Learning to Live With Ourselves

2009-06-19T09:19:00.003-05:00

Winning a Dollar

2007-12-06T17:04:00.001-06:00

http://www.nbc.com/Deal_or_No_Deal/video/#mea=101458

How to Change Buses in the Middle of Nowhere

2007-07-26T10:12:00.001-05:00

We boarded a runaway bus in front of a Hispanic Wal-Mart. We had no idea what was about to happen to us. We boarded the bus because it cost $30.00 to take a taxi from Wal-Mart versus $8.75 to take the local bus. Sure, we were the only white Caucasians on the bus. Yeah, the Hispanics stared at us and would not smile at us. Would not maintain eye-contact. Would not even look at us when we sat down on the bus. They looked tired. Looked bored. They looked as though seeing us reminds them of their poverty. Then we pulled away from the bus stop and noticed that we were the only ones sweating our glands off. They were as cool as cucumbers. Riding a hot bus was an everyday occurrence. They were used to it, but we were a minority in a majority of trouble.

In the first ten minutes of the bus ride, we stopped at least a dozen times. We’d let some off and take some aboard. It was 5:30 PM and this was the working class’ ride home. Some were dusty from masonry work they hadn’t even bothered brushing from their clothes. Some wore uniforms from the local resorts. They’d waited on spoiled and rich Americans all-day and wasn’t thrilled to have them aboard their personal lives.

So there was an uneasy feeling in my stomach. Would we be robbed? Would we be left for dead? Would we get a knife in the lung? All of these things were going through my mind as I sat amongst them on that bus. And twenty minutes into what was supposed to be a ten-mile bus ride, we thought something was up. But then again, we had been told that there were two buses that went to our resort—one a short ride, the other a rather long route.

So we figured we had taken the long way home. So to make sure we were on the right bus, my buddy, Todd, ran to the front of the bus and asked the driver, who assured him that the bus was indeed going to Paradise Village. Now he didn’t just say in six long sentences or even one short paragraph that we were going to our resort. He just said, “Se Senior.”

So my buddy, Todd took his seat, and we rode on for a few more miles. We stopped at bus stops under bridges were we could see lean-tos and abandoned cars and filthy children playing in dusty streets while the adults sat in doorways trying to catch a breeze on this sweltering day. It was near a 100°. It was as humid as Alabama. And we were getting a good education in Mexican living. We lived their day. I stared at their backpacks and wondered what type of lunches they had carried to work that day. A single banana? Some tortillas and chips?

After an hour on the bus, we believed the driver behind the wheel had gone a little mad. Where was he taking us? We left the coastal city of Puerto Vallarta behind and climbed narrow roads at what seemed a hundred miles an hour. We met dump trucks—big dump trucks. Smash you like road kill dump trucks. The deranged driver was taking the bus to the edge of drop-offs that would plunge us a hundred feet below if he made one mistake.

This is when I remembered all of the Dateline stories of Americans dying while on vacation abroad. We would become part of that list. Our bodies charred and broken by the bus’ plunge off a cliff. Then the police would stand above us on the narrow stretch of highway, look down, and think we got what we deserved. They’d say, “They saved a few pesos, but lost their lives doing it.”

Then toward the top of the mountain the deranged bus driver stopped the bus in the middle of nowhere and yelled to us at the back of the bus, “Paradise Village!” What? He wants us to get out here? He actually demanded we get out there. And this is when his lunacy—that was hiding behind a language barrier at first—reared its ugly head. This deranged bus driver set us up. He knew what he was doing all along. He knew he was going to dump us on top of this mountain. He knew it would be a long walk home—twenty miles to be exact. The guy was loco. He was crazy. He was repaying us for whatever an American stood for in his mind.

So we got off the bus and I sat on our beach bag at the side of the road. I buried my face in my hands. We would die on top of this mountain. We would never make it home alive. We’d be butchered in a field. Our bones would decompose before anyone ever found us. How would they know that a deranged bus driver had taken us to the top of a mountain and dropped us off? How would Dateline with Stone Phillips find us? How would 48 Hours Mystery solve this one? Would we be a one hour show or a two hour documentary?

We watched as he closed the doors of the bus and pulled away, leaving a plume of diesel engine smoke.

