Running with smart people

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Andrew and I have started running together on Saturday mornings. It’s been great – we made eight miles today.  The runs don’t seem so long and tiring because the conversation is so stimulating,  and covers the gamut of subjects from history (especially war history) to current events,  politics,  poverty,  etc.

Running with smart people (I’m referring to him,  not me).  I highly recommend it.

Update – I’m also getting used to my other Saturday tradition after these long runs: coming home and eating everything in sight, then crashing in bed as my legs and body realize that they’ve had all the energy sucked out of them.

Long time soccer spectators

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Last night Jill and I, along with Jill’s parents, our daughter, her husband, and two of our grandkids, went to see Blake play soccer. It’s strange; we’ve been watching that kid play soccer since he was four. He’s now eighteen and in his senior year of high school. We don’t really know how many games we have left to cheer for him.

Blake is excellent at soccer. I don’t think I’m saying that just because I’m his dad. He is poetry in motion: finesse, skill, and a strategic sense of the field and the movements of teammates and the opposition that can’t be coached. Last night he had two assists and two goals in a win against the St. John XXIII Lions. It was a lot of fun.

I hope we’re still watching him play next year. Time will tell. It’s been a really, really fun ride.

Vision casting

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My Pastor, Steve Bezner, has written a post at For the Church titled The Slippery Slope of Vision Salesmanship (casting vision without feeling icky). He begins with some hard-learned lessons; a list of things not to do. Among the ones that most resonated with me as a layman with a heart for a people group and visions and dreams of my own:

Stop Making Church Growth the Goal: In our church we talk intentionally about expanding the Kingdom of God rather than increasing church attendance. Do I want our church to increase in size? Of course. But Kingdom work may often mean valuable ministry in the city that will help other churches or even lead people away from your church to help other churches. The gospel has always had people leaving churches to follow the Lord’s call. Release them.

Stop Making Church Growth Your Identity: Jesus said, “I will grow my church.” Your name is not in that verse. Your job is to be faithful. Yes, be intelligent. Yes, employ skill. But when things do not go the the way you anticipated—and, yes, that will happen—you are to hold fast to the finished work of Jesus, not attendance numbers. I was once addicted to church attendance. Don’t be. It is not good. Trust me.

He then goes on to explain the things that make up a good vision strategy. Read the whole thing, it’s good!

Righteousness and rescue

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The Bible
God’s word
The Word
The Word made flesh
The Man
The Word, the Man, enacting
In flesh, in bones
in veins, in muscles, in neurons
The righteousness, the rescue
Spoken of, performed
For centuries
Under the shadow of Rome
Spoken in a new tongue
Once unknown, in Greek, new languages, new customs
In lights fueled by unquenchable oil
By sad rivers in Babylon
Besieged, blinded, childless
In scenes of unspeakable horror
Yet with hope in the lament
Morning, new morning, in the night
Righteousness and rescue
Spoken of in the word
Performed
In a new temple
In a tent
Milk and honey
Across a river
Across the wilderness
One dark night in Egypt
Hope within lament
Lament and cacophony
A bush burns
Righteousness spoken
Wonders performed
Hungry bellies filled
Reconciliation
Hope in famine
The Word
A family
A flood
A bloody stone
A tree
But not alone
Righteousness and rescue
Now in flesh appearing
Carrying in his body
The power, the surge
of righteousness and rescue
Now in the written word
Now in the living Word
Become flesh
At last

Street Theater

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She conceived again and bore a daughter. And the Lord said to him, “Call her name No Mercy, for I will no more have mercy on the house of Israel, to forgive them at all. But I will have mercy on the house of Judah, and I will save them by the Lord their God. I will not save them by bow or by sword or by war or by horses or by horsemen.”

When she had weaned No Mercy, she conceived and bore a son. And the Lord said, “Call his name Not My People, for you are not my people, and I am not your God.”

Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured or numbered. And in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it shall be said to them, “Children of the living God.” – Hosea 1:6-10

The “She” referenced at the top of this passage is Gomer, the “wife of whoredom” God commanded Hosea to marry.

There is a lot packed into these five verses. The names, for instance: “No Mercy” and “Not My People”. Implied in those names is some astounding obedience by Hosea – he actually had to name his kids these horrible names. See, some of the prophets got to just prophesy, but certain lucky ones were commanded to do some gut-wrenchingly difficult street theater for the people. Among this latter category are people like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea. Hosea’s obedience to the street-theater commands of the Lord involved marrying an unfaithful woman and naming his children horrific names of abandonment.

God enacts in this real life familial story what seems to me to be one of the major themes of the Old Testament: terrible judgement for unfaithfulness followed by amazing restoration by God’s grace. In a way, and I’m not trying to trivialize this, God’s dealings with Israel in the Old Testament are a form of street theater for us, and also for the host of principalities and powers watching in amazement. He repeats over and over in this long history of his people the story of sin leading to rejection and judgement leading to amazing, uncalled for, unexpected grace, restoration, and belonging.

It’s real, but it’s also a picture in many dimensions of what was coming, soon.

Enter the Word made flesh, living mercy, coming to his own people. You see, in Christ the sin is absorbed, the rejection he takes as his own, and the divine wrath falls on his shoulders, his head, his hands, his feet, his back, his side. The amazing, uncalled for, unexpected restoration and grace that flows from this is delivered to us, forever restored to the Father.

And in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it shall be said to them, “Children of the living God.”

