faith

My Friday

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I had a rather uneventful Friday. I spent most of it hanging out with three very gentle and sweet dogs that I’m currently house-sitting for. Two of them were scared of me when I first took care of them a couple of years ago, but both of them have warmed up to me since. I’m their Uncle Greg now.

Some animals (and people) just need a little more TLC before they come around. Sometimes all you need is patience and kindness to win them over. It doesn’t always work 100% of the time, but when it does work, it does sure feel good.

I did manage to make a rare trek to McKay’s Used Bookstore, my personal nirvana. I traded in some movies and got in return 1) Captain America: The First Avenger on blu ray, 2) The Walking Dead on blu ray, and 3) Bob Dylan’s Tempest, his 2012 album. I call that a win. And I have $4.04 left in store credit.

I ended up my night by watching an old BBC production of a Lord Peter Wimsey murder mystery, entitled Strong Poison and based off the novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It wasn’t as thrilling as your Friday night probably was, but it worked for me.

It was a good day. My old pastor’s favorite verse was “This is the day that the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.” That’s good enough reason for me.

I’m Still Here

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Some days your best accomplishment is that you survived. You made it 24 hours.

It may not sound like much. It may not have been what you set out to do when the alarm went off at 6:25 am.

But you know what? It’s an accomplishment. Go ahead. Give yourself a pat on the back.

I look at it this way. Being alive means that God still has plans for you. He has a reason for you being here.

So celebrate that in whatever manner you choose, whether that’s a big bowl of ice cream, a large plate of chocolate cookies fresh out of the oven, a binge-marathon of your favorite TV show, or maybe something healthy like a jog or some quality time on the treadmill.

And maybe thank God while you’re at it.

A Hump Day Psalm

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“Here’s the story I’ll tell my friends when they come to worship,
    and punctuate it with Hallelujahs:
Shout Hallelujah, you God-worshipers;
    give glory, you sons of Jacob;
    adore him, you daughters of Israel.
He has never let you down,
    never looked the other way
    when you were being kicked around.
He has never wandered off to do his own thing;
    he has been right there, listening.

Here in this great gathering for worship
    I have discovered this praise-life.
And I’ll do what I promised right here
    in front of the God-worshipers.
Down-and-outers sit at God’s table
    and eat their fill.
Everyone on the hunt for God
    is here, praising him.
“Live it up, from head to toe.
    Don’t ever quit!”

From the four corners of the earth
    people are coming to their senses,
    are running back to God.
Long-lost families
    are falling on their faces before him.
God has taken charge;
    from now on he has the last word.

All the power-mongers are before him
    —worshiping!
All the poor and powerless, too
    —worshiping!
Along with those who never got it together
    —worshiping!

Our children and their children
    will get in on this
As the word is passed along
    from parent to child.
Babies not yet conceived
    will hear the good news—
    that God does what he says” (Psalm 22)

I posted this Psalm (translated by Mr. Eugene Peterson in The Message) on my Facebook about a year ago. It still speaks to me so I thought I’d post it again here. I don’t really need to add any commentary to it; it speaks for itself, or rather God still speaks through it.

On a side note, I wonder if the good folks also known as All Sons and Daughters got the idea for their song All the Poor and Powerless from this particular translation of Psalm 22. Just wondering.

Bob Dylan on the Brain

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saved bob dylan

I’ve been listening to a lot of Bob Dylan lately. As a sort of challenge to myself, I decided to listen to his albums in order starting from his eponymous debut in 1962. Currently, I’ve got his 1980 album Saved playing in my car.

It’s interesting to see how he evolved from a traditional folk singer into something much harder to define. He had his folk-rock era, his country era, his singer-songwriter era, and his gospel era. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. And I’m fairly certain at this point he’d rather not be pigeon-holed into any kind of genre or musical style.

I do like his Christian albums. Both the ones I listened to were recorded and produced in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which has a very rich musical history. I recommend the documentary about that town and its music.

I’m not going to speculate about whether those albums were a phase or he had a genuine conversion experience. Only he and God know that. I will go on record (pun intended) to say that he made some really great music during that time, in my humble opinion.

My Bob Dylan pilgrimage will end with the latest album of his that I own, his 2009 record, Together Through Life. I don’t have the last two he recorded.

