen to the radio, and I do run with the windows down, so I hear a lot of stations over a month. I recognize the music rolling out of the windows of people my age. The Boomers are redefining the layout of the radio band as much as they are anything else, and I like it when they drive by because I get an instant warm feeling from whatever song they're currently ignoring.

And it makes me wonder stuff.

Are we hardwired to learn and like music in our teens, and after that everything we like requires extra concentration? I learned to like classical in my early 20's, and it still doesn't give me a warm fuzzy.

And I learned Camptown Races and She'll be Coming Around the Mountain (with variations) and others as a child, and they're still a part of my repertoire. There's hardly any cause to sing such songs any more, but they used to be a common language across generations according to popular American myth.

Amazing Grace is like that, or it was before it fell into complete disuse. These days you hardly hear it except on the bagpipes in movies that want to create instant grief. Just as I Am used to be one of those. I still wish it were around. It's probably my favorite sentiment, and statement of grace upon which I most rely. I chose it for my wedding 20+ years ago, and still love it.

It seems to me our churches are making a profound mistake by not perpetuating the common language of song. There should be (let's say) 8 songs that are sung at least 4 times a year, and everyone should be required to learn them. Anyone who is a member of the church should be able to sing these 8 songs, at least the 1st and last verses, without an overhead, hymnal, or karoake prompter.

Simple reality teaches me that the older folk ain't going to learn the new songs easily, so if we want the barrier to entry to be low for them, we should give the benefit of the doubt to an older hymn over a newer alternative.

What would your 8 songs be?

(Over the next week, I'll be at a conference in Wash DC, so I might actually be able to comment on this thread! WooHoo! Vacation!)

What Happened to Cause the Financial Meltdown?

2008-10-04T22:53:00.000-04:00

Ya'll know I'm a diesel mechanic gone digital, not an economist. Still, this thing is big. And more than just big, it's fascinating because the damage control is being done in real time by panicked leaders and companies. The opinions are thicker'n skeeters in Louisiana right now, and not just from pundits. The average Joe has an opinion, the pundits are changing their opinions, congressmen have opinions, and it just so happens we have a quartet of presidential candidates with opinions.

It's absolutely enthralling.

In a, "Wow, my kids might grow up in the stone age," kind of way.

Anyway, here's a link to Michael Kruse summarizing his opinion of the steps that got us here.

I live in a world of linked data points. The more points you can make jive together, the more likely you've got a useful opinion. Michael is the first guy I've seen link every point. He indicts Democrats, Republicans, lenders, free markets, regulation, and greedy Americans, but that's no big deal. Everyone is doing that. He does it in the right way. He points out what they did, and why they did it - actually why I might have done it myself if I were in their shoes.

I respect and can use an opinion like that.

And, for the record, you might enjoy the video at his post, too. :-)

A Prophetic YouTube Post

Why We Divorce

2008-09-28T00:07:00.000-04:00

Salvo Mag started up a conversation between me and my son. The magazine is excellent for that. If any of you need such fodder, I HIGHLY recommend it. I even agree with it quite often.

Anyway, Salvo blamed the rising and already astronomical divorce rate on something. I'll let you read it for yourself to find out what. I'm going to give you the rant I went on over it. The conversation was pretty awkward, because I'm one of those statistics, but I never let a little awkwardness stop me. I argued that everyone's wrong about the reasons behind the crazy divorce rates.

The Left Wing often says the divorce rates went up as soon as women were no longer forced by economic necessity to survive in empty, unfulfilling and even abusive marriages. They have a fascinating data point, and one for which I have respect. The divorce rate in any society increases and decreases in lockstep with the degree to which women are treated like chattel. As women become freer, the divorce rate increases. With this data, they point out the essential inequality of the deal women get in marriage. Women, they assert, immediately realize how much better off they are alone when the option becomes viable for them.

The Right Wing usually says all us divorcees just lacked commitment. The romantic excitement went away, and things got hard, and we all caved and ran away looking for greener pastures. They point to the hippy generation's free love mindset and the Boomer's self-obsession and find all the explanation they could possibly want. The "Greatest Generation" died and left America in the hands of a bunch of selfish cowards. When the marital going got tough, we walked away.

Bzzzt.

It seems to me both arguments are paper thin on the surface. The lefties cannot possibly imagine women are better off alone. Raising kids is the most fulfilling experience life offers us in our 30's and 40's, but doing it as a single parent is devastating. There's still good and joy in it, but the workload kills you a little bit every day. And financially, the single life is stupid. To be single financially is to have no backup plan, and to pay double for most of the resources in your life. (Housing, food, utilities, etc. could all be split with a spouse.) The idea that women are freer just because there's not anyone committed to facing life with them is silly.

The righties could possibly be more insulting, but I don't know how. Everyone who says divorcees lack commitment has simply tattooed on their forehead that they've never been divorced. Again, I don't know any Christian who got bored and decided to spice things up by starting over fresh with a new face. Pretty much when your "answer" on any subject is that everyone's lazy, you're missing something key. I just wish evangelical Christians wouldn't miss this one from the rooftops with their bibles held high over their heads, because millions of broken souls have no way to take their self-righteous accusations helpfully. They just turn away, every bit as lost and broken as they were before Jesus' self-appointed representative stepped in to "help."

Still, we all need an explanation for the hockey stick that describes divorce rates from 1960 until the present.

The explanation is simple. None of us knows how to stay married any more.

It's a skills thing. Our parents used to be involved in helping us judge the quality of our prospective spouses, and after we'd chosen someone to wear our ring, they were "present" enough in our lives to help us navigate a course through those critical first rollercoaster humps.

Who's involved now?

Our parents used to live a couple blocks away from their Mom and Dad. Now we live a couple states away. The extended family used to be the only family there was. Now, it's almost weird to stay in touch with Mom and Dad, much less to lean on them for help and advice. Moms and Dads used to watch "that son-in-law of theirs" and if things got iffy, they got mad. Not any more. These days we keep everything to ourselves, and our parents never hear about our problems, even if they can see them.

And we are hopelessly awkward at fighting. Spouses used to know how to have a good fight and a good forgive. These days the fights are too intense and the forgiveness is too shallow. Consequently, we don't know how to complain to each other. If you cannot complain without starting a too-strong, too-permanent fight, then you won't complain. And if you don't complain, things that could be changed fester. We panic at every conflict.

And that's caused because we don't know about the rhythms of relationship.

We're told that the emotion in a marriage follows a steep downward curve and bottoms out by about year 10 of marriage. If you ask many kids today to draw the trajectory of romantic love in marriage, you'll get something that looks like the current housing market - it starts high and spends the next 50 years in the toilet.

But that picture is not true. Instead, romantic love starts high, dips low, bounces back a little less high, dips a little less low, and through this process eventually settles somewhere in the middle of the scale. No one taught us that. No one taught us it was so simple, so when the first huge dip came we poured heart and soul into getting the fight resolved and the love restored. And when we "won" and everything was back where it should be, we relaxed - only to find ourselves speeding into another dip. We wore ourselves out trying to fight every dip and depression, when all we had to do was trust each other and exercise courtesy, honesty, and forgiveness.

Our generation KNOWS that you need a personal trainer to lose weight or learn tennis. Anything that requires actual skill requires meaningful training. No one tries to become a good tennis player without finding a good coach to give them the basics.

So what do we think? Marriage is easy?!?!

Marriage requires no skill?

Anyone can have a successful marriage if they are willing to be enslaved and if they have enough commitment?

When my wife and I were struggling through those first years of marriage, we had no training and no support. I don't think we were unique in that. We had another couple going through the same stuff we were, but we couldn't really talk to them. Church leadership didn't care to be involved, and our families were so distant as to be no influence at all.

We were guessing!

The real question is how we guessed right for 16 years given all the ballast we were carrying. But we were Americans, and we were smart, and we were successful at so many things. And it looked like things were working for so long, and we made it through so many high waters together. We sweated out days and months and years of low times, and we made it. Up until the last year of our marriage, we were proud of how we'd faced everything together.

But every struggle took its toll.

Go ahead and lecture me about not being committed. What? Do you think I haven't played that mp3 in my head? You can be as committed to tennis as you want. If you lack training, you'll injure yourself while learning nothing so much as to hate the game.

All our successes taught us to hate the marriage.

It takes a village to make a marriage. Look back on history, and you're fooling yourself if you think you see greater commitment in 1950. You're fooling yourself if you think you see women who wanted to be free, but couldn't find a way out. Look back on a world that lacked the isolating entertainment of the television, though, and I think you're onto something. Those kids HAD to play with each other, and they learned profitable conflict. There was nothing else. Look back on a world that expected parents to be involved in their adult children's lives. You can see the last vestiges of that world played out in the sitcoms that made the mother-in-law a villain. Mother-in-law jokes aren't funny any more, because there's no more friction there. The mother-in-law is half a state away, and the young couple has her visitation rights carefully controlled.

Nobody meddles any more, and it's costing us dearly.

We need help.

Infantilism

2008-09-24T23:07:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine is a committed agnostic. He's not the kind that wonders if there's a God when the power goes out for a couple hours, then forgets again when the wide-screen comes back on, either. He's the kind who's argued against Richard Dawkins after reading 3 of his books, against Plato after reading the Republican, and against preachers after hearing them ply their trade.

He commented after reading the book of Matthew that it was like no other philosophy book he'd ever read. He found it amazing in its directness. He put it like this, "No matter how well it might be concealed, every philosopher's book whispers, 'Don't you think I'm smart?' That's nowhere to be found in Matthew. Neither Jesus nor Matthew cares whether you think they're smart. It's just as direct as it can be."

You have to respect that kind of observation and that kind of observer.

He was listening to Christian radio again the other day and noted it depresses and encourages him equally. One of the depressing things, he said, was the Infantilism.

He said the people on that radio wanted Jesus to answer all their listeners' questions. Jesus could tell them what to think and what to believe. The preachers wanted Jesus to clear all the obstacles in their hearers' lives. They wanted Jesus to pave their paths with roses and wipe their butts for them. "If," he said, "you can imagine wanting it, Jesus WANTS to do it for you."

I don't know about you, but I will absolutely vouch for his observation.

I've never thought of calling it infantilism, but the name is dead-on.

I've written on this subject enough times that anything I said now would be repeating myself so I won't bore you with a diatribe against Infantilism. I just wanted to share the term with you and the prayer that we would be delivered into a rich, fully mature experience of God.

The Year of Rallying Dangerously

2008-09-16T23:44:00.000-04:00

In August of 2007 I made a promise to myself that I was going for one year to pour everything my body had to give into winning a tennis tournament. I started my quest at the Reynoldsburg Open. In August 2008 I played the Reynoldsburg Open for the second time. In 2007 I won through easily to the Quarterfinals, then lost in a tough match to the #1 seed. In my second attempt I won the hardest match I'd ever played to get to the Quarterfinals, then lost in a tough match to the #4 seed. They were my best two showings of the year, and the second was no better than the first.

This is the story of my continued failure to master tennis.

I've had an expensive affair with this elegant, introverted sport, and never more so than this year. I know everyone doesn't like to read and think about tennis as much as I do, not even most players, but if you're interested read on and I'll tell the story of this year and what it's meant to my life. If you don't I promise I'll understand.

I fell in love with tennis at age 14 or so.

Back at 14 my whole life was at, "Love All." That's the score at the beginning of every tennis match, and my life was still a blank sheet awaiting the unfolding of whatever story it would tell. I spent hours back then hitting against various wooden walls all over my little home town of Grass Valley, CA. I did the same thing with soccer, but it's much easier to practice tennis alone than soccer. With soccer, you can kick penalty kicks all day, and do some light dribbling, but without at least one other person it's pretty hopeless. With tennis, a simple wall will let you practice everything but volleying and return of serve.

I even bought my own racket. The $20 things my parents bought me just weren't cutting it any more. The T.A. Davis Imperial I bought was $80 of pure, voluptuous beauty. (http://www.woodtennisrackets.com/makers/tad/tadrac1.htm - it's in the third row, on the far right.) It was my own money, and when I wore out the first racket, I turned around and bought another just like it. I never regretted spending that money, and I never regretted wearing those rackets down to nubs.

I found that I actually loved more about tennis than just playing. I learned how much I loved being alone with my wall and my ball. I could settle into a groove, pushing myself left and right, wearing my body down, and wondering where the hours could have gone. I was a pretty massively depressed kid, and solitaire tennis played profitably into my survival.

I guess I was emo before emo was cool. :-)

In high school I began to make a little bit of a name for myself. No one on the team hit with as consistent form as I did. Against the wall, I had even worked out a dependable form on my one-handed backhand. No one else used the one-hander back then, so it became a kind of signature of mine. I went on to win a number of high school matches.

All I remember are two losses.

The first one was a really close ladder match on my team. John had not watched as many pros as me or modelled his game after them, but he was resourceful and he was getting the better of me. At one point the coach walked by and found out I was losing. He just said, "I guess John wants it more than you," and walked off.

I was devastated.

That was a deep, deep blow. I wanted that win much worse than John did. It meant a lot more to me to be #1 on that team than it did to him, but John had figured something out that I didn't figure out for years. Looking back, I know I could not have beaten him that day, but I carried my coach's accusation for decades. It might have motivated another player, but it hyper-motivated me. It placed a burden on me that I could not bear, and my reaction to it started me down the road to choking in a way I could not cure.