Today, we are going to talk about a time when King David went a little loco. King David lost his marbles. He had spittle in his beard. He scratched graffiti into the wooden gates of the city. He went nuts.

Let’s read the account from

1 Samuel 21:10-15

10-11 And at that, David shot out of there, running for his life from Saul. He went to Achish, king of Gath. When the servants of Achish saw him, they said, "Can this be David, the famous David? Is this the one they sing of at their dances?

Saul kills by the thousand,

David by the ten thousand!"

12-15 When David realized that he had been recognized, he panicked, fearing the worst from Achish, king of Gath. So right there, while they were looking at him, he pretended to go crazy, pounding his head on the city gate and foaming at the mouth, spit dripping from his beard. Achish took one look at him and said to his servants, "Can't you see he's crazy? Why did you let him in here? Don't you think I have enough crazy people to put up with as it is without adding another? Get him out of here!"

This is the backdrop of Psalm 34. When David was going through this turmoil, he sat down and penned Psalm 34. And isn’t this sheer brilliance what David did? He had enough mind to lose his mind to save his hide. (repeat)

David was much like our deranged bus driver. David knew what he was doing. He faked madness to deliver a blow that would free him. And what I want to talk about today is: “How to Keep Your Sanity While Everyone Else is Losing Theirs.”

What can you do to counter the problems you face? Now I wouldn’t suggest pretending your mad, but there’s something Jesus said that I want to discuss:

Matthew 10:16

16 “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

Troubled times always demands of us the heroic deed.

Maybe you are going through some kind of turmoil this morning. Maybe you are troubled. Maybe you are hurting for someone. Maybe you need to heroic. Maybe you need to act and be heroic.

When I got booted off the bus, I was mad and depleted. I put my beach bag on the side of the road and sat on it. Then I said, just before I buried my face into my hands, “We need a new leader.”

Now Todd and I have been friends forever. We are like brothers, and this didn’t bother him that I said it. Todd is a man of action, and he got busy trying to find a solution, because leaders don’t sit down and give-up—leaders act heroic. And what kept Todd off the curb was a heroic tendency. He directed his energy toward a solution.

I just wanted to blame and complain. And I think a lot of us fall into a state of how things should be. I should have a better leader. I should have a better job. I should have a better marriage. I should have better kids. I should have more success.

Never forget this one rule: When our attention is primarily directed to how wrong things are, we lose our power to act effectively.

So the first thing you must do in troubled times to act heroic is to:

1. Focus your energy on a solution.

Someone has once said, “Be part of the solution and not part of the problem.”

While I sulked on the curb, Todd searched for a solution. There was a guard shack nearby, so he walked to it. He asked the guards for advice. They said we had two choices: 1) We could get a cab, which would cost us $200.00. So that was out. 2) We could catch another bus and ride it back into town.

And Todd had the wits about him to ask the guards to write down in Spanish a note that would tell the bus driver where we wanted to go. Remarkable wit. Under fire by a big-nosed man, sitting on his beach bag, as well as the other riders in our group, and he performed flawlessly. Why hadn’t we thought of it earlier? My friend became my leader again after he possessed written directions. I knew his solution would work, hopefully. And maybe you need to write down an action plan. Give yourself guidelines to follow to get yourself back on track.

The greatest barrier to solving a problem is not failing to come up with a solution; it is coming up with just one solution—and stopping there.

And every problem must be met with numerous solutions. How did David come up with the solution of pretending to be insane? I’m sure it wasn’t the first solution that popped into his mind. If he is anything like us, he probably thought about escaping first. Maybe running. Maybe hiding. These are our first inclinations. Hiding was the first solution to the first sin in the world. Adam and Eve hid from God after eating of the fruit of Good and Evil.

I can safely say that if your solutions have anything to do with hiding, running, or blaming others, then you haven’t explored all of your options. Now maybe David’s solution was a little deceptive. OK, it was a little over the top, but sometimes dishonesty is not a bad policy. Now I’m not talking about breaking the law or breaking someone’s trust by lying to them or betraying them. I’m only saying that dishonesty isn’t always a bad policy when your head is on the chopping block.

