Human Touch, and Divine

There are joy-filled touches in human relationships. Hurts and joys felt so deeply, they threaten to undo us.

In a theater with family the other evening. My arm is around my wife, and my hand rests on the skin of her upper arm. The tenderness in that moment plowed through my soul with such force, I lost track of the movie, and time. I only wanted to feel and hold onto her and that fleeting instant.

Cradling my grand-daughter in my arms, then laying her in my lap and looking in her eyes. She begins to coo and speak with me. I speak and am quiet. She "speaks," then waits. Eventually, she wiggles her entire body trying to "say" what is in her. She smiles and I melt.

Sometimes when my children hurt or are sick, I'll hold them and tell them I'm leaking love into them. Or I'll say I'm soaking healing into them through my embrace. And I believe it.

What does love look like? I'm not always sure. But I know what it feels like. It stops time, it suspends my needs, it invokes deep passion for the better of the other.

I think of Jesus calling his Father, "Abba." The word is like our "Daddy," or "Papa." We are told the relationships within the Trinity are perfectly loving. I want to understand that. I want to believe that when I make my noises and wiggle with my fears and strive in my praying that somewhere, somehow God hears me and gets it. And then, I want to believe God begins to embrace and leak love into me...

Take peace in such hope.

Higher Ways and A "Calling"

This morning I'll read of Isaiah having a vision of God in the temple. And I hope to wonder aloud about my own visions of the Invisible One, and the ways that One encouraged me to pursue. As a child, when I wanted to kneel in front of the sanctuary like the adults...was there something profound in that? I still remember it forty-four years later.

And then in a fifth grade Social Studies/Geography class I said for the first time what I wanted to be..."A diplomat." That vision remains a clear and distinct calling for me to this day. I represent one kingdom, while living in another--or several others.

And in church youth camp, "I want to be a missionary." And I have been, and always enjoy trips to teach or serve in other cultures. Then in college, "I want to run a retreat center and just help people be away and think about their lives and faith." Oh yes, I've enjoyed speaking at dozens of retreats and still hope a retreat director position could be a part of my future.

And in my twenty-second year, "I want to really know that I know the one I believe in. I want to be real." And those words drove me to a month of desperate seeking and a lifetime of longing.

Let me ask you: As you retrace your journey, where have you been confronted by the Holy One and desires that seem to come from those visions? Are you open to God's calling? What part of you resists? What part of you is still awake?

If you haven't read my novel The Runaway Pastor, you can see the first seven chapters by clicking the link above and on the right. And if you want to read my newest--BREAKERS--you can go to the post immediately below and find links to read it.

Grace and peace to you.

Light Dwelling

The sun is coming up. It's been at it for a couple of hours now...a slow crescendo of light. Our cabin doesn't receive those unimpeded beach sunrises. Instead, as soon as the glow strikes the horizon to the east, a filtered green begins to weave its way through leaves and branches. The filter-surviving illumination is a magical, velvety green; dark and light hues and all shades in between blanket our home and our yard.

Somewhere late in the morning the sun tops the oak forest and spills its intensity. Those garden plants which require "full sun" begin soaking up their daily, if abbreviated, supply of glow. And so do I, if I'm here on the hill. And then, before the afternoon is gone, shadows cross the lawn once again. Shade-loving plants sigh their relief, and the filtered light--now from the west--lays like some life-giving fog over our home.

I'm trying to learn the ways of light. I want to live in it, and I want to appreciate its nuances. When the sun is up, yet filtered green, it is still daylight on Sam's Hill. And somehow, this sea of green tempers into a kinder form, what can be a powerfully depleting day-long shine.

Sometimes you feel that God is distant, and other times you wish there were some God-filter to temper holy light. I'm trying to be patient with whatever form of light I receive. And I'm trying to appreciate the nuances.

Peace to you light seekers...

Discipline and Life

Having just finished the Christian Season of Lent, I'm reflecting on some of the comments I've heard regarding Lenten fasts and other chosen disciplines. Many protestants believe the fasts and disciplines should be left to Roman Catholic Christians, or Orthodox. I disagree. We have much we can learn from their traditions in this matter.

Why disciplines? This afternoon I went to the state park next to our home for a workout. I climbed down and then back up a set of 140 stairs, three times. Then I left and ran a mile or so and returned and climbed down and up the same stairs 7 more times. Why would I choose such a physical discipline? It hurts. It makes my lungs wheeze. It is hard.

There is a very specific reason I choose this discipline. Next month this time, I plan to be hiking in the mountains. I'll climb and descend thousands of feet daily. My discipline now is putting strength in my legs, and wind in my lungs. I'm preparing for a tougher hike next month. And we prepare with discipline.

I choose spiritual disciplines for the same reason. Make sense?

Peace to you.

