….Never Crossed My Mind

An old warrior from my childhood passed away on Tuesday morning. A tough old bird that was always smiling and joking, but could break another man with little effort. One of those guys.

I didn’t want to go to the viewing last night, but knew I needed to go to the graveside to pay my respects. So, I pulled one of my two suits out of the plastic cover from the cleaners and donned my best to pay reverence to an old guy that was more man than I’ll ever dream of being.

I pulled around back at my old church to see if they were out of the service yet. They weren’t. So, I walked in to check and see how far in they were. The funerals at my old church drag out longer than the weddings. I saw that the old pastor was speaking and knew the new pastor would speak last. A while to go. So I slipped in and stood in the back though there was plenty of seating. I don’t like getting comfortable at these things. I looked around the sanctuary at the people in attendance. There were fewer than I had expected. It made wonder how a guy that cool and personable wouldn’t fill a church of that size. There were a hundred or so, still yet. These were all the people I had gone to church with up until I was 20. They were older. They were fewer.

I looked through the crowd and saw people there that I would have expected to have done this long before this guy. It just never crossed my mind. Not that you think that people will be around forever. More that you only allow your mind to grasp the idea of a few dying at a time. You subconsciously categorize the few that will be next. When one jumps in too soon it knocks you back a little.

At the graveside I tried to take it all in. I hadn’t been down there in nearly two years. Since my Grandma passed. Guys my age starting to gray in their beards. Gray in my own. The solemn and almost spooky sound of a single voice singing a hymn. Surrounding us were the graves of people I had known from my youth. It seemed like there were more headstones than people in the service. If not, they were gaining ground quickly.

Stones with one in the ground and the name of the other already ominously carved in. The guy standing beside me now. A reminder.

That’ll be my old man one day. That’ll be my mom. That’ll be me.

Maybe I have a ton left to write in my story. Maybe not. Either way, I want it to be good.

Something

By my side walks a real man. Like some hero in an old book. He makes all the right decisions and finds the right way. He is bold. He is compassionate.
A real man. He has direction. Where there is no path, he clears a new way.
He can be relied on. A provider. A protector. His wife lacks nothing. He is a father to his children. He guides them in the ways that are right. He loves them and dotes over them.
He fears little. He is a spiritual leader in and out of his home. People are drawn to him. He is humble. He is strong. He puts people at ease. He solves problems. He listens to problems.
He is sharp. He has wit. He has class. He dresses well and takes care of himself.
He exemplifies Christ to all people in all situations. He rarely lets people down. He lives up to his own expectations. He is efficient and finds satisfaction in his work.
He is the ideal man that shadows me every day. Look at him through a dirty and smudged glass. Therein is found the reality. Wrong on all accounts.

Soon and Very Soon

Haven’t done much lately, but Jo and I are giving each other a laptop for Christmas, so hopefully the amount of blogging will increase.  Will be a revelation after blogging for the past year solely from my phone!  Hope everyone has an awesome Christmas!

Doing Without Understanding

I haven’t had much time this week for full-on blogs. So it’s excerpts from what I’m reading, which for now is Mere Christianity for the fourth or fifth time.

“A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.”

Easy to Believe

Very well then, atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right- leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys’ philosophies.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Good Stuff From a Wacky Kid

First off, I don’t claim to understand everything about this girl. But if the best art comes out of deep pain, she’s got enough fuel to last well into her forties. Didn’t put any of her pictures of food on here, but her use of light has gotten incredibly better! Keep it up Auds!

Faith That Cuts Deeply

A pastor came and spoke at our church on Wednesday night from Honduras. His name is Pastor Israel and he trains pastors in the mountains of Honduras. The Cove has sent quite a number of people from the church to work with him there and every one that comes back says the same thing. Pastor Israel is widely known for being the man. He has influence. He has pull. The kind of quiet and unspoken pull of a Don Corleone. But not in a menacing way. Either way, his nicknames are “El Heffe” and “The Godfather”. He speaks very little English and used a translator during the message that sounded like he was straight out of the mountains of North Carolina. But, even in Spanish there was power in what he was saying. His message was simple, but filled with the Spirit.