What’s the point of all this? That I like Bob Dylan? That I’m a big musical nerd? That I have too much free time on my hands? Yes, yes, and yes.

 

 

 

Still Waiting

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image

I suppose that of all the disciplines, learning to wait is the hardest. At least that has been my experience.

At some point, I got the notion that waiting meant trusting God and binge-watching Breaking Bad on Netflix. But that’s not waiting. Nor is it sitting with folded hands in your lap and your eyes fixated on the gliding hands of the clock.

Waiting in the biblical sense is more than waiting. It’s more than sitting in one spot fixed expectantly toward the arrival of what you’re waiting for. It’s allowing God to form and mold you into the person who will be ready to receive that future gift.

It involves the discipline of persevering in hope, of training your mind to weed out any distractions to that one dream God has placed in your heart. Waiting means that you take the next of those 10,000 steps toward spiritual maturity and remain obedient in the details.

Yeah, I don’t really know how to wait well. Even after all these years and all the practice I’ve had. But maybe waiting well means simply not giving up. Maybe it’s feeling that you can’t hope any more and finding you can last through the next 24 hours.

Waiting is simple yet hard.

Two Words

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“Blessed be Your name
On the road marked with suffering
Though there’s pain in the offering
Blessed be Your name” (Matt Redman)

Two words: give thanks.

Give thanks even when you don’t feel like it. Give thanks as a defiant cry against desperate circumstances, in spite of the odds and the naysayers and the dark clouds on your horizon.

Give thanks like empty-handed Job, who in the face of his own wife telling him to curse God and die, with painful boils all over his body, made the declaration: The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

Give thanks when the checks bounce, when the bills are past due, when the rent money is AWOL, when it would be so much easier to throw in the proverbial towel and just give up.

Give thanks when there are no job prospects in sight and when you feel defeated and your life seems to have hit a dead-end. Give thanks even when your dreams and hopes are on life-support.

Give thanks if for no other reason that God is worthy of it. Period. Even if those fig trees are barren and the grapevines have no grapes and the olive trees yield no olives. Give thanks because God is always good and you are always loved.

Just give thanks.

Three Gifts on a Saturday

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I remembered again the remedy for when you feel overwhelmed and hopeless: count three blessings for which you’re thankful for 21 days.

It’s easy to feel trapped in despair and to think that your life will never get better. Thanksgiving reminds you that what God has done in the past is what He will do in your future because the same God is in both places.

As one who had been there, done that, I can tell you it’s much better to focus on what you have instead of bemoaning what you lack. Gratitude doesn’t mean your troubles instantly vanish, but gratitude makes what you have enough (as Ann Voskamp put it so well) and it unlocks the door for real joy to come in.

So here’s my list of three:

1) The yummy fish and chips from McCreary’s Irish Pub that if I ate every day I probably wouldn’t be able to fit through the door to get out of the house in the morning. But they is tasty.

2) Winter nights that have that brisk chill in the air yet where I still have feeling in my extremities.

3) Knowing that my best days are yet to come because God said so.

I recommend you write your own list of three blessings. Or you can steal mine. Just remember there is ALWAYS something to be thankful for in every circumstance, even if that is being alive and being able to breathe on your own.

So give thanks.

When Helping Hurts: My Take So Far

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whh

My church life group recently started a new study on the book When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. So far, I give it two enthusiastic thumbs way up.

The premise of the book is that poverty around the world can be traced back to four broken relationships: relationships with God, self, others, and the rest of creation. The book then goes on to say that where most people go wrong is to treat poverty solely as a lack of resources with the solution being to give money, food, etc., and treat the symptoms without addressing the underlying ailment.

One of the most convicting parts for me was reading about how in this American middle-class mentality there is an almost subliminal “health and wealth gospel” belief that God rewards faith with prosperity, therefore these people are poor because they are sinful, much like the disciples questioning Jesus about the man born blind and how it must have been either him or his parents who sinned for him to be like that.

There is a sense sometimes where Americans have an implicit “god-complex” about serving the poor, as if I am condescending to serve the poor out of my benevolence from my lofty spiritual position, like the Pharisee who praised God that he was not like those other sinners. Sometimes, I personally need to be more like the tax collector who acknowledged his own sin and deep need for God.

