Just Thinkin' Out Loud

The Sky is Falling and It's All Your Fault

2012-02-01T14:52:00.001-06:00

I have two primary theories that inform my therapy with my clients; object relations theory and family systems theory. I am acquainted with a number of other theories. What I have learned through the years is that what theory you use with a client is not as important as establishing a good relationship with the client. There are several qualities that make for good rapport, but none more important than being a “non-anxious presence”. The term “non-anxious presence” comes from the family systems theory, but has such a broad potential for application. Being the non-anxious presences means that as the person in front of you is getting more and more anxious that you resist the urge to join them in that intensity. Being a non-anxious presence means that when the person with you discloses something that is shocking to you on the inside, that you don’t show it on the outside. Being a non-anxious presence means that you do not jump to conclusions, you don’t overreact, you don’t judge and you don’t get lost in your own emotions.

To be really good at doing this, a person must have done sufficient work on their own internal world; tending to their own hurts, their own biases, their own beliefs, and their own arrogance. To be good at being a non-anxious presence requires a degree of humility. It means entering into the other person’s world so that you can understand things from their perspective without losing yourself. To do this, you really have to know yourself, but not be hung up on yourself. Being open to the other requires allowing others to explore their own thoughts and make their own choices (and live with their own consequences). It does not mean that we don’t express our thoughts or concerns, but it does mean that we don’t try to control the outcome for the other person. To be a non-anxious presence, we have to tend to our own fears, manage our own emotions, think through our own actions before we become “reactive”. Being present with another person in this way, demonstrates our inherent trust in the other person and God to ultimately figure things out. Being present in this way means not trying to control another person’s life and dictate the outcome of their story; it is seeking to be loving. For me, it is the way that God demonstrates love to us. Allowing us to figure things out and learn from our choices, but supporting and loving us on our journey.

The opposite of this can be seen in so many places, but it is particularly disturbing to me to see it in families, churches, and politics. It seems that social media like Twitter and Facebook and 24/7 news coverage provide people the opportunity to comment on events and people without careful reflection and complete understanding. When we reduce people to sound bites, exaggerate their views (or flat out lie about them) to create fear we are being emotionally reactive and manipulative. When we reduce people to labels and belittle them for their thoughts we are separating ourselves from the image of God in another human being. When we ostracize others because they are different than us we are denying the freedom of each person and the interdependence of our lives. I am continually saddened to see religious leaders – conservative, moderate, and liberals – who demonize those who are different from themselves and respond with knee-jerk reactive comments. I am disgusted by politicians that create unrealistic fears to emotionally manipulate the public. In our families, in our churches, in our society, we need more people who are willing to do the difficult work of introspection in order to offer the world a more non-anxious presence. I know it brings healing in a therapy relationship. I know it breeds healing in personal relationships. I don’t know why it would not benefit society as a whole.

Reflections on Matthew 14:23 - 33

2012-01-18T18:27:00.000-06:00

As I step out of the boat onto the sea that should not hold me
I am amazed that I am doing what I thought impossible.
I am trying to stay focused on the one that makes all things possible
And trust that I will not sink, but should I sink, I will not drown.
If I focus on what I am doing and all I could lose and not on the one that makes it possible,
I will grow anxious and sink.
Trusting that whether I walk or sink, I am in the care of the one who calls me –
That is my peace. That is where I want to be.
Lord, calm the wind of fear. Lord, support me in my doubt.

Me and Mrs. Jones

2012-01-16T08:59:00.000-06:00

“Me and Mrs. Jones” was a number one hit for soul singer Billy Paul in 1972. I have always loved the song and not because of its questionable themes (at the time this song’s release, those themes were lost on my naïve 8 year-old self). I always liked the song because it made me think of my second grade teacher, Mrs. Jones. While I don’t remember a whole lot about what we learned in the second grade, I remember Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones was a kind and wonderful woman who made each day at school a joy. She had way of making me feel welcomed and important each day. When Mrs. Jones spoke to me, I felt cared for. There were other teachers that I had through the years that stand out to me for many reasons – some rich and wonderful and some not so much. However, what makes Mrs. Jones unique was that she was African-American.

I grew up in Alabama (Birmingham and Tuscaloosa). As I have learned my history, I realize that it was no small thing for me to have black students in my class and black teachers in my school. What is so wonderful to me now is to realize that, for me, it was no big deal. Because of the sacrifice of others who fought for equality and a higher calling, I grew up without knowing a world of segregation and separation. Because of the openness of my parents to have high school and college students in our home of every color and nationality, I learned of our common humanity and not a separation of color. I did grow up in a culture where there were vestiges of the old ways in the form of blatant and many more subtle forms of prejudice. Over time I began to try to rid my life –as best I could – of those things that were still a part of my life. I did this because of people like Mrs. Jones and many others. How could I tell certain jokes or say certain things I had learned through the years about the kind and wonderful people who had such an impact on my life.

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. day, I am saddened by the heritage of division and hatred that has existed in this country and around the world. It is even more disheartening to see that these things still go on in various forms. For me, Mrs. Jones was not my “black teacher”; she was a kind and wonderful woman. I pray that one day our children will live in a nation where people will not be judged by thecolor of their skin (whatever color it is), but by the content of theircharacter.

Reflections on 2011, Tae Kwon Do, and Stuff

2011-12-31T12:24:00.000-06:00

One of the best parts of 2011 came very early in the year asI won a trip for our whole family to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. Though we were only there for a few days, it was a fabulous experience. When we returned from Hawaii, we finally moved out of my mom’s house where we had been living since the loss of our house in a mudslide during the 2010 flood. We moved into a condo that we have been renting since then. Though a little bigger than our house, living in our new place has been an adjustment to renting again and settling into a new routine. I have continued to feel blessed by my work at the Pastoral Counseling Centers and by the fabulous people that I work with. The work that we do is phenomenal and usually quite rewarding. However, the rewards have not been monetary this year. After making as many budget cuts as we can, the organization continued to struggle financially. It has been a challenging year in that regard. I am blessed by a staff that so believes in the work that we do that stay and support the organization when things have been difficult. The struggles this year did not keep me from trading in my 2006 Honda Shadow for a 2011 Kawasaki Vulcan 900LT and I have loved riding my new bike. Just enough bigger than my last bike to be more comfortable, I try to ride to work as often as I can and it makes life just a little more fun.

As 2011 moved to a close I had the opportunity to realize a goal of the past few years. On December 10, I tested for my black belt in tae kwon do (TKD). I began taking TKD in 2007 and have had an ambivalent relationship with it since then. I was drawn more to the “art” part than the martial arts and anticipated a fun way to exercise that I could add to other workouts. I soon realized that TKD would be more than that. I enjoyed the physical workouts, learning the forms/patterns, and hitting and kicking targets, but I was not so much into the loud shouts and the sparring. I liked that I learned things that might help me defend myself on the streets, but every time I tried to spar another student in class I wound getting my butt kicked. It was at times like this that I realized that TKD was more than just another way to exercise, but involved mental, emotional, and physical aspects that paralleled life. I am person who likes to be able to check off boxes and have a feeling of accomplishment. My work challenges me on a daily basis with a process that does not always get tied up in neat little packages. I don’t like to have a lot of attention drawn to myself and, therefore, I struggle with being awkward, imperfect, or inadequate. TKD has challenged me on regular basis to move out of the comfort zone – to risk failing at something new and appearing foolish in order to accomplish something great. I have had to tolerate slow learning and being imperfect. I have had to accept that there is a process to the learning and you cannot move towards mastery without going through the intermediary steps. I have had to realize that I can learn from others, but I cannot compare myself to others. I have to always strive to better than I was before, but I have to accept that there will always be another who is better, faster, and stronger than I am.

That being said, some days have been easier for me than others as I struggle with learning something new or challenging myself in a new way. I have come to a place of always trying something new and realizing that I may not be able to do everything. Along the way I reached a point where I knew that was going to see the process through to some point. I came to realize that achieving the black belt, while a great accomplishment, is only a beginning that marks a level of mastery of basic skills. I remain somewhat ambivalent about continuing as I have new aches and pains, as I continue to feel uncomfortable with being imperfect. But I have come to realize that the more I can learn to tolerate the process of learning and growing TKD and experience the joy of new accomplishments there, the more I can do this in my life outside the TKD studio. I am excited to see what challenges and excitements come in 2012. I pray blessings for you in the New Year.

Some Good News

2011-12-11T13:55:00.001-06:00

(Click the title above to hear a recording of this sermon)

Isaiah 61:1-4,8-11

Vine Street Christian Church

Nashville, Tennessee

December 11, 2011

Chris O’Rear, M.Div., M.M.F.T.

In the year 538 B.C., the Israelite people had returned to Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon. The life they had known there in Jerusalem before captivity had been devastated by the Babylonians, but they had hope of rebuilding their temple and rebuilding their lives. The Israelites did not return to Jerusalem with many belongings and they had very little money. They were now under Persian rulers that demanded taxes from them in form of tributes to the king. Year after year passed and the people began to realize that they were not going to have the resources to rebuild their temple or their lives in Jerusalem. Each year that passed brought more and more despair that the life they thought they could have would not be realized. They were free from captivity, but they were hardly free to live the life they wanted – the life that they dreamed possible. It is in this setting that Isaiah utters the words found in the text this morning. Isaiah offers a word of encouragement to the afflicted (or as some translations have it, the poor), the captives, the prisoners, the brokenhearted, and the mourning. The poor, the captives, the prisoners, the brokenhearted and the mourning were not in another group of people somewhere, This word was for the Israelites themselves and like so many times in their history, their story becomes a window into our own story and the work of God in our lives. While the circumstances may be different, this passage from Isaiah, is indeed a word for us.

You may look at this list of struggles and, at first glance, wonder how these things relate to you. You may say, “I am not poor or afflicted”. We may go home to our houses in the areas surrounding this building not really knowing what it is to be poor or afflicted. We sometimes think of the poor as being lazy or we may think of the poor as being from a particular ethnic group, but generally, we think of them as those other people in some other part of town or some other part of the world.

By any measure applied to it, I am not poor now. In fact, according to globalrichlist.com, I am now one of the 41 million richest people in the world, but it has not always been that way for me. When I was in my years of training I often worked multiple jobs and my wife worked her job and we tried to make ends meet. There were times we did not have enough to eat and worried about feeding the children. My wife spent a few very humbling days visiting government offices to apply for the WIC program that provides basic foods for women, infants, and children. There have been many times in our lives when we have eaten only because of the generosity of others. Poverty really is not that far away. The reality is that for many of us, losing everything is only a couple of missed paychecks away.

Right now in America there are a record number of people living below the poverty line. 15.1% of the population or (46.2 million people) currently live in poverty. Poverty is defined as a family of four having an income less than $22,350. This 15.1% is made up of people from every race and ethnicity. Two-thirds of these people currently work more than one job; they are far from lazy, but they are often the lowest wage earners. Those that struggle financially often lack the opportunities for better jobs, higher wages, a good education, adequate nutrition and adequate healthcare. Those who struggle in poverty in America are in need of some good news.

However, the news for the rest world only gets worse. That theoretical American family of four that lives on $22,350 and is defined as living in poverty in the United States is actually in the top 11% of the wage earners in the world. As one example, the average person in Haiti lives on less than $740 a year (or about $2 per day). On average, more than 15 Million children die of hunger each year. There is great poverty in the world and it can be overwhelming to see the faces of starving children and the magnitude of the need. The poor in this country and the poor of the world are indeed afflicted and they are in need of some good news.

Though we sometimes think of those in poverty by certain stereotypes, it is even worse for those in prison. There is great prejudice against prisoners. There is a huge difficulty for those coming out of prison to reenter mainstream life again because we tend to think about prisoners as “prisoners” and not as PEOPLE who have been in prison. We don’t think about prisoners as people in need of help, we think about them as evil-doers in need of punishment. We tend to think of certain races and ethnicities as criminals and not as people. The reality is that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any other nation. Currently about 1 out of 37 people has been in prison. The reasons for incarceration are complex and if we really seek to understand the issues, we begin to realize that it is not just as simple as “bad choices” and punishment. Around the world there are also those that are imprisoned because they oppose their unjust governments. There are those who are imprisoned for their faith and those that are tortured and abused while in prison. The imprisoned of this country and around the world are in need of some good news.

Isaiah says there is good news not just for the prisoner, but for the captive. We may wonder if there is a difference. While there is a high probability that most of you have not been in prison, it is not likely that you have escaped some type of captivity. There are those who are captive to things like addictions, but we are also held captive to materialism and consumerism that says we must have more, we must have newest, the biggest, the fastest, and the most attractive. We are captives to cultural expectations and media images of what attractive is. We spend so much time and money trying to match the expectations and trying to fit in. There are those that are very much captive by their own fears, by depression, by anxiety, by mental illness, and abuse.

Several years ago, I had a client that came to me complaining that she felt cutoff from her feelings and cutoff from other people. She did not have any huge complaints in her life other than she felt there ought to be more to life than what she was experiencing. As she shared her story with me she first revealed emotional and physical neglect by her mother and step-father. A she got older she began to act out in a number of ways to try get attention from anyone who would give it to her. Because of her behavior she eventually wound up being sent to live with her father. From almost her very first week living with him, her father abused her in some of the most terrible ways. To make sure that she would not leave or create too much trouble, her father held her captive by forcing her to use drugs and alcohol. She was kept as a slave for her father and as she reflected with me on the insanity of these years of her life, her biggest question was, “Why didn’t anyone ever try to help free me?”

Those who are held captive in this world are in need of some good news.

Some of you may be living the life that you expected to be living, but many are not. Even if many things in our lives have gone the way we thought they would, there are always the things that we are not prepared for that creep up in our lives. When we are young, we dream dreams of what life could be – what we would like life to be. We dream about our careers and where we hope to live. I have two teenaged daughters and I am amazed how early they start thinking about what they want their weddings to be like – What their dress will be like, where they want to marry, what colors they want to have in their wedding. We think about the kind of person we want to be and the kind of person we might want to marry – if we think about being married. In some of our plans and dreams we may even feel we hear the promise of God in our hearts. We set out on our journey with our young dreams and our ideal hopes and then we find roadblocks followed by disappointments. For some these roadblocks come earlier than later, but it seems there are always things that distract us on the journey. We find ourselves without the financial resources we hoped for, we may find ourselves feeling captive in our jobs or in our relationships, we may be broken hearted by the loss of those we love or relationships that we thought would last forever. We may have to deal with the illness in ourselves or those we love or we may suffer the anger and rage that another inflicts on us (or comes from within us). We can very much find ourselves lost in a strange world governed by unfamiliar things and longing for a home. We can find ourselves mourning lost dreams and the pain of disappointments. Like the Israelites, we are the poor, the imprisoned, the broken hearted and the mourning and we are in need of some good news.

The good news comes in the midst of our disillusionment when there is one who cries out; “The Spirit of God is on me because God anointed me. He sent me to preach good news to the poor, to heal the heartbroken, to announce freedom to all captives and pardon all prisoners. God sent me to announce the year of his grace— a celebration of God's destruction of our enemies and the things that fight against us. God has sent me to comfort all who mourn; to care for the needs of all who mourn, to give them bouquets of roses instead of ashes and messages of joy instead of news of doom.” But it is not enough to know there is good news. We want to know what the good news is.

On one hand it is comforting just know that God, the creator of the universe, is aware of our struggles and cares for our situation. I can think of few experiences that have been more meaningful for me than to sit with another person and share my deepest thoughts and hurts and then feel heard and understood. In that moment there is a sense of the presence of God and, as the other person becomes the embodiment of God’s presence, I have a sense that I am not alone in my struggles. Though I have found this connection with another to be personally meaningful, there have been times when, as a therapist, this “being with” people feels horribly inadequate. Last year as I had two clients who both lived for several months in their cars, I said to one of them one day, “I see you struggle with not having enough food to eat and not having a place to sleep, it feels so inadequate to meet with you every week in these sessions when I can’t fix those huge problems for you.” My client teared up as she said, “You will never know what it means for me to be able to come here and talk to you about everything that is going on in my life and to know that you understand.”

The client I talked about earlier who had suffered such terrible abuse came to a place in her therapy where we were questioning whether she should continue with me or whether we should explore another form of therapy for her. She sent me the following message in an email between two of our sessions:

You cannot know how grateful I am for you. I believe that God is the director of our sessions and with your guidance and God’s, I will be set free; free from the bondage of self. You seem to unconditionally love people – and that is new and odd to me. I try to make sense out of it and when I do I think I feel a glimmer of the love of Christ. Most people would not try to put themselves in my shoes and the fact that you do may be the grace of God knowing what I need. How can I be worthy of God’s grace now, but not back then – [when I was young]. I must stop assuming that I am not worthy. You treat me as if I am worthy. Please don’t change how you interact with me. You are saving my life – or helping me to find my life myself. This is very serious to me, still in writing this I am trying to believe that you find me worthy to offer any assistance at all. I will do my best to hold onto the hope that I have as much as I can this week. And that is what I believe will pull me out of this pit of despair. I know that you have hope and I may focus on yours until I can feel it for myself.

When someone else seeks to understand us and seeks to love us well, God is present, we are not alone, and that is good news.