My second memorable loss was in a match against the local public high school's scrub team. Our little Christian school didn't have a lot of players to choose from, so their scrub team ended up beating us. I don't remember whether if I had won my match, we would have won the meet.

Anyway, it was a single-set match, first to 8 wins. I was ahead 7-1 and felt badly for the poor little kid on the other side. I backed off the littlest bit to let him get a game or two and lost 7-8. It's the kind of thing one doesn't forget, but my coach's look told me I'd really, really never forget it. His eyes reminded me I lacked heart, and couldn't be trusted to deliver under pressure.

Halfway through my little opponent's comeback, my niceness turned into panic and finally into a full-blown choke. I started losing because I was nice, and then choked because I feared I hadn't "wanted it bad enough." I learned that day never to lose out of niceness again, but my habit of choking was permanently fixed by that day.

I'm a very emotional man, and tennis is a fickle sport to emotional players. I needed help dealing with my emotions in more areas of my life than tennis, but tennis was a perfect mirror for everything else that was happening in those years. I was a kid with some potential but who never figured out how to harness it. Instead of the real strength that I did have, I tried to harness some "true grit" that just wasn't me. I started trying to do everything by some unnatural force of will, and it just didn't work for me. And that never works for anyone on a tennis court.

Pretty much everything about life sucked. It just showed most obviously in my tennis.

I laid down my rackets when I graduated high school. Nothing good was happening for me out there, so I let it die. Any potential I might have had was long since gone, and there was no point in playing the game any more.

It was about 10 years later when I picked them up again. I found that tennis was fun if I played doubles with a partner who could keep my emotions under a wise rein. Singles was still too much and too hard for me, but doubles was fun and we won the city championship at our level - and the city was Atlanta. The level was pretty low, but it was nice to have some success.

Then I injured my knee, and laid the old rackets back down again until my divorce.

It had been 11 years since I'd last touched the old Wilson Pro Staff 7.5 in my closet, but with everything else falling apart I needed something unimportant to call my own. My knee was OK if I wore the brace, so I had the racket restrung and joined a 3.5 doubles team.

My two years were just what the doctor ordered. They were good men and I began to feel like I could play the game again. They whetted my appetite, and I began wanting to play more and more.

During my two years there, my main tennis weakness was on full display. No matter what kind of match I was in, I could find a way to choke. I could find a way to be intimidated, or to play below a poor opponent, or just to try too hard. Somehow, I figured my problems out by the time we reached the playoffs, and that never hurt. I think both seasons I was something like 5-3, but I don't think I lost a playoff match.

My little bit of success gave me courage. The choking problem was still there, but I began to hope that I could master it. I was, after all, 40-something now - not 16. The lure of singles tennis began to grab me. I had failed at singles all those years ago (2 1/2 decades? Really?) and I wanted to try my hand at it again. I'd heard there were singles tournaments around Columbus, and I wondered what would happen if I played them.

It seemed like I'd kind of learned how to handle choking during our playoff matches. Maybe playing in tournaments would tap into whatever helped me with that same kind of stress.

So, I started training for singles. And the choking only got worse. Somehow this sport that was a game for many seemed to be a life and death struggle for me. The fear of missing a simple shot grabbed me around the throat point after point, match after match, and year after year. I'd loved tennis for 30 years when I finally played that first official tournament in August of 2007. I beat a guy who hadn't played in years pretty handily, and then played the #1seed. I gave him a run for it. I surprised him, and hung with him for quite a while before he imposed himself on me.

He beat me in straight sets, and there was an obvious skill gap between him and me. If I was going to win a tournament, I really needed more and better skills.

So, I called in a pro.

I went to Joan Ramey's tennis camp.

http://www.rameycamps.com/site/tennis-schools.asp

I'd recommend her gifts and experience to anyone. She retooled my game from top to bottom in 3 days. She saw more hitches and more glitches in my game than I'd ever guessed anyone could find, but she was equally observant of what I was doing right. I left her camp with the strokes to compete with the big boys. It was expensive, but it was the cheapest money I'd ever spent. I could have spent years trying to put together all the things I learned from her in one weekend, and having those years given to me at 43 was quite a wonderful gift.

And with that training in hand, I came back to the local tournament circuit.

And it knocked me on my butt.

I'd love to tell the story of how I rose to the top of Columbus tennis, but I never even made a splash. I'm afraid I have no desire to the tell the story of loss after loss after loss. I know that will disappoint you, but try to understand.

It probably took 8 months after my time with Joan, practicing 3-5 times a week, for the things she taught me to settle down into the depths of my unconscious the way the 30 years of bad habits had done. The strokes I wanted at the beginning of my tournament journey were finally beginning to come naturally.

And even after those 8 months I was still losing to 1st string high school players. Now, that's not exactly something to be ashamed of. A 1st string high school player usually has one or two really good strokes, a lot of stamina, and a deep, burning desire to win, but I was playing to win.

An old man like me usually has cunning, experience, and a valuable calmness in any situation. Oddly, I have none of the three.

I'm not a cunning player. I come straight at you with my best game. If you can beat it, I'll lose.

And my experience was useless. When you throw out all your old strokes, it sets you back a bit. Suddenly, you don't know what to do in a given situation, because you've always done something else before. You find yourself having to think when you should be simply performing, and that's the death of any value experience might have brought.

And more than anything else, I was not calm. Even having strokes that should make me a decent tournament player could not help me breathe when the pressure hit.

I think I played fifteen to twenty matches total. I met up with about five 2nd string high school players during my tournament play. I beat them all. I brought my best game straight at them, and they could not beat it. I probably met up with about ten college level players. They all beat me easily. I brought my best game at them, and they knew exactly what to do to it.

And I met up with three 1st string high school players.

These were the losses that hurt. I lost all three of these matches, and I lost them because I choked. It was truly heartbreaking. And just to cheer me up, a couple of the happy winners gave me tips about what do to when I'm under pressure. Thanks guys. Every tip was one I've heard about 100 times, and whispered to myself during the trial by fire. Every tip failed me.

My old high school coach was a really great guy, and a good man. I praise him for everything he did, and I don't want it to sound like I blame him for what I did to myself across all those years. He did what every teacher does. He experimented. He cared and tried to figure out a way to help me reach my maximum potential. And he did what I've done so many times in my life, and guessed wrong. It's not his fault.

For 25 years I'd carried his words around in my head, and with my game sharpened beyond anything I'd ever achieved before, I was still pulling those words out and killing my potential with them in really unhappy ways.

I have to admit, I was getting close to putting the old rackets down again. I'm a card carrying masochist, but the fun of paying good money to get my butt stomped in the first round of every tournament was beginning to wear on me.

In July, I found Brent Abel.
http://webtennis.net/tips-series.htm

I may or may not ever play in the style Brent recommends. I've tried it out, and had both great success and abysmal failure. Some of the fault has been mine, and some of the credit belongs to my opponents. We'll see what I do next year. But whether or not I start playing his game, I purchased everything he had on mental skills, and it was a bargain.

Brent's primary aim is to teach each player mastery of themselves, and I needed that more than anything. My strokes were never my problem. It was always me. He freed me of my choke. And he did something even better than that for me. He taught me things about myself I didn't even know. He gave me permission to play tennis like an introvert, and in so doing I learned what I look like when I'm really competing well. I don't look like my high school tennis coach thought I should look. I don't look like tennis announcers think I should look.

When I'm playing my best, I look like I'm really unhappy and almost bored.

Since I started looking at myself through Brent's magnifying glass, I've seen something change in my game. I've become competitive. I beat my first 1st string high school player, beat a 1st year college player, and lost well to a pair of college+ players. It's been a new world for me, and a happy one.

My first win in the Reynoldsburg Open of 2007 had been against a 3rd string high school tennis player. My win in 2008 was against 1st string high school player or maybe even better. And my Quarterfinal loss there in 2008 had twice the quality of my loss in 2007. I was still losing, but my tennis was actually better. Finally. And more than that, I enjoyed myself in a way I did not enjoy my loss in 2007. Tennis is a lot more fun when you can breathe.

My results are no better, and I doubt they ever will be, but my joy with this game is much richer now.

Last night I lost a match 6-7, 4-6 to an old, cunning, inexperienced competitor. He beat me in exactly the same way I lost that ladder match back in my high school days. By rights, I should have won. My strokes were better and my mental game was sharp, but my opponent found the same old weakness. He discovered that I eat up any shot that comes hard and flat at me - like a wall might return. All those years ago I taught myself to hit balls that come off a wooden wall - hard and flat. Anyone who hits anything to me that a wall would not hit always has a great chance of humiliating me.

I lost that match, but one thing was different. I enjoyed myself. And I was sure the guy cheated me out of four critical points! If he had seen those 4 critical points the way I saw, I might have won by as small a margin as that by which I lost. But even with that weighing on my mind, I was enjoying myself. I could see how a worthy opponent was beating me, and I honestly enjoyed trying to stop him.

3 months ago the scoreline would have been 4-6, 1-6 because he figured me out at 3-3. We both knew the moment he changed his game against me, and we both knew the battle was on. It was a real hoot as I tried to force him into positions that kept him from hurting me, and he kept finding ways to hit that one ball I couldn't figure out. He pushed through, but I only choked away three or four points the whole night. It was fun.

And that makes me want to hold on to these old rackets for another year.

Tomorrow I'll work on that shot my opponent kept hurting me with. It'll be just like old times; me, a tennis ball, a machine (that can toss me exactly the shot I need to practice) and pushing myself until I wonder where the hour's gone.

And after my next match, I'll work on whatever hurt me worst that night.

And I'll enjoy myself.

In all this, I've learned one thing above everything else. I've learned the golden value of pushing myself to master something. I accept the reality now that I'm never going to master tennis. After all these beatings, it's still hard to accept. I really thought one day I'd be able to win a tournament, but I can now see that if I do it will take a lot more work than just a single year, a little bit of luck, and it'll have to be a small, small tournament. The guys who play the big tournaments are phenomenally good. The distance between their skills and mine is greater than the distance between Federer's skill and theirs. Really. They are that good. On my best day my best backhand can't compete with what they do while joking around and practicing.

And it is good, it is very good, for me to see what real mastery looks like. I'm embarassed to say I can see how little progress I've really made toward it, too. But I'm proud to see how much more progress I've made than if I'd stayed where I was and kept flattering myself. Pushing against the standard of play at these tournaments finally forced me to come to grips with things that had bothered me for decades, and that can only be good.

I finally learned to enjoy the game again.

Some day I'll probably rewrite this story, because it deserves to be more readable, but today I'm going to publish it as is. It's my story and it's kind of a rough ride. It makes sense that it'd be a rough write.

I'm really glad the Lord made me with a love of tennis, and I'm really glad I came back.

Power's Back On

2008-09-15T20:51:00.000-04:00

After just 18 hours.

In retrospect, I guess we might have resorted to cannibalism a bit early.

:-)

Even the food in the fridge all still seems fine. It was quite a blow, though. I cannot imagine being in it down in Houston.

I was out riding my bike on a tree-covered trail when it hit. I really ought to pay more attention to the weather reports. In fact, I had gotten back on the bike to head home after hitting some tennis balls with a random stranger. The balls were blowing as much as 15 feet away from their initial target when we finally decided to call it a day.

The trail ride was actually a little nervous. A tree fell behind me, and another falling limb caught me right in the arm. In the end, I just went home and watched it all from my porch. The neighborhood had some dramatic tree falls, but nothing personally. I went and checked on all my neighbors and contacts, and everyone was good to go.

I really do have about 3 posts in the oven. Don't give up on me yet. :-)

My First ...

2008-09-01T00:50:00.000-04:00

Opportunity to preach, that is.

Yes, your little codepoke got to stand in a pulpit for the first time this morning. That's not the whole reason I've been so slow to post, but it did have an effect. :-)

It was an exciting morning for me, and for those of you who are interested it's online already thanks to the ultra-efficient sound guy at our church.

Fruit in the Wilderness

We've Been Pronouncing It Wrong!

2008-08-14T22:32:00.000-04:00

Eureka!

Some of you will recall that I've been obsessed with the answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything for some decades now. It is the very question which Douglas Adams' fictional computer, Deep Thought, was brilliantly and successfully invented to answer. Deep Thought's answer, though, was as inscrutable as the question itself.

Deep Thought told them the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything was, "42."

The philosophical conniptions Mr. Adams imagined as a result of this one little answer filled a book and more.

But, you see, that's the very problem. Mr. Adams wrote a book, so we never got to hear the answer as spoken by Deep Thought its very self. Had we heard those words from its own sub-woofers, we'd have understood everything!

I was toodling along this afternoon when a car had to merge from two lanes over. It was an interesting car mostly in that it made a Mini-Cooper look like an SUV. I really hadn't previously realized you could make a roller skate street-legal, but the owner of this ... whatever it was .. obviously had looked the regs over a little more closely than me.

In fact, the roller skate could seat two people. I know this, because his license plate said so, plainly, for all the world to see, Four 2.

That was when I saw it. Or rather, heard it.

"For two."

Deep Thought never said, "Forty-two." He surely must have said, "For two" and some stenographer wrote it down in a messed up kind of shorthand that wasn't phonetically based like all rational shorthand must be, and we were left to pick up the pieces for all time. (And, of course, the world would not be here at all if it weren't for that mistake, but we'll not go there.)

Look at the universe around you and tell me it isn't for two!

