Category: Faith

WHERE IS GOD WHEN IT HURTS?

WHERE IS GOD WHEN IT HURTS?

Tragedy has tinted our town the last several weeks. As the world emerges from the pandemic, our small community has lost our excellent high school JROTC leader to sudden death and then one of the high school secretaries to sudden brain seizures. A church member’s son is diagnosed with cancer, and my wife’s brother is suffering from crippling sudden onset brain seizures with no precise diagnosis.

As Phillip Yancey poignantly asked: Where is God when it Hurts?

The Bible is clear about the source of suffering[1]. We live in cursed bodies, with cursed psyches, and cursed spirits, on a cursed planet, under a cursed system in a cursed time. Men will commit crimes against one another. Accidents will burn houses down. Even the earth will oppose us and challenge us at every turn until we return to dust.

We should therefore adjust our expectations accordingly. Of course, we may not like the answer. But the question is not whether we like it. Instead, does it make sense of reality as we know it? I believe that it does.

But all of that is abstract. Suffering is very personal stuff.

Nineteen years ago, I accompanied my friend Phil to the spot where his 18-year-old son Joseph had just died in an inexplicable car wreck. My heart wrenched as I watched my friend implode in grief. I spent the next three months so angry with God that I could not speak to him except on a professional basis. How could He let that happen?! Two years later, I buried one of my best friends, the victim of a car hitting his bicycle. Two years after that, I answered the phone late one night to the wails of a grieving friend and shortly after that buried her twenty-year-old son, a drowning victim. Finally, in August of 2010, I buried my 53-year-old brother, dead from a sudden heart attack. There was no explanation for any of these losses that made any sense. I grieved to the bottom of my soul, just as you do in your losses.

Where is God when that kind of stuff happens? Philosophers offer two answers: There is no all-powerful, all-loving God. Or there is an almighty God. He just doesn’t care.

But the Bible offers a third alternative. We can hear it in one of the most overlooked things Jesus ever said, something he wailed aloud from the Cross: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!?” (Matthew 27:46).

God is not up there, distant, aloof, impassive while we suffer. He is down here suffering with us. He has taken every single pain, every ounce of tragedy, every shred of injustice, each moment of mindless terror, “rolled it into a ball and eaten it, tasted it, fully digested it, eternally.”[2] God is in Christ, suffering with and reconciling the world to himself.

Where is God when we suffer? He is suffering with us.[3]

The Cross is stunning proof that God cares about our pain. As the universal symbol of Christianity, we are so familiar with it that we forget how violent, how brutal it was. Our word ‘excruciating’ comes from the Latin for crucifixion. Yet, we wear it around the neck like a trophy. In his death, Jesus, God in the flesh, fully identified with our suffering. He did not have to do that. He chose complete identification with suffering humanity.

When tragedy strikes, words on a page or the lips of a friend cannot fill the breach in our souls. Despite all the things he had promised, all the times he predicted the resurrection, Jesus’ disciples dispersed in depression. Their hope, it seemed, was empty.

But that was Friday. Sunday was coming. The world, suffering, life, and death itself were turned on their heads when it came. The Cross tells us that God fully identifies with all the suffering of the world. The resurrection reminds us that one day he will turn suffering on its head.

God, our heavenly father, is not holding us at arm’s length. He is embracing us. He is beside us, holding us up. He is weeping with us. He knows the emptiness of our grief and the hollowness in our hearts. He knows and shares these things with the whole world of suffering but especially with his people. On the Cross, he absorbed it, and through us, he absorbs it still.[4]

Take the Cross out of the center of Christianity, and you remove its core. It becomes just another system of morals and principles. But if you embrace the Cross, you find a God there who is unlike any other, a God who will go to unimaginable lengths to commune with his creatures. He will commune with us to the death on Friday so that we can conquer death with him on Sunday.

[1]See Genesis 3: 17-19; Romans. 8:18, 22-25)

[2] Peter Kreeft, quoted in ‘The Case for Faith’ by Lee Strobel, pg. 63.

[3] 2 Corinthians 5:18-19.

[4] 1 Peter 5:7; Romans 8:22-26;

RE-CENTERING SPLINTERING EVANGELICALS

RE-CENTERING SPLINTERING EVANGELICALS

“Have you heard this podcast going around Christian circles?” My friend asked, referring to the Holy Post Podcast, Why We’re Divided & Positive Pluralism with Bob Roberts. Full disclosure, I have not listened to it. But Roberts references The Splintering of the Evangelical Soul, by Christianity Today Editor in Chief, Timothy Dalrymple, which I have read. My friend continued, “I have a close group of Christian college friends where this divide is blatantly evident. I would be curious to hear your thoughts as I think it is a big issue facing the Church.”