And right now some of you need to come up with solutions that don’t include hiding, blaming, or escaping. If you aren’t sure, then list your solutions. Then ask your solutions questions. “Am I hiding if I use you as a solution?” This will help you decide.

But what might be holding some of you back is what didn’t hold David back, and that is pride. He risked his reputation.

"Can this be David, the famous David? Is this the one they sing of at their dances? Saul kills by the thousand, David by the ten thousand!"

Most of us would have never tried acting mad. We have too much pride to do something like this. We say, “What if it doesn’t work? I’ll feel like a fool.” So we talk ourselves out of the right solution because we judge the solution according to our pride. So make sure you remove pride from your problem-solving techniques. Ask yourself if pride is keeping you from coming up with the right solution.

2 Corinthians 12:9
But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me.

One of the best scenes in the movie The Pursuit of Happiness is when Will Smith’s character gets put in jail for not paying overdue parking tickets just when he seems to be getting a break to work at a Wall Street firm. Watch.

So how do you come up with a good solution? This brings us to the second thing we must do in troubled times:

2. Whatever you do when conflicts arise, be wise.

A good solution will contain a lot of wisdom. What is wisdom?

Job 11:6

6 And show you the secrets of wisdom!

For sound wisdom has two sides

Wisdom always has two-sides, and the quicker you look at both sides, the easier it will be for you to come up with a solution.

Before we got off in the middle of nowhere, Todd turned to the few riders on the bus and said, “Does anyone in here speak English?” A dude on the front row said, “A little.” During times of trouble a little can amount to a whole lot. Todd figured he could take the little and find a solution. Jesus took the five loaves of bread and a few fish and fed 5,000, so we figured we could take the dude’s “little” and find a solution. And it is so funny what he said. He looked at Todd and said, “You really need to get a taxi.”

Well, that’s one side of that solution, so we put it down as a viable option until the security guards told Todd that it would cost $200.00. And what we faced in the middle of nowhere was the decision between a taxi and catching the next bus, and we decided to wait on the next bus. Why? Because wisdom said that $200.00 was way out of our budget. So we waited.

We were up a mountain with no way down except to do what the third and last thing to do when you fall on troubled times:

3. Whenever you realize that there’s nothing you can do, wait.

After the security guard wrote down in Spanish our destination and told us it would be twenty minutes before the next bus, we settled into a long hot wait on the side of sweltering blacktop. We had to wait. We had to be patiently.

And as we did he delivered us, just like Psalm 34 says:

Psalm 34

4 I sought the LORD, and He heard me,

And delivered me from all my fears.

5 They looked to Him and were radiant,

And their faces were not ashamed.

6 This poor man cried out, and the LORD heard him,

And saved him out of all his troubles.

7 The angel of the LORD encamps all around those who fear Him,

And delivers them.

God delivered us out of all our troubles, because we heard a moan coming over the mountain. A hum, a clatter, a diesel engine, a bus. Eureka! Todd jumped to his feet and waved his arms. The bus stopped. Todd stepped aboard and handed the guy the note. The bus driver motioned for us to come aboard. We did. I sat behind a man and a woman who were making-out. They were going at. They didn’t even stop to lookup when we stepped on the bus. They were going to town, and so were we.

And when I sat down, I saw a huge cross that took up a large section of the front windshield. Jesus was still on the cross, so the guy must have been Catholic. But we didn’t care. We were all smiles. God had delivered us out of all our troubles. We felt good about this bus. At least it was going in the right direction. Then our stop came into view, and the bus did its swish of the air brakes and the door flew open. We were free. We were home. And for the life us, we will never ride another Mexican bus again.

Maybe this morning, you seem to be going in the wrong direction. Maybe you feel lost. Maybe you feel that someone is doing you wrong the way the deranged bus driver did us wrong and dropped us in the middle of nowhere. Maybe you feel like you are in the middle of nowhere.

Well, let me show you a cross. Let me show you a bus that is headed in the right direction. Let me put on its air brakes and open the door. All you need is one little note to hand to the bus driver, because on that piece of paper it says, “I died for you, so that you might ride—by my grace—on this bus destined to the Promised Land.” And when we get there, you better get back out of my way, because I’m coming off, I’m coming on out of there. I’ll be home!