When speaking about turning the other cheek and how only a true worshipper of Christ could conceive of this, the translator asked Pastor Israel for a moment to speak to the congregation. He told of helping the Pastor and his family pack their bags and move from a place they had lived and ministered for quite some time. Everyone in the family wept over how they had been hurt by a member of the congregation. Pastor Israel had been severely wounded by this person. The next day when the Pastor was at the grocery store he saw this same person. He hugged the man and invited him to dinner without ever letting on that the man had done anything. The man never knew how much he had hurt Israel by how strongly he had been shown love in return.

Another man in this same vein is Pastor Jackson from Kenya that’s in partnership with Port City. When you hear these guys pray or speak there is always a richness of the Spirit in their words. It was the same thing with pastors and missionaries that spoke at both of the Urbana conventions I attended. It always leaves me with a sense that the power of God is tangible with them. You get a genuine sense that there’s very little disconnect between their words and their experience. Between what they are calling people to and what they are actually living.

It also leaves me with a sense that in the Western Church, something is missing. Something has gone awry. I wholly believe that there are massive saints of the faith in many of our churches. But, with many, many believers in our churches I find a disconnect in all of the spiritual information we fill our minds with and the fruit of our lives. If you’ve read much of my blog, you can see that is evident within my own life. Many words, few actions.

When I listen to these men speak their few words something in my chest screams out to be, do and live something genuinely and passionately like Jesus.

Relevance is a great tool, but I think it may take center stage too often in the churches most of us attend. It brings people in who would otherwise feel alienated by some of the old styles of worship, but it takes a lot of work to create that environment and easily becomes the end rather than the means! Once they are there, everything else must be Christ.

Once the Spirit does all of the work to get me to this point of reflection, everything else must be Christ from here on. It’s what He calls me to. Pastor Israel said, “What if your physical heart took a vacation? You would die. It is the same with our hearts following Christ. No vacations. Ever again. Every day. Every minute. Until meet Him.”

Pastor Jackson at Port City’s 10th birthday.

Pastor Israel at The Cove Wednesday night.

“This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.”

-C.S. Lewis

Donald Miller

What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given- it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

-Donald Miller, “A Million Miles In A Thousand Years”

Low-light, My Old Friend

I always know it’s going to eventually hit me. It’s only a matter of time. You can’t tell by just hanging out a little with me. I can cover it up pretty well. Like talking to an Alzheimer’s sufferer on the phone. You have to spend a lot of time to actually notice. It’s even hard for me to pick up on it at times.

I realized it had arrived today when I was writing a little one-page literary masterwork for myself. When I re-read it, I almost offed myself. It was bleak, man!

The weird thing is, I actually kind of enjoy it. Most people won’t get that, but some will. I know for a fact some will. I’ve always known that about myself. After a girl and I broke up back in the day I was hurt for quite some time. I finally moved on from missing her and found that I missed the hurt more than her. Like it was my pal or something. Same thing with this.

I’m definitely most creative “feeling” in the midst of that foulness, though I may not actually be anymore creative. I’m definitely more observant and introspective.

So, welcome autumn! I greet you with open arms.

Quotes

“He heals their swollen pride and nourishes their love, that they may not wander even farther away through self-confidence, but rather weaken as they they see the Godhead grown weak by sharing our garments of skin, and wearily fling themselves down upon him, so that he may arise and lift them up.” — ‘He realizes the need for Christ the Mediator’, “The Confessions” by St. Augustine

“No culture can rise above it’s concept of God.” — “Trinity: God Is”, a sermon by Mark Driscoll

“…the first step towards deliverance is to treat the flesh according to God’s viewpoint. And what is that? It is not in trying to crucify the flesh but in acknowledging that it has been crucified, not in walking according to our sight but according to our faith in the Word of God.” — ‘The Deliverance of the Cross’, “The Spiritual Man” by Watchman Nee