Happy Friday
A joke is often told about the conversation between a young child and his mother. She asks what he is drawing. He says, “God.” She says, “but honey, no one knows what God looks like.” He replies, “Wait a minute and I’ll show you.” What does God look like? The writer of Hebrews says if we want to know we should look at Jesus. T.F. Torrence suggests we also look at the cross. He goes on to write that there we see meekness, patience, compassion, and “beautiful heroism” on display. Torrence later notes that the cross points to “a God of holy love willing to fight the inhumanity of man and the tyranny of evil”.
How do we Grow? I’ve been thinking about growth lately. How does it happen? What does the New Testament say? Sheri recently noted two ways to fast forward: the refiner’s fire (Malachi 3)and the gardener’s shears (John 15).
Elevator Music: My interest in elevators comes honestly. My brothers both work for an elevator company and during the 80s I suffered a short-lived fear of them. [BTW, I felt perfectly safe in elevators until I realized they let anyone design and build them, including my brothers.] I share this to explain why I was reading an article about the origins of elevator music. The author rejects the conventional claim that music was piped in to calm the nerves of those terrified of falling. Sheclaims the reason was to relieve boredom. I think she’s wrong. For starters, soft, bland, vanilla music not only did nothing to calm my racing heart when I was facing my phobia, it is the definition of boring. More importantly, boredom is largely a modern problem. Previous generations struggled with boredom far less than modern ones. All of our toys keep us from developing our mind.
Foster Wallace on Freedom: Back in 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace gave an uncommonly memorable commencement address at Kenyon College. I return to it from time to time because of what he said about worship. I turned to it recently while preparing for this weekend’s sermon on freedom. Wallace, a brilliant but troubled thinker who ended his life in 2008, understood that our culture’s definition of freedom – i.e., no right, no wrong, no rules and no limits – doesn’t work. In his remarks at Kenyon he said, “But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad of petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.”
Quotes Worth Requoting:
- Courage is almost a contradiction in terms: It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die…The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it. G.K. Chesterton
- Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?…Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.” Annie Dillard
Journaling: I received several notes from journalers encouraging me not to give up. [I’m not.] One of the more helpful comments pointed out the difference between self-awareness and self-absorption. Lord, may I grow in the first and avoid the second. While I’m here let me say I accepted a “gratitude challenge” – which requires each journal entry to include something I am thankful for – and found it surprisingly helpful. As I have shared, one of the reasons I changed my morning routine in an effort to more fully “enter the day soul first” (to quote Henri Nouwen). I have long been impressed by the story about David turning a very dark moment around by “encouraging himself in the Lord”. The gratitude challenge I accepted was to write down something I am thankful for each day. It’s that simple. For the record, I would have said that I did something like that in my prayer time. But I am finding this simple exercise to be helpful. BTW, I have heard it said that gratitude isn’t about passive reflection but building resilience.
Worth Reading: Saying anything about this week’s Supreme Court decision means I am stepping into what David Brooks calls “the free form demolition derby of moral confrontation”. But I want to be sure you see Skye Jethani’s insights. Jethani may make everyone mad, but I like his perspective.
Baby Aspirin: Since suffering a SCAD (spontaneous cerebral arterial dissection), I push baby aspirin. If you are over fifty and are not taking one every day, what’s wrong with you? Please.
Prayer Requests:
- We are sending out 100 high school students on mission / serving trips this month. Our prayer is not simply for safety, but for transformation – for the people and areas being served, and for the students.
- Also, since my days as a college pastor, I have been aware that the summer months are a time of spiritual growth for some, but laxity for most. My prayer is that we grow in love for God and care for others.
Closing Prayer: Lord, I sometimes wander away from you. But this is not because I am deliberately turning my back on you. It is because of the inconstancy of my mind. I weaken in my intention to give my whole soul to you, I fall back into thinking of myself as my own master. But when I wander from you, my life becomes a burden, and within me I find nothing but darkness…So I come back to you, and confess that I have sinned against you. And I know you will forgive me. Amen. Aelred or Rievaulx (1110 – 1167)