When Jesus was ready to begin his public ministry, he stood up in the temple and read the passage from Isaiah that we read this morning. He concluded his reading by saying that this reading was fulfilled in him. Indeed the good news that we have is that God knows us and God loves us. God doesn’t just know the things about us we wish we could hide from God and others, but God knows the “us” that we have the potential to be and God is working in our lives, as God has been working in history, to help us become all that we were created to be.

When we look at those who are poor, we tend to see “the poor”. When God looks at the poor, God sees his children in need. We tend to define prisoners by the crimes they commit, but the good news of the gospel is that none of us are defined by what we have done in the past. None of us must feel ashamed for the mistakes of our past. When God looks on us through the sacrifice of Jesus, he sees the person we were created to be – in all of our fullness – and we are defined by the love of God for us and not by what we have done. When we look across the world, we tend to see colors, ethnic groups, nationalities, genders and ages through the lenses of our own prejudices and stereotypes, but in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, no slave or free, no male or female. Our value in Christ is that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Our value to God is that God so loved the world that he sent his son. Though we were captive, Christ has died to make us free and as John writes, “If the son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). If we are free then our priorities are not based on the world around us, but the Christ that is in us.

If we are free, then we should live as though we are free. We set our priorities differently; we not only look for the Christ that is in our neighbor, but also the Christ that is in our enemy. We who are free should seek to bring the good news to those who still struggle. We should seek to embody the love of God for each person that we encounter. We should seek to the see the person behind each label. The people around us are not “the poor”, “the afflicted” , prisoners, captives, sluts, jerks, the lost, the stupid, democrats, republicans, or any other label we use to divide ourselves and hurt one another. The people around us are… people – the children of God, loved by God and deserving of our time, worthy of knowing, and worthy of love.

We are the poor, afflicted, the captive, the prisoner and the heartbroken, but through Christ we can also be the Good news for another on the path. Sometimes the task of helping seems overwhelming. Sometimes having different standards and priorities than those around us can seem lonely or exhausting. Sometimes we may feel called to help, but we are not sure we are up to the task. Isaiah says that it is the spirit of God on us and the love of God that is in us that makes it possible for us to persevere.

In your suffering today, know that that God sees you. Though you may not be living the life that you wanted to live, you are not forgotten. “The Spirit of God is on me because God has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor and afflicted, to heal the heartbroken, to announce freedom to all captives and pardon all prisoners. God sent me to announce the year of his grace and to comfort all who mourn; to care for the needs of all who mourn, to give them bouquets of roses instead of ashes and messages of joy instead of news of doom.” If you have experienced the power of God’s unconditional love to transform you from the inside out – heart, mind, and spirit – then the spirit of God is also upon you and mission of Christ is accomplished in the reading of this text this morning.

Let us pray,

Buried Treasure (Sermon)

2011-11-13T19:59:00.001-06:00

(Click the Title to hear this sermon on Soundcloud)

Matthew 25: 14-30

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Franklin, Tennessee

November 13, 2011

I don’t know about you, but I get uncomfortable when we start talking about God’s judgment. I certainly am much more comfortable when we are talking about God’s love, God’s grace, and God’s forgiveness. In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus is talking with his disciples about the end times and how there will be a time when people are gathered together before God and evaluated. It is not a comforting image. However, the evaluation is not based on random and arbitrary standards. In fact, the story Jesus tells his disciples in the reading this morning is just one of many that make the standards rather clear.

Jesus tells the story of a man who went away on a journey and entrusted his servants with certain gifts. To one, he gave five talents. To the second, he gave two talents. And to the third, he gave one. Now a talent was originally a measure of weight, but became equated with a certain weight of gold or silver and, therefore, had a specific value. Some have valued a talent as much as 15 years’ wages for the average worker. While we may be able to read this story as a story about money, the story is an allegory of sorts and, as such; the talents represent something more than money. The fact that we now refer to certain gifts and abilities that we have as “talents” can be traced to this parable. Certainly, we could talk about this parable in terms of our God-given gifts and abilities. Ultimately, the “talent” seems to represent several aspects of our whole being and, in the end, may just represent our life itself.

Sometimes it is difficult to know what our “talents” are. For many it is often easier to know what they are not. At a recent conference I attended, I sat in on a “jam session” with some friends who were playing music. At one point, a friend started to hand me a guitar. I told him that I only played at guitar and did not really play. Another friend said, “Well, you can always just sing along”. Then she paused a moment and said, “Oh wait, I’ve heard you sing. You don’t really sing either, do you?” I wasn’t crushed because I know that as much as I love music, music has not really been a gift. In fact there have been several things I have tried through the years that I have enjoyed to one extent or another that I know I am not that good at. Sometimes our gifts are harder to recognize because they are not the public gifts that others might see. The Country Music Association gave their awards this week, but there are never any award shows for someone who is a good listener. They don’t give Nobel prizes for someone who is really good at hospitality, but all of us have something in our life that we can offer in the service of God to benefit others.

We see in the story that the good servants – the faithful servants took what they had been given and multiplied it. I don’t think we should get bogged down in why one servant got five talents and one got two. The issue is that these servants took what they had been given; they took some risks and multiplied what they had. With pride they bring their earnings to the master when he returned. If we are going to be faithful with what God has given us, we must use what God has given us. We have to take risks. We cannot sit idly by – as we see in the life of the servant who had the one talent.

It is perhaps a bit unsettling to note that burying a gift of money to keep it safe was a perfectly acceptable practice prescribed in Jewish law. Jewish people were also not supposed to charge interest from other Jews. Therefore, what this servant with one talent did would have been perfectly acceptable by Jewish law and standards of the time, but I think it is safe to say that is was the bare minimum. It was simply adhering to the minimum standards of the law. This servant seems to do the minimum and plays it safe out of fear. He buries the gift out of his own fear of master and perhaps out of other fears.

I think that too many times we take the gifts of God and we bury them. We bury them under our fears of failing. We bury them under our own insecurities. Our gifts can get buried under the expectations we place on ourselves and that others place on us. Our gifts get buried under the pain inflicted on us by others. As a pastor friend ofmine pointed out recently, in the church, our gift as the church sometimes gets buried under the structures of hierarchy and committees that we have. We could be doing some great things for God in the world, but the good things are buried in the processes and the bureaucracy. The gifts get buried, but we are no less gifted. We just need to get the gift from under all that stuff that has covered it.

It is possible that people sometimes stick to the minimum standards and play it safe by their own choice. In a conversation with a client this week he described how his relationship with his ex-wife had eroded to a place of legalistic score-keeping in which each of them continually pointed out how the other was missing the terms of their separation agreement and each of them defended their own position by noting how it complied with the letter of the law. I could not help but think that anytime a relationship is reduced to monitoring the letter of the law, there is a loss of trust and love; whether it is in a work relationship, a parent-child relationship, a friendship or marriage. Who really wants any kind of relationship with someone who is just trying to do the minimum? Do you want an employee, a boss, a teacher, a parent, child, friend or spouse who is just trying to do the minimum? No, we would much prefer someone that we feel cares for us and will go the extra mile for us. Doing the minimum and waiting passively for the master to return is not what Jesus seems to desire in his story to the disciples.

God would have us take risks. God would have us go beyond what is asked and be faithful in what we do. We sometimes have to look beyond the monetary costs and do what is best for another person. Sometimes we have to set aside our own desires and our expectations in order to do something that makes another person’s life better. Sometimes we have to risk being rejected, risk being hurt, or risk disappointment to reach out to others.

It is interesting to me that after working so hard, the reward for the servants with 5 and 2 talents was not a rest from their work, but more responsibility. When I read it in the story about how the one talent was taken from the one servant and given to the one with ten talents, it seemed somewhat cruel, but when I reflect on it, it makes some kind of sense. The one who takes risks and goes a bit farther seems to get more opportunities than those that play it safe. The one who is faithful in little things may get the opportunity to be faithful in more. We can all buy a cup of coffee anywhere, but many are willing to pay more for that cup of coffee if they know the company selling it is watching outfor the well-being of the coffee farmer and not trying to take advantage of the farmer. I know that in my work, if a client feels that I understand them and if they feel they can trust me with small disclosures, they are more likely to share more deeply with me as our relationship progresses. We are more likely to favor an employee that continually does a bit more without being asked over one that simply wants to punch the clock and do what they are told to do. Those that do a bit more, those that are thoughtful, those that are creative, loving, and trustworthy will have more opportunities. They ultimately share in the joy of being the presence of Christ to those around them. The one who buries their gifts in fear and the one who does only the minimum, will not participate in the joy of the master and will find themselves separated from others and from God.

As I was reflecting on this passage this week, I thought of a country song from a few years ago called “I Hope You Dance”. I had the chance a few years ago to meet Tia Sillers, who co-wrote this song. It was Lee Ann Womack that took it to number one. I close with the words of this song as a prayer for you:

"I Hope You Dance"

I hope you never lose your sense of wonder,
You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger,
May you never take one single breath for granted,
God forbid love ever leave you empty handed,
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean,
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens,
Promise me that you'll give faith a fighting chance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance.

I hope you dance.

I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance,
Never settle for the path of least resistance
Livin' might mean takin' chances, but they're worth takin',
Lovin' might be a mistake, but it's worth makin',
Don't let some hell-bent heart leave you bitter,
When you come close to sellin' out reconsider,
Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance.

I hope you dance.
(Time is a wheel in constant motion always rolling us along,
Tell me who wants to look back on their years and wonder where those years have gone.)

I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean,
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens,
Promise me that you'll give faith a fighting chance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance.

Dance....I hope you dance.

Amen.

Adam & Eve - Part 2

2011-11-03T14:39:00.000-05:00

As noted in my previous post, whether one accepts a literal Adam & Eve in the creation account in Genesis, the story evokes something of a universal experience of humanity. For me the story of Genesis lays the foundation for the rest of scripture and prepares us for an understanding of God’s intentions and work in the world.

Because in Chapter 2 we see that Adam was created first many have made much of the fact that Adam was first. I do not read too much into the fact that “the man” was created first. It seems more significant that the relationship of God to humanity and humanity to the created order are established here. It In Genesis 1:27 we read that God’s intent was to create male and female. It was God’s intent to create male and female from the beginning and each was created in the image of God. Eve was not an after-thought (although we might argue that she perfected creation). The people were to be caretakers of the created world and were to live in perfect relationship with God and with each other. It seems significant to me that at 2:25 says they were naked, but felt no shame. God’s intent was that people live in perfect communion with God and with each other. They were not ashamed and they were not afraid.

While I have heard Jewish reflections on Chapter 3 of Genesis that do not include “a fall” and I can appreciate the thoughtfulness of such reflections, I am not convinced that the actions of Adam and Eve did not fundamentally change the nature of their relationship with God and with each other for the worse. While many through the years have focused on Adam and Eve’s disobedience as the “sin” they committed, that observation, while fundamentally accurate, seems overly simplistic. I think it is worthwhile to reflect on the fact that God created Adam and Eve with the capacity for rational reflection and the desire for knowledge. It is this desire for knowledge that leads to the changes in their relationship with God and each other. The reflection on freewill vs. determinism lies in this reality. I will simply say that for me, people were created with the capacity to choose and this is fundamentally what makes true relationship and love possible. I would argue that exercising freewill is not in and of itself sinful and that while God has the capacity to comprehend all possibilities at once and interact with possibilities as they unfold, God does not know our actual choice until we choose.

I find interesting and humorous (in a sad way) to read how the choice in the garden regarding the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. While many have read this passage and put the blame of the fall on Eve (and subsequently have blamed women for a sins through the ages), Eve is actually the one who demonstrates the greatest thought in the interaction. The woman has an extended interaction with the serpent regarding the fruit. She evaluated the fruit on its usefulness as food and she desired the “wisdom” that could be gained by eating the fruit (3:6). Adam, on the other hand, gets handed a piece of fruit by Eve and just eats it without any thought about what he is eating or what there is to gain or lose. Eve desires wisdom, while Adam just starts consuming. In this way, there is a “sin” in which they both ate the fruit that God said don’t eat, but they each have an individual sin that is bigger than that. Eve desires wisdom, but does not consult with God in her reflections. She ignores God’s words and seeks wisdom apart from God. Adam seems to sin in his lack of thought at all. He lacks any reflection on his actions and consumes without regard for the consequences. The bottom line consequence is the same for each.

Once Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit, “Their eyes were opened” (3:7) and they realized they were naked. Before this, they were naked and were not ashamed. They did not fear one another, they were not embarrassed, and they were open and vulnerable. Once they sin, they are no more vulnerable than they were before, but they are now aware of their vulnerability and the potential to be hurt. They begin to blame one another and blame others for their decisions. They immediately feel the need to cover themselves and they feel the feel the need to hide from God. It seems that the relationship with others affects our relationship with God. We also see that while we have knowledge of good and evil and can lead to wisdom, it comes at a cost to us in our relationships with ourselves, others, and God.

When God puts Adam and Eve out of the garden and gives them consequences, God acknowledges that the knowledge of good and evil makes us like God, but notes that humans do not know how to exercise this knowledge with control. The banishment from the garden and the subsequent struggles are provided by God to help Adam and Eve develop their knowledge into wisdom. God demonstrates grace by providing covering for the two of them. God cannot undo what they have done, but can provide for them and help shape them. Our lifelong journey is one of seeking to connect with God, ourselves, and with each other. We are to grow in wisdom and learn to use the knowledge we have as God would use it.

Adam & Eve - Part 1

2011-10-06T13:56:00.000-05:00

For some reason, there has been a great deal of talkrecently about biblical story of Adam and Eve. Many people I know have asserted that to be a “true Christian” one must believe in a literal man, Adam, and literal woman, Eve. This admonition seems to be aimed at trying to maintain the view that the biblical view of the creation of the world is complete and historically accurate as it is written. Those that hold this view seem to look to the accounts in Genesis as a history of the world and suggest that the stories there be held as factual accounts of creation without any attempt to interact or dialogue with the evidence for an earth that is millions of years old, the existence of dinosaurs, or the development of the human person over time as evidenced by fossil records, etc. I am a self-admitted skeptic of things of faith and like Jesus’ disciple, Thomas, I want some proof for things; “Because the Bible says it” has not been an adequate explanation for me since I was in the 6^th grade. I want to believe (and there are many things I try to accept on faith), but faith does not come as easily to me as others.

That being said, it is not that I do not believe in an actual Adam and Eve, it is just that I don’t know. I am not willing to stake my faith on their literal existence and I am not willing to judge others on their belief (or disbelief) in the existence of a literal Adam and Eve. To me, the insistence on a literal Adam and Eve as a litmus test for faith creates many problems. First of all, it creates divisions in the followers of the faith based on that which cannot be known with certainty and something that is not a fundamental of the faith. The stance lacks grace and humility and it does not focus on the message and meaning of the creation story for the generations. Just because I do not know for certain if Adam and Eve truly existed does not mean that there is not value in the biblical story. To focus on one seems to diminish the other.

As I learned through the years, the creation story was not necessarily written to tell us HOW the earth was created, but by whom it was created and why it was created. For me it is the story of humanity – both as a whole and as individuals. To simply say that the story of Adam and Eve is the story of the fall of humanity is to miss a greater truth about what that might mean.

Despite Dr. Mohler's (and others') argument, one of the reasons I believe that the story of Adam and Eve can be seen as story of humanity is because their names, Adam and Eve, literally mean “Man” and “Woman”. In this I see that their story is our story and the story of every person. It is the story of our personal history and the story of our corporate history. This truth for me does not change if Adam and Eve are literal people or not. They may have been literal people whose story speaks to all through the generations. If, by chance they are not literal people, their story still speaks to something very real about our experience. I appreciate the attempt to make sure that all parts of the biblical record fit together, but I do not accept that IF one part of the Bible is written as a metaphor, then the entirety of faith must crumble. The of the faith would then seem to be in the power of the metaphor to speak to generation after generation.

See Part 2 for reflections on the meaning of the story for humanity.

Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Pastoral Counseling

2011-09-15T20:46:00.000-05:00

I have been a part of several conversations recently that involved questions about the perceived difference between counseling, psychotherapy, and pastoral counseling. There are volumes and volumes written on each of these things and the differences between them. I don't know that I have a great deal to add, but I would like to offer my general reflections. In common usage, counseling and therapy are used interchangeably. However, technically there is a difference.

Many occupations and disciplines use the concept of "counseling". For the most part, counseling does involve listening to a person and helping them with some decision, skill, or problem. For the most part, counseling involves less in-dept responses. Counseling involves applying a particular body of knowledge to a particular problem. Counseling is more technique-driven and would be more instructional.

Psychotherapy also involves listening to a persons problems and does operate from a particular base of knowledge, but is generally more focused on insight. A psychotherapist is going help a client reflect on various aspects of his or her life that might provide insight into the person's current complaints or struggles. Which aspects of life become the focus of conversation will usually be driven both by the person's presenting issues and the theoretically orientation of the therapist.

In Tennessee, Pastoral Counselors can be licensed. Those who are licensed are called Clinical Pastoral Therapists. These therapists or those who are certified by the American Association of Pastoral Counselors are a special type of psychotherapists that use the spiritual resources of faith in their understanding of their clients. There are numerous books written on pastoral counseling and what makes it unique -- each with its own twist - and each is often quite deep and theoretical. This is why pastoral counselors often have difficulty articulating what it is that they do that is different from other therapists. Below is my latest attempt to summarize what we do. Even in reading this, there are questions about what this theory actually means in practice, but it is an attempt to capture it. The statement below was recently written for a congregation in Nashville to help them better understand the work of the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee.

