But What About a Kitchenette?

Several years ago I shared an extended email conversation with a young Christian lady named Casey who had begun attending a Church of Christ in Ohio. She was both intrigued and disturbed by some of the things that she was learning. She really seemed to be serious and committed to Christ, but the more she learned about this church, the more confused she became. She ran across something I wrote on our web site, and so our email conversation began.

The particular “brand” of Church of Christ she was attending believed, among other things, that faithfulness and salvation depended on whether of not you have a kitchen in your church building. (We have two “kitchenette” areas, and I wondered if that sealed our doom or if we get a special dispensation for not fully falling into the sin of “kitchen-ism”). The more Casey learned about such peculiar church dogmas, the more concerned she was that she was hanging her spiritual hat on the wrong hook. She could not believe that anyone was going to hell because they had a kitchen, but she was not going to fit in at that church until she believed that.

What would you tell Casey? Here was an honest soul seeking God through Christ; she wanted more than anything to find group of Christians with whom she could share her spiritual journey. What she found was a Church of Christ that seemed to stress everything else except Christ. Here's what I told her--

The more time a church spends talking about itself and its ideas and why it is right, the less time it will spend talking about Jesus. A church focused on stamping out kitchens is not a Church of Christ; it is a Church of No-Kitchen. My best advice is to find a church that is obsessed with Christ, his cross and his empty tomb... and is not so obsessed with kitchens.

Maybe you would have responding differently. There was a time in my life when I would have responded differently. But the older I get the more I’m convinced that we earn the right to the name Church of Christ only as we find ourselves connected to Christ… not to the traditions, issues and feuds that have at times defined our past.

You Can't Please Everyone...

In a recent response on the blog, I very brought up (tongue in cheek) a song by Christian singer-song writer Chris Rice entitled “The Cartoon Song.” Rice wrote the song 15 years ago as a skit for a Junior High youth group in a church in Tennessee. He intended it as something of a satire on how we seem to make “Christian versions” of everything, “I'm sure someone will try to do that with popular cartoons one day. Here's what I mean...” The kinds loved the song, and he sang it for other youth groups, camp groups, etc. It was finally included as a “hidden track” on one of his CDs. It promptly became a hit.

The song was met with the opposition of people who questioned its “theology.” People waited in line after concerts to explain to him why mentioning “The Smurfs” in the song was wrong because they were demonic. But mostly the song became hugely popular. It was still on the Billboard Christian Top-40 chart in 2005, more than 6 years after it was recorded. It remains the number one most requested song at many Christian radio stations all over the country. Finally, Rice decided to stop doing the song at his live performances and wrote something of an obituary for the song on his website.

Well, you can’t please everyone. Rice writes, “That’s the nature of public work. It’s really true--you can’t please everybody! I want to do excellent work. I want to reach a wide range of people… Well, when you can’t please everybody, you just have to check your own motives for purity, and then follow your own heart, and hope people will try to understand.” Sometimes that is all we can do.

Ricky Nelson’s old song “Garden Party” has the chorus, “It's all right now, I learned my lesson well. You can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself.” That’s not right. Our job as Christians is to please God, not ourselves. But there will be times when we do our best to serve him with a pure heart and motives, and still some people who will disapprove. Perhaps we need to make our motives or intentions more clear; perhaps it is their own motives and intentions keep them from understanding. Sometimes we simply have to do what be believe God wants us to do even though we are misunderstood by others.

Do We Care About Apathy?

I called a local chapter of Alcohol Anonymous for some information to pass on to someone. When I identified myself as a minister, the man on the phone said, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." He was a really funny guy (at least he seemed to think so), so I wasn’t really sure whether he was serious or not when he said, “I have a great deal of respect for people in your profession; I just don't know how you handle all that apathy.” He thought that “church people” were complacent and self-satisfied that they were pretty much good people with things together. On the other hand, the folks who came to AA knew they were a mess and had a vested interest in taking their commitments seriously.