Great Thursday (Maundy Thursday)

For the next three days, we will submerge ourselves in an intentional downer. Just as we think a party is beginning, we hear this evening that the party is over. I pray for the ability to be stunned yet again by the message and desertion of the day. I want to be confused by the cryptic message of Christ--Let not your heart be troubled. Believe...I am going away... to prepare...

This evening we have a service of scripture reading and communion. In fact, beginning tonight, through tomorrow night and concluding Sunday AM, our congregation will read through the entirety of the passion texts for this year. Dark texts. Death texts.

Tomorrow we extinguish the "Christ candle" that has joined us for every gathering since lighting it on Christmas. We will snuff its flame, and walk it out of the room. And it will be the last flame to be extinguished as we recognize all of the failures, desertions and betrayals that light faced before losing life.

And on Sunday morning. We might as well not meet for church. Because God, as of tomorrow afternoon, will be neatly tucked into a hollow tomb.

Dark days indeed. Can you live your way through them? Or will you shop for bright clothing and feast foods, ignoring the death on our hands?

Don't go to Easter without living Great Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

C.S. Lewis Poem: As the Ruin Falls

As the Ruin Falls

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

C.S. Lewis

Wow! Now that is poetry about the true human condition. Phil Keaggy recorded this to a hauntingly beautiful tune, and I learned it by heart as a result of the music when I was a teenager or college student. Good theology.

Grace and peace to you. I hope to post the first chapter of a new novel (Breakers) here within the next few days!

Scrapping Religion; Bringing Hope

I used to see self-denial as a bummer. A cruddy way to do life, but necessary none the less if I wanted to "make it" to heaven. Today, while the "way of the cross" is sometimes tough and requires sacrifice and discipline, I often find myself wanting to laugh my way toward Jerusalem.

For me, "self-denial" has always meant guilt about any personal gain or joy; it has looked like side-stepping pleasures and sins so that Icould end up in Heaven. Here is what that formula looks like:
The "cross way" of living=misery and self-denial now, in order to know pleasure someday.
(Just how far is that from the suicide-bomber's promise of virgins in paradise? And in our culture, which view of paradise wins?)

But for Jesus, the cross was always about liberation for OTHERS. Or:
The "cross way" of living = self denial in order to rescue and offer life to others.
And for Jesus, the Kingdom was present now, and later it would be an eternal blessing. Remember how he taught us to pray: Your (God's) Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

How do these two views of self-denial play themselves in light of his Kingdom? A few examples:
I used to see littering as "bad." Now I long to see God's creation made pure and beautiful as my King wants it...the way God called it "good."

I used to see an "alcoholic" as disgusting; now I see a broken person needing loving rescue.

I used to avoid some movies because they might tempt me to be bad, or warp my sensitivities. Now I watch some darkness to understand the distance we've traveled from God's plan and hopes for us. And when I'm tempted by evil, I tell God, and ask for the strength to bring about God's loving reign with my living.

I usually thought of adultery as tempting, yet bad because it would damn me. Now I see the carnage it brings into the lives of husband and wife, children, and all who know and love them. Adultery is bad for the planet--the cosmos. It deals a blow to the Kingdom of God's love.

Church attendance used to be "have-to" thing in order to keep me preserved for heaven. Now, I recognize that God has designed his loving kingdom to restore all humanity and all creation, and that Kingdom renews creation only as God's people come together and then go to give and serve as "the person and presence of Jesus."

Devotions used to be something I did in order to stay good. Now, my devotion is to be the person and presence of Jesus in order to bring in his reign.

Denying myself now means sacrificing my own dominance, in order to join and facilitate the loving reign of Jesus the healer of all creation. His cross is my joy to carry, and sometimes suffer under. Today, my vision for the future is bigger than my own mansion in "glory." I dream of a world where my grandaughter's generation will know peace, wholeness and healing. Someone else finding their significance in God's present love and real world changing reign is a bigger deal to me.

Sweater Hugs

I got the greatest sweater for Christmas this year! It fits just right, and is made from a wool that is perfect--it breathes, yet keeps me warm. I've already worn it while hiking in the mountains and at my Sunday morning job. I've worn it for dressy stuff and to work in the wood pile. I love my new sweater.

Last April, Shelly started knitting it at my mother's home. I had no idea she was weaving me this love-gift for the better part of the year. But every time I put it on I remember. She has held it in her hands. She has stitched each fiber, and looped it together in just the right combinations of knitting and pearling (whatever that means) and now it is my most treasured inanimate companion.

I'm working in a coffee house away from home this morning. I've thought of many of you today. Your face has come before my mind for one reason or another. And as I've sensed the Presence, I've been asking (imagining is a better word) that you are enveloped in your creator's perfect fit. Kept warm near life's cold shoulders, safe from sharp edges, and yet free to move--plenty of room to breath.

Soak in your Life today, and why not weave a prayer of love for those in your circles.

Cozy.

Such a thing as glory?

I paused in the forest the other day to look at a leaf. Then a tree trunk. Then I felt a breeze. I stopped again next to a gently flowing stream.