Right down to the Creator and His bride. :-)

The Church's Biggest Problem

2008-08-10T21:28:00.000-04:00

KB put together a great post on the evolution of the church, tracking it from the fellowship it was in the 1st century to the enterprise it is now. His take is fascinating, and as usual I cannot comment on it due to technical bugaboos. I cannot even go back and reread it before I pen this knock-on post. Ah the joy of technological limitations.

Way back when I was able to read KB's post that once through bloglines, I agreed and disagreed with it. I agreed that an ideal 21st century church would look different from an ideal 1st century church, and that the differences would be gains for the church overall. I disagreed that the paradigm of an enterprise could ever be a profitable one for any church, ever. I was tongue-tied, though, because I am not sure exactly what KB meant by "enterprise." I know what enterprise means to me, and I don't support that. I just don't know what it means to KB, and I'm sure if I did I would support whatever he means.

I think maybe the biggest problem facing the church today is our obsession with finding and fixing the biggest problem in the church today.

Along those lines, KB's post brought to mind an email I wrote a month or so ago (while I was busy not blogging.) It was about a book review I'm currently not writing while I'm not blogging. In the book, the author relates a life-changing experience he had doing a particular spiritual discipline, and proceeds to sell that discipline as the "one thing" missing in the lives of all Christians and the one thing that, if it were present, would change everything.

Here's what I wrote in that email:

The answer to fixing Christianity has to lie somewhere else than finding 99% of it's best and brightest certifiably insane.

The author tells persuasively of his experience learning how to do this method on a 6 week retreat. He gives ample evidence of changed lives in everyone learning it and of the lasting, beneficial effect the experience had on people from very different walks of life.

But is that proof of the method? I doubt it.

As I was reading his story, it occurred to me that the Navigators, the Promise Keepers, the Holiness Movements, the Charismatics, the Legalists, the Missionaries, and Everyone Else can produce equally stirring anecdotal evidence.

Maybe that's proof that all anecdotal evidence should be rejected? It probably should, but I doubt that's the lesson here too.

Instead, I think this is proof of overly narrow root cause analysis.

Each of these groups was doing a different thing, but they were all doing it "together" with other believers. The common factor in each of these widely varied stories is that a group of Christians was wholly committed to really connecting with each other to do something profitable.

Given any silly excuse, if Christians get together with love in our hearts, we will touch each other and the Lord in life-changing ways. It takes a little excitement, a little leadership, a little hope, and a little focus to start that flow of love between brothers and sisters that bonds us together.

It's those bonds that change our lives.

It's like being in a family. Which is most important? Financial security? Emotional security? Passion? Purpose?

Just try living without any one of those things.

The church needs doctrine. She needs connection. She needs worship. She needs purpose.

I think I still believe a little bit in the house church movement. It's hard to say, though, because there are other needs that are more important. When a man is out of oxygen, he doesn't care so much that he's sleep-deprived. I wish I might see the church organized differently, but before I spend energy there it seems there are other things that might be more important.

The need to find and fix the most important crisis facing the church today seems universal, and it seems to be driving us further and further apart. I'm tempted to name this tendency to obsess over the church's biggest fault, "The tree-trunk of division springing from the taproot of Laodicean Pride." We proclaim that we see when really we're blinded by the lumber in our own eyes. I know I blew 10 years of my life chasing that wild goose.

I think I know what to do about the tree-trunk.

Quit trying to fix the church.

Our worst problem is trying to fix every problem. Maybe it's because we imagine we're wise enough to know every problem. Or maybe it's that we like fixing big things instead of doing little things. Or maybe everything's pretty much OK and we need to get on with the business of doing that which God's been preparing us to do for all these centuries.

Whatever it is, we need to put 80% of our energies into loving the Christians to whom we are closest. Maybe with whatever's left over we can tinker with trying to revolutionize the church in our generation. I don't know, but I know I really need to pour my life out for brothers and sisters whom I can touch. I need to form bonds with my brothers and sisters that can survive the fires of disagreement, repentance, and boredom. I need to commit to people with all their messy needs, rather than ideas or disciplines or quests with all their manageable sterility.

And if that means learning to bond with emergent Christians, then show me the way to Starbucks. I can always buy a lemonade smoothie. :-)

A Chip off the Old Block

2008-08-08T07:03:00.000-04:00

It's not every day my son sends me an email, but when he does it's usually some pretty rich stuff. Yesterday's email was the kind of stuff that makes a father stop and say not just, "That's my boy!" but, "Dang. That's right."

I figured I'd share it here.

You might enjoy watching the video first, before you've heard his take on the things Obama says.

Obama proposes a gasoline price solution to struggling families

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And a young man analyzes Obama's thoughts

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The first thirty seconds are all I care about. The situation: consumers give money for product; companies increase prices because demand is increasing faster than supply; they make a lot of money, the majority of which is spent building the infrastructure necessary to provide five billion gallons of oil a day to the world; Obama, desiring sovereignty, promises to take money, willingly given in exchange for product, from the receiver, and return it to the consumer if the consumer votes him sovereignty. We have gone past the age of Rome, where the leaders provided bread and circuses with their own, albeit ill gotten, money. We have returned to some sort of barbaric feudalism where we choose our leaders based on whether they promise to earn us spoils. With his eyebrows hunched, his spine strait, in a calm, oratorical voice, he promises to break the trust of capitalism, which is that if you produce something people will give you what they produce for it, you can keep what they give you in exchange for your goods.

Who would not vote for a candidate who promises that you can spend your money and spend it again? A candidate who will have the police, the national guard, and the army behind any policy he manages to get through.

Perhaps I am making an excessive fuss about a throwaway comment, but the symbolic nature of it is so frightening.

Terminator: Spawn of the Machines

2008-08-02T21:29:00.000-04:00

In the heat of a fascinating discussion of whether a human can truly believe God, my son said that humans became self-aware at some point in evolution, and that when that happened evil became possible. He was countering my point that evil cannot be explained by evolution. Bad can, but not evil. His argument was that evil is a necessary possibility given self-awareness.

I basically had to concede the point.

Anyway, in a flash of insight, his statement brought back to my mind two things at once.

The first was that Adam and Eve "became self-aware" when they ate of of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In fact, from now on I believe that's the phrase I'm going to use to describe the fall. With the serpent's help, humanity became self-aware. It is out of our self-awareness that all manner of good and evil flow.

The second was the ominous history from the movie Terminator 2, "The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th."

For those of you, my faithful readers (and if you're still reading me at my blistering pace of 2 posts per month, then you are faithful indeed) who know the story of Adam and Eve a little better than that of the Terminator, Skynet was a massive supercomputer that became self-aware and began trying to destroy humanity. That's the premise of the whole Terminator series.

Hal is the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey that becomes self-aware and tries to destroy it's human operators. Wargames is about a computer that becomes self-aware and accidently tries to destroy humanity. I, Robot features a computer protected by the 3 Robotic Laws from ever hurting humanity that attempts to destroy humanity (yes, while obeying all 3 laws - that's the magic of Aasimov's work.)

What we have here, folks, is an archetype!

Of course, the theme is as old as Frankenstein's monster, but the thought was new to me. And I don't know how far Shelley really explored her theme. (Suddenly, I want to read the book. :-) )

On the 7th day of creation (I picture Adam falling on God's Sabbath; I don't know about anyone else) humanity became self-aware - and very scared of the Creator we were trying to supplant.

Idols in our Homes

2008-07-17T23:04:00.000-04:00

I've been worried for a while about people calling too many things idols. It's all well and good to be against people watching too much TV, but is it really an idol? Or is it just an inferior amusement, sometimes used badly?

I've been reading in Isaiah, and God is clearly annoyed when His people turn to idols. There's a really great scene in which Isaiah describes a dude who's obviously pretty handy with wood tools. Our new buddy grabs a good-looking hunk of wood, and turns it into a table and chairs, then maybe a plate or two, finally takes the chips and scraps and lights a fire to cook his dinner. That last left-over piece, though, he carves into an idol to whom he can "say grace" for his meal. It's almost funny how God sees no difference between the activity of making dinner and a making convenient god.

That's an idol.

Faith, hope, and love, Paul says, are the three things that matter, and those are the three things the idolator poured into that last piece of wood.

Faith is a logical, conscious decision to live as if a god's promise will be kept based upon prior knowledge of his power.

Hope is the ability to hang on now because you know god will make enduring the present worthwhile.

Love is a commitment to think, feel and act in the best interests of your god.

I see all three of those things in the actions of Isaiah's unhappy wood-worker. He reckons that his god has given him today's food, so he exercises faith that his god will do it again. His hopes for the future are truly based on the way his god will make that future pleasant. And he has invested his time and passion into pleasing that god with his carved image and tiny offerings to it.

I don't see any of that in America's relationship with the television. We don't think the television brought us any good thing, so we don't rely on it to bring us anything in the future. We don't hope for a better future because of the television's oversight in our lives. Maybe we invest in that box, but all our offerings are to ourselves.

And therein lies the key, I believe.

Our idol cannot be seen, because we no longer believe in the invisible. We don't have to incarnate it any more. We look at history, and find we've gotten our own meals for our own selves, so that's where we put our faith. We hope for our future, because we have laid plans for it and because science keeps making it better every day. And we pour our love out to stir up more passion from within.

In other words, we've not moved a lick from Paul's day. We've made a god of our bellies, trusting our lusts to bring us every good thing and our strength to keep us against the day of trouble.

Don't rail against the television. It's just a little offering we make to our lusts. Our cars and our wide screens and our nest eggs, our jobs and our houses and our spouses, our movies and our shows and our nightlife; they are the little offerings we give to appease our god, the little sacrifices we make to ourselves. We sculpt our abs, sleep at our custom sleep number, and dine in every luxury we can afford in order to strengthen and prepare our god to conquer for us. When our body is strong and our minds are tuned and our attitudes are adjusted, we can make the best of all possible worlds for ourselves.

When the Living God sees us in front of a TV, He doesn't trip out. I'm sure He knows a better way for us to spend our time, a way to spend time together, but He's got big shoulders and He can bear for us to overdo some entertainment. Through Isaiah God tells us it's when He finds us wrapped up in the arms of another that He is angered. It's not Ba'al with whom we whore, though, it's our better selves.

We strive to have faith in ourselves. We hope to grow better and wiser. We practice loving ourselves. We've refined idolatry in much the same way we've distilled the cocoa bean into crack. Ba'al was harmless compared to our idolatry.

Do you want to send a message to America?

Trust God.

The Match

2008-07-16T21:45:00.000-04:00

If you wonder what the match, The Match, between Federer and Nadal was all about, here's 13 minutes of bliss.

http://vimeo.com/1312674

As you watch, realize that any pro from any generation at any level can hit any of the shots you'll see in this video. No pro anywhere. ever. has hit 13 minutes worth of these shots, with this much on the line, with this much fear in his heart, as both of these men did last Sunday.

It was clearly the best tennis match of all time. The drama was unparalleled by any event in any sport I've ever heard of, stretching across almost 5 hours of time on court. If you've ever wondered what desire looks like, here it is.

Touching Base

2008-07-15T00:02:00.000-04:00

Hello all. Long time no see.

I think it's been more than a year since they instituted the blog-block at work, and it continues to make life tough for me. I used to be able to count on 30 minutes a day, 3-5 days a week, to put things out here that interested me. I think it's been 2 months since I've blogged anything regularly, and I don't see any breaks coming soon. I continue to be quite busy at home, and just seem to be getting busier.

One of my preoccupations these days has been tennis. This year I've played a very full tournament schedule, and I have learned SO MUCH about this game!

I cannot believe I ever thought I knew anything about tennis.

I don't know when I've ever been so profoundly humbled.

It's been very good for me.

Here's what's humbling about it. I used to think I knew as much about tennis as I did about being a Christian. Now that I know how badly I've sucked all these years at tennis, I'm pretty sure I'm right about being just that good a Christian, too. If people with true devotion can be so much better than me at a silly game, I am awed at how deep the waters of true wisdom might truly be.

I think about how far I thought I was in tennis, versus how far I now know I still have to go, all most every day. And almost every day I'm reminded how far I thought I was on the road to being a decent Christian. Well, praise the Lord, it just means I have that much more excitement and hope ahead of me.

The rest of life is really going well. I'm quite happy these days, and really feel the blessing of the Lord in every area of my life. I just figured I'd check in and let those of you keeping score know that things are good.

I do have several half-baked posts mocked up in my inbox. Maybe some day I'll actually write a couple of them. :-)

----

For those of you with too much time on your hands, let me tell you about my year of tennis-ing dangerously.

Here's the score. I've put all sorts of time and effort into learning how to play tennis right, and then teaching my body to do what my brain has absorbed, and what I've learned is that people who have been doing exactly that same thing for years are much better than me. I'm exactly 11 months into my master plan for local tennis domination, and so far I have yet to make it past the quarter finals of a single tournament. My record is something like 4-9, with at least 2 of those losses being 0-6, 0-6 drubbings.

I'm a putzer. :-)

I'm proud of this part of it all, though. I've stepped onto the court and measured myself. 3 years ago, I thought I was pretty good at this game, but I was playing at the 3.5 level when the tourney's are all 5.0+ events. I had no idea what the gap is from 3.5 to 5.0. Now I know. It's the gap between 7th grade algebra (which is way tougher than arithmetic) and college level calculus (which is still way below graduate level experimental math.) Not surprisingly, I've made it up to first or second year high school level algebra, and keep failing at the college-level tests.