This American Life

2007-06-27T09:53:00.000-05:00

Check this out. I love the radio show, and the television show is playing on Showtime on demand if you care to watch.

Leaving Earnhardt Nation

2007-06-19T05:38:00.000-05:00

I can’t tell you I wasn’t disappointed last week. I can’t tell you how the announcement rocked my world. I never saw it coming, and I haven’t taken it sitting down, because not too long ago Jill and I stood at Earnhardt Junior’s souvenir trailer at Talladega and purchased matching ball caps with number 8 on the front.

Jill and I were never more in love than we were at that moment. We bonded deeper into holy matrimony, as she put Earnhardt Jr.’s hat on and pulled her ponytail through the opening at the back of the hat. She was beautiful. She glowed. And next to the birth of my children, that moment when we stood at the souvenir trailer with matching hats on our heads is one of the highlights of my life.

We were in love. I actually held her hand in public, something I felt too macho to do before this moment. So, yes, I was shocked. I felt devalued as a man when Jill said she no longer felt as I did about Jr. She wasn’t disheartened about the announcement that Jr. was going over to the enemy, because this happened on Sunday. As if I wasn’t sick enough already, Jill announced that she was go over to the enemy.

Jill said, “I’m going to be a Jeff Gordon fan.”

My chin dripped to the floor. I narrowed my eyes. I said like Gary Coleman on Different Strokes, “Whatchoo talking about?”
She said, “I’m going to be a Jeff Gordon fan from now on.”

“Why in the world would you do that?” I asked.
She said, “Because he wins.”

I had no comeback for that one. She had me. Jeff Gordon has won more races than anyone this season. He can drive to Victory Lane in the dark. That’s how many times he’s been there lately.

After the race, after Jeff Gordon was blessed by God to win the rain shortened race in Pocono, during my phone call with Nana—because we talk whenever Gordon wins—And she even agreed with Nana on Sunday, during our Jeff-Gordon-wins-again-telephone-call. When Nana said of Jeff Gordon, “Well, he’s the cutest little thing on the racetrack,” Jill agreed. I declared that she was dishonorably discharged from the Red Army, from the #8 Nation.

I threw up. Then I called in sick to work.

Well, nothing much to say, other than I threw up again on Wednesday. Was physically sick all over again when Jr. crossed over to the other side and became Jeff Gordon’s teammate. He’s taken a risk. He has left the Earnhardt dynasty his father built behind.

And today, I want to talk about another rebellious kid that left the father’s dynasty and struck out on his own for greener pastures. Hopefully will discover some things about fatherhood that we haven’t known before.

The Parable of the Lost Son

11 Jesus continued: "There was a man who had two sons.
12 The younger one said to his father, 'Father, give me my share of the estate.' So he divided his property between them.
13 "Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living.
14 After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need.
15 So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs.
16 He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
17 "When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!
18 I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.'
20 So he got up and went to his father. "But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
21 "The son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.'
22 "But the father said to his servants, 'Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.
23 Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate.
24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' So they began to celebrate.

Today I want to discuss the making of a father. What does it take to be a good father in a world like ours? Some believe it’s a monetary responsibility. They believe a father should take care of his family’s well-being. Others believe the father should be head of the household and what he says goes, and there better not be any undisciplined action in his army-like family. Others believe you should love and support your sons and daughters, no matter what.

I guess every father wishes he had a manual to go by in raising kids.

So, the question becomes:

How do you become a good father when there's no manual?

Would love to hear your answers. Post them below.

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Could I Weep Today?

2007-06-14T11:44:00.000-05:00

I could weep today
but you would never
hear me crying

I could weep today
but it wouldn't bring me
any closer to happiness

I could weep today
but then you'd
question my sanity

I could weep today
but pity is not
what I'm after

I could weep today
but it wouldn't bring
the answer any faster

I could weep today
in the bonds
of holy matrimony

I could weep today
and call it
a psalm of disaster

Could I weep today?
I would if it
really mattered

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High Stakes Decorating

2006-12-15T21:41:00.000-06:00

We live in an old historic district that celebrates Christmas with a competition. This is a big deal in my neighborhood. The people in my neighborhood don't play when it comes to decorating their houses. Big bucks are paid out to decorators to decorate doors and hang things in windows that don't go along with Christmas, such as oranges and pineapples. I know a decorator that gets paid $400.00 a door to decorate. And the winners get a real estate-looking sign placed in their yards. Then you become the envy of the neighborhood. People stop in front of your house. They admire your handiwork or the handiwork of the decorator your money purchased. You get the picture.