The question about what makes the counseling at the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee (PCCT) unique is a common one. The short answer to the question involves some version of the fact that our counselors have a theological education and we offer financial assistance with our fees. The identity of our therapists as representatives of various faith groups is part of our identity; however, exactly what that means is more complex. The training and experience of our therapists means that they attempt to understand their clients and do therapy with them in a way that is different than the counseling or therapy offered at other places.

In a world where diagnostic labels abound and managed care dictates modality of treatment, length of treatment, and frequency of treatment, PCCT offers something more personal. We are capable of using the common diagnostic labels of our mental health peers, but we intentionally seek to see each person beyond those labels and understand the richness of each person’s life and how the various components of a person’s life interact to influence their faith, mental status, emotions, and relationships. This holistic approach to therapy seeks to understand the underlying issues of a person’s presenting problems. This approach to therapy requires attention to the development of a relationship that goes beyond the application of a particular technique. This approach to therapy attempts to see each person in the fullness of what they were created to be and help them identify and overcome obstacles to living into that potential. We often refer to this as “Seeking to embody God’s healing presence.” In the process of relationship, we use the tools that other qualified psychotherapists might use, but we also can call our training in theology, scripture, church history and the traditions of our faith when they might be helpful. Our goal is to sit with clients as they sort out their struggles and make meaning of their lives. We do not rush to answer the difficult questions for them and we do not leave them alone and lost.

The style of therapy that we foster and promote has proven again and again to be healing and meaningful for our clients. We believe it is the most excellent care. We are committed to the idea that God does not just love those or offer healing to those with financial means, but God reaches out to all people. For this reason, we seek to offer our services with financial assistance for those that cannot afford our regular fee. We want to make our style of therapy available to anyone who wants it. Because we want to represent the faith traditions in which we were nurtured and the community of faith as a whole, it is part of our identity and mission that we be intimately connected to local congregations. Our offices are all located in space provided by local congregations. We seek to offer training and other benefits to local clergy and the congregants they represent. We are grateful to each individual and each congregation that supports us through their prayers and through their financial gifts. Through this support we are able to bring God’s healing to the community of Middle Tennessee.

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

2011-08-09T13:40:00.001-05:00

I know it is a cliché question that really seems laughable, but I really don’t understand the level of divisiveness that seems to have permeated our society, our politics, and our churches. I understand that people feel strongly about what they believe and they don’t want to compromise their beliefs. The problem I see is that people think that if they try to understand another’s ideas or beliefs that they will somehow lose something of themselves. The reality that I have experienced is that when I more fully understand another’s beliefs or ideas I gain something for myself. I either come away with a better understanding of why I believe what I do or I come away with something that alters or enhances my beliefs. I do not come away feeling like I have lost anything. I have also found that when I enter into conversations with others with whom I differ, but who are willing to be open, I gain relationship. When we close ourselves off to interactions with others, we only gain loneliness. When we insist that others must be like us or be against us, we walk a path to division and shallow connection.

I am so weary of people who interrogate others and question their integrity simply because they hold different ideas. If a person is so sure of what they believe, why should they fear what others have to say? I am also saddened by those that when they encounter another’s idea, their first response is to look for how the other is wrong or different rather than looking for places of commonality. Jesus gave his followers the COMMANDMENT to Love one another just as he has loved us (John 15:12). He also instructed us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44). If we are looking for ways to ostracize others and if we are referring to the world in terms of “Us” and “Them”, then we are not seeking to build community and love. If we remove the “Us” and “Them” thinking, then we are only left with “Us”. If I approach another with the attitude of, “I am not sure what to do with my thoughts and feelings, but I am committed to figure out how to live well with you and love you” that seems very different than, “You are not like me, therefore you must be bad and wrong. I can’t associate with you and must do what I can to discredit you.”

Too often the public interactions of our leaders seem more motivated by the preservation of power, than finding a common good. There is more talking than listening going on. In order to build community, we need to learn to listen. We have to realize that true power is accomplishing something great together, not in defeating the one another. As long as people are afraid of losing their power or are afraid of losing…period, then they will act as if all interactions are competitions. I know some of my worst moments have been motivated by anxiety. However, the Bible is clear that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love (2 Timothy 1:7). In fact we also read that perfect love casts out fear (I John 4:17-19). Jesus’ most harsh words were for those that used their power to take advantage of others and those who thought themselves better than others. Likewise, Jesus’ most compassionate words were for those who were vulnerable and repentant. I continue to pray that the love of God would overcome the hatred and fear that divides us. May the people of God demonstrate God’s love to one another and to the world.

Surely the Lord Is In This Place...And I Didn't Know It.

2011-07-17T20:46:00.002-05:00

Genesis 28:10-19a

The story of Jacob in the reading this morning begins with verse 10 of chapter 28 of Genesis and says that “Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran”. Jacob didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Hey, I wonder what’s happening in Haran tonight.” We have to go back a few verses into chapter 27 to see that Jacob was leaving one of the most dysfunctional families in the history of the world! Jacob had conspired with his mother to steal his brother, Esau’s, blessing from their blind father. Esau had threatened to kill Jacob and their mother learned of this. So, she convinced her husband that the women in the area where they lived were not really good “wife material” and suggested that he send Jacob to another land to marry a woman there (one of his cousins I might add.) When his brother heard that his father “didn’t like the women in the area that they lived,” even though he was already married, he went out and got another wife from another country just so his brother would not be one up on him. This family’s story is full of jealousy, deception, manipulation, competition, anger and hatred…and THIS is the family that God chooses to make His covenant with! We should all feel like maybe there is just a bit of hope for us in our relationship with God at this point!

When Jacob deceives his father into giving him the blessing that should have gone to the first-born son, his father is trying to determine if the person in front of him really is his first-born son, Esau, and he asked a question about how the son was able to bring him a meal of wild game so quickly. Jacob, who was pretending to be Esau, said, “Because the Lord, YOUR God granted me success” in my hunting (Gen. 27:20). It seems important to note that in that moment, Jacob does not claim his father’s God as his own. By the use of the word, “Your”, Jacob distances himself from God. For those of us who grew up with religious parents, there seems to be a time when we began to question the reasons for the faith that our parents professed. As a parent of teenagers, I have had the experience of listening to my children as they question the God that we have worshipped as a family.

Jacob’s family was also full of difficulty and struggle. There are times when events in our lives cause us to question the God that we have grown up with. There are times when our difficulty and struggle may cause us to question even God’s existence. There may be times that we don’t know how to reconcile the world around us with the God we thought we knew. God becomes YOUR God or THEIR God. It is another’s God, but we are not sure what God is to us. It seems that it is in this kind of state of mind in which Jacob leaves his house and heads out to his uncle’s house in Haran. This where our reading picks up this morning.

Jacob is traveling by himself towards Haran. As he travels, he has time to think. He could be reflecting where he is going and wondering what he will encounter or who he will encounter. He could be reflecting on where he has been. He may have thought about his brother and his brother’s threats to kill him. He may have thought about his own actions in deceiving his father with the help of his mother. Maybe he felt guilty…or maybe he didn’t. Either way, he was out in the middle of nowhere and all alone.

As he reached the end of the day, he settled in a place called Luz for the evening. He apparently had no tent or such supplies and simply lies down with his head on a rock. The vision that Jacob has is of, what is called, a ladder between earth and heaven. It could be a stairway or a ramp, but it is some connection on which angels are ascending and descending between earth and heaven. The movement of the angels signifies the fact that God is aware of the things of earth and God interacts with the world. The angels take reports and messages up and the angels bring the words and actions of God down. So, it very much could be that Jacob is confronted with his own actions. God certainly demonstrates full knowledge of who Jacob is as he offers to continue the covenant with Jacob that He began with Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham.

Jacob awakens from his dream and I just love what he says. He says, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!” Jacob had never really known his father’s God and what he did know seemed to be tied with his family and his father. Jacob had left his family and perhaps believed that he had left his family’s God too. In this strange place, away from his family, and all alone…Jacob met God. Just like there are those times when we find ourselves questioning God, I hope that there have also been those moments when you find God in the most unexpected places. Sometimes we experience God when we are all alone and pondering our life, but we may also find God on a hike in the woods or walk on the beach. We may experience God in a concert hall as a gifted performer demonstrates mastery of her instrument. We may experience God in a coffee shop or restaurant in the presence of a friend with whom we find connection and acceptance. Sometimes we experience God in a regular moment that is suddenly transformed into a holy moment and we realize, “Surely, the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.”

It is possible that we could even be surprised in this place. Though it is place of God, we sometimes come here with other things on our mind. We come here thinking we know what to expect. It is possible that we might just take for granted the words from the texts and the communion of the saints. Maybe, just maybe, there are times when we experience God here in ways that we have not before and we say, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I didn’t know it.”

When we have those moments, we should do what Jacob does. We should do something to remember that moment and that place. Jacob renamed Luz and called it “Beth-el”. El is one of the names of God and Beth-El means “House of God”. It was Jacob’s way of noting that he encountered God there.

My wife has several containers of Shells and sand that are in various places in our house. They are there to remind her of the many trips we have taken to the beach. It has almost become a family cliché for us, but when we are at the beach…at some time while we are there…my wife will say, “I think God lives at the beach.” For her, the beach is a “Beth-el”. The sand and the seashells in our house are not traditional religious symbols, anymore than the rocks that Jacob used, but they are a reminder that “God is in this place.”

What is your “Beth-El?” Do you have one? What reminds you of the moment or moments when you experience God? Has there been a time when your language changed from “Your God” or “Their God” to “MY God.” Have you had a moment in your life where you have felt close to God, but it wasn’t a place you expect to find God? Or have you ever been surprised to actually find God in place where you took God’s presence for granted? I love those moments in my life when I can say, “Surely the Lord is in this place…and I didn’t know it.” I pray you have you have such moments in your life. Amen.

There's Why We're Here and Then There's Something Else

2011-07-10T17:28:00.002-05:00

At First Baptist Church, Nashville, our Pastor’s family has been dealing with some personal issues; issues he has shared with thechurch. These issues have led to “Pastor Frank” taking several weeks off from the church. This morning another “Pastor Frank” filled in for our pastor. With the National Assembly of the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ in Nashville this week, Rev. Dr. Frank Thomas of the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis filled our pulpit. As he began his sermon, he said, “I realized I may have been called here for one purpose, but maybe I am here for another.” After that, he led the congregation in a beautiful time of prayer for our pastor and his family. Dr. Thomas indicated that his family had also struggled and he felt led to support the pastor and our congregation in this way. After the time of prayer, Dr. Thomas brought us a most thought-provoking and moving message around the servanthood of Jesus that centered around the “Basin, the water pitcher, and the towel” that Jesus used to wash the disciples feet.

The beauty of the servanthood message was that it was presented with an act of servanthood. There were at least two thoughts that immediately came to mind. First of all, the word preached is never as meaningful (or meaningful at all) without the act of service that communicates the authenticity of the message. However, an act of service that is designed to solely “earn” the right to speak is hardly authentic. A person who demonstrates genuine humility in service that comes from a place of transformation may have the right to speak of love, transformation, and servanthood as no other. It seems rather trite to simply say that “faith without works is dead” when what we mean is that if our faith does not make a transformative difference in how we live our lives on a daily basis, it is completely lacking in any authentic significance. Demonstrating care and compassion with humility surely must come before any explanation of WHY we might live such a life…if any such explanation is necessary.

The other thought that stays with me from the experience in worship today is that what we think we are supposed to be doing and what God thinks we are supposed to be doing may not be the same things. However, instead of this becoming a source of stress as we try to figure out “the real truth” of things, we simply have to be open to seeing the opportunities before us and the willingness to act on them. The prayer for the Pastor’s family was not in the program today, but it certainly did not feel like a waste of time by the time it was done. I wonder how many times in my life, I have been frustrated by what I thought was an interruption or a distraction that, if I had been open to it, could have been an opportunity for blessing. However, one of the things that I think about the ministry of Pastoral Care and counseling is that Pastoral Care givers often provide a time for reflection and care that is not on the agenda. When someone has received bad news of some kind or is dealing with difficulty, so often there is an established way of “treating” the difficulty or “dealing with” the difficulty. The Pastoral Caregiver, however, allows for a time-out from what is “supposed” to be happening to find out what is really happening. The person who may be used by God does not get so bogged down in their role, duty, for function that they can’t shift gears when needed. This morning, the “preacher” shifted gears. He named the hurt out loud and took time to address it. We need to be open to being used by God in just such ways. Learning the patience of letting things be what they are, rather than trying to make them be what we think they should be is a challenge, but a path to great blessing.

What Will They Say About You?

2011-07-05T13:49:00.000-05:00

"Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus." Philippians 3:12-14( NRSV)

Several years ago I attended the funeral of friend. During the funeral several people from my friend’s life were able to share their reflections about the man that he was. Each person knew my friend in a different area of his life – work, family, etc. Without exception, each person described my friend in exactly the same way. They talked about his kind heart, his religious faith, his friendship, and his sense of humor among other wonderful traits. I was struck by the fact that it did not matter which part of his life was being talked about, he was described in exactly the same way. I wondered if people in every area of my life would be able to do the same for me. I wondered what I would need to change now so that when I die, people would be able to say those kinds of things about me. This experience was just one in line of events that have shaped me in the last 15 years, but one that I return to in my thoughts again and again.

At the time of this event, I realized that I took some relationships for granted and tended to let my guard down a bit when I was with certain people. I could be irritable or short with those people while I tried harder not to be with others. During the last decade, I have sought to try to be the same person in every area of my life. Those that know me know that can count on honest and direct feedback from me, but that I also try to demonstrate love and care in what I do. The odd thing about seeking to live life this way is that I am very aware of every time that I fail. Whether it is being impatient with one of kids or a stranger in traffic, I immediately know that I have fallen short of my ideal. I know that I fall short because I constantly hold the ideal for myself.

Because my life has been so profoundly affected by experiences of the unconditional love of God, which has become the highest good for me; seeking to love God because of the love God has shown to me and seeking to love others as I have been loved. Having an overarching goal for life means that when I encounter an event, encounter a person, or a problem, I try to figure out how to live out the goal in that moment. Again, there are so many times that I fail, but I keep on trying. Some that I know struggle because they set unrealistic goals for themselves or they get bogged down in self-criticism when they fail. The beautiful thing about God’s grace is that it means that when we take a misstep, we can simply adjust our stride and just take our next step in the direction we want to go. There are some missteps that have consequences that we must live with, but God walks with us through those and can help us learn from those if we are open to that.

As the country song says, I want to live my life so “The preacher won’t have to lie when I die.” I don’t want others to have to lie either. I also want the satisfaction that I have done the best that I can. Even though I fail every day, I never want to lose sight of where I want to be and where I want to go. Don’t know what brought this to my mind today, but was reflecting on it this morning and just wanted to get it out.

Thinking about Sin

2011-06-15T20:30:00.001-05:00

I have been attending Baptist churches since the day I was born. I have heard so many sermons that I can’t remember them all. Many of the sermons included some kind of formulation against living a sinful life. There have been attempts to define sin. There have been those who have graded sins and those that have rightly tried to level the playing field by recognizing that no sin is better or worse than another. The place that I become uncomfortable is when someone starts trying to list sins. They always have some verse from the Bible to back up whatever wrong-doing they are against today and they are convinced that God is on their side against that very thing. There are also those who reject any idea that sin is relative. They say things like, “If something is a ‘sin’ then it is a sin for all” or “Right is right and wrong is wrong.”

As a quick side note, I do find it interesting that ALL of the major world religions have some things in common that are considered “sin”. Even many non-religious people will say that something like “murder” is a sin. There seems to be something universal about one person taking the life of another that is particularly reprehensible. In broad terms, I think sin is something that interferes with our ability to be connected with God and others. Many or most Christians would say that any “sin” automatically alienates us from God. The problem is that so many people seem to have different lists of what is on that list and what is not. People have picked and chosen rules from the Levitical code of laws that suit them while rejecting others as culturally irrelevant. The problem is that different groups pick different sins.

For several years, I have been reflecting on the fact that Jesus summed up all of the law in two commandments that he called the greatest commandments. In Matthew 22: 36-40 Jesus quotes portions of Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 and says, “'YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.' "This is the great and foremost commandment.”The second is like it, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' "On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." The entirety of my thoughts on this passage have been shared in lectures and workshops and will have their place some day. However, I will offer a summary.

The two most important things that a person can do are get their own relationship right with God and love others. Getting the relationship right with God is not about a one-time decision to accept Jesus’ gift of grace nor is it simply developing a list of things not to do so that God will be happy with you. Getting the relationship right with God is about acknowledging our own brokenness and failures, past and present, and acknowledging our own giftedness and potential. One helps us discover how to be involved in the world and the other helps us maintain humility with others. The part about loving others as yourself means that first we acknowledge the humanity of each person. We cannot simply see others as the divisive labels that we put on each other like Democrat, Republican, Christian, Jew, Black, White, Straight, Gay, Lost, or Saved, etc. Just because we know something about someone, does not mean that we know everything about someone. Each person is individual and each person is a…person with a story and feelings, and so on. If we are to love the other as ourselves, then we must want to hear the others’ story as much as we want others to hear ours. We must seek to understand others as much as we want to be understood. Beyond that, if we are to love others as we love ourselves, then we must help the other when they struggle with their brokenness and failures – not ridicule and attack. We must seek to help others discover the fullness of their potential and all that God created them to be.

Sin, for me, then becomes anything we do or think that denies our own brokenness and supposes superiority; it is the failure to acknowledge our own frailties and struggles. However, it is also whatever we do or think that keeps us from seeing the giftedness we have been given by God. When we treat ourselves like we don’t matter, we deny the God in whose image we are created. Likewise, sin against another is when take advantage of the vulnerability of the other or attack the frailty of the other. Sin against the other is denying the image of God that is in us all.

This can be stated in a positive in that we should seek to know ourselves fully, as God knows us. We should seek to see others as God sees them and to seek to embody the grace and love of God towards others. Too many times, sin is reduced to a list things we should not do, however, sin comes into full view for us when we set our hearts on offering love and grace to others; to treat them as fellow humans on the journey of life; and help them become all that they were created to be. How can we seek to harm another, take advantage of another, use another, or hate another when we are seeking to help them become all that God created them to be? And the same would be true of activities that affect us in our own relationship with God.

This reflection is why most sermons and lessons on “sin” seem so watered down and meaningless. When our purpose in life is more about relationships - with God and others – a simple list of do’s and don’ts seems so superficial.

Conversations With My Soul

2011-05-19T21:22:00.002-05:00

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are
moments when, whatever the posture of the
body, the soul is on its knees....Victor Hugo

For years I have pondered the fact that there are some experiences – religious and not blatantly religious – that seem to speak to me in ways that cannot be communicated with words. I have written about this in at least one previous post. Recently, I had the experience of being a part of a musical a church. I took only a small role, but thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The music was good, the musicians were gifted, and the choir phenomenal, but it was not the music itself that moved me. In one of our final rehearsals, dancers from the Ballet Magnificat were added to the musical and it was like a two-dimensional image all of a sudden sprang into 3D. I have never been one to appreciate dance in this way, but I was moved to tears as I watched the graceful movements of the dancers and the way they interacted with the actors on stage.

I have a similar experience each time I have seen the musical, Les Miserables. I first saw the musical in London in 1987 and have seen it several times since. I have the 3 CD “Complete Recording” of the musical and listened to it dozens and dozens of times. Each time I see the stage performance of hear the music, I feel I experience something brand new and comfortably familiar all at the same time. Though I know what is going to happen in each second of the show, I never fail to cry at certain times. I can offer analysis of the many things I love and appreciate about the musical, but the moment that I do that, I begin to move away from the experience I have when watching or hearing it. (I am looking forward to seeing Les Miz again tomorrow night.)

It is the reflection on analysis vs. experience that has led me to new insights into my emotional/spiritual experiences. I am a bit of a jaded person. I am often suspicious of others and their possible motives. I fear being taken advantage of. I have spent years trying to work out an understanding of God that makes sense to me (while acknowledging that there is a God out there that exists beyond my ability to comprehend.) I have cautiously sought to let down my guard and connect in new friendships. An all of this occurs in a (mostly) reflective, rational, and meticulous way. When I am in this rational, intellectualized place, I am often comfortable, but emotionally “safe”.

Then there are those moments when hearing a gifted musician, seeing a beautiful painting, singing an old familiar hymn, or watching a magnificent play or movie can bypass all that intellectual horse hockey and speak straight to my soul. In those moments, I can find myself moved to tears before I even realize what is happening. There are times when this has been unsettling, but for the most part I have come to accept that even in “secular” setting, these moments are moments of spiritual awareness. In these moments I feel closest to God and to others. In those moments I feel more connected with myself. I sometimes eventually can gain some understanding of what is so moving about a particular experience, it is often the case that these experiences continue to defy explanations that are logical, rational, or verbal for that matter. I thank God for these moments and I pray that in some way, I can be a conduit for others to have these experiences with God.

One Year After the Nashville Floods

2011-05-01T21:56:00.003-05:00

As I remember the events of one year ago today, it is greatly disturbing to see the images that are coming out of Alabama and a little frightening to hear of more possibilities for flooding in the Nashville area. Though my family is definitely on a path of recovery from the storms, I am reminded how much our lives can change in the blink of an eye. I could have never dreamed the journey that my family has made in the last year and hurt for those who are now dealing with all kinds of losses. I know so many who are still recovering from the storms of last year, those who are affected in some way by the storms of this year and even as I am writing this a friend of my daughter is in the hospital with a fractured skull. Illness, disaster, accidents, injury and death are all terrible things that often occur without notice and forever change our lives. Some wounds heal and some do not. Physical injuries often leave scars, but too often we do not attend to the scars left on our hearts and souls by such things. Too many times in the last year people (with good intentions) have asked if we are back to normal yet. I am sure others in traumatic circumstances have been asked similar questions. My family is on a path of economic recovery. We are in a new place to live, but the members of my family still have struggles related to the things we have been through. I do not know when we will be back to “normal” though.

Whenever I talk about these things, however, I feel compelled as the Psalmist did to also affirm that in the midst of these challenges, there is a goodness of God and a kindness of others that has been wonderful. Being able to affirm these things does not change our circumstances or magically fix all that is wrong, but it is a reminder that we are not alone. I have been inspired to try to give to others as much as I can – to be that presence for them. At the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee, where I work, our slogan is “Seeking to Embody the Healing Presence of God”. I believe that we do that in our work, but so many have been that kind of presence for me through the years and specifically during the last year. How wonderful it would be if each person thought of their purpose in life as to seek to embody the healing presence of God. There would probably be a lot less division and hatefulness, a lot less war and strife, and less poverty and disease.

Yes, it has been one year since the rains in Nashville took our house. We continue to bear the scars on our minds and souls. We continue to struggle in other ways too, but in the midst of the struggles, there is a peace and a joy that can only come from being grounded in the ever present love of God. Thanks be to God for those who have sought to embody God’s presence for me and my family. May God use me to embody that presence for others in the years to come.

Does Anybody Ever Win Those Things?

2011-03-26T17:05:00.002-05:00

This year our family won a trip to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. It was an all-expenses paid trip for four. Except for my being sick with a sinus infection most of the days we were there, it was a very nice trip. I won the trip in contest on Chunky Soup’s Facebook page. This was just one of many that I may enter on a weekly basis. This was the biggest trip I have ever won, but it is the third big trip I have won. Over the past several months I have been telling friends about winning the trip. I have been getting one of several responses from people. I appreciate those who say, “Your family deserves that after the year you all had.” Some people say to me, “You are so lucky. You win everything.” Others will say, “You won a sweepstakes? I didn’t think anyone ever won those things.”

To those that say our family deserves it, I can only say that it was nice to win and get away for a few days. I don’t think people that say this about us deserving it mean that there is some cosmic balancing of the scales that happens and I certainly don’t believe that. Life is a roller coaster of wonderful things that happen and not so wonderful things. Those that expect life to always be wonderful or who think that life going well is a sign of God’s blessing seem to spend a great deal of time dismayed by the frustrations of normal regular life in an imperfect world that is not ruled by the goodness of God. When we expect that “bad” things will happen to us, then we seem to take them more in stride when they occur; not that they are “easy” to bear or “no big deal”. We always need the grace of God and often need the support of others to help us through difficult times. We should also be grateful, I think, when we have those moments of blessing.

I was reflecting the other day about those statements about my luck or about the “win-ability” of contests. First of all, I have to say that for every contest I have ever won (and there have been several) there were dozens, if not hundreds, that I did not win. I have never won life-changing money. I have never won the Publisher’s Clearing House money. I have never won the Powerball or Mega Millions. I have never won a car. The three trips I have won are the biggest prizes I have ever won. The fact that I have played or entered thousands of times and won a handful of prizes doesn’t necessarily make me that lucky. The fact that I have played or entered thousands of times and won a handful of prizes doesn’t make me unlucky either. Many times I can say that I have cut the odds simply by entering a contest. (You can’t win if you don’t play.) However, it remains true that “Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t”.

That is where I started thinking about those who don’t believe that anyone ever wins a contest. How often do people don’t take a risk because they don’t believe that you can win. For years, I never risked trying to make friends because I didn’t believe that I would ever be able to find someone that really connected with. When I did venture out to lunch with others, sometimes I felt a good connection and other times I did not. I know of people who don’t really risk falling in love because they are so afraid of being hurt or rejected. If you can’t really “win”, then why play the game? It is sad. When it comes to contests, if you don’t play, you can’t win. If you do play, sometimes you lose, but sometimes you win great trips. (Other times you just win the latest CD by some band you never heard of.) The same is true in friendship and love. If you never venture out and make yourself vulnerable in some way, then you will never find a good connection. When you do venture out, sometimes you make great friends and sometimes you just get to know another person a little better.

Life without risk is definitely safer and each person must figure out how much he or she is willing to risk, but without some risk, there is a lot less chance for reward.

The House That Built Me

2010-10-19T19:04:00.005-05:00

My oldest daughter, Rachel, had the assignment in her U.T. English class to write a paper about a song. She had many options, but one was to write about a song that had an impact on her in some way. The following is her paper, just as she wrote it, about Miranda Lambert's "The House That Built Me."

You Can’t Go Home Again

During the first weekend of May 2010 a flood washed away my city and my house. Nashville “Music City,” Tennessee is the home of country music and was my home for thirteen years. I was never a fan of Nashville’s famous country music. I was drawn more to the rock, blues, and the singer/songwriters of Nashville, because they were more original than the country music that used the same guitar rifts to sing about growing up in the back woods, drinking beer and driving pick-up trucks. After the flood, I gained a new appreciation for country music with the song “The House that Built Me.” Miranda Lambert’s song would become the theme song for all of Nashville as the city was rebuilt, for my family as we packed up our home of thirteen years, and for me as I moved to Knoxville.

“The House that Built Me” was released in February of 2010 and became widely popular around the time of the flood. It was said in all of the media coverage of the flood that Nashville was a big city with a small town feel, a town where six hundred thousand people could call home. In “The House that Built Me” Lambert sings of specific memories associated with certain parts of the house, such as learning to play guitar in her “little back bedroom.” For many Nashvillians, like myself there were a lot of places in Nashville that had sentimental value similar to a little back bedroom. During the flood many of the places that made Nashville what it is were damaged. The Titan’s stadium, Predator’s rink, and the Grand ‘Ole Opry House were all flooded, and all these places held fond memories for many people. Lambert’s song is about returning to a childhood home in hopes that the her current “brokenness inside [her] might start healing.” For Nashvillians, we had to return to the devastated parts of the town in order to heal the city that built us.

I was raised in was a very old, small house built on top of a steep hill. My parents, especially my dad, were never happy with the look of the house so he renovated the basement, bathrooms, and kitchen. He built the house “nail by nail and board by board,” in the same way Lambert’s family built their home. Personally, I knew the house was small but I always liked it because it was home. Then on May 2, 2010 a mudslide pushed my house off its foundation and a tree fell through my sister’s bedroom and the kitchen. From that day on we would only return to the house to move our belongings, search for our cat that ran away in the wake of all the commotion of the slide, or to simply sit on the front steps wondering how it would all work out. We “thought if [we] could touch [the] place or feel it [the] brokenness inside [us] might start healing” and our questions might be answered.

A few days after the flood water’s receded and we moved in with my grandmother, my dad built a playlist with music either about floods or songs to help our family cope. In this playlist was Lambert’s “The House that Built Me,” which quickly became the song that my family related to the most because some of her memories were identical to our memories at 525 Holt Valley Road. Lambert’s mother and my mother both “cut out pictures of houses for years from Better Homes and Gardens magazine.” Lambert had her favorite dog buried under a “live oak,” while we had our favorite cat under a pear tree. It was the house my sister learned to play the piano and the house we I spent hours doing homework. It was the house with the kitchen where we had thirteen years worth of family dinners. For my parents and sister, the song reminded them of all the memories that we had shared at 525 Holt Valley and it made them sad that they had lost the place that held all of the memories. As for me, I was leaving for college in a few months so the song had a different meaning for me.

Since I was already moving out of my childhood house before the flood hit, Lambert’s song became a reminder of my roots. Lambert returned to the house to “take nothing but a memory from the house that built [her].” The song reminded me that even if I could not physically return to my childhood home, I could remember all of the things that built me. I was built by a family full of love for one another, for animals, for music, for sweet tea, and barbeque. I was built by a city full of friendly faces, country music and southern accents. For me, “The House that Built Me” is not a reminder of the home we lost, but a reminder of the how “I [can] find myself” so that I never feel “like I’m someone else.”

Country music may not always have the most original lyrically or musically, but in reference to the flood it was appropriate to have a country song be the song that embodied Nashville as it was rebuilt. The fact that “The House that Built Me” was country became moot once I was able to appreciate it significance to my life and to the lives around me. The song connected with my family because of the eerie similarities between Lambert’s house and our house. The idea that “a memory from the house that built me” could heal the “brokenness inside me” is the part of the song I carry with me, because even though I can’t return home I will always have the memories.

(Oh, and she got a 98 on this one.)

Breaking the Law

2010-08-22T20:57:00.004-05:00

Breaking the Law

Luke 13:10-17

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Franklin, Tennessee

August 22, 2010

Chris O’Rear, M.Div., M.M.F.T.

For the most part, I am a rule-keeper. I obey the laws. At least I try to obey the laws. I am, for the most part, aware of the big ones and I do try to obey them. I am sure that I don’t know every law. I just saw this one the other day from Article XI, Section l5 of the Tennessee Constitution that says “No person shall in time of peace be required to perform any service to the public on any day set apart by his religion as a day of rest.” Since I read this, I have been trying to figure out if I ever asked my kids to do any public service on a Sunday. And… maybe sometimes I do drive too fast too. I didn’t say I was perfect, but I do try to obey the laws and, I guess I don’t just mean the state or federal laws. I also try to observe those more unspoken cultural rules too. I don’t like to do things that draw a great deal of attention to myself…Okay, maybe the tattoo and the motorcycle that have are kind of a gray area on this one, but I’m really not WAY out there. I try not to put non-recyclables in the recycling bins. I never liked my kids to cry on the plane or make a scene in a restaurant. I don’t necessarily like to wear really flashy clothing. In fact, my wife gives me a hard time because she says I dress now like I did when we met 27 years ago. I don’t really know if that is true, but I do like to stick with a “classic” style.

I am a person who likes to keep the rules, I feel like things go better in general when people keep the rules. It annoys me (and sometimes angers me) when people blatantly and flagrantly just disregard the rules and the norms and put others at risk or cause others harm. Rules are there for a reason. They are there to help protect us and to make life easier or better. I was recently in Haiti where there seem to be very few traffic laws. I have to say, I am very glad someone else was driving us around because I would have gone crazy trying to deal with that traffic. Most of the roads are not paved and there were big pot holes everywhere, so cars and motorcycles go speeding down the road weaving back and forth across the road dodging the potholes and narrowly avoiding head-on collisions regularly. Where we were, there were few traffic signs or signals and when they did exist, they were blatantly ignored. Every intersection was a fight for survival and threat to life and limb. In short, it was sheer chaos. So, when we try to play loose and free with the rules and the laws it really does seem to threaten the stability of society. Things are better when we obey the laws.

This is exactly the feeling and the mentality of the leader of the synagogue described in our gospel reading this morning. While teaching in the synagogue, Jesus took a moment to heal a woman who had been crippled by an illness for years. The leader of the synagogue does not seem to be angered because Jesus healed the woman, but because he healed her on the Sabbath. Of course, this person - the head of the Synagogue - was responsible for the order in the synagogue. This person prepared for worship in the synagogue. This is the person that was responsible for what was to happen in the Synagogue and Jesus had just threatened one of the most important rules for the Jewish people – the rule of the Sabbath. We can assume that that this man feared that if Jesus, and others, began disregarding the rules of the Sabbath, then the structures of faith and society could be called into question and foundation of society itself could be threatened. Maybe you think that is a bit absurd, but I am not so sure that this man wasn’t acting from thoughts pretty much like this.

The difficulty with this thinking in the story is a bit easier for us to see because we have years of perspective and the teaching of Jesus, but Jesus has to spell it out for this man. He had become too focused on the wrong laws. Earlier in Luke, Jesus had a confrontation with other religious leaders and had said to them that they focused on many details of the law, but they had neglected “Justice and the Love of God” (Luke 11:42). He told them that they should have practiced more of THESE things. This is probably why Jesus calls this man, the leader of the Synagogue, and those like him, “Hypocrites”. They focused on many many laws, but they missed the point of the law. Jesus noted that these people would allow a man to free an animal on the Sabbath because of concern for the animal, but they gave him a hard time for freeing this woman – this child of God – from her debilitating illness on the Sabbath. Wasn’t this woman more important than an ox or a donkey?

Jesus seems to call us to focus on a different law – or at least to not lose sight of why we have the law. The law of God is to help us in our relationship with God and our relationship with others. The law of God is to help us in practicing Justice and embodying the love of God for others. We should be focused on the law that helps us in these things. But doing so can be difficult.

As we see in the life of Jesus, following these laws of love and justice do not always fit with the laws of the land or the cultural expectations. When we follow THIS law, others may look at us oddly. This is like a couple of years ago, when my mother and her husband decided to take in a man who had a mild mental illness and was dying of cancer and let him live with them because his family had forsaken him. My brother and sister and I thought my mom had lost her mind. Many others looked at her oddly and questioned why she and her husband would do such a thing, but my mother and her husband kept Joe at her house and cared for him for almost a year, until he died of his illness.

When we follow this example of Jesus, others may not understand, like the father I heard of recently who could not comprehend why his daughter who had just finished college would “give up on a real career” to go and use her skills to serve people in Africa.

Sometimes when we follow this law of God’s, people may even respond to us with hatred. As has been the case for the Thompsons, a missionary family I met in Haiti, who have been yelled at and threatened for teaching about the love of Jesus to people in Gonaives.

This law of God may lead a student to forego a spring break on a sunny beach to go and serve on a mission. Many couples now are now choosing to give up on traditional ideas of a honeymoon to provide acts of love and service to those in places of need. My friends, Jason and Elizabeth, recently celebrated their 25^th anniversary by joining with a group from the Global Orphan Project to work with orphans in Haiti.

We may be called to stand with people who are rejected, hated, or unloved. Following this law of God’s may have us join with people and causes that we would never have imagined. Our friends may question our sanity and others may find us an inspiration, but we cannot ignore that we are called to a greater law and bigger cause. What will you do for the cause of justice and God’s love? Are you up to the challenge or would you prefer the safety of what is proper and the way it has always been done?

I pray you will seek the higher law. Amen.

Haiti 2010

2010-07-27T15:11:00.000-05:00

I have just returned from a trip to Haiti with 6 of the recent high school graduates from our church and two other adults. Our group met with 15 others from Lincoln, Nebraska and went to take supplies to three orphan villages as part of the work of the Global Orphan Project. The Nebraska team was made up primarily of educators and others associated with a school in Lincoln that has adopted one of the orphan villages that we visited. Though our trip was brief, only 5 days, we were able to see and do quite a bit in those 5 days.

We arrived in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, July 22, and traveled from there to the Kaliko Beach Club in Cote des Arcadins. Friday we traveled up the coast to Gonaives, an area that even Haitians call the armpit of Haiti. While in Gonaives, we visited three orphan villages, delivered some clothes and supplies, and interacted with the children there. On Sunday evening we returned to Kaliko and then on Monday morning we returned for a bus tour of Port-au-prince before boarding the plane home. What I saw and what we did has changed me. A friend recently shared with me the song, “I Saw What I Saw”, by Sara Groves and her lyrics about her trip to Rowanda have captured my feelings in reflecting on Haiti.

I saw what I saw and I can’t forget it.

I heard what I heard and I can’t go back.

I know what I know and there’s no denying.

Something on the road cut me to the soul.

Your pain has changed me.

Your dreams inspire.

Your face a memory.

Your hope a fire.

Your courage asks me what I’m afraid of and what I know of love (and God).

While in Haiti we saw devastating poverty and we heard stories of miraculous hope. Pastor Benoit, a pastor who was raised Haiti, told us of his life growing up the son of a voodoo priest and priestess. He described his life in voodoo, a religion still followed by about 65% of people in Haiti, as a life filled with fear and hatred. He said there was no peace for him in voodoo. He described hearing of peace and hope in a relationship with Jesus through a radio broadcast. He came to know that peace and hope and now has a church, a school, an orphanage, and a senior adult home in Haiti that by next year will be fully funded by his concrete block business. He is an advocate for Haitian financial independence, but a huge advocate for physical visits by people from the U.S. who can share their love and their skills with the Haitian people.

Pastor Benoit also recounted the story of Haitian independence from France and how the people made a pact with the devil with a promise to dedicate the country to Satan if they won their independence. I am not usually a very devil/spiritual-warfare kind of person, but I could not help but think that if there were ever a place controlled by evil, this would be it. This is a place where the government conspires to keep the people illiterate and poor. This is place with little infrastructure and little hope. Haiti is a place of “dog eat dog” mentality and people struggle for advantage and survival. I could not help but thinking of Alice Cooper’s song, “Nothing’s Free”, in which he imagines the attitude of the devil who has enticed someone with a deception that only turns out to be prison of another sort and in the end, says, “But you’re free. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Though we were not in Haiti for a long period of time, I am grateful for those like Pastor Benoit, the Thompsons (a missionary family) and others who are making a long-term commitment there. I do not think that our time there was a waste, however. We went to demonstrate the love of God to some of the most vulnerable in this society. We brought supplies to help with their health and education. We made an investment in the future of Haiti. There are thousands of orphans in Haiti. Some who have lost their parents to disease, accidents, and natural disasters and some who have been voluntarily given up by parents who can no longer care for their children. Many of these are not in orphanages. Those that are in these orphanages, have varying levels of supplies and care. Just in the three orphanages we visited, we saw a huge disparity in resources. In one village (Mapou), there are four rooms approximately 10x8 where children sleep 20 to a room. There they have only 4 bunk beds and the children sleep two to a mattress. The others sleep on mats on the floor. In another village, Fayeton, the children have four dormitories where each child has their own bed. In each of these villages we played with the children and did crafts with them on very hot days. Our people had their water bottles when we were hot, but these children never had a drink while we were there. We saw children with toothaches and infections that were not adequately treated. There cooking conditions were questionable and their surroundings filthy.

While we were there, our group leader (Bob Sparrow) challenged us to reflect on James 1:27 which says, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows, in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (NRSV). Our religious practice is not meaningful – or does not exist – if we do not care for those most vulnerable in our world. One of my personal mantras is the last line sung in the musical, Les Miserable, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” As I experienced the need for compassion and love in the children the past 5 days, my heart has been broken and felt the love of God for these little ones. I could not help but think that I was truly seeing the face of God. I do not know how a person can visit a place of such devastation and poverty without being changed forever. I will be challenged in the months and years to come to figure out how to integrate this awareness into the things of my life here and I look forward to a time when I may be able to return to Haiti.

What I know after May 2, 2010

2010-06-26T20:12:00.006-05:00

Many of you have followed the saga of our house for the past couple of months and I cannot express my gratitude for your concern, your prayers, and your gifts to my family and me. I have thought many times about posting these thoughts to my blog, but kept putting it off – thinking that at some point, I would be able to report on the solution of things. However, our situation is not yet resolve and we do not yet know how it will be completely resolved. However, there are some things that I do know that I want to share.

I do know what has happened to our house. On May 2, while most of Nashville was experiencing floods, there were several mudslides in my neighborhood. My neighbors have experienced horrible effects of these slides. At my house, several smaller sections of the hill behind our house gave way, but a larger section of the hill apparently moved towards my house and stopped. The pressure of this movement has cracked the foundation of our house and slightly bowed the foundation wall. All walls that are connected to that wall are now warped. In addition to this, a tree from behind our house fell through our house smashing the roof, our attic, and ceilings in our kitchen and in my daughter, Jessie’s, room.

After talking to numerous government officials, FEMA, the SBA, geologists, contractors, insurance agents, adjusters, and real estate agents, I know a few more things. Insurance only paid for damage caused by the tree. FEMA gave us money, but not enough to cover the other damage to our house. The SBA is unable to process our request at this time. The city may consider our home in a “buy back” program, but not for at least two years. Though I had purchased additional coverage from my insurance agent because I feared such an event, the coverage I purchased does not cover this (we are still dealing with the agent over this.) The cost to stabilize the hill behind our house will be over $100,000. With the combined cost to repair our home and stabilize the property well over $150,000, it is not economically feasible to restore our house to its pre-storm condition. Therefore, we have been exploring our options for “losing” the house.

Every day since May 2 (And I literally mean EVERY day), has included a phone call, an email, a form, a fax, or a face-to-face visit related to our house. Almost every day brings a new bit of news, a new wrinkle, or another set-back. Exactly how this will ultimately be resolved is still unknown. All of this has been very stressful and though most days I do well, there are days that don’t feel like leaving the house and other times I just cry. But that is not the final word on what I know.

Through this time, I have never once questioned “Why Me?” and I have never once wondered where God is in the midst of this. I do not think that “God did this to me” and I do not question that good has and will come from this. I feel blessed that my family was all safe – including my oldest daughter who was upstairs when the tree fell through the house. With every thoughtful gift we have received, I have felt the tender comfort of God. Many people have sincerely asked how they can be of help and we have tried to let people know when we know what are needs are (like help with moving, storing our “things”, financial assistance, and other gift cards). However, I have been especially moved by the spontaneous gifts that we have received; some of which are things that if I had asked for, I would have been WAY out of line. There have been spontaneous financial gifts to us. My friend, Jenny, who makes cakes offered to make a cake for Rachel’s graduation party. She just said, “Tell me how many people and when.” My friend, Ray, who is storing my motorcycle for me, had a new tire put on the back of my bike and had a general maintenance check done on my bike for me. A doctor at Vanderbilt, who knows Lynda, has offered to have a graduation party for Rachel to make sure that she has all she needs to be ready to go to college in the fall. My mom and her husband, Jim, have given us a place to live as long as we need. These are just a few of the amazing things that people have done for us. In each act of kindness, I feel the presence of God with us.

There is one great thing that I have felt through this experience. Several nights since we moved out of the house, our family has eaten together as a family (both at home and out) as we have always done regularly. As we have gathered around the table, we have talked about our lives; we have laughed, and shared deep reflections. I continue to be blessed by my two daughters and my wife. Eating these meals is an ordinary event, but when we share with each other and I experience the joy of these precious moments, they are transformed into holy moments of divine incarnation for me. I have realized that my hope does not lie in my house (and certainly does not lie with insurance companies). My hope is in the love and connection of my family and the goodness of God. I have thought more than once that I we could be living in the homeless shelter and I could be unemployed and while I would not be “happy” about it, I would feel content. Serenity, for me, has not been in everything working out (because it definitely has not worked out well yet), but serenity has come in knowing that no matter what happens, the love of God and the love of my family are steadfast. These are the things that I know. Some of the details of this story will change as time goes on, but some most certainly will not. Thank you all for your continued prayers.

A Little Rant about the Drop-off Line at School

2010-03-01T08:42:00.001-06:00

I do not understand why it takes some parents 20 minutes to drop their kids off at school every morning. Every morning when we arrive at school my daughter collects her things and gets out of the car. The whole process takes less than 15 seconds. Then I sit behind some mom in an SUV while their child has to open two car doors to get all of their belongings. THEN the mom calls the child back to the car to tell them one more thing before they leave for the school. THEN the mom sits in the car and watches their child as they take the leisurely stroll to the school door. Meanwhile another car has pulled behind me so I can no longer back up and try to get around the over-protective SUV mom. All I can say is, "somebody needs to get more organized and somebody needs to get a life." Okay, I'm done now.

Arrogance Will Get You Nowhere

2010-01-10T19:00:00.005-06:00

Several years ago I was asked to lead a class at my church on grief. As part of the class, I had visitors from the Muslim and Jewish communities come on different nights and talk about how each of those traditions cares for those who are grieving. I love the way that care for those who are grieving is built into the regular worship at Jewish temples and synagogues and I thought we might could learn from this and other aspects of others' faith practices. Later I was criticized by one participant who said we didn't need those "foreigners" to come to our church to tell us anything.

Today I watched the ABC Documentary "Different Books, Common Word" that highlighted the dialogue between Baptists and Muslims in various parts of the United States. The program highlighted how several different people found themselves with the opportunity to interact with a person from another faith group and learned something about the common humanity of the other. So many times in church, I hear more of the "We are right and 'they' are wrong" kinds of rhetoric. Whether it is about religion, politics, race, gender or some other division, there seems to be a tendency to talk about those who are in and those who are out. Too often, what is called tolerance by such thinkers is the willingness to allow others the "right" to live life by their own cultural standards as long as "those people" know that "they" are in the minority and not in positions of power. There also seems to be an idea that if I truly enter a dialogue with someone who is different from me, I will have to give up something of who I am. This just simply is not true. In fact, dialogue that requires that a person give up a part of who they are lacks any potential for genuine connection. However, we do have to set aside our need to be right long enough to enter into the world of the other and try to see the world through their eyes.

This point has been portrayed beautifully in movies such as Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and more recently, Avatar. If we just keep saying why we think we are right and why others or wrong, we never truly understand the other. (And this is true in world politics, marriages, and parenting.) In an encounter with another we may find something that changes us, or we may be reminded of why we believe as we do, but that cannot truly happen if we approach such conversations with arrogance. To a lesser extent, I have the privilege to practice this on a regular basis as I get to visit other congregations as part of my work. I have learned to appreciate the liturgy and practice of other Christian Churches. In each visit, I find things that I like and reasons to return to my own congregation. However, every encounter opens my eyes to new ways of doing things. For a couple of years I had regular lunches with my friend, A.J. Levine. A.J. is a Jewish woman who is also a professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt. I loved our conversations both about her faith and practice and her views on Christian faith and practice as she critiqued it through her studies of the New Testament. I have loved the rich conversations that I have had with those who are just across party lines from me or those that have different ethnic background. Each time I come away from a conversation with something I have learned and something that affirms a part of myself.

I do not understand the need to draw deep divides between people or those that express anger when they encounter views that are different than their own. In fact, if there is one place that I need to practice my own tolerance for others, it is for people who seem to demonstrate these types of rigid stances. As we learn what it is to love our neighbor as ourselves or as we truly try to embody the teachings of the "Good Samaritan", I think we have to learn to love - not tolerate or endure - others; others from different religions, countries, cultures, races and political parties. My life has been enriched as I try to overcome my own prejudices daily.

Service of Remembrance

2009-11-29T22:51:00.004-06:00

Each of the candles in this photo represents the life of a loved one remembered at the annual "Service of Remembrance" at my church. Each person present at this service completed a card with the name of their remembered friend or family member prior to the service. During the service, each name is read and the family member(s) come forward and light one of these candles. As the next name is read, the candle-lighter passes a taper to the next family.

It is moving simply to hear the name of each person read. Some of the people named are people I knew and some are not, but as I looked into the faces of those lighting the candles and saw the interactions of friends and family members I felt connected the life that was honored. Some grieved with a grief that is fresh and raw and others with a grief that has been tempered with time. However, for each person, the holidays present an opportunity to connect with the memory and absence of the lost loved one. Though it was pointed out that we, as people of faith, do not grieve as those who have no hope, we do feel the physical absence of those we lose while we remain here.

It is interesting that even though I did not have a connection with all of those honored tonight, I could identify with the grief and loss experienced by their friends and family. As I allowed myself to connect with their grief, I was connected with my own losses (past and present). As a community of faith, we joined with one another in expressing grief. In doing so, we participated in a healing ritual that helped us deal with our losses.

For those of you who find the holidays to be a particularly difficult time of grieving, I offer my prayer for God's peace for you. May you find a place of healing and comfort.

Starbuck's Rant

2009-11-17T09:53:00.002-06:00

If you were to ask me, I would tell you that I am not a coffee drinker. I don't like plain coffee. I don't regularly just drink a random cup of coffee. However, with enough milk and syrup in it, I really like a coffee-flavored beverage from Starbuck's. My favorite is a peppermint mocha. Several times a week I will go around the corner and order a "Grande, non-fat, no whip, peppermint mocha." Which, unfortunately, usually sets me back about $4. It used to be $4.32 until I learned about registered gift cards. With a registered gift card you could get your extra syrup free and just like that, my $4.32 became $4.

However, when the holidays rolled around, Starbucks offers a "Holiday" Peppermint Mocha that sells for $4.42 in the Grande size and your registered card doesn't get you nothin! Last year, I spent my days at Starbucks asking the cashier if they would not ring my drink as the "Holiday" version, but just as a Mocha with peppermint and "Presto" I got my syrups free. When the holidays rolled around this year, same issue. So, this year, I wrote to Starbuck's to say, "What's up with the added expense and no free syrup?" However, their response seems to have been to notify the stores to not ring holiday drinks any other way than as the holiday version. So now my $4 Grande costs me $4.42. This is just CRAZY to me.

There are new benefits coming in December for registered gift cards and I can't wait for those.

However, as I write this, I am reminded that there are literally MILLIONS of people in Africa alone that do not have clean water to drink and that those people must sometimes walk hours a day to get what water they have. This fact alone means that young women do not get education because they are carrying water all freakin' day.

So, I am not happier about my $4.42 Mocha, but it kind of keeps things in perspective for me.

Thought for the Day: Leaves in Fall

2009-10-28T13:52:00.002-05:00

I was driving back from working out today and in a yard that was ahead of me I saw a magnificent maple tree that appeared to be glowing in florescent colors of red, orange, and yellow. The tree was stunning. As I drove by I looked at a few individual leaves and noted the color of each. The leaves in and of themselves were beautiful, but the collection of all of them together was what made the stunning image.

So, in this way, the Kingdom of God can be compared to a maple tree in fall. Each person is gifted and beautiful in and of themselves bearing the glory of God in themselves, but it is when we exist together that colors blend into a rich palate of vibrant color that is the Church. Therefore, let us bless the giftedness and uniqueness of our brothers and sisters and strive demonstrate God's love to on another. In so doing, we show the world the love of God.