I've had to learn to take my game out of the ivory tower, and learn how to make it happen on the hard courts. I now know, not just what an attacking game looks like, but what it felt like both times I did it right. I know what it feels like to decide to flatten out a forehand against someone who's eaten flat forehands for lunch for 2 decades. I've measured myself against the #1 seed in 4 different tournaments now, and come up wanting every time.

My expectations were completely unrealistic (or I probably would not have had the courage to try.) The thing with expectations, though, is that we really expect them to work. Having those expectations dashed really hurt ... every single time ... repeatedly ... publicly. But after a mere 11 months, I think I am beginning to see what I can really expect, and it's rewriting my experience of the game. I look back and see some pretty quick learning, and now I really feel good about what I see.

Here's my grades, as best I can assess them:
[Legend:
Dimension of Tennis
[:]
The way I thought I was playing in 2007.
[-]
The way I was actually probably playing in 2007.
[-]
The way I think I'm playing now.]

Grade card:
Forehand: B - D - C
Backhand: C - F - B
Serve: B - D - C
Approach: C - F - C
Volley: D - F - C
Put-away: C - F - D
Mental toughness: D - C - B

I think my best chance to become a winning tennis player at this level is to turn my volley into an A. You need an A to win, and you need to force other people to play into your A strength. Right now, my best hope is to lull people into playing against my backhand and surprise them, but it's not an A and it never will be. But I think I have the nerve to make my volley an A, and I think it's a rare enough game to upset some otherwise much better players than I am.

We'll see.

With my newly adjusted expectations, I'm actually starting to enjoy tennis. It's been a great ride, and maybe I've got a little glory tucked away somewhere in these tired old bones. I'll tell the story of my latest win some day, if I can get to it while it's still fresh. :-)

Thanks for listening.

Ishi, not Baali

2008-06-27T22:05:00.000-04:00

I was at church, and we had a visiting pastor who quoted Hosea 2:16.

He said, "Ishi," as he read it, and I was all over that. I guessed pretty quickly what I thought it meant, and quickly BlackBerry'd myself an email message so I would remember to dictionary it when I got home. Sure enough. About 1 time in 6, the word means, "husband."

This is such an arresting passage I'm going to go ahead and quote the whole thing. I don't have any big conclusions from it, but that one word was so telling to me. God found Himself betrothed to a lover who whispered Ba'al's name in her sleep. She sought Ba'al out with all her free time. She gave him little presents and the flower of her youth.

And He was God.

He made Ba'al, and could "disappear" not just him, but everything over which he was supposed to be "god." YHWH could have manipulated the wife of His youth, or overpowered her. He could rightfully demand that she call Him, "Lord Omnipotentate, YHWH." She has spent so much time adoring Ba'al, an abusive god if ever there was one, that she has taken to reacting to her Lord as if He needed to awe her with His power. She has taken, not only to worshipping Ba'al, but to calling YHWH Baali as an act of tenderness.

He dreams she will call Him, "Ishi."

He rejoices when we name Him rightly, tenderly.

Hsa 2:14-20
Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. And it shall be at that day, saith the LORD, [that] thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali. For I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered by their name. And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and [with] the creeping things of the ground: and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely. And I will betroth thee unto me for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the LORD.

Regarding my 10 years under Gene Edwards

2008-06-22T16:45:00.000-04:00

In a small group meeting in my church, I mentioned that I had spent 10 years in a "cult." I then had to apologize for not having mentioned it before, and explain that this is not a fact one usually "leads" with when meeting new brothers and sisters.
:-)

About 2 months ago, I promised a sister in the Lord that I would republish a statement I made about 6 years ago regarding the leader of this little group.

Those two events finally pushed me over the edge to get off my duff and pull this little story back from the archives and publish it again here.

This article was written in specific answer to some question. I believe the question was something like, "Would you recommend I join Gene Edwards' church?" It's not tremendously detailed, but it covers the broad outlines of what happened. If you'd like a little more detail, you can look at this series of posts.
http://familyhoodchurch.blogspot.com/search/label/Gene%20Edwards

Leaving Gene Edwards

By the time I started college, I had decided to spend my life as an itinerant minister of the gospel. The two things I knew were that no minister of the gospel should earn a salary, and that I didn’t want to take over anyone’s church. Instead, I would move from church to church, helping as I could, when I could.
Yes, I was full of the arrogance and idealism of youth, but I also knew something of my ignorance. I knew that it would be decades before I could be of use to any church, and that I needed someone to teach me. I began looking for an old man to train me in what it meant to be a worker in the church.
My quest for a new type of church led me to Gene Edwards’ books. I loved every word, and practically memorized every one. I had found the man who could teach me what the church should be. Amy and I married with the understanding that as soon as possible, we would move to be a part of one of Gene’s churches.
I had written Gene some time earlier to request permission to move to his church in Portland, Maine. Gene had recommended that I wait, and move to a church that he planned to plant in Atlanta. I could not have been more excited. Gene always wrote about how important it was to be in a church from the beginning. This would be my chance.
Gene wanted us to avoid Portland. It turns out that Portland was in its death throes. Gene explained to us that half of that church was experiencing church life for the first time, but that the other half had been a part of his earlier experiment in California. The older members seemed to be tearing the church apart due to secret bitterness against Gene. It should have been a clue to me, but I was too excited that the Lord had answered my prayers for a mentor.
We didn't expect to find a "perfect church" in Atlanta, but we sure did expect an exciting ride.
We could not have been happier those first few years. We fell in love with our new brothers and sisters, and practically wore out each other's living rooms. We spent hours together eating, singing, and dreaming. Life in the church was everything I’d ever imagined. We described the church as a piece of heaven come to earth, and we meant every word. We fought more than we could tell, and hurt each other too frequently, but we loved each other, and were loved just as much.
In the end, we left Gene and his church, and we would never go back. We still love the memories and maintain relationships with people who accept our departure, but Gene’s church was not heaven after all. In retrospect, the church in Atlanta looked suspiciously like a frat house, commune, or any other group of college kids thrown together by any fate. It was fun, but I suspect the excitement was just youth.
I believe the problem in Atlanta, and in all Gene’s churches, lies in the vision of the worker.
Gene started a 40-year countdown on his ministry in 1987. In 2027 he wanted us to look back on his ministry, after he was long gone, to honestly evaluate whether his time had been well spent on this earth. He told us that there would be no way to honestly judge his work until it had survived forty years worth of crises. I half agree with him. There is no way to judge a man’s work a success without seeing it survive forty years. I believe, though, that we can and must judge his work a failure today.
Gene Edwards proposes two standards by which a worker in God’s kingdom should be judged. The first is by his ethical standard, and the second is by the health of his churches. I believe Gene’s work fails both standards. To be fair, Gene believes that he is doing exceptionally well in both areas, and that he is doing so against incredible odds. His followers agree with him, and will defend his record without reserve.
Gene teaches that the foundation of a worker’s ethics should be that the worker would consciously lose whenever one of his churches is in crisis. I believe that this standard is false. Moreover, I watched Gene neglect even to try to meet it. What I saw him do under pressure was the exact opposite of what he preached. In situation after situation he manipulated the church from the outside, and micromanaged the outcome of crisis after crisis. He chose a spy or two in each church (sometimes overtly and sometime covertly) and used that person to pull the strings of our lives. At first, we were amazed at how much he knew about what was going on in the church. Within a year or two though, we had figured out what was happening. By the third or fourth year his ways were old news.
Gene's churches never had true, independent elders while I was there. Instead, we had "contacts". The brother or (more often) sister who reported our actions to Gene and brought instructions from him had an aura of prestige, but no real authority. Gene changed contacts pretty frequently, such that they could never grow into de-facto leaders. Instead, all the brothers ran the church together via “brothers’ meetings”. Gene told us that this method was not biblical, but that it was necessary to keep the egos of 20th century Americans in check.
Gene teaches that elders will spring up organically within the church. He also claims that those elders are his head covering. In my brief tenures as contact/elder, and in my observation of others in that role, I never knew anyone to exert headship over Gene at any level except once. That once, Gene declared that brother a mortal enemy, shunned him for the next seven years, and never allowed that brother into any position of responsibility again. I believe that this action is a natural outflow of Gene’s theology, and I'm sure that he would defend it as safest for the church.
The job of the brothers was to implement Gene’s plans. Gene does not like to manage details, and it was the job of the brothers to flesh out his plans and make them happen. Gene alone set the spiritual agenda of the church, and any deviation from that plan was sure to anger him. I know that this is a far cry from the version of the church that Gene preaches, but it is what I watched for ten years.
I was eventually forced to the opinion that Gene ministers in a fundamentally dishonest way. He told us that he was the most honest man we would ever meet, and for years I took his claim at face value. With stunning regularity, though, he put my trust to the test with actions that seemed to give lie to his words. I made excuses for him again and again, and struggled to understand each of his actions in the light of his conflicting claims. For years I found ways to believe him, but it was an exhausting way to follow the Lord.
The house of cards fell for me over the course of a dismal year in which I watched him tear apart the church in St. Cloud. He bragged about his boldness and ethics, then explained to us how thankful they should be that he been so spiritual in their dismemberment. There was no excuse for the things I watched him do that year. Finally, I had been forced to look at his actions, rather than at his words. Looking back over the previous years, I saw everything he'd said and done, and everything I’d chosen to believe, in a new and heartbreaking light. Gene’s years of explanations and excuses were all torn away, and the reality of everything I’d supported came crashing home.
I had watched Gene plant a handful of churches, and I had watched each of those churches die, sometimes more than once. I had listened to Gene explain how in each of those cases, it was the church’s fault. They had ignored his warnings, and failed to do what he lovingly suggested they needed to do to thrive. Looking back, his excuses were the same in every case, going all the way back to Portland. I cannot know what happened there, but I sure recognize the excuses.
I knew several of the churches that grew and died under Gene’s ministry. I watched them weep as Gene dealt with perceived enemies in their ranks, and listened as they begged to know why Gene was being so cruel to them. My loyalty lay more with Gene than with my own eyes, though, so I allowed those saints to believe that they were bringing all this pain down on themselves. I was wrong. I should have known enough even then to conclude that Gene was lying to these people, but I was too indoctrinated to see the truth.
Whether you agree with my assessment or not, nothing can excuse Gene’s track record. The second standard to which Gene holds the worker is the health of the churches he plants, and there are no survivors. (Several crawled back from the grave and he called them resurrected, but I would call them zombified. I lived through one such rebirth, and the second church was only half-alive while he was not there to breathe life into it.)
Gene blames all that death on the brothers and sisters who gave their lives to those churches, and to him. I would listen as Gene praised brothers and sisters to the highest heaven. A year later I would listen again as he claimed to have known all along that these same brothers and sisters were troublemakers. I watched it happen in every church, and to saints whom I know had done nothing wrong.
I was forced to realize that the problem was with Gene, and had no option but to leave him. Leaving him, though, opened another can of worms. I had to decide whether Gene’s theology was right or wrong. Should I leave just him, or his theology too? Should I keep trying to practice what he preached, or had we been pursuing the wrong goals for those ten years?
There are brilliancies in Gene’s theology, and he is a wonderful speaker. His standard for church ethics is quite elegant (if the world believes it is wrong, it’s wrong, else wise it’s probably just someone hunting brownie points with God). His teaching of the Lord’s Supper is truly beautiful (it should be a high celebration and a joyful feast, rather than an introspective wake). He also preaches that salvation is not the prime force behind history (the relationship between the Father and the Son is the central motivator for all of redemption).
Still, the core of anyone’s theology is a hard thing to nail down, and I was most concerned with Gene’s theology of the church. Gene preaches that each church should be autonomous, but his actions belie his words. Practically speaking, Gene’s several churches share one leader. The church planter makes every significant spiritual decision for the church. Gene taught us that the wisdom to handle the weightier matters would grow up in the church, but it never did. Gene handled all the weighty matters himself, or through his trained men, and we in the church were simply required to keep our mouths shut.
The two defining characteristics of Gene’s churches are both direct fruits of his theology. The first is their church planters, with their ultimate authority. The second is their brothers’ meetings, with their displacement of eldership. Inevitably, the churches became men’s clubs.
This atmosphere has had some painful outcomes. Gene told us, during the conference in which he planted our church, that the church and the family are natural enemies, and that neither can flourish, except at the expense of the other. When asked to clarify that statement, he told us that the family must not be allowed to steal from the church. Over the next 10 years, I watched, applauded, and participated as time and again our church stole from its families. There is nothing that I regret more than the pain our church caused families, and I believe that most people who have been mothers and fathers within Gene’s churches would agree.
In the end, Amy and I left Gene's movement for a number of reasons, but mostly we left because of Gene. We had our share of troubles with the saints, but those could usually be worked out. We fled that man's ministry. We adored those first few years in the church, and there are a hundred things to remember fondly, but leaving Gene Edwards is the best decision we ever made.
Whether you chose to follow Gene Edwards, or to move on without him, may the Lord bless you, and the body of which you are a part.

An Apologetic Moment

2008-06-19T20:33:00.000-04:00

I don't care much for apologetics. It seems a silly thing to me to try to prove God exists when the issue is one of judgement and repentance. Preach the word and trust that the spark inside a man will declare God's reality more loudly than any bacterial flagellum.

