My spiritual gift is telling bad jokes. Not funny jokes. My jokes are so bad that they are almost physically painful. You only laugh because you feel so uncomfortable and awkward with how bad my jokes are.

So here’s the joke of the day.

You’re welcome.

I’ve heard all my life that the reason many people use for not attending church services (or going to church, if you will) is the abundance of hypocrites sitting in church pews on Sunday.

A hypocrite by definition is someone who wears a mask and pretends to be someone they’re not. It goes back to Greek theater when the actors on stage used to wear masks when portraying different roles.

My old argument used to be that yes, there are hypocrites in churches. There are also hypocrites everywhere else. There are very, very few people whose words and actions always match. But I’m not going to quit going to my place of employment because of hypocrites. I’m not going to stop going to the gym (hypothetically) because of hypocrites.

Now I say that I need to be gathered together with other believers not in spite of the fact that I’m a hypocrite but because I’m a hypocrite. Yes, I am aware that far too often what I profess and how I live don’t match. A lot of times they don’t even come close.

Every time I enter the doors of my church assembly, I’m confessing that I don’t have all the answers and don’t have it all together. I’m admitting that I need not so much to be informed as to be transformed. I need to see Christlikeness modeled and lived out and preached and taught so that I can better live out what I proclaim to believe.

If I weren’t a hypocrite, I could probably stay home on Sunday and catch up on Netflix. I could go jogging with all the other perfect people who apparently have it all together.

The problem is that the Church has done a poor job of communicating why it is that we meet together weekly. It’s not so much a celebration of how we lived so perfectly but a confession that we messed it up again and need Jesus as well as each other. We’re not perfect (or even close to perfect), but we are redeemed and loved, not because we deserve it but because of the grace of God.

So I’ll be there at my church at 9 am next Sunday because I’m a great big hypocrite and still need to be shown how to live like the Jesus I believe in and to show the love of Jesus that He’s shown me. I still need to have others model the faith for me and for me to model my faith for someone else. That’s why I go to church.

Because who doesn’t want a Hawaiian shirt covered in Mickey Mouses?

According to Google, there are 17 days until the Autumnal Equinox, the official beginning of the fall season. Everyone in Tennessee knows that autumn usually doesn’t start for real in the South until at least mid-October (and sometimes later).

But there are days like today that are sort of a sneak preview of fall. The temps dropped below the normal sweltering range of late summer and descend into glorious fall-like range. I can close my eyes for a moment and pretend that it’s October and all the good holidays are just around the corner.

Eventually I open my eyes and find that it’s not even Labor Day yet. But I’m not complaining. I know that fall is inching closer and closer. It also helps that the A/C in my car is working better than ever, so I can navigate the last few weeks of hot summer before flannel season starts.

Flannel. Pumpkins spice. Leaves changing colors. Apple cider. Bonfires. Crisp breezes. These are a few of my favorite things and they’re all coming soon to an outdoors near you.

“I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul.…Now I think that the vast majority of us ‘normal’ people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered” (Martha Beck, Expecting Adam).

I heard a sermon illustration once that went like this: a man broke into a store and spent all night changing the price tags on all the inventory. All the expensive merchandise got the cheap price tags, and visa versa. The result was that things like televisions were selling for pennies on the dollar and things like safety pins were several hundred dollars.

But that’s what we’ve done. We prize all sorts of things that in the grand scheme of eternity don’t mean all that much and take for granted what is really valuable beyond price. We’ve made career accomplishments and monetary gain the standard of wealth and success, while at the same time devaluing and deprioritizing relationships and faith.

But at the end of your life, when you are on your death bed, you won’t be asking to see all your diplomas or certificates. You won’t want your bank account information or your stock portfolio. You won’t care how many initials are after your name when your life is coming to an end.

Instead you’ll want to be surrounded by the people you love and who loved you. All that you will care about are the people who invested in you and those in whom you invested. What will matter most is your faith in God and those who know God because of you. That’s the real legacy you’ll leave behind. That’s what you can take with you when you die.

“Don’t keep hoarding for yourselves earthly treasures that can be stolen by thieves. Material wealth eventually rusts, decays, and loses its value. Instead, stockpile heavenly treasures for yourselves that cannot be stolen and will never rust, decay, or lose their value” (Matthew 6:19-20, The Passion Translation).

“Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal” (John 12:24-25, The Message).

Sometimes to the untrained eye, growth looks like anything and everything but growth. It looks like chaos and disorder and destruction, not life.

But look at the seed. It first has to die before it can sprout and multiply. But you can’t keep digging up the seed to see if it’s growing yet. You have to leave it in the ground and trust that it is working.

Maybe that’s how the life of faith works — let God have His way in the secret and trust that He knows what He’s doing. Even in the midst of a pandemic. Even in 2020.

“If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don’t know its name or realize that it’s what we’re starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it” (Frederick Buechner).

“Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met” (Matthew 6:33, The Message).

“So don’t worry and don’t keep saying, ‘What shall we eat, what shall we drink or what shall we wear?! That is what pagans are always looking for; your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all. Set your heart on the kingdom and his goodness, and all these things will come to you as a matter of course” (Matthew 6:33, J. B. Phillips).

The quest continues. It’s been a while since my last update, but I’m now up to Doctor #12 (Peter Capaldi) with the latest companion, Bill Potts, played expertly by Pearl Mackie.

I can’t believe that I’m almost to the end. If my memory serves me right, I have just about 2 1/2 seasons left. That will complete my second go-round through the entire Doctor Who story.

I am such a nerd.

But I’m proud to be a nerd and I don’t care who knows. It’s kinda fun every now and then to do what you like and not care what others think. It’s freeing to break away from the “norm” from time to time and to be a little weird occasionally.

I imagine there won’t be too many more updates before I’m done, but I will hopefully get one to you sooner than later.

I sometimes wonder if we’ve got it all backwards. We’re all about planning worship services down to the last second. We get the most gifted and talented people (which are plentiful here in Middle Tennessee) both on the stage and behind the scenes.

I wonder if it has become more about production value than the presence of God. I wonder if in all our programmed and strategized-down-to-the-last- detail services we haven’t gone and left out the Holy Spirit.

I’ve been in worship services where the music was very amateur, the vocals were off-key, and the songs were old, but I remember God moving in that place. I don’t remember any of the songs or the sermon, but I know God was there.

Churches lately feel more like well-organized Fortune 500 businesses run by CEOs than the first-century fellowship of believers who weren’t co-workers but family. They turned the world upside down because they dreamed God-sized dreams way beyond their reach.

Maybe we need to quit planning so much and start praying more. Perhaps if we went into every service with the expectation of God now only showing up but filling up every square inch of the sanctuary and moving mightily in power, we might see the impossible becoming possible. We might just see revival.