Do you think he has a point? There is an old story of the man-in-the-street interviewer who was asking people, "Do you think that ignorance or apathy is our biggest problem today?" And of course the answer he kept getting was, "I don't know and I don't care." Are complacency and apathy the big problems that the church faces today? Do we assume that we have it so all together that we don’t take our commitments to church or to God as seriously as we should? Listen to these warning from the Old Testament—

• "Woe to you who are complacent in Zion, and to you who feel secure on Mount Samaria, you noble men of the foremost nation, to whom the people of Israel come!" (Amos 6:1).
• "At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps and punish those who are complacent, who are like wine left on its dregs, who think, 'The Lord will do nothing, either good or bad' " (Zephaniah 1:12).

Israel had become satisfied with her status God’s chosen that she became fat and lazy and unmotivated to actually serve Him. It was that apathy and complacency that led to her destruction.

Can we become so satisfied with what we know about God that we fail to study more? Can we become so complacent with how we have served God that we fail to seek to serve Him more?

Can we become so smug with who we are before God that we fail to seek Him in prayer or mourn our imperfections or worship Him with all our hearts? Maybe we need to start all over in focusing on God and our need for Him. The twelve steps of AA begin like this— (1) We are powerless over our sin, (2) we believe in a power that is greater than ourselves and (3) We make the decision to turn our lives over to the care of God. Not a bad way for us to begin each day, huh?

A Picture of Worship

I think I surprised some of you yesterday by having Will King (our resident photographer) move around and take some candid shots of us during worship. We have no pictures of ourselves on our web pager doing what we do most (and maybe best). We post pictures of ourselves dressing up to pass out candy at Trunk-or-Treat, dressing up in costumes for a Fiesta VBS or a drama production. But what we don’t have are any pictures of us dressing up to worship God on Sunday. OK, so we don’t dress up so much, but we do worship. I just thought there needed to be some shots of us doing that.

This morning Will emailed three of the pictures he took (8 megapixel pictures do take awhile to shoot through cyberspace), and I posted them on the web site, and I hope to add more pictures later. One thing struck me as I looked at the picture of us singing (besides the fact that we are an extremely good-looking group). It is very hard to sing praises to God and look dignified in the process. Look at the picture. Richard Pittman looks kinda cool, but Richard always looks cool. Sabrina has a great smile on her face as she’s singing. And Lynn is as cute as she can be (that’s why I married her). But the rest of us just look, well, goofy. With our mouths wide open-- we look like were at a guppy convention or something. (At least the rest of you do; I used my editorial discretion to Photoshop myself out of the picture). It is hard to worship and look dignified. Maybe that is the point.

The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (does that sound familiar?) reminds us that if we are focused on ourselves (“I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get”) or on others (“or even like this tax collector”), then we have missed the whole point of worship. If we hold back our expression of love and gratitude for God because we are too dignified to get carried away, maybe we’re not approaching praise properly. Worship helps us to focus ourselves on God and lose ourselves in His presence. As we sang yesterday, “It’s all about you, it’s all about you Jesus.” That means it’s not about us.

There is one more question this picture raises. What’s the deal with everyone packing in like sardines at the back and avoiding the front several rows as if they were “full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean?” I don’t get it. In every other venue, you pay extra for front row seats. Any ideas?

Not Good to Be Alone

Here’s the other half of my CSI story promised in the last post. I wanted to quote the Grissom speech from the end of the episode, but I didn’t remember enough of it to even summarize. So I do what you do in a situation like that—I googled. I didn’t find the speech (I ran across that quoted on another blog; great minds and all that). What Google did find for me was the “Talk CSI Forum.” This is a cyber-community of thousands of (very) dedicated people who like to talk all things CSI. There were 180 people ONLINE when I logged in, so this site gets slightly more traffic than tucksdenbighblog.

I scanned through some of the the discussions which ran the gambit from favorite characters and storylines, last week’s episode to what would happen in the next episode. Everyone agreed that Eric Szmanda (Greg) did a great job last week; everyone agreed that no one likes Kevin Federline (guest star last week). Many of the posts were written DURING the episode and gave a running commentary on what was happening and what would happen next on the show.