That said, an apologetic article in Touchstone Magazine caught my eye last week. The author was attempting to prove that it was the atheists who were really stepping out on faith by not believing in God. The absence of proof is not the proof of absence and all that, you know. I don't have the article in front of me, so I cannot quote it. Sorry.

Man, he pointed out, really ought to have a hard time conceiving of God's reasonings. It doesn't make sense for us to grasp God's thoughts. If God were to decide to hide Himself from all but those who truly sought Him, the fact that it made sense to Him would be all the justification He'd require. We would have to adapt to His reasons, and not the other way around.

From there, I got to thinking about how ants and humans interact. They don't. They just interfere with each other. We keep accidently stepping on them, and they keep taking inappropriate notice of our picnics and kitchen counters. And so it's almost hard to prove to an ant that we're even real. They see our acts, the things we create, but they don't really see us. They could even invent a bunch of bizarre rationalizations for why a field became a strip mall, if they cared to put their little hive-minds to it.

But the analogy does not hold, because of scale. We're too close to ants in scale. Ants could interact with us if we only spoke in pheronomes instead of words. And really, they see us just fine when we plop a finger down in their paths.

Which led me to think of microbes. At that difference in scale, I found a much better analogy. Microbes literally don't know we exist. They share the world with us, and we can affect their lives with heat and pharmaceuticals and light, but we cannot step on them and they cannot steal our food. We live in different worlds, even as we share the same world. We can ferment milk to feed the microbes we like, or incinerate our meat to off a bunch of microbes we don't like, but we're never going to amuse ourselves by making a moat around a microbe-hill.

And that seemed a lot more like our relationship to God. The scale of our relationship is just more massively different than any other relationship I can describe.

But why stop imagining just there? :-)

More than merely being generic microbes, we are cells. Each of us is different, and we were meant to colonize with each other. We are meant to come together, with all our uniqueness in full bloom. Then, when we are all assembled, we will be a body - a body capable of interacting with God as peer-to-peer, at His scale.

As long as we live alone, we are nothing. We are not even viable tissue when we are alone. But together, here in this womb we call Earth, we are growing and changing. Little fingers are becoming distinct and a heart is beating. We are confused, because we see only the cells nearest to us (and how oddly misshapen they are!), but God sees things at His scale, even if He entered ours once and now understands it. He sees what we each are becoming, but He also sees what He is making us together, and He is patient in ways we cannot imagine. He'll wait until His perfect goal for us is fully realized.

One day the sons of God will be revealed.

That Sinking Feeling

2008-06-16T23:00:00.000-04:00

Wow. Unanimity. What's that?!

:-)

I'm actually a little surprised that everyone agrees that "the answers" are not all in scripture. It's as if I'd figured out that the Earth is round ... yesterday. Being me, I'd let everyone know of my discovery by making some bold statement about how I was willing to sail past the sunset, confident that I'd return alive. Everyone else would look up from their newspapers and say, "Yeah. It'd be fun to sail past China and under the two great capes, Horn and Good Hope. Enjoy your trip!"

Fortunately, here in blog land, none of you could see my jaw drop. :-)

Well, and I'm still not used to people agreeing with me about much of anything. :-D

I was raised amongst three groups of Christians, all of whom shared basic doctrines and some theological differences, but all of whom were unanimously committed to scripture as the sole, final, absolute, complete, sufficient source for every question of life. Any question more complex than how to get to Arby's could be answered directly, completely and unambiguously from scripture.

Did I mention that my denominational background is, "Damentalist?"

And did I explain that Damentalism is what's left after you take the fun out of fundamentalism?

My Damentalist elders would have had a scriptural answer to my question, "How could I know not to marry a girl in 10 days." They'd have pulled something out of the scriptures (no, not those other places) about many counselors making for safe plans and the Lord not being the author of confusion and haste making waste (some of them would occasionally confuse Ben Franklin with Solomon), and assure me (and themselves) that had I only been firmly grounded in scripture I'd not have made a Gordian Tangle of my life.

Here's the problem, though. The kid sitting next to me would spend 12 years engaged to some poor woman, marry her, and divorce in two years, and they've have found every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did. And some other joker would call responsibly on a young lady, court her for 6 months, be engaged for 12 months and 3 days, and marry her with her father's blessing and muddle his life, and they'd have every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did.

The common factor is that their understanding of scripture's perfect guidance is clearest after-the-fact. They're like gypsies gazing into their crystal ball pronouncing the future as dim, until the dust settles and the weeping's begun. And suddenly, their wisdom doesn't taste like honey in my mouth any more. I just wish it were sweet in my belly.

So, as I look at the possibility that wisdom is something we learn, more like riding a bicycle than being born again, it resonates well against my experience. You all obviously agree with that intuition, and I think scripture would support us together.

But...

Have you thought about the tremendous burden and responsibility that puts on us all?

Hey! Being a Damentalist was easy. As long as I could not think of any scripture to stop me, or at least could plausibly explain it away, I could charge forward with my life like a rhonicerous on the scent of tasty daisies. I could examine the scriptures with an open heart, and whatever it they did not proscribe was fair game.

For example.

I could look at David snatching up Abigail and think 10 days was a LONGGGGG courtship. I could even be proud and thankful that I didn't have to collect the foreskins of 200 Cajuns as a dowry for Michal (and I didn't have to worry about the whole dying while trying thing, either. Those Cajuns can be mighty opinionated about their foreskins, I've heard.) I could even look at a handful of brothers maturing beyond the message of John the Baptist the very first time they heard Christ presented by Paul, and figure it was a wise thing to follow a man who brought a higher gospel.

The bible is full of stories of short courtships, immediate changes of doctrine, and droppings of everything to follow the leading of God.

Haste is commended by scripture over and over and over, if you're looking for that sort of thing. And my personality is always looking for a good reason to make haste. Always. Always. I'll even settle for silence on the subject that just lets me make my haste with a low-humming conscience. It doesn't strictly have to "quiet" for me.

But if the scripture is silent on some things, then I need to be cautious. I need to seek wisdom. I need to be sure I'm not being an idiot. Or simple. Or even a fool. If the scripture proscribes only those things that might show me to be evil, but leaves unmentioned some things that might show me to be simple or a fool, then I need to grow up.

It's a shame to have to learn that at 44, but I'm afraid I'll learn it again at 54, and again at 64. If the Lord is kind to burn this lesson into my memory through the fires of self-imposed experience, then maybe I'll only have to learn it this one last (major) time.

And I'll lay one more responsibility at my feet, and this one may fall at yours, too. As the church, as one of the three that agree on Earth (thank you, Missy!), I have a responsibility to those I see being foolish as I was foolish. I have a responsibility to turn my hard-earned wisdom into their narrow escape. And when I say responsibility, I mean that the church needs her holders of wisdom to step forward for those who need them. I mean that the Lord needs those who have received wisdom at His hands to pass it along to His sheep. I mean that He might hold us responsible for hiding our experiences from each other.

Perhaps the only purpose for my life is to serve as an example to others (http://despair.com/mis24x30prin.html) but I think maybe that's a pretty important thing.

Flipping Life

2008-06-15T16:05:00.000-04:00

In my previous post, I shared how I learned that one should not take ridiculous risks on a tennis court, if one hopes to win from time to time. Of course, if your hopes are more modest, then anything goes. :-)

It's not a brain-surgery-level leap to apply that to any number of areas of life. If one is not seeing eye-to-eye with a girlfriend, one could try to reverse the whole situation by marrying her. To a person who "flips" many life decisions that might even make sense. Such a man will experience some astounding successes, but "flipping" usually results in yet another defeat. Some of us have been there, or somewhere like it.

I lived the first 40+ years of my life flipping decisions most people could never make at all. Consequently, my life looks a lot like my tennis. People sitting in the grandstands are impressed at how well I'm playing tennis or living day-to-day, then are shocked to find out I lost 0-6, 0-6.

My life is very much like my tennis. I lose way too often to ascribe it all to luck.

The whole idea of playing the percentages, building a tennis point, or building a life one little part on top of another is refreshing and new to me. In a very real way it seems like a defeat to restrain myself from targeting an outright winner, but maybe I've suffered enough at my own hands to begin to do so. I'm afraid I'll end up accomplishing nothing if I don't take scary risks, but I've made a shambles so far by doing things the way that seemed right to me. I always want to be building something, but thus far I fail by building haphazardly, too quickly and with bad materials.

I won't belabor this point, because it's pretty obvious.

Instead, I'd like to ask a really tough question.

In church today, someone was talking about answers for life and said, "They're all in here," while pointing to his bible.

Are they?

Could I look in the bible and know that I should not marry after 10 days of courtship? Could I look at the bible and know that I should not follow a man who comes bringing a message of Christ more excellent than anything I'd ever heard before? Could I look at the bible and know whether I should spend 8 hours a week building the church and 4 hours a week building my children, or the other way around?

I think the answer is, "No." And I think the answer is "no" by the direct intent of God. He simply did not want us to be able to find those answers out of a book. I think He gave us judges and judgement and wise old men and women, and that we are to be very nearly as much to each other as the scripture is to us.

The bible will tell me that I must not start a family without marriage, that I should not follow a man away from God, and that I must work to build church and home, but it doesn't tell me how. I have been told for decades now that the bible tells me how to do each of these things, and I think that lie encouraged me to be more confident in my foolishness. I think that lie is an expensive generalization.

What do you think?

Flipping Tennis

2008-06-12T23:33:00.001-04:00

Ah yes, now where was I?

And how do you work this "blogger" thingy?

I do vaguely remember a time when I used to post pretty frequently, so I'm sure it will all come back - just like falling off a bicycle.

A couple of you have followed my tennis ramblings over the years, and I thought I'd share a little bit of what's been happening lately. In a nutshell, I may have played the first decent tennis match of my life on Monday night. It felt almost like one of those science-fiction stories where the hero falls asleep and wakes up in a new world. I blinked, and found myself playing at a level I never knew existed. I still lost, but I think I'll make it back to that place again the next time I step out on court, and I'm looking forward to that moment in a brand new way.

It's kind of along story from 1972 when I first started hitting tennis balls until 2008 when I finally hit one right, so I'll skip forward to Aug 2007.

Last summer my forehand was tearing apart my right wrist. I was using a really twisty motion known as a "windshield wiper" to put topspin on the ball, and all that wrist motion plus all the power was doing bad things to me. I was pretty convinced I was doing life-long damage to it, but I was still winning so I couldn't stop playing. As the 3.5 doubles season came to an end, I decided something had to change, and before quitting tennis I figured I'd try modernizing my game. (Anyone who knows me, knows how anathema "modern" is to me, but I was desparte!) As is my wont, rather than changing my forehand, I changed everything. I went from the Eastern grip taught for the old wooden rackets to the Semi-Western grip that is so natural with the new carbon-fiber rackets. Before all was said and done, I'd changed my forehand, backhand, volley and serve, all in radical ways. There ain't nothin' else to change, or I'd have changed it.

The new strokes gave me more spin and more power, all with the added benefit of my wrist no longer feeling like it was splitting in half. But wait! There's more! For no additional cost, I also received more accuracy and a more reliable shot under pressure.

There was no downside.

I was prepared and empowered to take the world by storm!

I entered my first tournament in September, and beat one kid before losing to a couple of solid players. They were easy losses to understand, though. Under pressure, 35 years of habit proved hard to break. I was mingling my Eastern style into my Semi-Western performance, and those two flavors did not taste great together.

I kept grinding the new style into my body, creating muscle memory with every stroke. I practiced a lot and critiqued every swing, working to keep my style as purely simple as I physically could. I never reverted back to the old style under pressure. I'd lose with the new style rather than scrape by on the old even one more day. It was all going to pay off. The temptation to give up and fall back was strong each time I lost, but I resisted.

Come December, I entered my second tournament. I beat one flaky player, before losing to a couple of solid players. They were easy losses to understand, though. I still reverted to the old style sometimes, and I hadnot enough played under match pressure with the new style.

I played some more between January and May, and even started having some success. Usually, I was pulling off come-from-behind wins against decent players. The inexplicable thing was that I had vastly better strokes than the players I was beating, and I was losing to my equals. I was choking in every match, and my game was suffering horribly for it.

Choking has been the eternal theme of my tennis, and it was not going away without a fight. If I could get past the choke, I usually won any match I played. The opponent became an after-thought for me. More than anyone I feared the enemy stuck eternally between my ears, and I was searching out weapons with which to fight him.

The new strokes were very helpful in fighting the choke. The Semi-Western is twice as choke-resistant for me as the old Eastern style. Others have different experiences, but the Semi-Western fits me like a glove. And my new skills gave me confidence that helped me fight the choke.

But something was missing, and the choke was always one wrong thought away for me.

I entered the Lancaster Open on Memorial Day weekend, and beat one kid before losing to a couple solid players. They were easy losses to understand, though. Nah. Not really. The losses were getting harder to understand. I beat that first kid 6-0, 6-0, which was nice, because in the past I'd never been able to beat anyone effectively. So, things were looking good. Then I ran into Steve Gunderson. I lost to him 0-6, 0-6 and I simply shouldn't have. Yes, Steve should beat me. Yes, he's much better than me. But no. He's not THAT much better than me. He plays with the old Eastern style, and he uses it brilliantly, but my strokes should have matched up well against his, and obviously they did not.