Dalrymple frames the issue in his lead:

New fractures are forming within the American evangelical movement, fractures that do not run along the usual regional, denominational, ethnic, or political lines. Couples, families, friends, and congregations once united in their commitment to Christ are now dividing over seemingly irreconcilable views of the world. In fact, they are not merely dividing but becoming incomprehensible to one another.

This blog is too short to cover all the issues Dalrymple raises in his 3000-word article. But I can tell you three fundamental things that are missing. And without those fundamentals, evangelicals have no center.

First and foremost is Christ and his gospel. But we immediately have to ask, whose Christ, whose gospel? Is he the Jesus of the New Testament who created the world, came to die a substitutionary atoning death for sinners, rose from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of God?[1] Is he the head of the body, the Church, the firstborn from among the dead, who has supremacy in everything?[2] Is he the same Christ who said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”?[3]

The first thing that is missing is the centrality of Christ. Is he the Christ that Christians must obey, or is he only someone whose opinion we should consider? Dalrymple says the “sense of commonality grew increasingly strained as groups not formerly identified as evangelical came to be lumped together, defining the category “evangelical” less in theological terms and more in social, cultural, and political terms.” But “Evangelical” divorced from its fundamental theology is not evangelical at all.

The second thing that is missing is the influence of our sinful nature.[4] Dalrymple talks about how desire and experience shape our “plausibility curve” but makes no mention of the spiritual forces shaping our desires.

“The heart has reasons reason knows not of.” When our sinful nature wants something, and it always wants something other than God’s way, it will cling to any rational explanation for abandoning the Biblical Worldview.

One college course questioning the authorship and authority of scripture is not enough to unravel a young believer’s moral code unless that code was already under assault by the sinful nature.

The third missing piece, already alluded to, is a commitment to the Biblical Worldview that flows from a commitment to the authority of scripture as inspired by God. Our world and everything in it, including humankind, was created good. But men and women rebelled and brought all of life on earth under the curse and fell into bondage to sin. That is the source of all of our problems. Christ’s mission, and thus the mission of his Church, is to redeem what was lost: men, women, children, civilization, and the earth. He will return one day to restore all things and bring all who oppose his righteousness to account.[5] We should analyze every social, moral, ethical, political, and personal issue through that rubric. Without that, evangelicals have no common ground, only the vagaries of experience and whichever information stream we tap on a given day.

As John Stonestreet often says, evangelicals need to walk and chew gum at the same time. If we subject everything we hear to the Lordship of Christ through the biblical worldview, we will arrive at conclusions that upset right and left, moderate and progressive, but we will be faithful to Christ.World News Group avoids these extremes and holds itself accountable to the biblical worldview. Its process for doing so is very well-defined. They write as people who know that they will give an account to God, and it shows. I commend them to you.

[1] Romans 3:25; Hebrews 2:17; 1 John 4:10.

[2] Colossians 1:18-20.

[3] Matthew 24:35

[4] Romans 7:18

[5] Romans 14:11; Philippians 2:9-11

WHO’S IN & WHO’S OUT?

WHO’S IN & WHO’S OUT?

In his novel, A Painted House, John Grisham describes a Sunday school teacher eulogizing a mean character named Jerry Sisco, who had been killed the night before in a back alley fight after he picked on one person too many.

In the words of the little boy who had seen the fight with his friend Dewayne: “She made Jerry sound like a Christian and an innocent victim. I glanced at Dewayne, who had one eye on me. There was something odd about this. As Baptists, we’d been taught from the cradle that the only way you made it to heaven was by believing in Jesus and trying to follow his example in living a clean and moral Christian life… And anyone who did not accept Jesus and live a Christian life simply went to hell. That’s where Jerry Sisco was, and we all knew it.”

Did you grow up believing that? I did.  But growing up with a belief is not the same as coming to grips with it in adulthood. Is what we learned as children valid? Is Jesus himself as categorical and exclusive as all that? 

Many years ago, I sat across the table from a man who almost lost his faith over this issue. He had friends – people he loved and respected – who had a much broader view of things. They told him he was very narrow-minded to believe that Jesus was the only way.  Would they be lost, damned for all eternity, if they refused to believe like the boys in Grisham’s novel?

