Just finished taking car pool and got behind a Dodge with two bumper stickers. One said: “WE ARE COMING. God may forgive you. WE WILL NOT.” The other sticker? “Jesus lives.”
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Churches, like dysfunctional families, often suffer from an inability to laugh at themselves. One thing about reasonably healthy families is that they can almost always laugh at themselves without anyone accusing anyone else of hating the family. It is, in fact, a fairly reliable sign of their health. You can tell things about your OWN family that wouldn’t be nearly as funny if someone from the outside were telling it!
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Note to Highland folks: Don’t miss “Oasis” this Wednesday night. Donna Hester and Jill Maxwell are going to be presenting “Iron Apron Strings,” the dramatic presentation they did at the ACU lectureship and then at the Zoe conference. It creatively tells the story of Jesus through his maternal lineage from Eve to Mary. The next Wednesday night, November 9, I’ll be focusing on >”The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” in anticipation of the movie being released on December 9.
Just seeing a few of my preaching buddies in Ft. Worth reminds me how lucky I am that through the years I’ve had lots of friends in ministry. I’ve heard older guys talking about not having many friends who were fellow preachers because everyone was so competitive. (That’s probably not everyone’s experience.) But I’ve been lucky to experience just the opposite: lots of guys who were watching each other’s backs and supporting their ministries in every possible way. I’m thankful for the Abilene guys: Eddie, Dwight, Ris, Phil, Chris, Don, and Terry — just to name some. And also for Rubel, Rick, Milt, Larry S., Jeff, Larry J., Buddy, Don and so many others. What a blessing it’s been in my life!
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After spending the morning at the soccer field, I remember how much I love about youth sports . . . and what I don’t love. Hearing a coach yell at a player on the opposing team “Quit your crying and get up off the ground” (just before our player had to be helped off the field) makes me so sad. Take away about 10% of the parents and about 5% of the coaches, and little league sports would be amazing!
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Enjoy the extra hour of sleep tonight.
The DaVinci Code has been popular partly because it’s so well written. But another big factor is that it gives many the (false) sense that they’re being let in on some long lost secrets that have now been recovered that make everything plain.
Wade Hodges and I visited recently about a great preacher we enjoy hearing (from another tribe) who is always peppering his sermons with insights that NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD BEFORE–obscure material from rabbinic teaching that makes everything clear. The problem is, the stuff probably isn’t true, at least not as background material for scripture. It is probably from writings that come centuries later. But people soak it up because we love the idea of being in on lost secrets now recovered that explain everything. If scripture can just be made less mysterious and obscure, we’ll take it! Remember hearing the old interpretation about how there is a spot in Jerusalem called “eye of the needle” that was so low a camel could barely get under it? And remember how exciting it was to finally make sense of Jesus saying that a rich person going to heaven is comparable to a camel going through the eye of a needle? One problem: there is absolutely no evidence of such a spot.
Several people have shared with me their joy in watching some video series a guy has done that supposedly reveals what NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD BEFORE from backgrounds that seemingly only he has discovered. Again, it makes scripture so much clearer. But again, it’s just probably not right. But we love being in on lost secrets.
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Some members of this blog community have started another blog focuses on glimpses of grace all around us. Check it out at www.ourgracenotes.blogspot.com. And while you’re at it, try the new Wineskins site at www.wineskins.org.
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Tonight is the big AHS-Cooper football game. I’m speaking this morning at Richland Hills at a gathering of Church of Christ and Christian Church leaders, and then I’ll head back so that we’re in our seats on the 50 yard line well before kickoff. How many high school games have over 15,000 in attendance?
ASTROS BATTLE FOR SERIES WIN. So reads the big, bold headlines at the top of the Abilene Reporter-News sports page today. Great headline. How we wish it were true!
The first World Series game ever in Texas was, of course, BIG. There were 482 — yes, 482! — pitches in the game from 17 pitchers. The game was nearly six hours long. Geoff Blum, the guy who hit the game-winner homer in the 14th for the White Sox, hadn’t had an at-bat in 21 days and hadn’t driven in a single run in 56 days.
After three of my four favorite teams made it into the Championship Series (Cards, Angels, Astros), the ‘Stros are now down, 3-0.
Having said all that, I’ll take your average little league game–with $2 burgers, outfielders stomping ants rather than watching the batter, and a free snow cone to anyone who chases down a foul ball–any day.
Why can we never remember the names of famous actors? It’s resorted to this. We had a date night this weekend and went to a movie. Later when we tried to explain which one, we couldn’t think of the name. All we could come up with was: “It’s the one with Legolas and Spiderman’s girlfriend.”
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The “mother of the civil rights movement,” Rosa Parks, has died. Her courageous decision almost half a century ago sparked a movement that was soon led by a Montgomery pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. Here’s the account in Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters:
On December 1, 1955 . . . Rosa Parks left the Montgomery Fair department store late in the afternoon for her regular bus ride home. All thirty-six seats of the bus she boarded were soon filled, with twenty-two Negroes seated from the rear and fourteen whites from the front. Driver J. P. Blake, seeing a white man standing in the front of the bus, called out for the four passengers on the row just behind the whites to stand up and move to the back. Nothing happened. Blake finally had to get out of the driver’s seat to speak more firmly to the four Negroes. “You better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” he said. At this, three of the Negroes moved to stand in the back of the bus, but Parks responded that she was not in the white section and didn’t think she ought to move. She was in no-man’s-land. Blake said that the white section was where he said it was, and he was telling Parks that she was in it. As he saw the law, the whole idea of no-man’s-land was to give the driver some discretion to keep the races out of each other’s way. He was doing just that. When Parks refused again, he advised her that the same city law that allowed him to regulate no-man’s-land also gave him emergency police power to enforce the segregation codes. He would arrest Parks himself if he had to. Parks replied that he should do what he had to do; she was not moving. She spoke so softly that Blake would not have been able to hear her above the drone of normal bus noise. But the bus was silent. Blake notified Parks that she was officially under arrest. She should not move until he returned with the regular Montgomery police.