My other loss that weekend was to Pete Mudre. He ate me alive with frankly inferior strokes. He put wicked slices in the middle of the court, and watched me fail to handle them. Should I have beaten him? Probably not. But losing 0-6, 1-6 was just not right. He was not that much better than me. Really.

I registered my lessons from Lancaster and went home and added an attacking game to my style repertoire. It was the right decision, and it completely failed me in my next match. I played a guy who wanted to beat me really badly, and I choked. It made him really happy. Not so much for me. It had been so long since I'd won a tennis match, I was beginning to wonder whether I deserved to hold a racket at all.

I talked all this over with a kind-hearted, long-listening friend, and we decided I needed to feel more released in my tennis. I was too uptight about each error because I took them as indicators of my commitment or some such. Instead, I needed to realize that tennis was just a great opportunity for me to learn about myself, so every mistake was just another clue into my mind.

Then I entered the Gahanna Open. I only entered one division this time (I think I'm going to just stay with the Open divisions for a while, and quit playing the over-35's) and was paired against the #4 seed. The guy was much better than me, and it showed in my 4-6, 1-6 loss. The 5 games I won in Gahanna were an improvement over Lancaster, and my mood after the match was improved. I'd "felt it" a little bit, and when I'd made mistakes I'd been able to relax and avoid choking. I'd lost because my opponent was better than the, and not because I played worse than I should have. It felt better than the drubbings I'd received of late, but it was a far cry from good.

And then Sunday, blessed Sunday, happened. I went out to play against my "measuring stick," Nate. Nate could beat any of the guys who beat me (except maybe Steve, but I'd enjoy watching that match.) When I am finally able to put real pressure on Nate, I'll be able to play anyone. Sunday was not that day. I failed to play even to my own level against Nate. It was awful. All my self-talk about "release" kept me mentally positive, and I was not exactly choking, but nothing I hit was going in.

After we were done, Nate tried to give me a pep talk. It was an uphill battle, and he was not making much progress until he said these fateful words, "You're trying to flip everything."

I was baffled.

Nate explained.

If my opponent hit a ball low and wide to my backhand, I was in a bad position. That's tennis 101. I had maybe a 20%/80% chance of winning that point. 20 times out of 100 I win the point, and 80 times out of 100 I lose it. Nate observed that I was trying to flip that percentage with one awesome shot. I was trying to flip my 20/80's into 80/20's, and that required that I hit something amazing.

I won't be falsely modest here. I can hit shots just like that. Really. From that ridiculous position, I often will hit a screaming cross-court winner that leaves my opponent gaping.

I won't be falsely proud here, either. Ten times as often as I hit that screaming winner, I hit the ball just wide, just long, just into the net, just within my opponent's reach, or just out of the tennis park. There happen to be a lot more ways to miss than there are to amaze.

Nate said, "When you're in a 20/80 position, fight for neutral. Don't look for an advantage. Hit for 40/60, and if that works, then hit the next shot for 50/50, and then start thinking about 60/40. Don't try to flip it. Fight for neutral"

The light hit me like an arc-welder in a mirror factory.

I can scorch the ball back right at my opponent, instead of trying for an amazing winner. The chances are he will still win the point, but my percentages are up to 40/60 instead of 20/80. My odds improve. The chances are his next shot will not be as wicked as the one I'm dealing with right now. And if he does put the ball away, oh well. Against quality opponents you're going to lose some points even though you never made a mistake.

The reams of history and understanding that flowed through my mind at that moment would torment you, my reader, far too much, but let me point out a couple things.
+ So, THIS is what it means to "build a point!" I always thought building a point was trying to hit an almost winner followed by a clean winner, but no. It's bigger than that.
+ All I earned with my shiny new strokes was entry into the "rookie" level of real tennis. The guys I'm playing now all have every stroke I'm just learning. And when I say, "have," I mean they can hit it in practice 9 times out of 10, and can hit it confidently under match pressure. I really am vastly better now than my old 3.5 hitting buddies, but that means squat at the 5.0 level where I'm trying to play.
+ With every stroke, I need to be adding 10% to my advantage. That means I should not be hitting just to stay even, but I should not be trying to add 45% to my advantage with one stroke, either.
+ But my opponent is doing the same thing!
+ Wow!
+ Tennis is really an arm-wrestling match, with both of us trying to push through for 5% at a time until our opponent falls too far behind to make it up. And then we play another point.
+ ALL THE GUYS I'VE BEEN LOSING TO HAVE KNOWN THIS FOR YEARS!

No wonder they're beating me!

For 35 years I've been stepping out there and trying to flip disadvantaged positions. When I fail at the improbable, my opponent gets the point. When I succeed, though, they don't try to flip the point. Instead, they fight for neutral and build until they have me at a disadvantage again. Then I try to flip it again. If I'm lucky, I flip 1 in 5 points. In tennis, you must win 55% of the points to have hold a comfortable lead in any given match. Winning 20% of points leads to brutally ugly scores.

My opponents have been working to neutralize my advantage without risking a "full flip" like I do.

And this realization led to another, and more important one.

No wonder I choke.

You can only miss important shots so many times before you begin to feel like a failure, and begin to doubt yourself. More often than not if I'm in the low percentage position in a point I'll miss a big shot trying to flip the point, and when I'm at the high percentage position my opponent will hit a neutralizing shot to get back to even. Once we're even again, it just means I have another opportunity to fall behind, which gives me another opportunity to miss. I keep putting myself in positions that lead to missing! Psychologically, I've been shooting myself in the foot for 35 years.

The percentages don't lie. If I'm as good as my opponent, at some point I'll be ahead in 50% of the points we play and behind in the other 50%. From that position, if I win 55% of points in which I'm ahead and win 15% of points in which I'm behind, I'll get my butt waxed in public. In a 180 point match, that puts the score at 63-117, or in tennis score terms, 0-6, 0-6, 0-6.

Let me put it another way. I have to be so much better than my opponent that I am ahead in more than 70% of all 180 points to win. I will only win when I'm playing an inferior opponent.

And THAT's exactly what's been happening in my tennis life. I win with difficulty against people who are worse than me, and lose to people who are at my level.

Hmmm. When intuition and statistics agree about a thing, one had best pay some attention to that thing.

So, I signed up for the Bexley Open, drew another #4 seed, and held my breath. I went out there determined to "fight for neutral." I'd literally not touched a racket since Nate breathed his advice out upon my game just the day before, so I had no idea what it would feel like to "fight for neutral," but I was gonna give it the old college-dropout try.

The match started at 0-3. It was not propitious. :-)

But I learned. I saw that I was not going to be able to attain a neutral position by hitting softly or down the center. The guy I was playing was a former college player. That means he had been killing tennis balls daily for 4 years and testing his skills against high level competition weekly while I was plinking around barely winning 3.5 doubles matches. He was ripping shots that I don't even dare to try, and generally kicking my butt easily. To reach neutral against this guy, I needed to hit hard and toward the safe edges of the court.

So I did.

1-3.

The set ended at 2-6, and I was feeling the despair. I was broken twice, and that never feels good. Then again, I had nothing to lose, so I doubled my commitment to fighting for neutral and added to it a commitment to emphasize the word, "fight."

To start the second set, I broke him and held my serve to consolidate for a 2-0 lead.

I had never, ever, not even once been in the lead in any way against a seeded player in a tournament in my life, not even while down a set. Heck, I'd only once won more than 1 game in one single set against a seeded player! This was new territory for me.

Choke time.

Only I didn't choke.

My opponent had to work to win the next game, and then he had to work hard to break me back for 2-2. It hurt to be broken, but I'd made him earn it. I didn't give anything away, so I squared my chin and shoulders and went back to work.

I broke him again for 3-2. And consolidated by holding serve for the 4-2 lead!

I could not believe how I was playing. I was not surrendering points like I always do in pressure situations. I was playing like I belonged on this court with this guy who had years of experience under his belt, was 15 years younger than me, and taught tennis for a living at a local junior high school. I was making him sweat.

He held and broke me back for 4-4.

There was no longer a question of him deciding whether to bring out his A game. He was playing with every drop of tennis in his blood, and he was scraping out games. The two service games I held, I held at love. I was officially winning more points than him because I was making him scrap for every one of his service games.

But he did have all that experience, and there was a lot of tennis in his blood.

He held for the 5-4 lead.

At the changeover, I actually changed shirts. The pros do it when they want to feel ready for whatever comes, and it made sense, so I did it.

5 points later, the score was 30-40 - it was Match Point against me. If I lost the next point, I went home a 2-6, 4-6 loser. If I choked, I went home feeling like a sucker again. If I double-faulted, I felt like a moronic sucker. If I patty-caked the ball, and he killed it like he should, I felt like a sucker masquerading as a tennis player. And yes, all those thoughts squirmed into my mind past the locked doors of my subconscious. I shoved back down before I could serve.

I cast the krypton beam of "fight for neutral" all around my brain, and filled my mind with the determination to hit for 5% at a time. I served a good kicker to his backhand, and he sent back a mere 30% reply to the center of my court. I was up 70/30 in the point, and barely knew what to do. I fought off the urge to crack the ball somewhere, and went for 75/25 by hitting a reasonably tough shot to his backhand. I followed it in to the net, and he hit a neutralizing shot back to me. By attacking the net, though, I'd placed myself in position for just that shot. I stepped up and firmly punched the volley away.

Just like in the textbooks.

Just like I'd practiced when I added the attacking mojo to my game.

Just like a real tennis player would do.

That moment was the culmination of everything I've done in learning to play this game at this level.

I followed that point up by taking the next two and the game for a 5-5 tie.

Nothing could take that moment away from me. I played the percentages and made my attacking game the deciding factor at a critical juncture. I succeeded because I didn't choke, because I fought for neutral, and because I knew how to take the attack to my opponent safely. Just like real tennis.

I still cannot describe what that feels like.

For 35 years I've wondered, if I'd had the chance, could I have played real tennis with the big boys. For any number of reasons I've not tried, and when I finally did try, I failed miserably, and when I failed I wanted to quit. That volley put away 35 years of doubts and fears, and said to me that I'd grown up just a little bit. Finally.

I forced my opponent to weather a deuce during his service game, but he pulled through for the 6-5 lead.

This time, at the changeover I ate half an energy bar. It's the first time I've ever done that, and the first time I've ever wanted to do it. My opponent was suffering badly in the heat, and I was feeling as good as I've ever felt, but if I pulled off the next two games, I need the energy for that precious third set. I was hydrated and nourished and pumped.

And behind 15-40 very quickly.

My experienced and honorable opponent was cracking winners at the lines. I held firm. I served hard, and leveled at 40-40, then even pulled ahead for a game point. If I won the next point, we would go to the tiebreak and my chances looked good.

My next serve drew a 35% reply to the center of the court on my backhand side. I decided to go for my most beautiful shot, but I didn't decide it with enough conviction. I went for the inside out backhand. It's a shot I have, but not when I lack conviction. To take that shot felt to me like I was changing dance partners, and playing against the percentages. It was the right shot at the right time, but I didn't quite believe it.

I missed that shot, and probably the match, by 5 inches.

Back to deuce we went, and my opponent earned two more Match Points. I fought them off with an ace down the line (you should have seen his face) and a kicker out wide. On the sixth match point, I finally succumbed. In a heated exchange I put an inside out forehand just a couple feet long. It was a good shot, played for the percentages and played with conviction, that just happened to sail a little bit on me.

I lost, but I lost my first good match.

Looking back, I think my opponent knew somethiNg I had not figured out yet. Toward the end of a match, during clutch time, and after a hard fought battle to get to the moment of truth, you have to let fly with some calculated gambles. That's the moment to let the "wild things" off their leashes and see what you can do, if you're going to beat an equal opponent. I suspect in those last few games, after your body is fully dialed in and firing on all cylinders, you swinging with calculated abandon can shift things your way. It worked for my opponent, and he knows this game a lot better than I do.

If I had known that on Monday, I don't think my opponent could have stayed on his feet for the third set. The heat had about taken him out.

It's OK.

I'm signed up for the TennisFax Classic next week. We might just meet again.

The Most Important Day in Tennis, EVER (again)

2008-06-07T22:31:00.000-04:00

Yes, on Sunday June 8th, Roger Federer will take his 4th straight shot at beating Rafael Nadal in Paris at the French Open, Roland Garros.

Never has staying home from church been so tempting.

For those of you in a little bit of doubt who these two player are, you should read these links. (Those of you who know, should DEFINITELY read these links.)

Roger Federer
Rafael Nadal

Anything can happen, but Rafa is the 4-1 favorite so far. If you watch the match, watch for Federer to try to win points by attacking from the backhand wing. Watch for Rafa to counter by hitting the ball straight at Federer's backhand. Should Federer pull ahead at any point, immediately start holding your breath because the 4 times Federer has held a lead against Rafa on clay this year, he's managed to give it back again. The reason for this is simple. As soon as Rafa's behind, he quits trying to pick on Federer's backhand. Instead, he tries to blow the ball right over the top of Federer's backhand.

Since Rafa's a lefty, their backhands will be down the line from each other, instead of across the court from one another, and the one who puts the ball into the other's backhand side the most effectively will win. The problem is that Rafa will win just by putting it over there. Federer will only win if he puts it to Rafa's backhand, and then follows up by putting another shot all the way over to his forehand.

It's almost not fair.

But all's fair in love, tennis, and the Uncyclopedia.

