Posts from — June 2009

“We’d like to move to a smaller house, but what would I do with all my things?”

I looked around the once-lovely home we were visiting, and saw shelves filled with books, photographs, collections of figurines, teapots, and sea shells. End tables were decorated with candles, bowls, and more figurines, to the point where there was no place to set my mug of tea. The coffee table had a glass top, with even more “collectibles” displayed inside. At one end of the room, a set of glass-fronted display cabinets held several dozen plates, an assortment of cut glassware, and even more figurines.

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This church needs a drive-thru window! I couldn’t help comparing the service I was attending to the many fast-food restaurants we had been frequenting over the last few days. I was sick of burgers and fries. I wanted something more substantial, and better for my body. I wasn’t too excited about the church we were visiting either. They were going through the motions, but what I was craving was more of God.

We were on a road trip across much of the U.S.—almost 4,000 miles in about two weeks. It’s good to get out of one’s comfort zone, and experience new people and places. Today was Sunday, so we decided to sample a local church. We received a recommendation from some locals who we highly respect, and headed out to see what God was doing in this part of the country.

I’m afraid I was pretty disappointed.

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“If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.” —William Law.

Profound statement—one which I must admit is true.

Often times I fool myself into thinking that perhaps it was easier for the early Christians to follow Christ so obediently (despite even their problems), and that as times have changed, it has made it much more difficult for those of now days to do the same. And yet, every time I’ve relied on such an excuse, I’ve always known it to be an outright lie.

Our challenges today may be different than those of the early Christians, but we most certainly cannot say that they are more difficult, or so much more difficult, that we can begin to excuse inferior behavior. If we (myself being no exception) insist on being inadequate followers of Christ, let us not blame our current social/political/environmental/economic conditions, but own up to the fact that our lack of obedience is nothing more than flat-out rebellion against God. Blame, unfortunately, is an easy thing to relocate to where it will do no good whatsoever.

—Jeremy Gosse

Jeremy, my son-in-law, reviewed “Religulous” on his Facebook page. I thought he presented some important points, and asked for permission to reprint his article here. The article is long, but I wanted to leave it in Jeremy’s “voice” rather than edit it for length.

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Few things in life create more social tension than prying into people’s religious beliefs, particularly when the prying is done on camera. The 2008 Larry Charles/Bill Maher movie, “Religulous” does just that, and certainly takes no prisoners. The movie, for those who don’t know, is a comedy-documentary in which the host, Maher, travels to various places around the world to interview people from different religions (although the movie predominantly focuses on Christianity) so he can ask them questions about their beliefs, and why they believe what they do. Maher takes a very cynical and sarcastic approach in performing this task, often leaving his victims deeply offended, which subsequently provides (or is supposed to provide) its comical aspect. Ultimately, Maher reaches the extraordinarily philosophical conclusion that all religion is bad and people who believe in any kind of religion are morons. As this is a major area of interest in my life, I decided I should watch the movie and see if Maher could change my mind.

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I’d like to draw your attention to a new blog I’ve linked to. The primary author is Cynthia Bezek, a wonderful friend of mine, and editor of Pray! Magazine. While Nav Press recently announced that it will no longer publish Pray! in paper form, features have been added to the website. One of those new features is Cynthia’s blog.

Prayer is very much on Cynthia’s heart, and her blog will reflect that. I highly recommend you read her bimonthly postings. You will be edified and encouraged.

Does God care what color shirt I wear? I hear that question often. Usually it’s rhetorical… the person asking assumes that God could care less about what color shirt they’re wearing. God has more important things to do… run the universe for example, than worry about what color clothes I pick out.

And I suppose that, for the most part, they’re right. Not that God is “too busy” to care about the details of our lives, but that He really doesn’t care too much which color shirt we pick that morning. Usually.

But what if He did care? Would we notice?

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If “you want to be part of something extraordinary… something bigger than yourself,”[1]but wonder how to get started, I’ve got a great book for you. I’ve been reading Butterfly in Brazil, hot off the press from Tyndale Publishers. It’s written by Glenn Packiam,  a worship leader and songwriter for Desperation Band, and director of the New Life School of Worship at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. (Yes, that New Life Church—and yes, we attend there.)

I sat down after lunch to skim a few pages, and found myself halfway through the book before dinner time. I kept wondering how much of it I could quote here without running afoul of copyright laws, and finally decided to just encourage everyone to read the whole book.

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This is the view from our house. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? That’s Pikes Peak on the right, at 14,110 feet elevation. We live in Colorado, a state famous for its Fourteeners (peaks surpassing 14,000 feet).

Conquering such a mountain is exhilarating. All the effort you expended in the ascent is a small price to pay for being on top. The view is incredible. From such lofty heights, you gain a sense of perspective on the minutiae of daily life. Your senses are full—the wind blowing your hair and drying the perspiration from your skin, the eerie quiet, perhaps dispelled by the piping call of a marmot, the smell of rocks and dust. Unfiltered sunlight glares in your eyes. You gasp for breath in the thin air.

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Lately, instead of blogging about being “Mom,” I got to be “Mom.” Our son-in-law’s brother, Andrew, came to stay with us for nine days. Since I was busy enjoying his visit instead of writing, I think it only fair that I let him be the guest blogger this week. Here are his thoughts, inspired by his flight from Phoenix to Denver:

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I’d missed the metaphor the first half-dozen times I’d flown over Colorado. Somehow it had been staring me in the face for years, but it didn’t click until Thursday afternoon. Waking from a nap as we approached Denver International Airport, I glanced out the window of the plane just in time to see the wings tear free of the thick cloud cover obscuring the ground beneath me. From above the earth looked like a patchwork quilt sewn in agriculture, geometric and surgically precise. To the East, as far as I could see, there were squares, rectangles and “Utahs,” divided neatly from one another by rigid boundaries marking one territory’s end and the beginning of the next. From the ground one would never realize that the state had been so neatly segregated, but from my perspective it was equally difficult to perceive it simply as a whole.

It was then that I grasped the message hidden in the earth below: this was life laid out before me. It comes at us in “blocks,” or seasons, each of which is neatly divided from those before and after it. We spend our earliest days floundering helplessly, dependent entirely upon our parents, then merge into childhood with an awkward grace, seeking identity and autonomy. As we age we leave behind the ignorant chaos of our youth, ultimately finding ourselves in God, the work that we do and the people whom we love. Though unique in the details of our lives and personalities, each human being is generally cut of the same genetic cloth, a part of the greater fabric of our species. We are that soil-borne quilt beneath the airplane.

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