Silly? A huge online community dedicated to following fictional characters and made-up events on a weekly TV show? Yes, it does seem silly for people to get worked up over a TV show. But this drive toward community, the desire to find people with whom to share things, the void within us that drives us to others like us—that is not silly at all! That is something put inside us by our Creator. God did not create us to be alone. His observation in Eden that “it is not good for man to be alone” was not, I think, primarily a statement that Adam needed a wife. What he needed was a companion, a community. It was not good for him to be alone. It still isn’t. We are created for community, to share our lives with others like us.

When God calls us to Himself through Christ, he calls us into a community of faith—a church. May God help us to become the community of faith that we are called to be. Church is not a place to go to do holy things once a week. Church is a relationship in which the people of God share the life of God.

Our Moral Compass

Last Thursday’s episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation ended with a discussion among the CSI team on what is wrong with young people today. Several offered opinions—too much free time, hanging out with the wrong crowd, not having a grandma to whoop ‘em when they need it. Sara thought that those kinds of explanations were “blaming everyone but these kids” who were “perfectly capable of telling the difference between a wild night out and beating somebody to death.” She said that “you don’t get a bye just because you grew up here or your parents are on drugs.” Grissom ends the episode with the kind of sermon you don’t really hear much in prime time--

The truth is, a moral compass can only point you in the right direction, it can’t make you go there. Our culture preaches that you shouldn’t be ashamed of anything you do anymore. And unfortunately this city is built on the principle that there’s no such thing as guilt. “Do whatever you want, we won’t tell.” So without a conscience, there’s nothing to stop you from killing someone. And evidently you don’t even have to feel bad about it.

The Las Vegas tourism board uses the slogan, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” That has become words to live by for many, whether they are in Vegas or not. There’s no such thing as guilt. No conscience. And so the CSI guys and gals will never run short of crime scenes.

So what is the point for us? We live in a culture that is up to its eyeballs in moral ambiguity. As Christians, we need to make sure that we do not add to that ambiguity. There is darkness and there is light. We need to make sure that what we do in our personal (and private) lives adds to the light and not to the darkness. We must live as people of light who reflect the light of God into a world of shadows. We need to have that moral compass and follow it toward the presence of the God of light, and lead as many people there as we can.

There is another point, here… but I’ve save that for tomorrow.

Tempting Faith

David Kuo was the deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, an agency which channels federal dollars to various religious charities. Like many former political insiders, Mr. Kuo recetnly published a book entitled Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. He charges that his office became a political tool used to rally evangelical voters to get GOP politicians elected. At the same time, so Mr. Kuo alleges, Bush officials like Karl Rove have mocked Christian leaders behind their backs, calling them “ridiculous,” and “just plain goofy.” He believes that religion was used as a politcal tool to rally support and turn out voters. In a 60 Minutes interview, he said—

It was spiritually wrong. You’re taking the sacred and you're making it profane. You're taking Jesus and reducing him to some precinct captain, to some get-out-the-vote guy.

Now Mr. Kuo is indeed tying to sell a book, and you do that with “shock and awe.” Any tell-all book is to some degree more “based on true events” than it is “the whole truth” because it is always one’s person’s take on the most newsworthy (read seedy) parts of their experiences. I am not suggesting that we take Mr. Kuo at face value.

But this does serve to remind us that there is a fundamental difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of men. The kingdoms of the world operate based on exercise of power; men of power use power to gain more power. (I know all about this p;olitcal stuff because I used to watch West Wing). Jesus says that the “rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them” (Matt 20:25). That is not the way of the kingdom of God. At some fundamental level, the kingdom of God and man run at cross purposes. There is a difference between a leader who is a person whose conscience is informed by God (we need more of those ) and the politician who uses the gospel of God as talking points to placate part of the electorate bent on getting their way (we have had enough of that).

Kuo had a brush with death (a brain tumor caused a seizure which led to a serious car accident) that caused him to re-evaluate his priorities. he suggests that core Christian beliefs and values have compromised by the focus on politics. His solution is an interesting one. He suggests that Christians need to fast from politics for two years—everything except voting—and spend that time and money getting inolved with charity work and showing the compassion of Christ. He says, “We need to spend more time studying Jesus, and less time trying to get people elected.”