HT: http://tennisworld.typepad.com/tennisworld/index.html

For all the Worker Bees

2008-05-26T22:27:00.000-04:00

This poem is not Christian. In fact, it allegorizes a Christian event to make a point that almost seems anti-Christian. In my opinion, it's just a beautiful, beautiful point and it applies equally to Christian and secular and family spheres.

---
======

The Sons of Martha

Rudyard Kipling 1907

The sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited
that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the
careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she
was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without
end, reprieve, or rest.
It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and
cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that
the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care
to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by
land and main.

They say to mountains, "Be ye removed." They say to
the lesser floods, "Be dry."
Under their rods are the rocks reproved-they are not
afraid of that which is high.
Then do the hill-tops shake to the summit-then is the
bed of the deep laid bare,
That the Sons of Mary may overcome it, pleasantly
sleeping and unaware.
They finger death at their gloves' end where they piece
and repiece the living wires.
He rears against the gates they tend: they feed him hungry
behind their fires.
Early at dawn, ere men see clear, they stumble into
his terrible stall,
And hale him forth a haltered steer, and goad and turn
him till evenfall.
To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till
death is Relief afar.
They are concerned with matters hidden - under the
earthline their altars are-
The secret fountains to follow up, waters withdrawn to
restore to the mouth,
And gather the floods as in a cup, and pour them again
at a city's drouth.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a
little before the nuts work loose.
They do not teach that His Pity allows them to drop
their job when they dam'-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark
and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's
day may be long in the land.

Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path
more fair or flat -
Lo, it is black already with blood some Son of Martha
spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness
to any creed,
But simple service simply given to his own kind in their
common need.

And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessed - they
know the Angels are on their side.
They know in them is the Grace confessed, and for
them are the Mercies multiplied.
They sit at the Feet - they hear the Word - they see
how truly the Promise runs.
They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and - the
Lord He lays it on Martha's Sons!

A Child's Laughter

2008-05-24T22:01:00.000-04:00

The little girl and her momma were just close enough that I could hear her laughing as she ran ahead. From across the pond, I could hear her constant stream of giggles, brightening my day as the two of them rushed back to where daddy was fishing and waiting for breakfast at the park.

I was lost in thought, studiously not thinking about the tennis match for which I waited, when the giggling stopped. Almost without looking up, I knew to expect the crying to start. Sure enough, she was tummy-down on the road, lifting up and looking back at her mommy, winding up for a good one.

It's inevitable, isn't it? Giggling and excitement and risk are followed by tears. But it's inevitable in a good way. No amount of money or peace could make me wish that little girl hadn't giggled her way ahead of her mommy and toward her daddy, even if it meant she had to cry, too.

It's called living, and I'm for it.

Poverty

2008-05-17T21:46:00.000-04:00

Today I saw a driverless truck, and kind of grinned.

Sure enough, there was the tiniest grandma ever behind the wheel of a brand new, fire engine red, full-sized Chevy pickup with big-ol' step-side running boards. I don't believe she could see me as I passed her, but I kept an eye on her in my rear-view. She seemed almost to notice and slow down a little for the 8-sided sign she rolled through.

And I got a little sad.

In the little town of 3,000 in which I grew up, I'd have marked that truck and made sure it was never broken down by the side of road, or in any danger of being hit if it rolled in front of me at some 4-way stop. Before long, the whole town would have just naturally noticed and made little allowances. I'm sure somewhere in smalltown America, there'd be some wannabe macho man roll through town in a fire engine red Chevy, wondering why everyone seemed to move over a little bit for him.

I'll never see that little lady again.

I wonder sometimes just how poor we really are.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

2008-05-12T23:26:00.000-04:00

I know, this is a funny topic for me.

I read this book in 1983, and hardly remember anything about it. I liked it at the time, for what it was. And of course, what it was was an anti-Christian bit of cultic and heretical propaganda. :-)

I was studying to be a theoretical physicist (at a local junior college - don't ask), but I about half-wanted to be a mechanic. So this little book offered me a twofer deal I couldn't pass on. It gave me a chance to learn about Zen in a kind of semi-safe way, and a chance to learn about mechanicking from a distance. I would be hard pressed to say of which of them I was most scared. Zen was frightening in an eternal way, but mechanicking was frightening in a very visceral man's-man kind of way that left me feeling quite hopeless. Learning about mechanicking from a Zen mystic seemed about right for a wannabe like me.

I think I remember two things from the book. The first is, "Never by a 2-pound hammer - you might be tempted to use it!" But that phrase may never have appeared in the book, or if it did it might be completely stolen from mechanics all over the world.

The second one I'm absolutely sure of. I won't put quote marks around it, because I am giving you 25 year-old impressions of what it meant to me at the time, and there's no telling exactly what he really said. It went like this.

Turn off your radio. Zen is about being in the now, wholly present in the moment that is. Life is about being in the now. But if the thing that you are doing is fixing a motorcycle, how can the thing you're doing be listening to the radio? And if the thing you're doing is listening to the radio, how can it be fixing the motorcycle? Do what you're doing with all your being.

That hit me hard. I was always trying to do two things at once, and no matter how eternally damning Zen might be, the joker was right. I simply could not do two things at once, and even if I could, I could not do them both with all my heart. I could not do them both to the glory of God.

I never forgot that. For a year or two of my ten under the hood, I listened to the radio while I turned wrenches. I spent months listening to a rotation of a handful of tapes and crying to them as often as not. But for the most part, I found I was happier when the radio was off and I was pleasantly cursing the problem at hand. [Mechanicking really is calculated to drive a man to despair. If it were not for the (even if they're sometimes pyrrhic) victories at the end of every nightmare, I'm sure we'd all quit.]

The other night, I told my small group that I'd turned off the radio in my car 2 years ago. You should have seen the jaws drop. But yes, I sit in traffic in complete silence, just listening to the engines of all the cars around me, and the blowing of the heater fan, and how the sounds play off the brim of my hat. Sometimes I play my harmonica, but not even much of that these days.

And it helps.

It's an odd thing. I committed years ago that once I got on the road, I was done trying not to be late. Once I was on the road, nothing I could do would get me there more than 2 minutes faster, so I'd just be an extra 2 minutes late rather than frazzle myself every morning and evening. Once I'm on the road, I pick the lane that is easiest on my attitude, and drive fast enough to keep the guy behind me from getting mad. If I can't drive that fast, I move over. If 6 people pull in front of me, I might speed up, but not because I'm mad. (Yes, sometimes individual morons irritate me, but usually not more than once a week.)

And since I'm not in a hurry, and not on edge, and not looking for that 3 car-length advantage every 10 seconds, I can let my mind go where it will.

The radio kills that mindset, and yes, I mean Christian radio. It takes my mind where I don't want to go. Once or twice in each trip, I might hear a song that connects with me, but more often than not it's a song that connects with where I was last week. I end up being happy the song meant a lot to me last week, and singing it with joy, but it's last week's joy.

I'm not against the radio itself. 4 years ago, just after the divorce, the radio was a near-constant blessing to me, and I listened to it every minute. Today, though, it isn't. The song, "Be Still My Soul," moved me a couple weeks ago. So, I spent a week memorizing it in the car. (Have you EVER known a song to be so hard to memorize???) I did it at my pace, and with my convictions, so it felt like it was mine. It felt peaceful and comforting. At it's best, the radio seems to dangle the hope of something beautiful much more often than it delivers, so I guess I'm against it a little bit, but I'll probably turn my radio back on some day.

So, I thought about all this.

And I thought, "Why does Zen do this kind of thinking, and Christianity doesn't?"

Why does Zen have so much to say about getting up in the morning and making breakfast and getting ready for bed at night, and Christianity doesn't?

It's just something to ponder.

Good Luck!

2008-05-04T22:42:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wished a brother in Christ good luck, only to be lectured on how luck is no part of a Christian's life?

Sigh.

You know? Who am I to argue, I guess? But into what kind of bind does that force God? I play tennis, and it's traditional with the first serve to wish your opponent good luck. What should I say instead?

"May God grant you the grace to crush the living snot out of me during this match."

"And may His divine sovereignty fix the outcome of this match such that we both reach the eternal benificence of His holy presence due to His providential ordering of all things."

"And since the outcome of this match is ordered in the eternal counsels of I AM that I AM from before the creation of light itself (6,012.5 years ago), let's just go for a prayer-jog on a treadmill and get a beer - I mean lemonade."

It's amazing how some Christians, like me, lose so many opportunities to be a real and living testimony for God. It might change the match a little bit to start it like that, but it might change the eternal destiny of the person against whom I'm playing.

No wait.

His eternal destiny would be something ordained before the dawn of time, too, wouldn't it?

Hmmm. So telling him, "Good luck," probably won't damn my opponent to hell after all.

Hmmm.

And it would be a lot quicker, so we could get down to playing tennis.

But, no! God's eternal plans rely upon His ordaining of human means. So, I have to give the slightly longer greeting in order to make sure that all possible means have been exercised in case he might be one of the elect of God, and the means appointed to his salvation include the revelation this very day in his heart that luck is a pagan concept toppled before a living Deity like Dagon was toppled before the Ark of the Covenant.

And the longer traditional greeting might lull my opponent into thinking I'm afraid to serve, which might give me the mental edge - and I love being mentally edged.

But everyone knows that God does not order anything He has not revealed in His holy word. So, maybe I should use something straight out of scripture, and out of the mouth of one of the holy saints, like, "Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well."

Maybe not that one.

"I come to thee in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. This day will the LORD deliver thee into mine hand; and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will give the carcases of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel."

Or maybe I'll keep looking.

---

Good luck understanding this post.

Quantum Predestination

2008-04-26T12:18:00.001-04:00

God is Light, and in Him is no shadow of turning.

The history of man's understanding of light is a physicist's rollicking, mud-wrestling fest of scientific goodness. I've forgotten all the details, remembering only the ebb and flow of hard feelings on both sides. The Wikipedia article captures all the major events, but overlooks the intense competition and fiery conflict involved. The best insight the article gives comes at the bottom when it quotes the rock-star scientist, Richard Feynman, telling his audience that light is particles - full stop - and Carver Mead telling his audience in equally confident terms that light is waves, and so is everything else. And those two quotes are from now, not nearly a century ago when the mud slinging was in full splatter. The war around man's understanding of light may be over, but cleanup actions continue apace.

The first guy to describe light mathematically did it with wave equations. The next guy did it with particle equations. The thing is, waves and particles ain't the same thing. A wave is something that happens in the ocean, and a particle is something you throw into the ocean. When you talk about equations that describe light, you're talking about differences that extreme.

+ Waves go around corners.
- Particles don't notice corners.

+ Waves interfere with each other. If two peaks meet, they make a single peak twice as high. If a peak meets a valley, they cancel each other.
- Particles bounce off each other.

+ Waves can be polarized so only one kind works, like maybe left/right waves work but up/down waves get smooshed.
+ Particles don't vibrate, so polarizing particles makes no sense.

+ Waves don't knock electrons out of solar panels and make electricity.
+ Particles make solar energy possible.

+ Waves don't have any good reason to make "quantum leaps."
- Particles, also called, "quanta," are the defining point of a quantum leap.

So, physicists had a religious war.

The wave guys did math and experiments using diffusion grates and frequency-energy relationships, while the particle guys calculated about reflections and interactions. Then the wave guys came up with complex, hard to follow equations that fully explained the particle stuff in wave terms if you held your mouth just right and squinted just so. That's when the particle guys had to give up (except Mr Feynman, I gather). The particle guys could poke little holes in the wave-guys' equations, but they couldn't write equations that would explain all the diffusion grate and frequency stuff.

In the end, though, everyone had to swallow a little bile because the wave guys couldn't really make their equations work either.

And the reason no one's equations would work is really quite simple. Light is a particle-wave. Light is made of particles that vibrate like waves. The physicists were forced to say, "We're both right," and that breaks any debater's heart. But they only said because they actually were both right. Light particles seem to be kind of big and squishy and vibrating in a perfect frequency. So, when you shove them through diffraction gratings they act just like waves, but when you run them into solar panels they act just like particles.

It hurts to admit that the other guy is right, but it's not too bad once you've gotten over the initial shock of admitting that you were wrong. What's deadly difficult is admitting the other guy is right while you still have not been proven wrong at all.

That's what happened to our mud wrestling physicists, and that's what should be happening to our mud wrestling Calvinists and Arminians, too.

I hate to say, "We're both right." I really do. In most things mathematical, one person is wrong, and I tend to extend that thinking to theology. That's a mistake on my part.

The odd thing is that I still don't think the Calminians are right. Calminians tend to jetison the rightness of both sides and end up with a wishy-washy God and semi-responsible people. I think the truth is harder than that.

God does predestine, and does so absolutely. God chooses those whom He saves, and is not panicking over those whom He might have been able to save if only we'd evangelized more/better/perfectly. Those who are not saved are those whom God knew would not be saved before He ever created. He knew how it would end for each of us, what His actions would be that would influence us, and what He could have done it differently, and that He would do everything exactly as He has done it. If that's not absolute predestination, I don't know what is, but it's a little different from saying God created some people for some bizarre pleasure He might take in damning them.

To me, those are the wave equations.

The particle equations are true too, though.