We don’t have to wonder. Jesus made it crystal clear in Matthew 7:21-27.

21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

24 “Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall because it had its foundation on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” [1]

He followed that up with an even more exclusive statement in John’s gospel:

 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”[2]

Membership in the kingdom does not depend on what we say, how religious we are, or how moral we are. Membership belongs to those who believe and from that belief obey. Membership in the kingdom is not about creeds or images. It is about heart and action. Membership does not depend on what we think of Jesus.  Membership in the Kingdom of God and where we go when we die depends on what Jesus thinks of us.

What does he think of you?

[1] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 7:21–27). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[2] John 14:6 NIV

GOOD FRIDAY AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

GOOD FRIDAY AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

One of the great questions of the skeptic, the greatest objection to Christianity as we know it is: How can a good God let bad things happen to good people? How does Christianity deal with that question?

The standard answers run something like this:
 He loves us but he isn’t powerful enough to do anything about it.
 He’s powerful enough to do something but he really doesn’t love us.
 He’s not there.

But when we look at Psalm 22 and see that David prophesied all of it 1000 years before Christ quoted it from the Cross, it opens up an answer that we hadn’t considered:

God is doing something to overcome evil that we never would have dreamed.
• He is wrestling evil to the death in the body of the king of goodness.
• He is swallowing all injustice in the suffering of the just one.
• He is putting out the fire of death in the unquenchable life of the Living One.
• He is breaking the power of sin and the curse by nailing it to the Cross of the sinless one.

What did God do with the problem of evil? He absorbed it all in the person of his son who sang the great question out of the depth of his soul while nailed to a cross.

PREPARE FOR CULTURAL ICE STORMS

PREPARE FOR CULTURAL ICE STORMS

Our rural Virginia county got hit hard by the recent ice storms. It wasn’t as bad as Texas, but many people who had generators were still running them and hauling “flush water” a week later. And good luck buying a generator if you weren’t prepared.

Another storm is coming, a cultural ice storm that, like Narnia’s Ice Queen, is already freezing free speech, intimidating the weak, and punishing dissenters. Most of us are unprepared. Rod Dreher is and his recent books, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post Christian Nation (2017), and Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020), will alert readers, all readers, not just Christians, to what’s ahead and help them develop a plan.

I know that sounds sensational. Alarmist rhetoric across media has made us wary of all warnings. But when all the signs indicate a storm is coming, it is time to ring the bell and make a plan.

Some recent examples: A friend and tenured professor at a state university tells me his department’s deputy director is pushing a diversity statement—Dreher calls it “a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity”—all faculty must sign. The situation is serious enough that he has retained legal counsel. The Virginia Values Act, which threatens freedom of conscience for all Virginians, was signed into law last July. Amazon just blocked the sale of Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, the most scholarly, well-researched, and unpretentious book—every parent of a child in public school should read it—on the subject of transgenderism. School teachers tell me that their social media accounts are being watched, and somebody will punish them for any speech deemed out of line by school boards who are rapidly adopting state diversity guidelines. The Equal Rights Amendment will soon enshrine in Federal Law what the Virginia Values Act does on the state level. Attorneys who work in the religious freedom arena tell me that Christian business owners are increasingly at risk for business-destroying lawsuits. Politicians and policy wonks tell me the laws pursued by the left in general and the LGBTQ lobby, in particular, are meant not to secure equality of access—they already have that—but to “punish the wicked,” i.e., religious and other conservatives who disagree with them.

Meditate on that for a moment. It means using state and federal law to force agreement. Read thought police.

Dreher says, “As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in  the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.”[1] He calls what’s happening “soft totalitarianism” and defines it thus:

Back in the Soviet era, totalitarianism demanded love for the Party, and compliance with the Party’s demands was enforced by the state. Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic—and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit…Today in our societies, dissenters from the woke party line find their businesses, careers, and reputations destroyed. They are pushed out of the public square, stigmatized, canceled, and demonized as racists, sexists, homophobes, and the like. And they are afraid to resist, because they are confident that no one will join them or defend them.[2]

Samuel James, writing for Christianity Today, finds Dreher’s thesis unconvincing, commenting, “prophecy is tough work, and people who share the deepest religious and social convictions can nonetheless interpret all the moving parts differently.” I hope he is right. But Dreher’s cultural analysis has been dead on target so far.