So my wife, Jill--who knows she can't compete with the high-dollar decorators--shocked me when she said, “I’m going for it this year!”

Being the optimist I am, I said, “Don’t get upset if you don’t win something.”

She said, “Shut up, Robbie.” Then she went next door to our neighbor's house and recruited one of her friends to help her. They were going to take down the high-dollar decorators. And as the day turned into a week of decorating, my next door neighbor became the Decorations Nazi, and the Decorations Nazi is every husband’s nightmare. On the day God said rest, the Decorations Nazi said, “Work!” And we did.

She even recruited her husband who was settling down for a long winter's nap. She called in the big guns of Chin Lee. She told Lee to go up in my attic and crawl across the boards and put a candle in the front window. I told the Decorations Nazi it couldn't be done. She said, “Oh, yes it can! You march your butt right up into that attic and do it! We need this candle in the window if we expect to win.”

And this kind of talk and this kind of neurotic decorating went on for a week.

Wreaths were made, and then remade. Bows had to be hung. Berries placed perfectly beside the hedge apples. Lights were placed. Then! The Nazi decorator went home. It was over! I could rest. I could say, "I told you so."

Now the wait, and wait we did. We went to the Decatur High School basketball game and told the Nazi decorator that if anyone puts a sign in the yard to call us. Well, Jill told her. I didn’t care. I was called down numerous times for being Bah-Hum-Bug.

After the game, around 8:00 PM, no phone call. So we drove around the neighborhood, picking out houses that always win, saying, “They must not have the signs out yet.”

We had hope. We went home. We peeped out the window, knowing the big yellow house across the street would pull in its usual win because the owner had paid big bucks for the door decoration.

By 10:00 PM, still no sign. I gave up. Went down stairs. I didn’t think I’d care, but all of a sudden I did. I wanted that darn sign as bad as Jill and the Nazi Decorator did. I wanted to win. But, maybe next year.

Then I heard screams. Sloan is yelling, “We got one, Mom!” “Glory to God in the Highest! Peace on earth and goodwill toward Jill. We won!

But they were too scared to go out and look at what we’d actually won. So they made me go. I went out and looked at the sign, and I went back to report my findings. I closed the door. They clasped their hands in front of them. They tilted their heads forward. They said, "Come on, tell us."

"Do you really want to know?"
"Just tell us, please. You're not funny. Now out with it. What did we win?"
"We won third place," I said.

We high-fived each other and screamed like little girls at a slumber party. Poked our chests out. We about tore the house down. We were in the history books.

There will always be that feeling when the Stofels pulled in their first win on the tour. And I wish I could say that Jill told me to send this email. I wish I could tell you I don't really care about competitions and signs in the front yard. But the next day, I went out and positioned the light on the sign and waved at the cars snaking through the neighborhood. Then I went to work and said, "Thank you," over and over again, when people said, "I saw your name in the paper--3rd place . . Not bad."

Barney Fife would have been proud of my humble expression and the way I pulled at the top of my pants.

Shooting For the Stars

2006-10-03T21:05:00.001-05:00

God took Abraham outside and said, ‘Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be’” (Genesis 15:5).

If God took you out and showed you the stars, what would he say? Would he say what he said to Abraham? Would he say he’s going to give you children as numerous as the stars? We would be afraid to look up. Nobody wants that many children. Maybe the old woman in the shoe would be happy with this arrangement. But most of us would settle for our American average number of children—2.5. And Abraham only wanted one child. This would be plenty for him. So why did God tell Abraham that his descendents would be numerous as the stars?

Face it, God is a little on the extravagant side. He sees much greater possibilities. He sees many when we see few. And the curse of every life is to set limits. We limit our possibilities by saying, “I could never do that.” Humans want to settle. We want to set boundaries, which—in and of themselves—are not bad. But we can never set limits to God’s vision of possibilities for us. We can’t suppress his great love. But we try. We say, “I’m not worthy. You don’t know what I’ve done.” To say this is to believe we somehow control the way God responds to us, but we don’t. Ask the Prodigal Son.