Amazing Grace!

Deconstructing Star Wars plot holes

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I walked out of the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, think that it was a really good movie with some serious flaws. But after reading this take-down by Matty Granger of a recent negative Huffington Post review of the movie, I think some of my objections were unfair. He answers the HuffPo article plot hole by plot hole, often hilariously. He swayed me; I’m actually a lot more excited now about future installments.

Here are some of my favorite responses. (Warning: Granger’s article contains some salty language).

4. Rey becomes nearly as effective a Force-user in a few hours as Luke Skywalker did in a few years.

Yeah. Makes you wonder why doesn’t it? Kinda feels like we’re being set up for something in the future. I wonder if we’ll ever find out about her mysterious past and her mystical connection to the Force and Luke Skywalker? If you don’t understand that this is set-up for future films, then you should have your Netflix password taken away from you.

5. Just minutes before Starkiller Base explodes, Supreme Leader Snoke tells Hux to go get Kylo Ren and take him off the planet. Unfortunately, Ren had recently (unbeknownst to Hux) run into the woods like a lunatic, leaving no information about his whereabouts. It’s no problem, though, because Hux apparently has special Kylo Ren GPS.

Or the powerful Force user Snoke closes his eyes for two seconds and tells Hux exactly where Kylo is. Unless of course that power is reserved for first-time Force users like Leia when trying to find her brother who’s hanging from a twig on the under-side of Cloud City. Don’t make me use the Original Trilogy against you, dude. That [stuff’s] just wrong.

14. Finn is an ex-janitor who goes AWOL from a Stormtrooper force numbering in the tens of thousands. Yet he is absolutely convinced, despite being someone of no importance whatsoever to the First Order, that he will be chased across the galaxy for having defected.

And breaking a high-value prisoner out of the brig. And stealing a Tie Fighter. And blowing up a few dozen guys. And shooting up the landing bay of a Star Destroyer. Not to mention helping return the droid the First Order is scouring the galaxy for to the Resistance. All things considered, I think he has a pretty good reason to believe what he does. Also, he’s not a janitor. Just thought I’d remind you. Again.

And, perhaps my favorite

29. Who trained Rey to fight with a staff as effectively as she does, given that (a) she is an orphan with no friends or family, and (b) she has never been in a battle, but is, rather, merely a scrap-metal scavenger?

Dude. Wander down to the poorest part of whatever town you’re in and pick a fight with a mangy little mutt of a guy. The smaller the better. Once you’re out of the hospital, you’ll realize that people who are forced to survive in the harshest environments don’t train to fight. They learn the hard way and they get really, really good at it.

Read the whole thing.

Seek first

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But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. – Matthew 6:33

My high school discipleship group and I were talking about this verse tonight. As I’m learning to ask myself when reading scripture, what does this look like? What does it look like to seek first a kingdom?

I think it’s important, for starters, to understand what a kingdom is. A kingdom is a realm that is ruled by a king (I like to keep things simple). I, unfortunately, live in the kingdom of Bill too much of the time. Too often, I seek first what will increase my little kingdom; I focus on what will make my name great, what will increase my kingdom’s power, what will grant me, as the king, riches, luxuries, pleasures, power and exaltation.

It’s all about control, you see.

Our Lord understands that we are naturally this way. We worry about our own kingdoms; the context of this passage is our (natural) anxiety about the things we need to live.

But Jesus pushes against what we call “natural” – because, really, it’s not natural, or logical, or wise. We’re fallen and twisted, departed from what we were made to be, divorced from the natures God intended us to have, so much so that the wisdom of following after God is missed, often without us realizing it.

Here’s what makes sense: all the things we need fall under the domain of the King who created them. He offers us free citizenship in his Kingdom through the death and resurrection of his Son, but to gain this citizenship we need to take our white-knuckled grip off of our own kingdom. This feels like death to us, in our unnatural, fallen condition, but it only makes perfect sense. Our kingdoms are small, wispy vapors that will rise and fall like flowers and we don’t know our right hand from our left. He is the King who created the universe and holds it together by the word of his power. His Kingdom is forever, the government is on his shoulders, and he has authority over all things, including everything we need.

Is this really a hard choice?

True, his call on us is weighty. Giving control to the true King can and often does lead to hunger, nakedness, the sword. As Paul wrote, “for your sake we are being killed all the day long”. But Jesus promises us that if we seek the Kingdom, if we are aligned with the King’s purposes and sent out as ambassadors for him, he will give us all the things we need, and he understands what we need so much more than we do. He will give us what we need to seek the Kingdom even more! And in the end we will receive an eternal weight of glory that far surpasses anything we have to deal with in this life.

That’s a Kingdom worth seeking. First.

True persons

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“Just as Adam could not be truly himself without Eve, so are all the Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs called by God – not to live in solitary faithfulness, but to serve as the progenitors of his people Israel. In Christian tradition, faithfulness always requires “two or more.” Solitary fidelity is a contradiction in terms. Faithfulness is always communal. Jesus goes alone in the wilderness – just as Christian hermits still dwell in solitude – only for the sake of his community and Kingdom. Tolkien stands in full accord with this fundamental insistence that we become true persons only in engagement and community with other persons. He also discerns that pride, the deadliest of the cardinal sins, is usually a denial of our dependence on others. It is an attempt at pseudo-lordship – as if God himself were not a triune community of persons, as if he were not the God who refuses to be God without his people.”

From Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien