Leaving on a Jet Plane

When I was a kid, we spent three weeks each summer in Arkansas. It was a glorious time of fishing with cousins in Wolf Creek, working on my uncle’s chicken farm, and exploring the countryside around my Grandmother’s house. (Grandmother lived just outside town—Delight, Arkansas, population 243… salute—and everyone else lived out in the country. We also went to Arkansas during Christmas vacation, but that wasn’t nearly as fun. We opened our presents early, left them all at home, jumped in the car to ride 24 hours or so just to get to Arkansas in time to watch my cousins open their presents! That was loads of fun!

One of the things I remember Mom talking about is how hard it was to get ready for those trips. She ran by Dad’s office for the family business, and before she left she had to do all of her regular work and all the work that needed to be done while she was gone. While she was gone, she worried about what she didn’t think to do. And then when she got back, she had to catch everything up that piled up. I remember her saying that it was almost not worth going.

In a few hours, Lynn and I will leave for our week in California for a 3-day mini-vacation and the Pepperdine Lectures. And I feel a little like Mom, wondering what it was that I was supposed to do that I forgot about. Unlike Mom, I don’t plan on worrying about it while I’m gone. And thanks to our mission committee setting up Paul Reganathan to preach and teach Sunday and Roger and Cathy taking care of everything else, I don’t have anything to worry about anyway.

I won’t have internet access where I’m staying and I’m not taking the laptop, so I don’t plan on filing any blog reports while I’m gone. (I will have the Dell handheld, so if I get real motivated I might scratch out something, though the Dell doesn’t read my writing much better than humans can.) I’ll most certainly have some thing to say about Pepperdine when I get back.

Now, what was it that I am forgetting?

Marked Men and Women

Italian researchers recently reported the case of a 65-year-old man from Caserta, Italy who suffered an injury to the frontotemporal region of his brain. This injury leads him to instantly assume the identity of whatever people he is around or setting in which he finds himself. So when he goes to the doctor, he started acting like a doctor. When he goes into a bar, he relates to everyone as if he were a bartender. The man is totally unaware that he is taking on the all these different personas, and he suffers from amnesia since the time of his injury.

Unfortunately, there are too many Christians who suffer from a similar disease. They tend to naturally and instantly assume the roles and persona of the people they are around. When they are around people from work, their language and actions mimic people at work. But when they are with people from church, their behavior, attitudes and language completely changes. This is not really a form of frontotemporal dementia as in the case of the man from Caserta. It is rather that too many of us have found that fitting in with the world around us makes our lives less complicated and difficult.

There is an old story about a student feverishly working on his exam in a large lecture class. Time was called, but the student failed to stop writing, and he continued writing for several minutes after the professor announced that the test was over. When the student went to hand in the exam, the professor refused to accept the paper because the time limit had been exceeded. The student asked, “Do you know who I am?” The professor indignantly replied, “No!” The student said, “I didn’t think so” and then stuck his exam in the middle of the exam stack and shuffled the papers around! Fitting into the background with everyone else can be both comfortable and safe.

But God has not given His people that option. We are to stand out from the world around us like a city on a hill (Matt 5:14) and like stars shining in the universe (Phil 2:15). Our lives are to stand out against the backdrop of the world to the point where people will notice and even glorify God because of us (1 Pet 2:12). We are to take on the persona and character of Christ in every situation in which we find ourselves—at home, with friends, on the job, and at church. We are to be like Christ, not like everyone else.

It is much easier to live when you can fade into the background and act just like the people around you. It is much harder if you have an “X” marked on you. But we have been branded with an “X” and it stands for Christ. One thing that Jesus never did was act like everyone else!

Countdown

Several months ago, I downloaded a widget (or is it a gadget) that puts a countdown timer (http://calebegg.com/countdown/) on my Google homepage. The timer counts down the number of days until an event. My timer, which said “140” when it was installed, now says “4.” That means 4 days until we leave for our annual Pismo Beach and Pepperdine getaway. This marks the 17^th year in a row that we’ve made the trip to the Pepperdine Bible lectures, and we look forward to it as much as we did the first time.

For the last 10 years or so, we’ve combined the lectureship trip with a 3 day mini-vacation at Pismo Beach on the Central Coast of California. Why Pismo Beach? Well, this picture from Wikipedia may have well been taken from the window of the hotel where we have stayed for several years! What a view! Of course, that hotel has gone up from $80 a night to $300… so we don’t stay there anymore. But Pismo Beach does have a Motel 6.

Randy and Better Tanner and Roger are joining us at the lectures this year, and we’re happy about that. Mike and Joann Guthrie have been out there a couple of times too. We wish that more of our family from Denbigh could make the trip to Malibu for the lectures. But not Pismo Beach… that’s just for us.

Closer to Home

We got a call from Greg Ericksen this afternoon that reminded us that the tragedy at Virginia Tech was more personal for our Denbigh family than we realized. One of the students who was murdered Monday was Lauren McCain. Lauren was a neighbor of the Erikcsen's and Jessika's friend, and she had visited Denbigh several times. Jessika had been calling her to make sure she was OK. She wasn't. The following entry appeared on the MSNBC website--

Lauren McCain, 20, of Hampton, Va. An undergraduate majoring in international studies.

On her MySpace page, McCain listed “the love of my life” as Jesus Christ. Her family said McCain became a Christian some time ago.

“Her life since that time has been filled with His love that continued to overflow to touch everyone who knew her,” the family said in a statement. Her uncle Jeff Elliott told The Oklahoman newspaper that she was an avid reader, was learning German and had almost mastered Latin. She was home-schooled, he said, and had worked at a department store for about a year to save money for college.

She spent several years of her childhood in Oklahoma, but her father’s Navy career also took the family to Florida, Texas and then to Virginia.

"Lauren had such a sweet innocent heart," Jeanne Meadows, who attended church with McCain, wrote to MSNBC.com. "I can bet you at the last moment of her life she was most likely praying for the gunman and forgiving him."

Our hearts and prayers go out to Lauren’s family and friends as well as the families of all the victims of the senseless tragedy. It somehow makes the heartbreak worse to realize that we had this passing personal connection. But her testimony of faith brings hope to the heartbreak. Here is her full statement on her MySpace page—

The purpose and love of my life is Jesus Christ. I don't have to argue religion, philosophy, or historical evidence because I KNOW Him. He is just as real, if not more so, as my 'earthly' father.

Fox News has a pretty article entitled “Questioning a Tragedy: Where is God?” The article ends with these words—

So where is God? He is in the prayer vigils. He is in the rivers of tears flowing from everyone affected. He is in the community coming together to offer support to the families. He is at work in the love and strength people are offering each other. God is with us.

What Kind of World?

As Clifford said in his response to yesterday’s blog, “No better reminder of how quickly things can change is witnessed in the massacre at Virginia Tech.” There was a time when we could not even imagine incidents like the one which happened yesterday in Blacksburg. But in our post-Columbine, post-911 world, perhaps the most shocking thing about the mass-murder at Virginia Tech is how it was not really shocking. Sure, we were surprised and appalled that it happened so close to home this time. But we are no longer surprised to learn that we live in that kind of a world. I know Blacksburg seems to be a quiet place for such horrible events, but didn’t the last school shooting take place in a one-room Amish elementary school? Surely we live in a broken world!

And this world will stay broken until Jesus returns to end it. I don’t subscribe to the end-time theory that the world is getting worse and worse as we get closer and closer to Armageddon. God’s arrival into our world 2000 years ago wrapped in flesh and in swaddling clothes was accompanied by the slaughter of the innocents. And our word’s innocence was slaughtered long before that! Our world was twisted on its moral axis in Eden, and we have been finding new ways to rebel against God’s goodness ever sense. There are many good people in the world, and too many of them died yesterday in Blacksburg. But evil is always here with us, and the evil one will never give us a respite from his dark influence. It is easy for us to see things like yesterday’s bloodbath and ask, “What is our world coming to?” Sadly, our world is simply living down to what our world has always been. One Virginia Tech professor survived the holocaust only to die yesterday! What a sad, sad commentary on what our world is and was and ever will be.

But though we live where evil reigns, we also live surrounded by goodness. We live in a world where professors and students risk their lives (and give them) to block the way of the killer into classrooms so that others have the time to escape. We live in a world in which the memory of the Twin Towers collapsing is match by the memory of police and firefighters running into those building to seek to save others and die in the effort. We live in a world where evil reigns, but it does not reign supreme. And it never will!

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who were killed and with those recovering from their injuries. We look forward to the day when God will forever destroy the evil one and take us to live in a place beyond the reach of pain and death.

We Never Know...

Lynn went shopping the other day. She does do that often, but it’s getting close to time for our Pepperdine trip and that, of course, requires a whole new wardrobe! She was at the cash register with another customer who was talking on the telephone. Lyn could tell by the woman’s body language that something was wrong. She closed the phone and said to no one in particular, “My son is dead.” Her 26-year old son had been killed earlier that day in an automobile accident, and the California police had been trying to track her down. The found her on her cell phone in a store across from Lynn.

To be fair, the CHiPs officer asked her to go home so he could call her there, but she insisted that he go ahead and tell her. Lynn tried to help her and offered to drive her home, but she said that she would be OK. Of course, she wasn’t going to OK. She went home knowing that in as sense, her world would never be OK again.

We never ever know what life is going to bring us, do we? You can go from mindless browsing at a thrift store to mind-numbing grief with one single phone call. We never know. All we can do is live each day to its fullest and to make the most of every opportunity. The old Tim McGraw song tells us “To Live Like You Were Dying.” Well, we all are dying. We have very little (if any) real control over what will happen to us in the future. What we do have is control over how we live our lives today.

Knocking on Heaven's Door

^9 “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. ^10 For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. (Luke 11:9-10)

No one likes to be be a pest. We have been trained to be polite and not to bother other people unnecessarily. So if we are really following the rules of etiquette as outlined by Miss Manners, we may find ourselves saying something like, "Excuse me my Good man, but if it is not too much trouble, could you possibly back your car up just a bit; your front tire is on my foot." OK, so most of us aren't quite that polite, but we never want to be a bother to anyone.

So we are a little surprised perhaps when Jesus tells us to make a pest of ourselves in prayer. The parable that he tells in Luke 11 encourages us to pray persistently. The apostles ask Jesus to teach them prayer, and he responds with Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer. Then he tells them a story--

⁵ Then he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, ⁶ because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.’ ⁷ “Then the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ ⁸ I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs. (Luke 11:5-8)

So are we to pester God long enough until He gets so annoyed with us that gives us what we want? Well, not really. The point is rather if we really believe in the power of prayer, then we'll continue to pray and not be deterred when our answer is delayed. We never really learn the point of prayer until we learn that God answers in His own good time and in His own good way. We generally can't tell the difference between God's "No" and God's "Wait." So all we can do is continue to pray. We must keep on asking, keep searching and keep knocking (see the NLT translation of Luke 11:9). God will answer, but our job is to keep knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door.

... For Tomorrow We Diet

Yesterday I mentioned that I was going back on a diet after my week on vacation where one of our main pastimes was eating. So now I’m back to watching what I eat. Well, I always watch what I eat; it is just that sometimes I watch myself eat a whole lot more than I should. Now it is time to knuckle down and get serious about dropping a few pounds. That is, I was serious before I read of a report that was released today.

It seems that scientists at UCLA have conducted one of the largest comprehensive reviews of dieting research ever, and they have concluded that dieting does not work. The researchers analyzed every study they could find that followed people on diets for 2 to 5 years, and what they discovered is that it would have been better for most to have not gone on a diet at all! Why? At the end of five years, their weight is the same plus their bodies have gone through wear and tear from losing and then gaining the weight. While 10% if dieters have lost weight after 6 months, 33 to 66 % gain more than they lose within 4 to 5 years. This is not the encouragement I need to pony away from the feedbag and drop the excess weight.

What dieting is (at least from my experience) is a period of depravation (that’s the diet) following a period of indulgence (the rest of the time when I eat what I want). I’ve seen books on dieting for Christians like “The Bible Diet: 40 Days to Cleanliness” (based on Daniel and his refusal to eat the king’s food) and “The Maker's Diet” (based on clean and unclean food regulations). To my knowledge, no one has written “John the Baptist Diet” extolling the benefits of locusts and wild honey, though John didn’t live long enough to know what the long term results of this high-crunch, high-carb fare.

I rather suspect that if God did write a diet book it would tell us to eat what we enjoy, just not too much... and to take the extra we forgo and share with those who are hungry. I think He may tells us to never over-indulge in food or drink and to make wise and healthy choices about what we eat and don’t eat. He would tell us to undergo both periods of fasting and feasting, but to have spiritual and not just physical goals for each. And He would tell us not to become obsessed with how we look but to make wise choices that care for the physical temple which is our body and which He uses to accomplish His will. I think He would expect us to make those kinds of healthy and wise choices because we are self-controlled people of moderation. I mainly think God would say those kinds of things about our diet because God has said those kinds of things. But these are a lot easier to blog about than they are to live, aren't they?

I'm Back!

I'm back. It has been forever since I have posted anything on the blog. We were out of town all last week on vacation with my parents in Crossville, TN. What is in Crossville? Well, not a lot. There was no internet access, so I could not make any blog posts. We were at a timeshare there because Crossville it is about halfway between Little Rock (where my parents live) and Newport News. So we met them there and spent a relaxing week doing very little except sleeping late, eating, playing a little golf, eating, watching old (really, really old) movies on TV, eating, playing dominoes… and eating. So today I’ve started a diet trying to loose 5-10 pounds before our Pepperdine trip at the end of the month (eating is a pretty big part of that itinerary as well!). We also go to drive into Nashville on Sunday to attend church at Otter Creek and eat lunch with my brother-in-law and niece. (My sister was out of town touring New York City with a friend; she had that trip planned before she knew we were coming... I think!).

The brother who did the table talk at Otter Creek shared a great quote from Mother Theresa. When she was asked how it felt receiving all the attention after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, she pointed her questioner to the story of the triumphant entry as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey. Mother Theresa asked her questioner that with all the palm branches being waved, the coats being laid down, and the singing and praise going on in Jerusalem, do you really think the donkey thought all of that was for him?

This is a powerful reminder that it is all about Him, not about us. We can get bent out of shape over a lot of things that happens at church when we forget that it is not about us. We can become smug and self-sufficient in who we are and what we have done when we by into the fiction that it is about us. It is all about Him. They donkey would not have dreamed about thinking that the worship was about him. We should resist the temptation to let the donkey come off smarter than are we.