Jesus rebuked his enemies by telling them, “You can read the weather, but you cannot read the signs of the times.” Rod Dreher has read the signs. Christians and others who believe in truth, reality, freedom, and justice need to prepare for what’s coming. Dreher’s insights are an excellent place to start.

[1] Rod Dreher, Live Not By Lies, p. 58.

[2] Ibid, p. 8-9.

THE PLOW An Ash Wednesday Reflection

THE PLOW An Ash Wednesday Reflection

Every summer, we enjoy another of the benefits of living in a rural community: garden-fresh fruits and vegetables. I thought I knew what a fresh tomato was before I moved to the country. But then I ate an Abbott tomato. I thought I knew what sweet was, but then I tasted a Turbeville cantaloupe.

One such garden was across the street from our house. But none of its fruit would’ve been possible without Mr. Rice from down the street. He didn’t water the ground. He didn’t plant the seed. He didn’t even help in the harvest. He just appeared on his tractor every spring with the thing every garden needs: the plow. 

The plow is hard and sharp. It rips through weeds, punctures the hard surface, and breaks up the clotted dirt. The plow prepares the ground for the beginning of life-giving things.

The spiritual life has a parallel in the plow: repentance. Repentance penetrates hardened hearts, breaking up clods that clog our souls. Repentance opens the way for the word of God to work down into the soil of personality and bring forth the sweet fruit of a life empowered by the Spirit. Repentance is the first step in ‘putting off the old life’ and ‘putting on the new.’ Nothing happens without it.

Today is Ash Wednesday when some Christians mark their heads with an ashen cross to begin the season of Lent, a concentrated period of personal repentance before Easter. That’s good if it helps. Like an unused plow in an abandoned field, repentance has rusted away in our “self-esteem is everything” culture. But repentance is a spiritual discipline that requires regular practice if it’s to do us any good.

Nehemiah shows us how to do it.

Repentance Reviews the Offense

Repentance calls sin, sin. Nehemiah said, “I confess the sins…we have committed, including myself.” Neh.1: 6b-7.

There goes that plow blade, right into the toughest part of the ground, the hardened surface of self. We come before God and say, “Lord, I did it. It wasn’t my environment, it wasn’t my job, it wasn’t my family, I did something wrong, and I’m responsible for it.”

Repentance Is Specific 

Nehemiah confessed sins of commission, doing what we know is wrong. “We have acted very wickedly toward you,” he said. We might say it this way: “God, I have been corrupt in my dealings with you. I’ve played the religious pretend game. On the outside, I look fine. On the inside, my heart is far from you.”

Corruption is a heart hardening thing. It needs a sharp plow.

Nehemiah also confessed sins of omission, failing to do what we know is right. “We have not obeyed the commands… you gave to Moses.”

Finally, Nehemiah confessed to group sins. He used the plural pronoun, “We.” We don’t imagine ourselves responsible for what our culture is doing. But when we fail to speak up for the defenseless unborn, are we not responsible? When we fail to care for the poor, are we not neglecting our responsibilities?

Repentance reviews the offense and takes responsibility, putting everything out on the table between God and us. That is essential if we want a response.

It has been a long time now since we ate the fruit of the garden across the street. The neighbors who tended it died or moved away, grass and trees now fill the lot. I chatted with Mr. Rice about that. He said, “I’ve been plowing gardens for folks in town here for decades. At one time, there were thirty-five that I plowed every spring. Now there are less than five.”

When I observe our culture and see the poison it produces, I wonder if the reason is that we have stopped tending the garden of the soul, we have stopped turning over the soil of the spirit with the plow of repentance. 

GENESIS 2021 Building Our Future on Stable Ground

GENESIS 2021 Building Our Future on Stable Ground

Fans of the first Star Trek movies remember that in The Wrath of Khan, the villain tried to destroy the Starship Enterprise by detonating an experimental terraforming device called Genesis. We learned in The Search for Spock, that the planet that emerged from that explosion was beautiful but unstable, doomed to devour itself in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. David Marcus, a key scientist on the project, revealed the reason. He had used a restricted substance, “proto-mater,” to speed up the process. What should have been a utopia was doomed from the start by the hubris of its creator.

By 1984 standards, the special effects were excellent. But that is not what made me think of Star Trek movies at one o’clock this morning.

2020 has been an epic disaster. People will make movies about it. Heroes and villains will emerge. Everyone hopes 2021 will be better than 2020. But the biblical worldview warns us that we dare not anchor our hopes here. It tells us that God made us good, but in our hubris, we inserted an element to make life better. We rebelled and corrupted all our capacities in the process. We took earth with us when we fell, and because of the fall, we can count on two things.