[Jesus prayed] The glory which you have given me I have given to [my disciples], that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. John 17:22-23

Pastoral Care: It's Not About Me

2009-10-06T22:09:00.004-05:00

In some circles these days there are discussions about who should be the focus of Pastoral Care. Military, hospital, and other chaplains (and Pastoral Counselors) have debated to what extent the religious views of the care giver should be expressed in care of the "care receiver." In the U.S. Navy there is controversy about a prayer offered for all of the crew of one vessel that was prayed "in Jesus' name." If the prayer was prayed on the behalf of ALL people, should the Christian chaplain pray in Jesus' name. In my training and experience, Pastoral Care is about me offering care the reflects the faith tradition of the person that to whom I am giving care. I had a moving experience today that reflects just this point.

I have been seeing an older person in therapy for several months that has been diagnosed with cancer. (Please excuse the cumbersome language avoiding pronouns in this piece, but I want to protect the identity of this person.) When I first met this person, they were not expected to live longer than 4 to 6 months and our sessions focused on preparing for death and issues of faith. The chemotherapy that this client has undergone has been successful in treating the cancer and this person is now a candidate for surgery and the chances of long-term survival is now better than 70%.

Almost every time I met with this person we talked about the fact that this person was never baptized by their family in the faith tradition in which they grew up. Since reaching adulthood, this person has had a personal sense of faith, but has not been connected with any one congregation. As this person has faced the possibility of death, the issue of not being baptized has been brought up as a matter of concern. We have spent several sessions discussing what their beliefs are about baptism and how it is related to salvation for them. We have discussed the historical traditions and meaning of baptism in those traditions. Each time we came to place where this person felt that something was missing from their life, but not being sure exactly how all the pieces fit together for them.

As we met today, we came to this same issue of baptism again. There was a greater sense of urgency than usual because this person is facing a potentially healing, but dangerous surgery. This person could not find peace in the possibility of death with uncertainty about eternity. This person could articulate faith, but felt incomplete. After a lengthy discussion and at this person's request, I agreed to perform a baptism in my office today.

As a Baptist, I do not believe that baptism saves anyone. I also believe that baptism should be done in the context of a community of faith. I believe that baptism by immersion is the appropriate (though not only acceptable) mode of baptism. However, after discussion today, I retrieved a bowl of water from the kitchen. I prayed with my client and then sprinkled in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. My client reported that they felt differently. They reported that they felt more relaxed and prepared for surgery and more connected with God.

I performed a religious activity that did not fit with my faith understanding in order to provide care for someone who found it meaningful. In the larger picture, I am not sure exactly what this baptism means, but I have no doubt that I provided good Pastoral Care today and I felt the presence of God in a mighty way. What a blessing.

What is human nature?

2009-09-11T22:02:00.002-05:00

In several conversations this week, I was engaged with others about how our outlook on life, our view of God, and our view of human nature (among other things) affects the way we live our life. Tonight I watched the History Channel with different videos of the events of 9/11/01.

It was interesting to note that the events of 9/11 were an act of misguided religious fervor and hatred. There were those that certainly took advantage of these events and there were those who responded immediately with shouts and acts of hatred. However, there was story after story of people helping others, offering water, carrying others, and sacrificing themselves for others. It raises the question about whether human nature is good or bad.

There are those that insist that humans are flawed, bad, selfish, and evil and there are those that insist we are blessed with a spark of the divine that instills us with a capacity for selflessness, love, and kindness. So many times our theologies and our lives are built upon believing that humans are one or the other. Some emphasize the sin nature of humans and their brokenness, while others minimize the idea of sin and look at the human capacity for altruism. What we believe to be fundamentally true about humans affects how we approach relationship and interactions with others. It seems an odd thing on which to be polarized, and yet, there are divisions and conflict between people and churches that are based on this very split. The difficulty seems to be in our desire to reduce things to simple divisions of black or white, right or wrong, good or bad.

It seems more difficult for us to live with the tension of "both/and" in anything. In the end, people are not good or bad; they are good and bad. That Jesus needed to die for a broken people separated by God always meant to me that goodness was impossible without Jesus. I have learned from others that even broken people have the capability of goodness from time to time and I believe that God may even be present when people act in ways that are compatible with God's ways.

In the end, I was broken and sinful, but I am still broken and sinful. I am also blessed, gifted, and forgiven. It is not not that I WAS bad and now I am "good", but that I have a sinful nature and am in need of reconciliation with God on a daily basis while I am also trying to live out that love in the service of others. I struggle some days and I feel grounded in God's love others. My guess is, so do you. So, when I struggle, I will look to you for help, but take heart, when you struggle, I will do my best to bring the light in me to you.

Be Still and Know That I Am God (Psalm 46:10)

2009-08-03T20:27:00.009-05:00

It is ironic that I have not had time to sit and write these thoughts recently. A few weeks ago, the sermon at church was on "Finding a Quiet Place" to be with God. We observed some ACTUAL silence in the service. I realized then how rarely I have actual silence in my life. There may be times that are somewhat quiet, but there are emails, facebook, voicemails and other distractions. I rarely accomplish actual mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual silence.

At a seminar a couple of weeks ago, oddly enough on how to utilize the internet and social media to reach people with the message of our non-profits, I learned just how "A.D.D." our culture is. I realized again just how many times a day we are bombarded with messages and how impatient we are as a society. During this class we watched the video clip again of Louis C.K. on the Conan show and I was reminded how much we take technology for granted and how immune we have become to the miraculous.

Then...I went on vacation. For the past few years our vacations have consisted of going to youth camp with the church youth or going on large family vacations with my whole extended family (which are nice in a different way), but this year, we went on a trip with just our four family members -Lynda, the girls, and me. We visited some colleges and then went to stay with my aunt and uncle at the beach for a few days, but it was so much more than that. We rode long hours in the car together and laughed. We ate meals together and talked and laughed. We shared thoughts, hopes, and ideas. We heard stories of our common ancestors and shared some of our lives as well. We played every day in the waves of the ocean, something that has long renewed all of our spirits. One day after body surfing and jumping waves until I could hardly stand, I went and laid on my towel and watched the clouds drift over the beach. Though there were people all around, there was a wonderful sense of peace in that moment as I wondered at the magnificence of the ocean and beauty of creation. I thanked God for the gift of my beautiful family and God's fabulous creation.

I am blessed that I don't have to go on vacation to have experiences like this with my family, but unfortunately I don't take the time to be mindful of the moment and things around me on a daily basis. It is in these moments of awareness and sense of gratitude that my soul is fed and I have a sense of peace. Here's to more silence, being still, and drawing closer to God.

What Does It Mean To Love Another Anyway?

2009-05-19T20:56:00.003-05:00

One of the most Godly men that I have met in the past several years is Ryan Tucker. Ryan Tucker is planting a church in Billings, MT. Ryan has a heart for God and seeks to embody the "Good News" of Jesus Christ in every aspect of his life. He is creative in seeking ways to bring the Good News of Christ to people who may need to hear that news. Billings has the most churches of any town in Montana, but 85% of the population of Billings does not attend one of the churches in the area. Ryan has no desire, whatsoever, to take members of the churches in Billings. They are having their needs met in those places. What he wants to do is develop an outreach to those in Billings that will never darken the doors of those established churches.

As Ryan has been seeking to connect with others, he began spending time at a local microbrewery and talking to folks there. The owner of the microbrewery is not a church attender, but has been kind to Ryan. After weeks of spending time there, Ryan felt led to ask the owner about the possibility of holding services in the microbrewery. Ryan prepared a proposal for the owner to read and asked the owner if he could email "something" to him. The owner agreed and then said, "Ryan, you've been wanting to start a church here, right? Would it be just too weird to have services here?" It was amazing that this man who does not have a church home anywhere, offered to have worship services held in his "bar." If this is not in line with the teaching and practice of Jesus, I have no idea what is!

My father-in-law, Bill, is currently in a nursing home in Billings. (See my previous post.) He was an early member of one of the first Baptist Churches in Billings and literally helped build the church from the ground up. However, since Bill entered the nursing home, NOT ONE person from that church has been to visit him. However, Ryan has been to visit him every single week since he learned of my wife's family.

Ryan's church is currently struggling with support of its core members and part of their difficulty is the hate mail that they have been receiving demanding they stop what they are doing and repent of their sins. I don't know if these letters are coming from members of the other churches in town or someone else, but I cannot imagine too much that would be further from the teachings and wishes of Jesus.

I John 4:7-8, & 11-12 says, ⁷Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. ⁸The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹²No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.

I cannot believe that God is honored or glorified in the hatred of one person for another. Ryan Tucker has nothing from which to "repent" in what he has done to start this church. I don't believe that he is perfect, but there is a depth and maturity in his ministry that does not deserve the attacks - especially attacks by other professed believers.

Spring Break 2009: Ode to Bill

2009-03-24T22:34:00.002-05:00

I spent my daughters’ spring break last week visiting my in-laws in Montana. I always approach these trips with a bit of ambivalence. Montana is a beautiful place and there are some fun things to there. However, I know that I will also be in the company of those like my mother-in-law, Thelma, that still blame me for Lynda moving to Nashville after college. The trip this year was complicated a bit more by the fact that my father-in-law, Bill, is in a nursing home. Each day we spent part of the day at the nursing home visiting with him. (This was probably not the most exciting Spring Break my teenaged daughters could imagine. Not that they said anything negative about it.)

However, I did come away with some reflections from my time with my in-laws that are worth noting. My wife’s family is worried and annoyed with their mother because of the pressure she puts on herself to monitor her husband’s care every day. The nursing home staff, I’m sure, loves her hyper-vigilance of all that they do. (Granted there are some things that need some attention in his care.) My mother-in-law gives EVERY afternoon to caring for and sitting with her husband in the nursing home. Her life IS caring for her husband. I have my own concerns for her well-being in this, but I did note the dedication she has in caring for and being with her husband. I also hear her say that she does these things because of the years she has spent with him, feeling that he put her interests first and pampered her. While I would argue for a bit more balance in the mix, it is moving, in some ways, to see that level of dedication to one another after 59 years of marriage.

The saddest part of the trip for me is seeing Bill in the nursing home. Bill suffers from a form of dementia, but not in such a way that he has lost touch with reality. He seems to come and go in his recognition of those around him. He also seems to have suffered some “mini” strokes or such and at this point is not able to walk, feed himself, or speak well. When he is awake (which is not often) he seems to observe the activity around him, but cannot or does not comment on it. My experience was that often he was like a person trapped in his own body; aware of what is going on around him, but not able to interact verbally or physically. What makes this profoundly sad is the level of activity and creativity that Bill had just a few years ago when he retired with big plans for his retirement years.

Bill has been a man of many gifts. While I have not always (if ever) agreed with his political or theological views, I could not deny the quality of his character or his gifted abilities. Bill has been a man who lived out his beliefs. This, to me, is the mark of a man with integrity. Even if I did not agree with him, I had to respect the depth of his integrity. Bill obviously cared for his wife. Though they often seemed to argue and complain about one another, it became clear over time that they each understood this as a mark of the care that each had for the other. Thelma describes several acts of kindness and little acts of service that demonstrated for her the depth of Bill’s love.

Bill was also a gifted craftsman, carpenter, and gardener. As a woodworker, Bill was able to craft beautiful pieces of furniture and other items. We have a cradle at our house made by Bill for our daughters. We have shelves, quilt racks, bowls and trivets all carefully constructed from carefully chosen beautiful wood. Bill could build anything from cabinets to complete room additions. He added a room to their house and completely remodeled their kitchen. Each thing he did demonstrated his strong attention to detail. He was as gifted outside as in. He could pour concrete, build flower beds, or anything else outside you could imagine. As when any artist develops his or her gifts to such a level, Bill’s abilities inspired a sense of awe that was a shadow of the creativity of God. The beauty of this was the quiet humility with which Bill used his gifts for others. Bill built equipment and props for use with children with special needs in the schools. He used his gifts to literally build a church building (with some help, of course). He was generous and caring in the use of his talents and abilities.

One cannot speak of Bill, however, without mentioning his gardens. From the carefully manicured flower beds and custom-made walkways to the raised vegetable gardens, Bill was as gifted in the garden as he was in his workshop. A picture of Bill with his prize of a 3lb tomato currently hangs outside his room at the nursing home as a testament to his ability. Flowers, fruits, and vegetables all grew beautifully under Bill’s careful attention. Without ever being among the “tree-hugging” crowd, Bill insisted on organic gardening. He could kill all kinds of blight and insects with natural concoctions that he whipped up in the house. He had natural ways of fertilizing and caring for his plants and they always responded by producing for him. Again, the care of these plants was representative of God’s care and the beauty of Bill’s gardens a reflection of the beauty of God’s larger creation.

As much as Bill could produce in the garden, Thelma could process, can, and freeze anything. The family could enjoy the fruits of Bill’s gardens all year round. Thelma carefully attended to the inside of the house as meticulously as Bill tended to the outside. In this way, they reflect the stereotypes of their generation, but don’t make the mistake of labeling them. My wife’s strong convictions of feminine strength and challenging meaningless authoritarian traditions are rooted in the strength of her mother. Thelma is a powerful woman who does not seem to comprehend the power that she wields.

Though my in-laws are sometimes frustrating to me, I have to honor the strength, integrity, and commitment that they embody in their lives and in their marriage.

A Stranger In A Strange Land

2009-01-05T19:39:00.002-06:00

In 1987 I satisfied my one remaining foreign language requirement in college by studying Spanish in Spain. I was to stay with a Spanish family and would study with others at a language institute in Madrid. After a two-week tour of Spain, we arrived in Madrid. My
roommate and I were given enough money for taxi fare and a piece of paper that had on it the address of the apartment where we would be living for the next several weeks. We got in the taxi and could only point to the address on the paper to indicate where we wanted to go. When we arrived, we walked up a few flights of stairs and knocked on the door of our host family. They were very friendly and invited us in. The only difficulty was that my roommate and I spoke very little Spanish and our host family spoke even less English. We were going to have to learn the language in order to get by.

Every day we walked from our apartment several blocks to the school where we studied. We entered class the first day only to learn that our instructor spoke NO English. This was going to be a bigger challenge than we imagined. Our classes were in Spanish, we had textbooks in Spanish, and we lived with families that only spoke Spanish. Every time we went to eat or to
purchase anything, we encountered the same difficulty of not being sure if we were communicating well enough to get what we needed or wanted, but we also had a concern about the exchange rate of every transaction to make sure we knew how much we were paying. After struggling day after day to get around the city, my roommate and I would sit in our room in the evening and talk about our day – in English. Those moments were so nice. I did not have to work to find the right words or worry about being misunderstood. Communicating was easy and it just flowed. It was an odd oasis that would usually not last very long because our “mother” would knock on the door and in a stern voice say, “No ingles,Español olamente” (No English, Spanish only).

By the time I left Spain, I could speak enough Spanish to get around and carry on some rudimentary conversations. Much of the Spanish spoken around me was still lost on me and every conversation required effort on my part. I learned a lot about Spanish culture and appreciated a different pace of life, but I often felt lonely because I could not just connect wih someone who spoke my native language. Getting to speak my native language was a breath of fresh air in every day.

At PCCT, our new initiative to reach those in the Nashville area for whom Spanish is their primary language is an attempt to provide that breath of fresh air. Eduardo Lelli, our Spanish-speaking therapist, understands the challenges not only in language, but other challenges to adapting to a new culture. While not every Spanish-speaking client will come from the same culture or speak the same dialect of Spanish, Eduardo is providing a service that hopefully allows someone who must struggle with words and other communication to have a place to relax and breathe a bit while trying to work on the very human challenges of emotional, relational, and spiritual health. It is myhope and prayer that PCCT is always a place like that for all who seek our services.

My experiences in Spain and the experiences of our clients at the Pastoral Couneling Centers is why I am bosting this in opposition to the "English Only" proposal in Nashville. Please vote against this proposal. Early voting is open now.

The Secret Life of Bees

2008-10-24T16:15:00.001-05:00

So, my daughter Jessie read the book and my wife wanted to see the movie. I generally try to avoid movies that I know right up front are going to make me cry, but I didn’t know anything about this movie. So, I agreed to see it. After the first two minutes, I knew I was not going to get out of this movie without some emotion. When it was all said and done, I have to say that my first thought was, “Sometimes I hate being a white man!” In a movie that deals well with racial tensions of the early sixties, southern white men are not generally portrayed well. However, there are a couple of moments in the movie where white men do challenge the predominate views of the day and time and cross the invisible line that kept blacks and whites separate. As I reflected on this aspect of the movie, I thought about the confederate flag I saw waving high by the side of the interstate today and I thought, “We haven’t come very far in forty years.” Of course evidence that things are better is everywhere, but the dream of racial equality and peaceful co-existence still has a way to be achieved.

In other reflections on this masterful film, one has to look at the way that each character deals with connection, vulnerability, emotional intimacy, pain, loss, and guilt. Each character carries within themselves a different experience – a different set of fears, joys, and hurts. Throughout the movie, each of the characters attempts to balance his or her own fears with care and connection with others. Some characters cannot do it, while others seem to be able to do it effortlessly. “There is no perfect love” is just one quote that is lived out perfectly in the movie. People laugh and cry together. They reach out to each other and hide from each other. They connect and withdraw. It is the nature of human attachment. We love as well as we can, but we love imperfectly.

If you don’t know the story and don’t want to know the story – Stop reading now. This story is of a 14 year-old girl named Lilly who accidentally shot her mother when she was 5, while her parents were fighting. At 14 she lives with her father and works in his peach stand on their peach farm. Her father is distant and harsh to Lilly. Lilly does not have the love of a mother and is rejected by her father. She has a friend in their black housekeeper, Rosaleen. When Rosaleen is arrested (after a disturbing scene and a gross miscarriage of justice) Lilly takes Rosaleen with her to run away. In series of coincidental (or providential) events, the two girls arrive at the home of the Boatwright sisters – a trio of sisters that have a family honey farm. The remainder of the movie is about the relationship that grows between the new arrivals on the farm and the relationship between the sisters. In the end dad makes one last return to retrieve Lilly, but what happens then – you will have see the movie to know. Suffice it to say, that love and acceptance are always healing and even when we lack the love we feel we should have from parents, we are not without the capability of being loved.

The religious references are vague and ambiguous and tend more towards goddess worship than Christianity, but the references to faith are not without merit. There are strong messages of the power of love, the art of care, the dance of intimate connection, and the power of relationship. There are themes of forgiveness, unconditional love, and the power of God in each of us that calls us and encourages us we seek to be all that we are created to be.

So, yeah, I cried. (Most of you know it is not a difficult job to accomplish that though.) It has its moments of deep sadness and overwhelming heaviness, but it accompanied by moments of laughter, love, and joy. Pretty much just like life.

REFLECTIONS ON UNCLE MORT'S

2008-08-04T21:31:00.004-05:00

Some how Jean Godfrey is a cousin to my dad. It is one of those long stories of distant cousins that I don't remember, but she is a cousin. My wife says you can tell we're all related because the whole extended family has the same blue eyes. All I know is that growing up, whenever we went to visit my grandparents in Jasper, Alabama, we took a trip to Uncle Mort's. Mort is Jean's husband, so he wasn't my uncle, but they were family.

Jean and Mort opened a little store to sell their cured meats - and boy were they awsome! Then they opened a little restaurant to sell some prepared meals. Next thing you know they have a 150 seat restaurant that is serving breakfast all day and some of the best steaks and ribs you ever ate. Mort and Jean lived upstairs for a while and then they build a huge mansion back behind the restaurant. Mort had a collection of antique cars and it used to drive my brother crazy that he didn't keep them up. There was that surreal story about how Mort accidentily shot Jean in the foot one night in drunken rage, but that wasn't how they really were and so that story just evaporated over time.

Jean and Mort were hard-working people that literally lived the American dream. They came from being poor hog farmers to having a world famous restaurant! They did work hard for it though. Until their kids were old enough to keep the place for them, Jean and Mort worked almost 24 hours a day. When the kids did get older, Jean and Mort would often travel to various parts of the world. It was fun to hear their stories about Paris, Rome, Italy (or IT-ly as they would say it). I could only imagine what Europeans would think of these very rural and very country visitors, but what great stories they had.

As I said, we went to Mort's whenever we visited Jasper. I have been to Mort's at the time of Weddings and at times of funerals. I went their with my family and I went there with college friends. I took Lynda there to eat before we were married because I wanted her to know this place that had been so important to our family. Lynda came to love the place and the food as much as the rest of the family. We would often stop there when we could to buy a few pounds of meat to bring back to the rest of the family. I particularly loved the smoked sausage links, but my brother's favorite was the bacon. Their country ham was pretty awsome as well. I even have some pictures of my girls taken there from our visits to see my grandmother.

The last time I went there one of Mort and Jean's daughters told me that they were going to sell the place. I just couldn't imagine a world without Uncle Mort's. I was saddened to learn today that Uncle Mort's not only had been sold, but that it recenlty had burned as well. Uncle Mort's will go the way of so many things in my history now. It will simply be a memory of great times and sad times spent with immediate family, extended family, and friends for most of my 40 years. Some traditions are hard to grieve simply because of the memories of the people that go with them. I already missed Jasper because we don't get there much since Grandmother died, but it is said to know that those little pieces of my past are being lost.

Parenting Is Sometimes Lonely Work

2008-08-01T23:28:00.004-05:00

I tell my daughters on a regular basis that I feel blessed to be their dad. I usually take great delight in watching them live their lives. There are days that it is more difficult than others because of the struggles they sometimes have. I hate watching them struggle. Like most parents I want so much to provide a great life for them - financially, spiritually, and emotionally. I love my kids so much and want to be included in what they are doing. However, more and more they have friends that they spend time with that I don't really know that well. They spend their days in chat and email conversations that I don't know about. I invite them regularly to share with me or to do things with me, but more and more they have other things to do. Today I took the girls out to buy them school supplies. We ate dinner together. We went shopping. We didn't buy all they needed and spent close to $400. When we got home, one daughter left to go to a friend's house and one went to her room to make plans for tomorrow that will no likely involve me driving her somewhere without asking me what my day is like. No "thank yous". No acknowledgement of our time together. I feel like I keep giving and they just keep taking. Maybe this is parenting or maybe I am doing it wrong, but sometimes parenting just seems like a lonely job.

(I know, these are the rambling writings of a person on a little depression. It happens sometimes. It will pass.)

P.S. Four days later - Life is good and kids are great. I had a little melt down, but it passed.

Long Days+Sleepless Nights=Free T-Shirt 2008

2008-07-20T21:40:00.003-05:00

I just returned from a week at the Blue Horizon Camp in Panama City Beach, Florida with the youth from my church. This was my third year in a row to attend camp and every year it seems I do just a bit more in the preparation. This year I was responsible for the daily "seminars". The seminars are designed to be practical information sessions that students attend in the time opposite their daily Bible Study time. I was also involved in their special drama event on Wednesday night (a special time of focus on the camp theme designed to bring the point of the camp directly into self-reflective focus). I brought my professional self as well and both formally at decision time and informally at other times I was the "camp counselor". Other than that, I helped with other aspects of camp as needed and stayed in the cabin with the students who just finished their Freshman year in high school.

Once again, I was blown away by several things about our students. The first was how incredibly well-behaved our students are. Even on the nights my cabin had difficulty settling down I was very aware of what I was not worried about in their conduct. I was also incredibly impressed this year with the openness and honesty in the sharing of the students. As is usual, the more students shared, the more open others became. The students reached out to one another, prayed for one another, and supported one another. There was a sense of bonding and caring within the group that was tangible. This was also demonstrated in the way that the students supported and responded to each other during the annual talent or variety show (some of those performing were less on the talent side and more on the creative/humorous skit side.)

As the week went on it became more and more apparent that the students were growing closer to one another and and God. As the Camp Pastor preached on forgiveness and keeping relationships right as a tangible way of expressing God's love, the kids seemed to be greatly affected. Some kids called home to apologize to their parents and begin working on relationship with them, while others sought out friends for hugs and apologies. I was moved to tears more than once watching these interactions.

This camp had a special significance for me having just had the reunion of my own youth group. (See separate post) During the week I had the chance to talk to Joe Morrell, the music minister at my church during my youth group days. I told him that I was trying to pass on the next generation what he had given me as a youth. I really have that sense as I have the chance to interact with the kids. At times I have to remember that I am a grown up and they are youth because I love to laugh with them, I learn from them, and I appreciate them as friends. However, I have many years of living on them and I try to share with them things I have learned that I hope will help them. I had a few youth tell me that they appreciated what I shared and it felt good to think that I might be able to help them as they continue to grow and develop. It is a blessing to feel used by God. I sometimes feel I am getting away with something because while camp is for the benefit of the kids, I come away feeling blessed every year. I am already ready to go again! I am so pleased my girls tolerate my being at camp with them. They are a blessing to me as well.

Call it a mid-life crisis, if you have to

2008-06-16T13:50:00.005-05:00

So, last wednesday I went and got my first (and only - EVER) tattoo. Since people have been learning about it, I have heard comments like, "Well, I guess it was only a matter of time since you got that motorcycle" and, "Wow, are you having a mid-life crisis or what?" I have been thinking about that idea of a mid-life crises. I guess getting a motorcyle at 40 and a tattoo at 43 does conjure up some image of a guy with a bad comb-over buying a Corvette or leaving his wife of 20+ years for a beautiful woman who just "makes him feel younger." However, as I think about it, I am not conscioulsy trying to "recapture my youth" or "trying to feel young again." I have been young and there were parts of being young that are not worth doing over.

Part of my being young was about being driven by "shoulds" and "oughts" that got from my family and from my understanding of faith. Because I was often very judgemental, I assumed others were as well and I tried to not do anything that would seem "bad" or "too crazy." I wanted a motorcycle as teen, but my parents said no. The best I could do was 50cc Honda Express Scooter. Top speed was a whopping 30 mph (when you were going down hill.) When I got married, Lynda said she would be too afraid for me to have one and she threw in that her father called them "Murdercycles." So, I scratched that off the list. Over the years Lynda and I have had talks about it and we are much better at communicating now. (That one sentence could be a completely separate post sometime.) For Father's Day several years ago, Lynda gave me the Motorcycle Safety Course and I completed that and got my operator's license. After another very long series of events that needs a separate post here, I got my first bike.

The motocycle was one thing; the tattoo something else. I have thought about one for years. Had ideas about designs (just in case I ever REALLY got one.) My brother-in-law got one a few years ago and I thought that was good for him. My sister-in-law got one and I just thought it would be too painful. Then my brother recently got one. I went with him for his and watched. While there I talked with the artist who did it and a few weeks later, I had my tattoo. (If you want to know what that tattoo is to me, follow the link above and read the comments.)

So, I am 43 now. I love my wife. I have great kids. My job goes pretty well most days. I teach Sunday School. I am involved in several organizations. I am pretty happy. I have been in lots of therapy for myself over the years. At 43 I have been doing life review of sorts. I have had some regrets. I have regreted that 17 year-old I used to be that thought he knew what was right for himself and everyone else. I regret that I spent so many years afraid of others' opinions of me. I regret the fears and anxieties that have ruled my life. I regret that because of those fears and anxieties, I did not let people get too close to me. I regret that I spent so much time in my life feeling lonely. So, I am 43. I have some life ahead of me. I want to live that life to the fullest. I want to experience some things in this life (within some kind of reason). I want to laugh hard and love deeply. I want to have good friends and enjoy my family. I want to help others be the best that they can be and not tell them what to do. I have reflected on my past and tried to correct for the future. That is a mid-life review. I don't feel a crisis about it, but if you have to call it a mid-life crisis, I guess it is okay. I am not so tied up in what you think about me anymore anyway.

What a reunion

2008-05-27T11:00:00.004-05:00

My youth group in Jr. High and High School was a very special group for me. The members of that group were my best friends and my primary social outlet. My church youth group nurtured my faith and shaped my development. It made sense to me that we would want to schedule a reunion of our youth group. I was part of a group that planned this event. We picked the years of 1979-1984, the years that Jim Gallery was our youth minister and Joe Morrell was our minister of music. We had no idea how many would come, but there were several of us that thought it might be fun.

While I thought it might be fun, I began to have some anxiety about it as well. As I have reflected on who I was during my high school years, I tend to remember myself as a self-righteous, judgemental, young fundamentalist. Years of growth and experience have broadened my perspectives to include a lot more acceptance of the unknown and the gray of life and to emphasize grace and love more than "getting it right." So, as I began to think about the youth reunion, I began to have fears that others would remember me the way that I did and not want to spend time with me. I did not know what to expect.

On Saturday afternoon, however, we gathered with our families at the park for play and visiting. As one person after another found me and hugged me and asked about my life, my fears began to disappear. It was great love , grace, and a sense of forgiveness that I felt. Even if others remembered me the way that I did, they were willing to get to know me now. It as very humbling for me. As we gathered for a dinner Saturday night, we shared memories, pictures, and bits of our lives since those days at Woodmont Baptist Church. For just a little while, years melted away and it was as if we were at a "Mid-Winter Youth Retreat" once again, sharing about our feelings and God's work in our lives. People laughed and cried, hugged, and talked. Though people looked a little different, this was the same group of friends I had so many years ago and once again, they embodied the love of God for me.

The final event was Sunday afternoon when we gathered for a worship service in the Chapel at Woodmont Baptist Church. Parents, families, friends, former youth workers joined together to worship. With an inordinate number of seminary graduates and pastors in the group, there was certainly a lot of experience to go around. We sang many of the old songs we sang as youth. We heard testimonies of friends who have lost parents, lost children, been divorced, been paralyzed, suffered near-death accidents and other life experiences. Then we were blessed by the sharing and reflections of my friend, Kevin Roberts (see previous blog post about Kevin). Kevin honored that time in our lives when our youth leaders tried to pour enough faith and love into us that when life happened to us, we would not lose all we had. Kevin talked about the toll life can take and difficulty to find God sometimes, but there is an anchor in the faith experience of our youth. I referred to it as the Jesus we have in friends, but it was a very special time. We completed the worship time by joining together again as a "youth choir" and singing one of our long remembered anthems. It was truly a moving experience.

So, while I had mixed feelings about being with this group, I was blessed once again to be in their midst. Our youth experience was an extraordinary time and it was good to remember those times once again. Each of us seems to have been seeking a similar experience for our own kids and I hope that we can continue to carry those memories and experiences through the years.

The Long Way Home

2008-04-09T08:43:00.003-05:00

So, yesterday was not the sunniest of days, but it was warm and by the time I left the office last evening the clouds had cleared some and the sun was setting. As I left the office in Franklin on my bike, I decided I would take the long way home. This means that I leave my usually path home on the New Highway 96 and take the tail end of the Natchez Trace. The path takes me over the huge bridge where you can see for miles and then becomes a winding road through well-manicured natural scenery.

Last night, as I drove down the road I just felt wonderful. I was leaving work and headed home and that's always a good thing, but I had this wonderful experience there on that road that was more than just going home. I felt good on the bike. Riding through those curves and shifting the bike back and forth as I made "S" curves just felt so natural. (Yes, the bike gets 50 miles to the gallon, but it is just fun to ride!). The sun was just dipping behind the trees and silhouetting the trees. There was still just enough light to be able to see the pale violet blooms on the red bud trees and bright green of the new shoots of grass on the ground and leaves on the trees. As I exited the Trace, there was a "family" of wild turkeys gathered by the road. For just a few moments, I had this sense of joy and peace that was punctuated by gratitude for all I have and for the beauty of God's earth.

I love the days when I can take the long way home. I wish I could keep that feeling all day - every day, but I'll take it when I can get it.

Blessings in Unusual Places

2008-02-20T22:07:00.006-06:00

If you have read my postings (thanks) you know that my daughter, Jessie, has a best friend named Maya. Maya's parents, Chuck & Denine, are good friends and neighbors. Chuck is a drummer for Terri Clark. Chuck was diagnosed with cancer last year. He has not been able to work because of his treatments for several months. Several weeks ago, Terri Clark did a benefit show for Chuck that included a new artist, Joanna Cotten. Tonight, Joanna did her own benefit concert for chuck. There, at 3rd and Lindsley, a small bar, we sat at a table with Chuck and Denine and other friends to hear Joanna play. Joanna is bluesy country blonde bombshell. When she did her song, "Miracle in Lee County" she passed KFC buckets through the crowd to collect a little extra money for Chuck and Denine. As the bucket passed us, people dropped a variety of bills into the bucket. I noticed that Denine was fighting tears and I felt how humbling it must be to have hundreds of people gather just because they want to support you. I reached across the table and held her hand for a moment and then a friend beside her gave her a hug.

Chuck had been playing with Joanna for a couple of songs and rejoined us at the table as Joanna sang her song, "Keep My Faith." I have heard this song only twice (until I bought her CD tonight) and both times I heard this powerful song, the entire room disappeared as I was drawn into the lyrics and Joanna's beautiful voice. The song is about trials in life and the little miracles that help us keep our faith in something larger than ourselves. Tears filled my eyes listening tonight as I thought of Chuck, Denine, Maya, and Patrick and the trials of their lives these days. Who knew you could find the spirit of God and be overcome by God's love in a little bar on a Wednesday night. What a blessing!

I Hate New Year's Resolutions

2008-02-02T21:20:00.000-06:00

(My very first Testing in TKD)

(Thursday, January 1, 2008 - Transferred from a previous blog spot.)

I completely and totally despise New Year's resolutions.

I used to try to make them, but I would usually fall short and give up on them. So, I don't like to make them myself and I have really come to dislike the one's that other's make. I go to theYMCA regularly, but I know now for the next two months I am going to have to fight even harder to get to an eliptical machine because of all the people who have resolutions to '"exercise more in 2008. I am sure it is well intentioned and it may really be helpful. I understand that the end of a year is a good time reflect on who you are and what you want to be different in your life. I also understand that the first of the year is new opportunity (or excuse) to try one more time to make some significant change in your life.

What I find in my own life is that I will usually work harder at things I really really want to work harder at and I will not do that for things that deep down I really don't want to do. That is, saying I need to change something usually doesn't make me do it. I am like most of us; I will not change until my discomfort with where I am is bigger than my fear and/or discomfort with change. However, I spent far too many years thinking of change as a one-time event that I either passed or failed. However, my perspective has been changing over the past several years.

From previous posts, most of you are now aware that I continue to wrestle with issues of saying "NO". I continue to struggle with that. Only recently (as in the past year or so) have I gotten better at this, but I still need to refine this because I continue to find myself often spread too thin with all that I have to do. So, will I work on that in 2008? Yes, but as I have been for the last several years.

Like most people I struggle with finances. I have too little in savings and too many debts. Part of this is my fault because of poor choices and part is due to difficult circumstances that have compounded over the past few years, but the combination of these things has been personally humiliating. I wish I could say that at some point I made a decision to fix my finances and everything since then has been getting better, but it is not the case. I have decided several times to make changes and then I continue to make mistakes. Currently we are making active efforts to increase our savings and pay down some debt. Will I continue to do that in 2008? Yes, as I have been...unfortunately.

Finally, slowly throughout 2007 I gave up some exercising a little at a time. By the end of October I was not getting more than 2 days of exercise per week and, even then, it was not very intense. I have now gained 10lbs and my weight keeps creeping upward. In 2004 I weighed 225. That was down from 262, but now I am at 245. Okay it is really more like 249, but I am having trouble accepting that. I have been increasing my workouts since the first of November. I just got done going through my calendar for January and figuring out when I can put regular workouts into my schedule. I am choosing to participate in workout offered at our church on Sunday Nights this winter rather than leading small group/support groups. (That involves both saying, "No" and emphasizing exercise -- A bonus!) So, in 2008, I will continue to get my exercise back to an acceptable level. I will go to the YMCA a couple days a week and I will continue in Taekwondo a couple days a week (I just got my yellow belt!).

So, I don't really like "New Year's" resolutions, but I guess I do make resolutions. What I hope is different about what I do is that I want to be "perfect" in this, but I probably won't be. If I mess up one day or one week, my "resolution" is not over. I just get up the next day and get back on track. It is the process and the progress that is important, not perfection. (A lesson I learned from Taekwondo.) Oh, yeah, fighting that internal push to be perfect...that is a lifelong resolution

Blessed By My Friend Kevin

2008-02-02T21:10:00.000-06:00

(Kevin is back row, center, in the blue shirt)

(Thursday, November 1, 2007 - Transferred from a previous blog spot.)

This is a writing from my friend Kevin. I have known him for 30 years. He was in a terrible bike accident two years ago. I found his reflections quite moving. I just wanted to share this.
Chris

Seven Hundred Thirty Days

Seven hundred and thirty days ago my life changed.

I've read about life changing days, the ingredients and outcomes, but never had one of my own.
One of the problems I have had over the last seven hundred and thirty days is this: my life-changing day did not make me a better person, not yet at least. My life-changing day did not birth me back into the world where the little things that used to anger and frustrate me have no affect anymore. I'm still annoyed when the house is messy. I still get pissed off when people are stupid and phony. My life-changing day has not made me into a tranquil peace lover who can smile at dysfunction and live within it. I've not yet mastered the ancient art of "being" in the moment. I've not given speeches about my new life. People aren't flocking to hear about my fresh life strategy, the balanced life that was born from that day when I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I would never see my wife and our three children again.

Seven hundred and thirty days ago my life changed, and it's still changing, and I am growing weary of the recovery.

One year ago today, on the three hundred sixty fifth day since my life changed, we went to Disneyworld . I didn't want to be in town, didn't want to mark the year anniversary with anything normal, because normal is a far cry from what it used to be. We took the kids out of school, were gone for an entire week, and we pledged allegiance to the Mouse. On the first morning in the park, we stood in front of Cinderella's castle, taking pictures and basking in the shining opulence that results from the collision of materialism and fantasy. It was awesome, maybe even a panacea. And out of this sea of joy and bliss walked a Disney "cast member," that being the fantasized title given to anyone working within the park, who asked if we would like to be Grand Marshalls for the Disney Main Street Parade that afternoon.

If you have never been to Disneyworld , this is like being selected at random to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl or flip the switch to light the White House Christmas tree. Thousands of people will line the streets in the park, they will all wave and cheer, and they will wish they could be you, not watching the parade, but IN the parade. "Of course we would."
It was a different view, looking out from the cartoonish fire engine that carried the royal family. I was waving and the kids were laughing and I wondered what triumphant or tragic story brought these other people to Orlando . Me? I was escaping and celebrating simultaneously. And if they knew our story, would they really want to trade places? If there are ten million stories in a naked city, how many are their in a over clothed fantasy world? But one year ago there we were, and I am sure I wasn't the only one who needed the escape, the fantasy, the celebration.

A year earlier my wife received one of those phone calls, the kind that stops you in your tracks and brings other people to your side as they stand helpless and watch you run down the hall, get into your car and race to the hospital uncertain of what you will find when you arrive. She spent the next twelve days between the emergency room and the ICU, trips back and forth from our home to the hospital, sitting while I was in surgery, wondering when I would wake up and wondering in what condition her husband would be when he did wake up, if he woke up.
I'm no catch, believe me, I've always thought my wife could have done better, and she loves me fiercely. Even when I don't think she loves me, which is usually because of my frail insecurity and blinding selfishness, she really does love me, and those twelve days when I was unconscious drained some life from her. Our kids too.

After my wife got "the" phone call, after she rushed to the ER and sat with the chaplain and received the news about my injuries, after she saw me with blood pooling in my eye sockets and a head swelling as fast as a party balloon, she went home to tell the kids, "Daddy had a bicycle wreck this morning, and he is in the hospital, and..."

As I understand it, that is the point our youngest child held back her own tears and implored her mommy, "now don't you cry mommy. Don't you cry." I would suspect that for a five year old who has known only love, security and ease of life, such a thing is difficult to say to a mommy. "Don't you cry." That's what mommy's usually say to five year old little girls. But the tables were turned that day, and the youngest in the family did not want the gravity of the situation to rock her world anymore than it already had. "Now don't you cry mommy," offered not as a consolation but as a directive: You can't cry. I'll feel worse if you cry.

She was only five, and she wanted to cry, it was her right, her privilege as a child. With the news only moments old, her defiant response was to tell her mother not to cry, not because she couldn't handle her mother's tears, but because she wanted permission for her own, and if the only adult in the room was crying, where was she to lay her head for comfort? If someone stronger and braver than herself could not console her, what was she to do? "Now don't you cry mommy."

And for the next twelve days, waiting for daddy to wake up, people flooded our home, held vigil with my wife at the hospital, and cared for our children.

People still ask me about my "accident." And I've developed a script that I offer in response to that specific question. Maybe it's my way of coping, maybe it's my passive aggressive way of getting back at the woman who pulled in front of me and started this whole nightmare, but I correct anyone who uses the word "accident." Like some expert on a subject they know nothing about, I respond to my questioners, "None of my actions were accidental I can assure you. I did everything on purpose to try and miss that car, because I knew that when bike versus car, bike loses every time." I delve into this long litany about taking evasive action to miss the car, which is not easy when you are descending a hill going twenty four miles an hour with only fifteen feet to stop. And almost every time, when I finish the story, I wonder why I am still so needy that I have to give them all the facts. Can't I be done with this? Isn't it time to move on? Even so, I anxiously await the next opportunity to tell my story, and then when I finish, I'm left with a emotional hangover, feeling guilty and weak for vomiting my pain onto someone else. What I really want to say is that I am exhausted with trauma and I am having a difficult time doing the day to day stuff that comes from being a husband and a father and a minister while thinking about my life changing day, everyday, for the past two years.

I screamed "No" to the woman in the burgundy Honda, and two split seconds later, maybe less, maybe one or two seconds more, I had broken my back and a few ribs, crushed every bone in my face, and was on the side of the road doing everything in my power to stay conscious because my scrambled brain told me that if I went to sleep I would never wake up.

That was my moment. My moment of being one with life and death in the very presence of reality, and that very reality was consumed with staying awake to see my wife and children again. And because I was awake for the entire event, I was scared from what I could deduce. I stuck my tongue into the chasm in the roof on my mouth. The teeth on the left side of my face were pushed back and down about a half-inch. This was the line where the left side of my skull was separated from the right side, like two equal halves of a watermelon. The trauma surgeon later told my wife that every bone in my face was broken, with some fragments floating unattached to anything in my cranial space.

At the point of impact, when my face hit the pavement with the force of a catapult, I felt nothing, which might not be believable, given the extent of the damage. But I felt nothing.
I heard everything, however. Heard it? Yes. Think of a coarse cereal. Grape Nuts. When you eat Grape Nuts, you can hear the crunch radiate through your skull into your eardrums. That is what I heard in an instant. I initially felt no pain, but I heard the force of the impact. I heard the crunch of my skull. I can run my finger over my chin or around my eye socket today and feel the titanium that will hold me together for the rest of my life. And the sound echoes still.

I come from a great family. Mom and dad? Champion parents. My sister? Phenomenal. She loves me with all her heart, just like my mom and dad taught her to love her little brother. Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins. I am rich with best friends. I've had a legion of fantastic people cross my path and walk with me. And in those morning moments before I went to sleep for twelve days, I thought of none of these wonderful people on the side of the road. My awareness was focused on four people and the pool of blood that was pouring from my head on the ground beneath me. Amidst the crimson flood, I thought not of my life's entirety but rather the four people I do life with intimately; the people who see me at my best and worst and love me anyway, the ones who know the color of my underwear, who want me to tuck them in at night, two and three times, the one who has been uniquely present for my journey from teenager to middle aged man. I thought of these four people, my wife who is either yoked or stuck with me for the rest of our lives, and our three children who are the very product of love. They were born from love, wow, and on the side of the road all I could think about was staying awake so I could articulate just one more time my love for each of them. My life didn't flash before my eyes, just the lives of four people I would die for, and dammit, I didn't want to die on the side of the road seven hundred and thirty days ago. So I fought, drifting in and out of consciousness between the pain and the blood.

I never knew the color of spilt blood wasn't really red. In the blink of an eye, because her depth perception wasn't true or because she was day dreaming or because she never saw me at all, her left turn into my descending path put me face to face with the fact that blood, when pouring from one's skull, is not really red at all. It's deeper. It's scarlet, like an antique velvet quilt unseen for decades, or even some kind of haunting, bio-engineered purple seen only in your imagination, but it's definitely not red.

On the side of the road, the first drops hit my orange seat post, the steel tube that connects the saddle to the bottom bracket where the pedals are. Deep blood coursing through my face and cranium only seconds before was now painting a sick kaleidoscope on the ground beneath me. Blood on Molteni Orange bicycle paint. Blood on sandy black asphalt. Blood on blue grey cycling gloves. Blood in shade. Blood in sunlight. New colors I had never seen before.

Was this canvas being painted at the expense of my life? Must I stare death in the eye to see for myself the exact color of the blood in my skull? I'd have settled for just calling it red like everyone else, but I no longer had that option.

In the literal blink of an eye the drops went from a dribble to a pour, like someone holding a pitcher of tea next to my head and steadily pouring its contents on the ground; the color changed again. The first drops were already turning, slowly changing like an existential mood ring. "My blood should be inside me, not on the ground," and I think my blood was angry and scared about that too, so it changed color to tell me the situation was far less than optimal, in case I didn't know already. The drops at the edge of the purple pond were now almost brown.

I've heard that we humans carry a large volume of blood in our skulls. It facilitates cognition and sensory aptitude, but the funny thing is, with all that cognitive and sensory blood rushing out of my head I was still able to feel everything, and sense not only the loss of blood, but the possibility that I may lose more than that. "I may lose my life." I thought that thought. I felt that feeling. I lived both.

And at the moment that I was scared to death, literally scared because of my own death, I was alive…alive for my wife, alive for my children, and alive to see the color of my blood on the ground that was definitely not red.
That was seven hundred thirty days ago.

One year ago today trying to find normal, I was gleefully skipping around the pain at Disneyworld .

Today, two years to the day after my wreck, as if a counter balance to the Magic Kingdom , I started off the morning with a glass of water and my first anti-depressant. As I pulled out of the pharmacy parking lot on day seven hundred twenty nine reading the instructions on the pill bottle, "take one pill in the morning," I half chuckled at the irony.
My life changing day is now two years old. Not a day goes by that I don't recall that day, when I twist and my back shoots with pain or when the numbness in my face sends tingles down my neck, or when I see someone on a bicycle not wearing a helmet, or when an ambulance rushes past me with sirens blaring, or when I kiss that little five year old goodnight, she's now seven, that day has brought me to this one, taking a pill to help me cope. I quit rationalizing a long time ago how I was better than everyone else on prescription psychotropics. But still, I'd rather have been able to cope on my own, finding that great inner spiritual peace that I peddle, leaving people in my wake as I walked by, "wow, he's incredible, so strong, and so together." But instead, I've got this little pill, and I hope it helps.

I'm a Jesus man, I think. I love the person Jesus, I think. Love how he lived. Love how he died. Its not the only way to live, but it's the way I have chosen. Its hard, this way, but it is good. Oh sure, I claim the title of Christian, but that has become so convoluted and heavy laden I think it does more harm as a title than good, so I just say I'm a Jesus man. This colors most of my activity and response, but I recognize that its all mostly mystery, and I am OK with that, even as a vocational minister.
I came home from the hospital in a back brace, with my jaw wired shut and with a quarter sized hole in my neck as a result of the emergency tracheotomy. And as a cruel joke, I came home to a kitchen full of food that I could not eat. Actually, I drank some of it. If you've never had fried chicken and potatoes and gravy and a biscuit in a blender with milk, you should try it.
I also came home to a few mixed emotions. I cried when I walked through the front door. Actually, I whimpered. It's hard to cry when your jaw is surgically shut and there are pieces of wire woven through your gums to hold your teeth in place. So I whimpered, and I went to bed. I got out occasionally for a shower and for medicine routines. And I took some phone calls.

One was particularly poignant. A former church member, and I don't use that term loosely, called me and wished me well, and said, "You know, I think this might actually be good for our church. We've really rallied, and you know, we've come together in a way."
I had one of those moments of clarity when the words come to your mind quickly and you realize that there is one response to such a statement and one response only. I did so through clenched teeth not because of anger but because of necessity, fully aware that I was about to startle a church member who had no idea what she had just said, or how offensive it was to the hearer. I offered slowly in calculated response, very clearly to this sweet yet shallow soul, "Hell no this wasn't a good thing. I would never say my children wondering if their daddy would come home or not "good." I would never say what Alyson had to go through was "good" or beneficial to any congregation for that matter. This is hard on all of us, I hurt, Alyson is exhausted, the kids are scared and it's not "good," and the notion that my life can be disposable or of some utility so a congregation can be the better from my pain just doesn't fit with me or my Jesus."

I'm a Jesus man, and while I am still trying to figure out what that means, I am damn sure that Jesus didn't coordinate the breaking of my back and the exploding of my face to bring some unity to a little church.

She meant well, I guess, and like I said, she's a former church member now. Maybe I am too.

So I took this pill today. My family doctor and my therapist and my neurologist all are on the same page. They say the amount of psychic energy I am using to get through the day is spiking, and this pill can be useful in my entire course of therapy. They know I work in a helping profession, although I am not sure how much of a helper I have been in the last seven hundred and thirty days. They also know that my mother, who was standing in the kitchen in my home when I returned from the hospital, died eight months later. I preached her funeral and instead of sitting with tired shoulders on the front pew with my dad and my sister, I offered holy words for her. I had to postpone my grief, because I had to go to work. I did it lovingly. I don't begrudge the request she made of me, and that's another thing that sucks about being a minister. Don't get me wrong, its not all bad, there is good, but the worst thing is that in becoming a minister, you lose some of your humanity. People forget that you are human too, and the title doesn't mean you are any better at coping with trauma and loss yourself, at least not in my case anyway.

One month after I got out of the hospital, at the annual budget conference for the church, a senior gentleman stood up and made a motion to reduce my salary by twenty five percent because the pledges were not coming in like he thought they should and you get the point, "we gotta line this budget up with our pledges and the pastor makes more than anybody in our budget so..."

I was not there but I heard about it, and it infuriated me. Remember, my life-changing day did not give me that fresh outlook to suffer fools any better. And I wondered, while I was still in a back brace, while I still had a bandage over the hole in my neck, while I was facing monumental medical bills, why in the hell would a man who has gone to church his entire life, be him a Christian or a Jesus man or impostor, think this the best time to reduce my income by twenty five percent? Am I supposed to be so unattached to mammon that I would say, "sure, that's' a good idea?"

Maybe I am. I'll study that one. And I am human, and I want to send my kids to good universities, and pay for their straight teeth, and give them a good place to ride their bikes and play in the backyard, maybe a nice vacation every year.

I guess I am still angry with the woman who pulled out in front of me, maybe even madder that she never contacted me, never checked on me. Maybe I'm disappointed at the theology that allowed a woman to tell me that God wanted this to happen so a church could find some unity. Maybe I'm mad that a man I am pledged to serve would show so little care and concern for me and my family. Maybe I'm mad at myself for needing and wanting that twenty five percent. Maybe I'm mad that I can't call my mother anymore. Maybe I'm mad for not coping any better two years later.
Or, maybe I'm just me, and these last two years are the threads woven together to make a life. My life.

I guess I'll always be in recovery from something, or maybe even from myself.
And if I have learned anything between day one and seven hundred thirty, it is this: any love you get is enough to get you through.

And the fact that I am out of bed today is a pretty good sign. I just wrote nine pages without a break. This pill is good!

Actually, the pill isn't supposed to start working for another week; the doctor says it will take that long for the tiny magical chemicals to be absorbed into my system. So, I guess my recovery to date has more to do with me than the pill I took this morning.
Maybe I'm doing better than I thought?

Copyright 2007, Kevin M. Roberts