At the station, officers booked, fingerprinted, and incarcerated Rosa Parks. It was not possible for her to think lightly of being arrested. Having crossed the line that in polite society divided Negroes from niggers, she had reason to expect not only stinging disgrace among her own people but the least civilized attentions of the whites. When she was allowed to call home, her mother’s first response was to groan and ask, “Did they beat you?”
Shortly after that King spoke to a packed house, anxious to hear what he’d say. He said, “Let us say that we are not here advocating violence. We have overcome that. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation–we couldn’t do this. If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime–we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right. . . . We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!”
I walked into the Clyde Church of Christ Friday to do a funeral for Jack Farmer with a sense of deja vu. It looked almost exactly like the church building my grandpa had built in Missouri. Same colors, same pews, same classrooms down the side, same baptistry, same track rack in the foyer.
Since I didn’t know Jack well, I had no idea how many people would come. But it was amazing. Probably 500 people crammed into that auditorium. They knew for whom the bell tolled.
Jack and Betty had spent all 57 years of their married life in Eula, Texas on one piece of land. They moved once: ten feet. But for 57 years they raised their kids, nurtured their grandkids, loved and served their community.
When you study church history, get read about people who preached sermons, wrote books, and had broad influence.
But this is real church history, isn’t it? One man (and woman) being the salt of the earth and the light of the world through quiet, faith-filled lives.
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There must be some marketing genius at ACU. The students get one day — ONE DAY! — off, and it’s called “fall break.” But by listening to students, you’d think that they had a whole week off. “I’m tired, but I’m just trying to make it to fall break.” Are you kidding me? It’s one day off! But, hey, if it works . . . .
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Come on, Astros. And congrats to the Cowboys on beating the Seahawks for 3.99 quarters. It’s that .01 that’ll get you, though.
The Parents Television Council just released their list of the top 10 worse prime time shows for family viewing. Fox dominated the list with six, including the top four. The best programs for family viewing, according to the group, came from ABC and NBC.
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“Mental health is commitment to reality at all costs.” M. Scott Peck
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I spoke in chapel Wednesday on behalf of a new student group at ACU called Awake 3:18. They’ve taken their name from 1 John 3:18: “Let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” They are focusing on the 12 million AIDS orphans in Africa. Specifically, they have targeted one village in Kenya, where they know a woman who is trying to care for all the orphans there. I am meeting more and more students who have no interest in the version of Christianity that is obsessed with fine-tuning obscure doctrinal matters or nailing the perfect worship service. Instead, they are opening their hearts to the mission of Christ in this world.
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The full Bible is now out for Today’s New International Version (TNIV). I’ve been waiting for it, and it’s what I intend to use.
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Today Highland is sending a whole army of middle school students to The Promise. It’s a great trip (in a camp-full-of-middle-school-kids-and-tents sort of way!), but we’re having to force ourselves not to obsess on the travel part. I hope those fears don’t haunt us forever.
Yesterday we talked about doubts in my Bible class at ACU. It always comes as a relief to some students to learn that doubting is not the opposite of belief. That would be unbelief. Doubt is suspended on a continuum between the two and decides whether to lean in the direction of belief or unbelief.
It also relieves some (and probably frightens others who crave certainty) to know that their own teacher has his bouts with doubt.
There are times when it just doesn’t seem that this world works the way it ought to if a loving, all-powerful God is in charge. Even after all the talk about free will, natural disasters, and the effects of sin, sometimes that just doesn’t quite fix the problem. And there are times when you wonder about all the people in the world who will fight wars over their old books–which old book depends on their religion–written by people from long ago.
As I said, for those who need absolute certainty and don’t want anyone to mess with it–and I’m not just talking about college students now–that’s not anything they want to hear. They probably tell themselves that it’s because their faith is so strong. That may be right. Or maybe their faith is so fragile.
But others know the threat of being fully awake in a world that is confusing. It isn’t certainty they have, most of the time, but faith. Struggling, seeking, journeying faith.
As Frederick Buechner put it, “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith.” For some people, those doubts keep the faith fresh, alive, and vibrant–always searching over the next ridge for what lies ahead.
By connecting with an old friend, I’ve had songs from my high school years playing in my mind. That isn’t hard, of course, because I keep oldies going on my Ipod quite often. But besides the obvious — CCR, the Eagles, America, — it’s been Loggins and Messina, Jim Croce, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, Bread, the Carpenters, John Denver and Elton John.
Elton John? the Carpenters? Where’s that coming from?
Music has this amazing ability to stick in the memory when all other stuff starts to leak out.
Early in the game, the Fox cameras zoomed in on a sign from an Astros fan that said simply: WALK PUJOLS.
Had they listened, the Astros would be resting up for the Series. Now they’re headed back to St. Louis, staving off the demolition of Busch Stadium a bit longer. Baseball’s greatest hitter popped a three-run homer with two outs in the ninth inning for a 5-4 win.
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Someone told me this week that he’d read an article about how men, while often conversationally challenged, often have an advantage in starting conversations. Since most guys like sports (though certainly not all), men can walk into a room full of strangers and count on a default conversation about sports. Even if it’s about a sport you don’t get (NASCAR), you understand the passion. Women, on the other hand, have to search for a topic that works. Is that right? (And if it’s right, why do you often see women so deeply engaged in conversations while guys are checking their watches?)
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Did others read the stuff that George Will has written about Harriet Miers? It was brutal. I would think after a few blasts from the left and lots of blasts from the right she’d be thinking, “It can’t be worth this.”