God is the God of possibility. So don’t settle for a less stressful job, when God is offering you the job of your dreams. God isn’t bound by our limits. So open yourself to new possibilities. Hope for change. Ask yourself why you’re limiting yourself to a life of drudgery, to a job with no passion, to a faith that can’t believe for answers. Rethink your gloom. Rethink what isn’t working in your life. Be a little extravagant in your possibilities. Shoot for the stars! God does.

Vintage Path—Part One

2006-05-08T06:41:00.000-05:00

(This week's message at Vintage Faith of Decatur)

See the chairs you’re seated in. Some of the members pooled their money and bought them this week. Nice, huh? Well Cinda and I have a small confession to make concerning the chairs. The chairs you’re seated in are really not the chairs we originally purchased. Actually, they’re a second batch. We exchanged the first ones I bought.

It went down like this: I met Cinda at Sam’s Club on Thursday, and she showed me the plastic contoured folding chair like the ones at Hickory Hills. Then she showed me the ones you’re seated in now. And I couldn’t make a decision, I really liked the ones you’re seated in now, but Cinda, being a salesperson, did a good job of selling me on the contoured ones.

Because she said the ones you’re seated in now, she’d heard that Sam’s Club had trapped air inside the cushion that would soon collapse and become thin under constant wear. And I don’t think it’s any secret that Sam’s Club has a labor contract with the trapped air in the cushion of your chair. And no one can really say when it ends or if it will be renewed.

So I thought, since Jim Waller weighs himself every Thursday, not any other day, just Thursday, and if he goes over his perfect weight, he does crunches or fasts from Kaye’s cooking for a few days until he manages his weight.

So I figured we could keep our eyes on Jim, and if we see him sinking in his chair each Sunday, then we will know that the reason we are sinking in our chairs is not because there’s a loud Ross Perot sucking noise around the plate of Nana’s fudge, it’s because the air is actually going out of the chair as I speak.

But the false air didn’t deter me. But before we could load them up, Cinda saw another chair in the lawn and garden area.

“What about these chairs?” Cinda said. And, indeed this chair in Lawn & Garden had so much more to offer. It has a high-back, so you can rest your head.

It reclines, so if you wanted to turn the place into a planetarium, you could. We could project song lyrics on the ceiling.

But the feature that sold me on the chair was when Cinda said, “Heck, you can even take these to Talladega in the fall.” So I pictured all of us in the infield, and I smiled at Cinda and said, “Yeah, I can see us at Talladega.”

But we didn’t want our Talladega aspirations to cloud our decision, so we carried our scrutiny further and placed one behind the other and each took a seat, and Cinda yelled, “Can you see over me?” I couldn’t, but I thought of Talladega and said, “Yeah.”

So we bought the chairs but covered our butts and asked the man at the door if we could bring them back if Jill didn’t like them, not because she’s the boss of us, but because she’s the boss of me.

So I carried the chairs home and tested them out on my neighbors. And my neighbors, not the neighbors you know, liked them and said, “Oh, Robbie, I like those.”

So I was feeling kind of smug with my vintage look. Then Sloan came home, and I thought perfect. “Sloan, what do you think about the chairs I bought for the church, and she said—never missing a beat, scrunching up her face—“You bought lawn chairs for the church?”

I found myself getting defensive. “Yeah, we’re different. Hip. Cool. Vintage.” She shook her head and walked away. And I knew then if Jill Jr. said it, then Jill Sr. would have the same reaction. So around 9:00 PM, when Jill got home, I sat one up in the kitchen, and said, “Tell me what you think about the chairs we bought.”

“No, uh, uh. You can’t have lawn chairs in a church. What were you thinking?”

I said, “Well, Cinda talked me into buying them.”
Jill said, “I’d take those back.”

And in that moment my vintage—hip, cool chairs became what they really were, which is a lawn chair. All of the great features came crashing down. I realized I let my Talladega aspirations override my taste, which Jill says I don’t have.

