This weekend I spoke at the “In Step” retreat at Camp Wyldewood in Searcy. Diane and I were overwhelmed with joy at seeing so many people we love that we haven’t seen in person for ages. (By the way, except for one Sunday at Covenant Fellowship Church, it was my first time to speak in Searcy since 1991!)
We were flooded with wonderful emotions of nostalgia. Fourteen years of my life was spent at Harding: four years as an undergrad student, three years at the graduate school (in Memphis), and then seven years preaching at the College Church. As we walked on campus, we thought about the many ways our lives were blessed by people there. I remembered life-transforming classes with Ray Muncy, Neale Pryor, Jimmy Allen, Jerry Jones, Tom Eddins, and many others. I remembered first seeing Diane in the Patty Cobb cafeteria. I recalled our first date: seeing the uncut, unedited version of “Wilderness Family” at the Rialto.
One of the highlights was running into Dr. Ganus as we strolled through campus. In every possible sense, he’s a giant of a man. I have respected him as a president, as an elder, and as an older friend. Just talking to him for ten minutes makes me want to be a better leader!
Off to Searcy to speak at the “In Step” retreat at Camp Wyldewood. Look forward to seeing some of you there.
It began as a carefully constructed, formal speech. But in his heart, Martin Luther King wasn’t a speech-giver. He was a preacher. So as his message moved along forty years ago today, he began departing from his text. A woman behind him piped up, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin.” Here’s how Taylor Branch (Parting the Waters) describes what happened:
“The ‘Dream’ sequence took him from Amos to Isaiah, ending, ‘I have a dream that one day, every valley shall be exalted . . .’ Then he spoke a few sentences from the prepared conclusion, but within seconds he was off again, reciting the first stanza of ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee,’ ending, ‘from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’ After an interlude of merely one sentence — ‘And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true’ — he took it up again: ‘So let freedom ring.’ . . . As King rolled the freedom bells from New Hampshire to California and back across Mississippi, his solid, square frame shook and his stateliness barely contained the push to an end that was old to King but new to the world: ‘And when this happens . . . we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” With that King stepped suddenly aside . . . .”
I’m always challenged by what John Fischer writes about Christian engagement in culture. Check out this article involving the Harry Potter controversy (in some Christian circles).
I read an insightful article recently about people who change churches. Those people fall into three groups: the skunks, the turtles, and the butterflies.
The skunks go out the front door with all the attention they can get. They make sure everyone knows they’re leaving and WHY they’re leaving. They try to make it clear how badly they’ll be missed. As you can imagine, they leave an odor that remains for a while.
Turtles quietly exit out the side door. Maybe they’re hurt by the direction their church is moving. Perhaps they just couldn’t connect with people to find meaningful community. But they don’t try to become martyrs. They do their best to love everyone on their way out.
Butterflies aren’t really leaving–at least that’s not what they have in mind. It isn’t about the church they’re leaving but about the opportunity they feel called to ahead. So they become a blessing to everyone–affirming the work of God in the place they have been and seizing the new chances they have to minister ahead.
Nineteen years ago today, an OB-GYN in Wilmington, NC, placed a tiny girl into my arms. We named her Megan Diane Cope. We had no idea that day of the joys, challenges, and sorrows that were ahead.
For ten years she blessed our lives and the lives of people in Searcy and Abilene. Even since her death, her witness of simple love-in-brokenness has continued (at least in part through opportunities God has given me to speak and write about her).
Tonight our little family will gather for cake to remember her life of love and to anticipate a day of joy in the future. Maranatha.
I sat in my first Spanish class this morning since thirty (that’s right, 3-0) years ago. As I look at the projected demographics in Abilene and Texas, it just makes sense for me to quit procrastinating.
You won’t likely see Cal Thomas quoted a lot here. But this morning’s article on the Ten Commandment conflict in Alabama was insightful:
“If the ultimate question is how best for God’ followers to interest more people in his message, then the ultimate answer ought to come from internal, not external, things. Loving your enemies, praying for those who persecute you, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison and caring for widows and orphans make up the ’strategy’ laid down bythe Founding Father of the Christian faith. Could it be that too many have forsaken the harder but more effective work in favor of exterior symbols that, like crosses worn as jewelry, tell the observer nothing about one’s heart?”
This morning I’ll do something I’ve never done: start a series through the gospel of John. I feel more at home in the world of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John is unfamiliar terrain. Light and dark. “From above” and “from below.” Have you ever stopped to think how different our view of Jesus (and the Trinity) might be without John’s gospel?
As we approach the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, do yourself a favor: stop long enough to read (or watch) it again.
I like what Philip Yancey wrote about King and his influence: “I better understand now the pressures that King faced his entire adult life, pressures that surely contributed to his failures. King’s moral weaknesses provide a convenient excuse for anyone who wants to avoid his message, and because of those weaknesses some Christians still discount the genuineness of his faith. (These Christians might want to review the list of outstanding people of faith in Hebrews 11, a list which includes such moral deviants as Noah, Abraham, jacob, Rahab, Samson, and David.) I certainly once dismissed him. Yet now I can hardly read a page from King’s life, or a paragraph from his speeches, without sensing the centrality of his Christian conviction. I own a collection of his sermon tapes, and every time I listen to them I am swept up in the sheer power of his gospel-based message, delivered with an eloquence that has never been matched.”
Insightful words from John Stott in the new issue of Christianity Today:
“Tolerance is one of today’s most coveted virtues. But there are at least three different kinds of tolerance.
“First, there is legal tolerance: fighting for the equal rights before the law of all ethnic and religious minorities. Christians should be in the forefront of this campaign. Second, there is social tolerance, going out of our way to make friends with adherents of other faiths, since they are God’s creation who bear his image. Third, there is intellectual tolerance. This is to cultivate a mind so broad and open as to accommodate all views and reject none. This is to forget G. K. Chesterton’s bon mot that the ‘purpose of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.’ To open the mind so wide as to keep nothing in it or out of it is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feebleminded.”