You might not agree with Mr. Kuo’s assessment of our present administration, but it’s hard to argue with that final point. The power that transforms comes from God, not from politics.

When Fisherman Don't Fish

Will King asked me to recommend a Max Lucado’s books for him to download and listen to from Audible. I recommended a couple, though my favorite is still In the Grip of Grace. Afterward, I spent a couple of minutes looking back through my collection when I was reminded of my all-time-favorite Lucado story. It comes from In The Eye of the Storm and tells the story of a ill-fated fishing trip Max took with his father and best friend Mark.

We arrived late at night, unfolded the camper, and went to bed dreaming of tomorrow's day in the sun. But during the night, an unseasonably strong norther blew in. It got cold fast! The wind was so strong that we could barely open the camper door the next morning. There was no way we could fish in that weather.

"No problem," we said. "We'll spend the day in the camper. After all, we have Monopoly. We have Reader's Digest. We all know a few jokes. It's not what we came to do, but we'll make the best of it and fish tomorrow."

The hours passed slowly, but they did pass. Night finally came, and we crawled into the sleeping bags dreaming of angling.

Were we in for a surprise. The next morning it wasn't the wind that made the door hard to open, it was the ice!

We tried to be cheerful. "No problem," we mumbled. "We can play Monopoly… again. We can reread Reader's Digest. And surely we know another joke or two."
But as courageous as we tried to be, it was obvious that some of the gray had
left the sky and entered our camper.

I began to notice a few things I hadn't seen before. I noticed that Mark had a few personality flaws. He was a bit too cocky about his opinions. He was easily irritated and constantly edgy. He couldn't take any constructive criticism. Even though his socks did stink, he didn't think it was my business to tell him.

It was a long day. It was a long, cold night. When we awoke the next morning to the sound of sleet slapping the canvas, we didn't even pretend to be cheerful. We were flat-out grumpy. Mark became more of a jerk with each passing moment. Dad couldn't do anything right; I wondered how someone so irritable could have such an even-tempered son. We sat in misery the whole day, our fishing equipment still unpacked. The next day was even colder. "We're going home" were my father's first words. No one objected.

I learned a hard lesson that week. Not about fishing, but about people. When those who are called to fish don't fish, they fight.

Indeed! When fishermen don’t fish, they fight! That has been the problem the church has faced from the first century. When we forget who our enemy really is and get distracted from our task, we turn our sights inward and we fight. That has been true of congregations, religious movements and the history of the church across the ages. If we are not using our hammers to work to build the kingdom of God in the hearts and lives of men and women, then we will use them to attack each other. When fisherman don’t fish, they fight!

Vanity and Kentucky 31

A week and half ago, I invested the better part of three days getting my lawn ready for next year. That entailed mowing, thatching, mowing, raking, mowing, seeding and fertilizing. (Did I mention mowing?) Before I began, I bought a 32 count box of yard bags for all the grass I would thatch (or is that de-thatch) and rake out of the yard. When I finished, I had 3 bags left! I watered for three days, and then we were supposed to get rain. Perfect, right?

Wrong! What we got was a 2 day Nor’easter that dumped about 10 inches of rain on our area. Our backyard filled up with water to the point where I thought about going fishing. The standing water seems to have floated all the grass seed I go carefully had sown and has now deposited it in the lowest areas of the back yard… the flower beds! So next spring we’ll have no grass in the yard and I’ll be mowing the flower beds. I don’t think Jesus covered this contingency in the Parable of the Sower! But it does appear that seed in front yard stayed put, and with all the watering of the monsoon, it should produce 100 fold.

So what’s the moral of this story? I am tempted to play “the Teacher” and find a lesson of the vanity of chasing after the wind. Ecclesiastes looks back on his hard work and says this--

22 What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? 23 All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless. (Ecclesiastes 2:22-23)

He had described a great many accomplishments earlier in the chapter, but I choose to believe that thatching his yard was likely implied there in verse 5, “I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them.” (Of course, he talks about all of his slaves in the next verse, so we know who was doing the thatching!)

This morning I noticed the little patch of ground beside the door as you come into the church building. There is thick, healthy patch of brand new grass that has sprouted up on its own—without raking, thatching, seeding or fertilizing. That makes me feel so much better. “Vanity of vanity, saith the Preacher!” (Eccl 1:2).

How to End a Book

My sister went on a campaign to England while she was in college and brought be back a souvenir of her trip-- an original edition, first run copy of Mark Twain’s novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Twain published the novel under the pseudonym Sieur Louis de Conte, (SLC, as in Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Joan of Arc did have a page named Louis, and Twain published the novel in the first person as the memoirs of the page and secretary of the Maid of Orleans. It’s a good read, far different from any other of Twains writings. Don’t take my word for it; tread it. The two volume work is available for free on the web. I can’t imagine reading 750+ pages of html text, but it really is a good book.

Twain had a problem with the story… how was he to end it? Everyone knows how the Joan of Arc story ends. Even if you have never heard of Orleans or Patay, you know what happened to Joan of Arc. The rest of the book may read like a fairly take, but there can be no “happy ever after ending.” It kind of like the last Star Wars movie— you know how it will end and it won’t be pretty! Joan of Arc was burned at the stake as a witch by her English captors in an attempt to discredit her king and undermine the victories that eventually ended the Hundred Years War Years. Not a happy ending. But Twain comes up with a pretty good ending anyway, and the aged Conte reflecting back--

As the years and decades drifted by, and the spectacle of this marvelous child’s meteor-flight across the war-firmament of France and its extinction in the smoke clouds of the stake receded deeper and deeper into the past and grew ever more strange and wonderful and divine and pathetic, I came to recognize her at last for what she was—the most noble life ever born into this world save only One.

Not a bad ending, huh? Some people just know how to end a book.

I can’t help butreflect on the ending of our book. The ending of the gospel story was penned at the end of the first century by an aging apostle John "reflecting forward" through the strange visions and images of the Apocalypse. I don’t think John was predicting the precise details to be played out in an exact timetable right before the end of days. I rather see John encouraging persecuted Christians by pointing to the end of Roman power and by extension the never-ending battle between good and evil. I see the key point of Revelation as, “They will make war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers.” (Rev 17:14). There are two sides—good and evil, the Lamb and His enemies. We cannot change nor even contribute to the ending of the story; that has already been written. What we can do is choose which side on which we will fight. We know which side will win, so which side will we choose?

How are we going to end our book?

Monday Musings

The Arkansas Razorbacks gave me a rare and unexpected surprise Saturday as they beat the second ranked Auburn Tigers 27-10. Actually, they ran all over Auburn—literally. Both McFadden and Jones rushed for more than 100 yards against what had been the third best scoring defense in the country. Hey, now all we have to do is beat all the teams we’re favored to beat… and then pull three more upsets, and we go to the BCS! I’m not ordering the tickets just just yet.

It was good to see David and Julie Black again yesterday. There were back in the area so that David could perform a wedding. I was glad to finally get to hear him preach (the other times he’s preached here was because I was out of town). I also thought Roger did a good job leading worship, especially since he did not that he was until the last minute. Preparation is overrated!

My major job this morning is restoring my Dell laptop to its original pristine operating condition. Somehow I picked up a virus, and I could not encourage it to leave. My virus program graciously pointed out to me that I had a virus; it even showed me where the virus was. It wouldn’t repair or quarantine the virus-- it just kept on pointing out that I had one. Not only was the virus there, but the virus program popped up ever so often to rub that it! That is like some people who are more than willing to point out all your flaws and mistakes, but they will not help you do anything about them. Hard drives are much easier to reformat than are friends and neighbors!

I Just Want My Child to be Happy

Marc Gellman is half (with Thomas Hartman) of the “God Squad," the priest and rabbi duo who appear on radio and television. They have written several books, and they serve as religion consultants for ABC’s Good Morning America. Rabbi Gellman also writes for Newsweek, and his most recent article is entitled, “Worry, Don’t Be Happy.”

He suggests that the parental mantra of “I just want my kids to be happy” is misdirected and wrong. Bad people can be very happy. He points to images of people dancing in celebration while the rubble of the Twin Towers smoldered. He says, “Because terrible people can be happy, saying that all you want is for your children to happy is either foolish or evil.” He has a point. Why wish for your kids something that bad people can experience?