The reality is that both those in need and those in position to meet that need are equally broken, just in different ways. One may have a better coping mechanisms for hiding his brokenness than the other, but they are both equally flawed and both need Jesus.

For me, the biggest revelation is that poverty brings about a sense of helplessness and hopelessness and the solution is to help people see their innate worth as those created, redeemed and loved by God as those who with God’s help don’t have to remain trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty.

I suppose at the end of the day, we are all poor in one sense or another. Jesus says that it is blessed to be poor in spirit, realizing that we have nothing in ourselves to offer God but ourselves, for to those belongs the Kingdom of Heaven.

Trust me. The book words all this far better than I have. I recommend it to anyone who has a heart for the poor or the least of these.

PS Here’s a link if you want to buy the book. The cover is different than mine, but the content is the same. I’d go so far as to say this is a must-read for any individuals or organizations who want to work toward alleviating poverty in the most effective manner.

http://www.amazon.com/When-Helping-Hurts-Alleviate-Yourself/dp/0802409989/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1424978877&sr=1-1&keywords=when+helping+hurts

 

Something Else Borrowed

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As you know, I try to keep these blogs original and share my own thoughts from my own head written by my own hand (or more accurately, typed with my four fingers). But occasionally I read something that I know I have to share because it is so good and also because it speaks to me so loudly and powerfully that I know it will speak to some of you in the same way.

Forgive me if this is violating some kind of copyright laws. I will give credit to where credit is due and not claim any of the following as my own:

“…. so, yeah, turns out there’s absolutely nothing in those Words of Yours, God, that says it at all:

“Blessed are the rich in money & wealthy in mind & lavish in body & extravagant in stuff, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

You just quietly said:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, the needy in spirit, the weary at the end of their rope, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven — for theirs is the gift of getting to be tied close to Me.”

And You didn’t say either, “Blessed are those who live comfortable, who buy comfort, who want creature comforts, for they will be comforted.”

You just quietly said:
“Blessed are those who mourn, those who ache with grief, those who weep for losses of loved ones & dreams, for they shall be comforted– for they shall wake to being held by One who Loves them beyond their wildest dreams.”

And You didn’t mention it anywhere: “Blessed are the big shots with the big lights wearing the big names, driving the big cars, living in the big digs, for they shall inherit the earth.”

You just quietly said: “Blessed are the meek, the humble, the content-with-who-they-are, the simple and down to earth, for they will inherit the earth, they will find themselves with an inheritance as rich as the oceans, as glorious as the mountain peaks, as abundant as all the harvests of the whole earth.”

Nowhere, anywhere did You say, “Blessed are those who hunger for a bigger house, who starve for more applause, who thirst for more ease, more acceptance, more status, more convenience, for they will be satisfied.”

You just quietly said: “Blessed are those who hunger for rightness and goodness, who are famished for justice, who are starved for generous helpings of grace and truth and love, who have a wild appetite for more of God — for they will be satisfied, they will be fed the best things till they are deeply fulfilled.”

Oh. oh.

So tonight, Lord? Your ragamuffin people bow their heads… & our hearts turn upside down to everything we know — and upright to You, and to Your upside down ways, and we whisper our brave Amens to the coming of the Upside Down Kingdom here —
and in us” (Ann Voskamp, from something she posted earlier today on Facebook).

‪#‎HonestBravePrayers‬ ‪#‎SharingRealPrayerTogether‬ (also from Ann Voskamp)

Although I’d say not that the Kingdom is upside down, but that the world is upside down and the Kingdom will put it Right Side Up Again. But that’s probably po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

Repeating Myself

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Some nights, you don’t have the strength to pray. You can only breathe in and breathe out and believe that God’s Holy Spirit can translate those groans and sighs too deep for words into a hymn.

Some nights, you find yourself repeating a simple prayer like a mantra: Abba Father, I belong to you. You had a long list of requests, but you can’t seem to get past “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Even on those nights when your mind races and your thoughts won’t settle down, God hears you. He hears the longing and the unspoken desires of your heart. He knows what you need.

Trust that the same God who met you where you were and loved you just as you were still loves you. Trust that this God who paid everything to save you will stop at nothing to make you everything He created you to be. Trust that He will indeed work everything in your life for ultimate good– both yours and His.

Then exhale slowly and know that you are deeply and lastingly loved.