If there were only one tree in the world, would we cherish it? Charge admission? Send pictures across cyberspace? What if even the trees were gone, would we marvel at one remaining leaf in a museum? Would we gaze at the veins in its leaves and wonder at the life that once coursed through them? Or if there was no more wind, would we fan our children and tell them of the mystery of what once was? And if our faucets went empty in a drought, what would we think of water?

Rich Mullins once sang "There is such a thing as glory, and there are hints of it everywhere." If the hints were less abundant, would the glory shine brighter? Or, as I gaze out my office window and see a forest of trees that seem to have no end--each mulched in last season's leaves, blowing in the breeze and drawing up life their roots--is it OK if I experience each chunk of ever-recreating-creation as a demonstration of glory?

I think I will.

A Ticket to Ride

One of the major themes of the novel, The Runaway Pastor, is commitment. Promises are broken, yet reconsidered. Vows are reassessed, wrestled with. A train whistle haunted my writing of the book.

I've ridden trains, mainly brief commuter trips, or European city to city hops. And all trains everywhere have one thing in common: Once you board and the train begins to move, you have no power to change directions on a whim, no matter how much you might feel the need for such a turn.

While in the former USSR, our children were very young. My wife and I spent a great deal of time planning what we would do, should the rapidly opening and closing doors of the subway cars somehow separate us from one another. The nightmare scenario-- which thankfully never took place--was the possibility of our children exiting at a station, and the train moving forward with us still aboard. Imagine the panic of a parent, longing for the train to return to the station, yet knowing there is no stopping until the next.

During my years as a pastor, I've had the privilege of helping a hundred or so couples promise their lives to one another. Are there ever moments in married life when one partner or the other believes they might wish to go back, and reconsider their vows? Of course. It is at those moments, that vows are like a train ticket. No couple wishes to pledge themselves to love, cherish, have and hold one-another for the "next little while." Brides and grooms hold a passionate belief that each is committed to forever. You buy the ticket planning to arrive at the other end of the line together. It costs you your sacred promise. And you board the train when you make those vows.

My October 1979 promises have landed me 29 years down the track, riding with the same love. We've gone through storms that rocked the carriage. We've struggled at stops here and there. But we bought one ticket, and boarded one train. I'm so grateful for the promise that has carried us to this place. Without our vows, we each might have criss-crossed our lives in short bursts one way, and then the other.

Where are you going? What have you pledged your life to? Why not land in the place you committed to go in the first place? To where have you purchased a ticket?

Beginnings

Silence. Greeting the day with nothing. Ears strain, grasping for some sound out of the morning. No birdsong. Nothing. Only a shishing pulse in my head, counting down toward some next thing.

Be still... But junkie wants to reach for remote, for "On" button, for agitation. Junkie needs sound. Junkie wants entertained. Gulum-like insanity.

Breathe. Take in the silence. Listen beyond it for some better Word.

...and know that... Is there something to find in this nothing? Seeking, stretching, straining for stimulation. But no. All is quiet. Nothing in the emptiness.

Breathe. Be still.

Is there purpose in this new-day vacuum, where no expectations await me? ...i am not god.

The morning wood kicks into flame, ticking the stove and lighting its side of the room. From dark to light. From silence to crackling. From cool, to warming-heat.

O Life-giving mystery, teach me to pray beyond the static of the world. Tame my spirit so it longs for something beyond the inane teasings of this age. Hold me still long enough, that I tire of wiggling.

Some words out of nowhere...

I don't know that I'm a "morning person," or not. But when the time changed last weekend, it seemed like a great chance to hold onto my getting-up time, and maybe cash it in for the day an hour earlier than usual. And so the first few mornings of the week have been extraordinary.

The house is quiet. I can read and refocus, and there is not a peep to be heard. No one is at Facebook, and the chatter from the evening before seems less important after it has slept for the night.

And now is my chance. If anyone is going to listen to me this weekend, or anytime before then for that matter, I need to be listening. And so I read my daily dose of five Psalms, then spend some time in the New Testament, and then------it happens. Like a magnet to the left of my reading chair, my Sunday text begins to beckon from the laptop. Emails waiting for attention scream from a still blackened screen. And there is my ritual of running through the news, Facebook, Google Analytics, and checking in at the blog to see who has left a clue of their visit. (This AM, one new person had become a "follower," and another wrote on Facebook that they were enjoying the blog...and I feel another day of existence is justified for one such as myself.)

Do you ever get on with it before getting up to date with LIFE? Maybe, if you are a pastor or Christian leader, you can relate. Maybe, a healthy dose of step-aways would change a great deal for us---diminish the number of runaways. Can one burn-out when standing in such Light?

So I'm writing my blog for the day...speaking before listening much. Forgive me. It's 6:30, I've been up for more than an hour, and I have done many pressing things already. But I need to darken the screen, and seek some light.

Peace to you...