Every man must decide, and there is no crutch upon which he might lean. The decision is his and the responsibility for that decision is his. God made us with a will that bestows on us the right to suffer the consequences of our actions. And God only judges us on our own actions. Neither the sins of the father for any previous generations, nor the decisions of our great Creator before time will be weighed in the balance. On the one side will be the requirements of our own conscience (gentiles) or of the law (Jews), and on the other will be our performance against those requirements (unsaved) or Christ's performance of those requirements (saved.) We must choose Him.

The thing that stirred me to write was not some new insight into the scripture, but into physics, so please forgive me if I don't state the two positions any more clearly than that. You've all heard it too many times any way.

The thing that interests me is that the physical world gives such a great example of a complex duality. There is not a human being alive who can understand or picture what light really is. We cannot hold the idea of a wave and a particle in our mind simultaneously when trying to describe something so ubiquitous as light. The first thing ever created is so bizarrely complex that we cannot picture in our minds, though we sense it every waking second.

Light fills the void of space, transmitted from every direction and into every direction, and exerts its influence on things as random as plant leaves, microwave dinners, radio towers, and my mood on a gloomy morning, yet the brightest of our minds cannot tell us what it really is. It exists and behaves predictably, but not definably. One set of equations defines half of what it does, while another set of equations defines the other half of what it does, and the two sets of equations seem both to exclude the other set.

It's not enough to say, "The truth is in the middle." There is no middle between equations. Equations are either true or they are false. If you find some happy camping ground between two equations, it's either because the new equation is true, or because you're living in a fantasy world.

[Amusingly, quantum physics, the deep science of light, says the same thing. Light exists at discreet energy levels, and never in between them. Imagine that your car could go 5 mph or 10 or 25 or 50, but not 17.3 or 26.1 or anything in between those 4 speeds. That's why they talk about a "quantum leap." It always takes a quantum leap for light to change energy levels because while it might change speeds from 5 to 10 mph, it will do it without ever going 7.5 mph. It leaps from one energy level to another.]

There is only truth. There is no space between truths for convenient half-truth. The truth is that God predestines absolutely, and the truth is that we are fully responsible for our actions. I am comfortable saying that those two things confuse me, but I'm not able to toss either of them aside, even if they seem to be unable to live together. And the science of light gives me permission to be that stubborn.

Does that help or hurt anyone's thoughts about predestination?

Yahweh's Love Interest

2008-04-20T07:57:00.001-04:00

The Biblical Archaeology Review has an article in this issue regarding "A Temple Built for Two." The inspiration is a little house shrine evidently showing a 2-seated throne. One of the seats they suppose to be for Yahweh, and the other for His consort, the local fertility goddess, Asherah.

The article does a fine job evaluating the possible meanings of the idol, and makes a good argument that, yes, in the local popular religion (as opposed to the intellectual religion of the priesthood) Yahweh did not abide alone. One of the chief points the article makes is that the prophets all spent reams of parchment decrying Asherah. The prophets' complaint that sanctuaries to "The Queen of Heaven" were "on every hill and under every green tree," is about as good a proof as one needs that Asherah was big medicine. The little house shrine portrayed in BAR merely gives an indication that the Israelites came up with the usual way of reconciling their conflicting deities.

The point that occurs to me while reading this article is that Yahweh is the only God I can remember who has no mate, except His people, and them as a whole. I can think of many examples of gods who are mated to other gods. I can think of gods who have been taken with individual humans. I can think of gods who have every human romantic problem. I cannot think of a single other god who mates himself to all willing humans as a single entity.

Yahweh calls Israel His wife, and mourns her departures. He brings Israel gifts, protects her from enemies, nurtures her, and makes life promises to her that are unique in all religious history so far as my memory recalls. Ours is a God Who loves inhumanly. He loves a being no human has ever imagined as an individual before, the church, with a pure grace no human has ever conjured up in any religious fiction.

As the heavens are above the earth, so His love is above our love, His intent above our intentions.

We are so much more than lucky to be so loved. Praise the Lord our King.

The Spirit is a Little Cooler than you Thought

2008-04-16T22:26:00.000-04:00

http://www.beyondwordsworth.com/?p=293

Go Kathy. :-)

Revelation

2008-04-14T22:27:00.001-04:00

Rom 1:17
For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

It's just that one little phrase that arrested me.

... the righteousness of God revealed ...

Can you picture it?

If you can, you can picture lightning being hidden.

I was once close enough to lightning to hear it sizzling for hours before the thunder finally like'd to broke my eardrums. It seemed to be days later when I finally jumped for the ground and hugged it like never before. It had to have been 20 feet away from me, at most. I never saw it, and I've never done anything so fast in my life as dive for mama earth just then. The bolt sealed herself up again and went home to papa before my first flinch, though. The power, the speed, the brightness, the overkill in that split second of power revealed from heaven never left me.

Lightning cannot be hidden.

The righteousness of God is more powerful, and yet it cannot be found.

We cannot know this holiness. There is nothing in our experience to indicate perfect righteousness exists. They say that if you can imagine a thing, it proves that it exists - that we cannot imagine anything that cannot be. But here is an example of a thing that does exist, and that we cannot imagine. We can try to picture white, if we set our minds to it, but we cannot conceive of an unmixed motive. Everything to us is yin and yang. The seeds of righteousness exist in every evil, and the seeds of evil exist in every righteous deed.

In God, though, only righteousness is revealed because that is all there is. The I AM never changes, and from the moment the first atom blinked into existence until the last atom flashes back into the void, God never flirted with sin. God's care IS always pure, His eye IS always single, His love IS always sacrificial.

This is revealed to us by faith, and from faith to faith. This blinding, thundering, deadly, life-giving righteousness is seen only by the eye of belief. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the word of God, but the righteousness of God is revealed in and by faith.

I don't have a point. It was only an impression, and I hope I expressed a little bit of it. It really needs to be a poem, but I don't know that I could deliver on it so I had to write it this way.

2008-04-13T18:45:00.000-04:00

Psalm 119:25-32
DALETH.
My soul cleaveth unto the dust: quicken thou me according to thy word.
I have declared my ways, and thou heardest me: teach me thy statutes.
Make me to understand the way of thy precepts: so shall I talk of thy wondrous works.
My soul melteth for heaviness: strengthen thou me according unto thy word.
Remove from me the way of lying: and grant me thy law graciously.
I have chosen the way of truth: thy judgments have I laid [before me].
I have stuck unto thy testimonies: O LORD, put me not to shame.
I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart.

We studied this in Sunday School this morning, and it was right where I was. It was a delight to give it a good, hard look.

I like that the passage starts with the singer prostrate in the dust, melted under the weight of his loads, and afraid he might try to deliver himself by lying. I get that.

He answers his own situation with the word, the statutes, the precepts. And what else? If you take away from me my scriptures, where could I go to learn that Jesus suffered here along with me? That he watches my every tear and marks the enemies that caused them? That has delivered me from the sin that kept me from appearing before God my Hope?

Where else would I learn how to behave myself in the courtyards of His home - and now mine? Where else would I learn to tell the truth to those who are hurting? Where else would I learn to praise my Deliverer even before I see His deliverance?

But when I have those things, when I know those truths, I can stand up from the dust. When I know where to go, I can begin walking. And when I see what there is to gain, I can begin to run, because the Lord has enlarged my heart.

For a few more decades, there will be dust on my feet, but the invisible truth of God's love and actions keeps me upright in more ways than one.

When Did Changing the World Become Every's Job

2008-04-12T22:21:00.002-04:00

This is another of my son's questions.

I keep looking for where it all went wrong. I look back over the centuries, and I don't guess it ever really went right except during that one golden age of the '50's. But somehow, things look better in the past. I guess they always do, but a day when a man cared for his family, when morality was de rigeur, and when having good grandkids was "reason enough" looks pretty golden to me.

I wonder if one of the things that went wrong isn't this feeling that seems to pervade everything that we all have to be changing the world.

I think it started in the '60's, and it set us up for failure. If we're saving the world, then maybe it's OK that we skip a couple little insignificant things like hearing our kids crying out for our time, or our spouses longing to feel significant again.

Bob's 6 Word Meme

2008-04-12T22:19:00.000-04:00

Bob posted his memoir in 6 words. The moment I read his, mine sprung to mind, so I figured I'd fess up to it:

He came, he cried, he faltered.

Only the fact that the Lord is God would keep me from putting that on my headstone. Nothing could keep me from deserving it.

A Man's Salute

2008-04-07T22:13:00.000-04:00

Says a lot about him.

Someone saluted me as I was driving out today, so I saluted back. And as I did, it occurred to me some of the things a man's salute says.

When his fingers and thumb are rigidly held with a knife-edge precision, the man likes to see himself as precise. When his shoulder is properly pulled back, and his elbow extends directly 90 degrees away from his body and level with the terra firma, he really is precise.

But when he straightens his spine, and stands tall with his chin level, he's giving true respect to the man he's saluting.

I don't know why, but that was very interesting to me.

How Shall a Young Man Clean His Way?

2008-04-04T23:45:00.000-04:00

Psa 119:9
Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed [thereto] according to thy word.

I really enjoyed this verse when we talked about it last Sunday. I meant to post about this a little earlier, but such is life.

So, a young man definitely needs to clean his way up. That's believable. So how does the great 119th Psalm recommend he do it? 119 is the Psalm most completely dedicated to the law of God, to His statutes, so what does it recommend.

It recommends that young man take heed to "his way."

I don't know why, but I loved that. It doesn't recommend that he pour over the law every waking second. It recommends he love and learn that law, but take heed to his own way.

I know I'm fighting a rare enemy here, but some of us spent too much time on theology and not enough figuring out our way through life. It's cool when God's inspired word does not make the mistakes of young men.

So Young to be so Wise

2008-04-01T21:49:00.000-04:00

My boy said, describing our most annoying cat, "He wants so little, but he wants it so much."

Priceless

Pearlie asked so nicely. :-)

2008-03-30T22:31:00.001-04:00

5 things on several subjects in 1998, huh? Well, it was a pivotal year for me. My marriage was showing its first final cracks, and I was screwing up my courage to leave my dream church.

What was I doing 10 years ago?
1) Just settling in to my first job as an IT guy.
2) Rehabbing my knee surgery. Hit the gym and make it really hurt, bad, every day.
3) Hiding my true feelings about my church in hundreds of odd situations.
4) Wondering why I owned a pickup truck. Amy wanted it and wouldn't drive it.
5) Training a dog Amy rescued. When I was done, she could tie him to the handlebars of her bike and ride past squirrels without being nervous.

5 things on my to-do list today:
1) Church then Prayer meeting later.
2) Trial position some rocks I bought yesterday for the garden. Dig them in next weekend.
3) Watch a little tennis.
4) Work really, really hard to stay off the court. I need an off day, no matter how bad I hate them. Fortunately, when Nate called it started raining.
5) Iron and shine the ol' shoes. (All done.)

Snacks I enjoy
1) Uh. What's this? A joke? Food good. Grunt.
2) Whole-wheat, soured biscuits before tennis. Good energy, no sugar blitz.
3) Failing that, bread and butter.
4) Failing that, wait for dinner.
5) I love all snacks, but nothing good comes of them. I'll sit down to eat a snack, and before I'm done it was just a meal out of snack food. I eat until I'm not hungry.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire
1) I'd write, publish and advertise everything I could.
2) I'd support anything promoting the old Christianity.
3) I'd hire a lawyer to figure out how not to bleed it all to the government.
4) I'd probably spend loads trying to figure out how to set up community in my neighborhood around my church.
5) After I'd made all the mistakes, I'd try to change every church in the world into a neighbor church.

Five of my bad habits
1) Staying up too late.
2) Fitting too much into every little crack of time.
3) Ignoring the state of my house, cleanliness and repair both.
4) Focusing entirely on what's directly in front of me, without thought to what's waiting on me.
5) Doing recreational tennis and blogging before other things that matter more.

Five places I have lived
1) Grass Valley, CA - The gorgeous foothills of the Sierra Nevada range.
2) Fort Hood, TX - The armpit of one of the most ungorgeous states in the union.
3) Atlanta, GA - Too hateful to be busy.
4) Columbus, OH - The most pleasantly non-descript place I've ever lived.
5) Aaaah. Well, I did 9 weeks of basic in Fort Leonard Wood, MO (Fort Lost-in-the-Woods.) Basic was one of the most trying and affirming experiences of my life, but it really got under my skin. Once I started sleep-walking there, I never slept more than 90 minutes at a stretch again until I was married. My wife said after our first night, "The first task with a new baby is getting it to sleep through the night."

Five jobs I've had
1) Computer sales flunky. (I was fired. I learned then that it is not good for Kevin Knox to be bored.)
2) Fast food cook. (Probably my all-time favorite job. For 13 hours a day I was in full-on adrenaline mode. I loved the layers upon layers of challenge there. I burnt out every 3 months like clockwork, but I got really good at overcoming burnout.)
3) Soldier. (They weren't shooting at anyone while I was in, so it was pretty easy. I became a mechanic assuming that, "At least they can't make me a clerk. I was wrong. 3 times. For all 3.5 years of my active duty.)
4) Mechanic. (Probably did more to define my character than anything else. It was another 13 hour a day job, and I loved that too.)
5) Programmer. (Probably the most natural fit for the old, reclusive me. I got to serve people without ever dealing with them. These days I'm more of an admin, and I think I might like it for the very people dealings programming is intended to avoid.)

Phew. I survived. Now I can go another 6 months without doing another self-revealing meme. :-)