The word "happiness" in its modern usuage is a synonym for pleasure. When we wish for our kids to be happy, what we may mean is that we want them to have a pleasant life and feel good about themselves. But while that may be happiness in our culture, that is certainly not what the Bible means by happiness. Gellman uses a culinary example—

The reason we have an obesity epidemic in this country is not because we eat too much and exercise too little. It’s because we eat what gives us pleasure.

What we ca;; happiness may really be only pleasure. We don’t eat what is good (for us) but what brings us the most pleasure. That gets us into trouble with our weight and health... as it does in other aspects of our lives. Real happiness is not found in pleasure but in goodness. That is the message of Jesus in the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-12). We are happy or blessed (“beatitude” is from a Latin word for “happiness”) when we mourn, are meek, are poor in spirit, etc. Why? Because we are seeking God’s goodness. This is often not pleasant, but it is good!

Gellman ends his article with the story of David and Dana who came to him for premarital counseling.

I asked her what qualities David possessed that made her happy. She told me this story: On a blazing hot summer day they were approaching the Triborough Bridge when they saw a man selling newspapers. David opened the window, bought all the man's papers and said to him, “Go home. It's way to hot for you to be standing out here.”

Instead of saying, “I just want my children to be happy,” why not say, “All I wish is that on a hot day my children will buy all the papers.”

Prayer Is Like Sex...

I have been reading through Philip Yancey’s book Prayer: Does It Make any Difference? As always, Yancey has a unique way of approaching things that makes me think. The book explores the question set out in the subtitle, “Does It Make any Difference?” If God knows everything and is sovereign over everything, then how can anything we say in prayer make any difference? It is a fascinating study of some aspects of prayer.

One of the things I always like about Yancey is that he so seldom sounds like a preacher, which he is not. He is a journalist, and he often approaches topics from a totally different perspective… sometimes a surprising perspective. I was a bit surprised when he quoted a friend who compares prayer with sex.

I think prayer is analogous to sex. (Peoples’ ears always perk up when I say that.) Most people would complain about their sex lives; a few do really well. Sex and prayer are intimate and over-glamorized relationships. We are led to believe that we should be in the stratosphere in sex and in prayer. It sets up a false expectation. And breaks down intimacy.

Yancey goes on to observe how many “How-To” books on prayer can read very much like a sex manual. “What sounds so thrilling on paper bears little resemblance to how sex usually plays out between two vulnerable people who approach it with difference expectations.”

I never would have though of that analogy, but I think he’s onto something. Do we expect the “earth to move” everything we pray? When prayer doesn’t work (that is, we don’t get the answer we want), do we assume that we just aren’t doing it right? And so we try to find some different technique or procedure that will work better. Both sex and prayer benefit by giving some thought to improving technique; later in the same chapter, Yancey has a section entitled "Chosing a Prayer Routine." But by focusing mainly on techniques, do we in the process fail to enjoy what it is that God really wants to share with us in prayer—closeness and intimacy with those He loves so intently?

Analogies always fail at some point, but I think he makes an interesting point. I’ll stop writing now before I stumble over some double entendre that I never saw coming!

No One Is Safe

The recent school shootings have really been on my mind. In two of these, men armed to the teeth invaded a school bent on molesting and killing young school girls. My wife works as a special education teacher in a high school, my oldest daughter will soon begin working at the same school. I can’t help but think about the security measurers at Denbigh High. Last time I was there, I couldn’t tell there was any more security than there had been when I was there as an eighth-grader in 1969. But then, it is now much more of an inner city school, which makes it safer. Safer? There have been 29 school shootings in the last ten years, and only two deaths in urban schools (my quick count from a list at infoplease). Statistically, Tressa will be less at risk working at Denbigh than she was working with girls at a small, private middle school in Arkansas!