First, the earth itself, in the form of earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, and yes, pandemics, will oppose us. “Cursed is the ground,” God said to our first parents and earth’s first stewards. “Thorns and thistles, it will produce for you till you return to the dust from which you were formed.”  

Second, our best Utopia-building efforts will be fatally flawed because we are fatally flawed. Like Dr. Marcus in Star Trek, we cannot resist the temptation to hurry-up success. In our hubris, we add ingredients to life guaranteed to produce catastrophic, if unintended, consequences.

We need a savior, someone who can break the curse and reverse the consequences of the fall; someone who can cancel our corruption and restore true goodness to men and women. And the good news is, we just celebrated his arrival at Christmas.

The babe of Bethlehem became the man on the mountain who began his ministry by saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” His recipe for success, called The Sermon on the Mount[1], has no shortcuts, no place for hubris, only humility, faith, and love. He ended that sermon with this practical application.

“Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”[2]

The vaccines may work. Life might return to something like normal. But because of the fall, we can count on two things: something else will come along to destabilize the world, and in our hubris, it might be us!   Build your house on the rock. Put your hope in Christ in 2021. He is the only savior.

[1] See the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5-7.

[2] The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 7:24–27). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

THE WAY GOD DOES HOPE

THE WAY GOD DOES HOPE

God delivers hope in the strangest ways. When we want hope, we look for it in large promises made by powerful people. But when God provides hope, it looks like a tiny mustard seed covered in dirt. Like a pinch of leaven in a batch of dough, kneaded to a rubbery lump and left to rise in the dark, God’s hope comes to unlikely people in unknown places. And with it comes a crisis.

That’s the story of Jesus’ birth, well told in New Line Cinema’s 2006, The Nativity Story. The gritty reality of a family from impoverished Nazareth, staggering under cruel Roman oppression, comes through like no other movie on the birth of Christ in recent memory. Nothing is romanticized. Cecil B. DeMille would not recognize the sets or the clothing. The cast learned how to use the era’s tools, build houses, crush grapes and olives, milk goats, and make goat cheese.

Everything feels authentic, including Ciarán Hinds’ (Star Wars, Game of Thrones) menacing, paranoid, ruthless Herod. He reminds us that evil is everpresent when God is at work. Nazareth’s Jews’ stifling legalism is also palpable as Mary returns, obviously pregnant, from her visit with Elizabeth. The three wise men provide comic relief and a cosmic perspective on the birth of the King of Kings. But Oscar Isaac’s smitten, conflicted, and finally, courageous Joseph is the hero of the story. His portrayal of Jesus’ adopted father is a beautiful example of the positive power of a good man who puts others before himself.

Sadly, the weakest performance in the film is Keisha Castle-Hughes’ Mary. It may have been the script, but her portrayal, while authentic in biblical detail, seemed flat. Still, her and Joseph’s steadiness in the crisis of faith created by God’s entrance into their lives is worth the Amazon rental price. It reminds us that that is how God works hope into our lives. Not in big promises made by influential people but through small acts of faith by regular people facing the crises of obedience.

The smallest of seeds an inch deep in the dirt. A pinch of leaven in the dough in the dark. The greatest of kings born in the most humble of places. That is how God does hope. Watch The Nativity Story and find your hope this Christmas.  

STRESSED-OUT CHRISTMAS REMEDY

STRESSED-OUT CHRISTMAS REMEDY

The first Christmas wasn’t all angels singing, shepherds kneeling, and Magi giving gifts. It was also Joseph doubting, Mary wondering, Rachel weeping, and the family fleeing into Egypt. They were stressed out by Christmas too.

Depending on whom you ask, Christmas is either the best or worst time of the year. For some, “it’s those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings when friends come to call!” For others, it is time to sing the blues.  

True, the oft-quoted myth that suicides peak during Christmas is just that, a myth.[1] The rates go down.

On the other hand, WebMD reports that “Holiday blues are a pretty common problem despite the fact that as a society, we see the holidays as a joyous time,” says Rakesh Jain, MD, director of psychiatric drug research at the R/D Clinical Research Center in Lake Jackson, Texas.[2]

In other words, we’re less likely to do ourselves in but more likely to think about it. Especially at the end of 2020!

Those of us who have lost family members in the past few years, or been through the trauma of divorce, are most prone to the Christmas blues. Reminders of loved ones gone come in as many colors as gift wrap, and the complications of conflicts with step-families and feuding parents are well-documented sources of holiday unhappiness. Add to that this year’s pandemic pandemonium, the restrictions on travel, amplified expectations for joy, the stress of preparations, shopping, lack of exercise, and extra eating, and it’s no wonder some of us get grumpy and sad.

So if Blue Christmas is your holiday hymn, here are a few ideas to help you change your tune.

Usually, I would encourage you to change your environment. Humans are creatures of habit and highly sensitive to our environments. When we do the same things, the same ways, in the same places year after year, it can be challenging to associate Christmas with joy, especially if the people who were part of that joy are no longer present. We might not want to travel this year, but we can do different things to celebrate. I’m planning to build a fire-pit outside. We’re going to hang some outdoor lights and maybe drive through the South Boston Speedway light show one weekend. The point is, make some changes.

Change your traditions. Change the routine. Drop some old habits and build some new ones. Never baked Christmas cookies? Try it. Tired of baking? Stow your cookie sheets and try cakes or pies.

Change your attitude about grief. Grief is like the tide; it comes in and goes out on a schedule unpredictable for us. We don’t think it’s appropriate for the holidays, so we try to restrain it. But that’s the worst thing we can do. Like an ocean wave, grief has an energy, and that energy will find an outlet, even if we try to suppress it. Anger, bitterness, resentment, and depression can be the results. Better to adopt a new paradigm for dealing with grief, to ride the wave rather than stand against it. When we learn to do that, grief can help us heal and experience new kinds of joy. “Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus said, “for they will be comforted.” We can’t be comforted if we refuse to mourn.

Finally, change your theology. Remember that the first Christmas wasn’t all angels singing, shepherds kneeling, and Magi giving gifts. It was also Joseph doubting, Mary wondering, Rachel weeping, and the family fleeing into Egypt. They were stressed out by Christmas too.

And while you remember that, remember this: The food, the gifts, family, and friends are only the celebrants and elements of the celebration. The real joy is in the Christ child who came to “save his people from their sins,” and in the knowledge that God on high has declared “peace on earth to men on whom his favor rests.”    

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201212/is-suicide-more-common-christmas-time

[2] http://www.webmd.com/depression/features/emotional-survival-guide-for-holidays

CUP ‘A JOE WITH A HERO

CUP ‘A JOE WITH A HERO

I was a 25-year-old seminary student trying to sort through the meaning of ministry and leadership in a world without heroes. He was a 65-year-old retired U.S. Army Colonel and decorated combat veteran who had built harbors and airstrips from Normandy to Berlin in WWII. Roads and bridges across Korea, often under heavy fire, and twice wounded in the efforts. In retirement, he led an international security agency, served as a police chief in his hometown, and later became a roaming construction superintendent.

By the time I met Marc Walters on that job site in Memphis, multiple surgeries had weakened his once powerful body. He operated out of an old RV that doubled as his home on the hotel project we were building. I was looking for mentors, and he was John Wayne writ large, a tangible hero and nothing at all like the well-scrubbed theologians I was studying under at the time. Watching him handle the rough men on that job was an education no seminary could provide.

I was his gofer, aide de camp if you like. Every time we met, over every cup of joe, I asked questions and then just listened; questions about men, about values, about leadership under pressure. As winter gave way to spring, he shared his stories, and I worked hard to earn his respect. Their small-town church had scorned him and his wife because of her alcoholism. And though he was the son and grandson of Baptist preachers, he had not been to church in many years.

I knew that his health was failing, and one morning, as we finished our coffee, he got quiet, lit his pipe, and just looked at me for a moment. “I’ve told my family I may not make it through this next surgery,” he said. “And if I don’t, I’ve told them I want you to do my funeral. You’re an honorable young man, and I’m proud to know you.”

It was at once the greatest compliment I’d ever received, and the moment I had been praying about for months, providing the opportunity to talk about his spiritual life and his eternity. God gave us his grace that morning.

My friend survived. Because of our friendship, I think some reconciliation took place in his life and family, for which I was grateful. And I learned three valuable things. First, men who have seen combat, who have experienced life stripped to its essentials, know things most non-veterans cannot understand. Second, there is great value in listening to an older man tell his tale without hastening judgment on his life. Finally, the best ministry is not the kind that comes from pulpits, but life shared between friends over a cup ‘a joe in the quiet spaces.

Remember to thank a veteran today.