None of us are safe. If little girls in a rural one-room school in an area people where people are known for their non-violence can become the victims of a school massacre, then it can happen anywhere. No matter where we are or who we are, we are never safe from violence. The Amish made the decision long ago to cut themselves off from the world around them, but that world came crashing in on them a brutal and violent way. We build imaginary walls of protection around us, thinking that things like this only happen to other people. We push out of out minds the possibility that this violent world could ever come crashing down on us, but it is an illusion. The unthinkable is not impossible just because we refuse to think about it.

The only safety that is open to us as human beings is that found in God. David said, “For in the day of trouble, he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle and set me high upon a rock” (Psalm 27:5). Paul said, “The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom” (2 Timothy 4:18). God does keep us safe. That does not mean that no violent or evil act can happen to us because we believe. It means that evil loose its power to really harm us. Right after John tells us that God keeps us safe and that the evil one cannot harm us, he adds—

19 We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. 20 We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true—even in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. (1 John 5:19-20)

Safety is only found in Christ. This safety does not sheild us from tragedy and death... but from the sting of death. Bad things will always happen to good people, but in Christ, those bad things becomes an entranceway into unimaginable joy and love. In his song “Til My Faith Becomes Sight,” Dennis Jernigan points us to this ultimate safety—

Tho they slay me, tho I fall; in darkness You are light, Jesus.
I will keep my eyes on You til my faith becomes sight.
O Precious holy Lord and King so full of love and grace.
Though I live or though I die I rest in Your embrace!

Ten Minute Rule

I got my hair cut last week. Actually, I got them all cut. Badly. It looked like I had joined the Marines when she got done, but that’s not the part that mad it a bad haircut. It “getting it cut” rather than what it looked like after it had been cut. The girl cutting my hair carried on a conversation with her boyfriend the whole time she was cutting. Not only that, but she usually STOPPED cutting while she was talking. Not only that, she gestured wildly while she talked, her scissors swooshing by my ear as she gesticulated (Has anyone ever died in a haircut accident?) Not only that, but she had a booming voice that was going off within inches of my ear. So I was practically bald and deaf by the time I got out of the chair. Did I complain? No, she was armed and I wasn’t. Besides, if I said something to her, she would probably retaliate by giving me a bad haircut. Wait a minute…

While she and her friend had their own private conversation while ignoring me and my hair, I had a thought. I wonder how many guests to our worship services feel left out and ignored while we carry on great conversations with out friends. I know that we (generally) swing around sharp objects and yell next to their ear, but I wonder how many leave feeling left out of our conversations. Maybe we need a ten minute moratorium on Sundays—no talking with anyone you know well for ten minutes after church is over. For ten minutes, you have to talk with guests or members with whom you generally don’t have conversation. Fellowship is by its very nature inclusive; it brings people closer to God and to His people. When our friendship becomes exclusive, either intentionally or accidentally, then it is not really fellowship at all.

Most churches that think they are warm and friendly think that because they are warm and friendly to one another. Guests often have a totally different perspective. Think about it.

Exceeding Abundantly

For a couple of reasons, the church here had fallen way behind in our budget. Those two reasons beings we spent too much and took in to little (financial things confuse me, but I think I have that right). The elders did a great job cutting out some things we could do without while not affecting ministry. And they also asked the church to give one-time special offering to make up the deficit. We have been averaging something less than $5000 a week. Yesterday, we received almost $15,000 as the church did (to borrow Paul's words) exceedingly abundantly more than I could have imagined. Wow! Praise be to God!

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Yesterday was also sad as we said good-bye to Greg and Vicki and Jessika Ericksen. They were a big part of our church family way before Greg became an elder. I heard a preacher say one time that when we die we can either fill a hole in the ground or leave a hole in people’s lives. OK, they aren’t dead just leaving for Kentucky. (I’ll resist the temptation to add “same thing” here). But the Ericksen’s will leave holes all over the place at Denbigh. With them leaving so soon after Randall and Bobby, it feels like half our workforce is gone!

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Tressa will be attending the Monday Night Football game between the Eagles and Packers in Philadelphia tonight. I just want everyone to know that I’m not jealous! I wouldn’t even want to drive up to Philly and attend the game. Even if someone asked. Which no one did. But I’m not jealous! Seriously, she better call be from the stadium.