Sometimes in life we can’t really see our faults or someone else’s until we get back to what the original design is supposed to be. The people in China didn’t design the chair with Vintage Faith Church in mind. They made them to be lawn chairs, and I twisted them into chairs for church.

And sometimes I think we’ve twisted Jesus’ message into something beyond what he originally meant for it. We can do that, you know. We can misrepresent Jesus’ message. So Vintage Faith is simply going back to the original church to see if we’ve distorted the message over the last two thousand years. Vintage Faith is coming to the Gospel with fresh eyes, hearts, and minds to see where we’ve twisted it into a Talladega design.

Whether we know it or not, we view the church as a place where our needs are met, instead of a place we sacrifice and work for. We want lawn chairs to recline in because God knows we’re worn out from working all week, and the last thing we want to do is work at our faith.

When we come to church as a consumer, then we make church into an event that takes place on Sunday, instead of a lifestyle that is lived out seven days a week.

And the problem is we don’t always understand what kind of life the Gospel calls us to live, so we build denominations around certain doctrines. We draw the line on jewelry, on hair style, on smoking, on drinking, on being at church every time the door opens, on being successful as the world is successful.

So Vintage Faith is going back to the original to see where we’ve added man’s structure to the Gospel. We’re going to get back to what Jesus really meant when he said, “Follow me.”

How do you know when you’re truly following Him?

1. We follow Him when we have a clear understanding of God’s nature.

Psalm 145:18
The LORD is near to all who call on him in truth.

Why truth? Because we can have a faulty view of God. We can call on God to be a lawn chair God when He’s a pew God.

We believe the truth about God is that He’s supposed to feed us bread from heaven and perform miracles as a way of making life bearable amid so many pains and disheartening burdens. But what if Jesus doesn’t show up like this kind of God? It means that we have a faulty view of God.

Did you see the article in the Decatur Daily about me yesterday? Yeah, the Decatur Daily called me this past Wednesday and left a message on my voice mail. Melanie Smith wanted to talk to me about humor in southern Christian writers, and about the humor in my books.

Well, before I called back I took a moment, which is what I’ve learned to do when the Decatur Daily calls. So before I called back I sat down and wrote a couple of paragraphs about why I think humor is important. Now these two paragraphs took me about 45 minutes to devise. As I typed, I thought, This will sound great in the paper. Wait till my congregation reads this. They’ll be so proud of me.

Then I called Melanie back, and she said, “Thanks for calling me back I’d like to talk to you about the humor in your books. I’m doing an article, “You might be a Redneck Preacher If…”

Now this hurt me. To be a humorist in the line of Mark Twain or Flannery O’Conner is ideal, but to be in the line of rednecks like Larry the Cable Guy, now that was something entirely different than what I had in mind when I wrote my two paragraphs. And I was thinking, You should’ve told me that it was an article on redneck humor. By the way, do y’all see me as a redneck?

The problem with God is that we always sit down and write a couple of paragraphs in our minds of what we think God is like.

So I thought I’d do a little experiment here. I want you to finish this sentence for me. God is like __________.

Can God be all of those? Sure. But the problem occurs when we get a view of God that happens to us in life:
The death of a loved one, the uncertainty of health complications, a bad business deal, believing someone has your best interest at heart—only to find out that they’ve lied to you, cheated on you.

Did any of you go to the cancer walk down on Bank Street Friday night? You should go some year. It’s fun, and I had forgotten about it until my doorbell rang about 7:30 PM, and I opened the door to find the neighbors that none of you know, standing there like two Jehovah witnesses. They said, “You want to go down to the cancer walk? The Blues Brothers are playing.”

So we go and Jill starts talking to this neighbor that you don’t know about the chairs, and they laugh and laugh about my desire of lawn chairs for church pews. During this little walk to the cancer walk, the neighbor that you don’t know starts telling Jill how she was trying not to laugh when I told her I’d purchased them for the church, about how she was holding in little snickers that wanted to bubble right out in my face.

Then the neighbor that you don’t know, said she told Lee, the guitar man to go out there and tell me how much he liked them. And while the Blues Brothers are playing they kept on and on about how funny it was that I purchased lawn chairs for the church.

So Saturday morning at 5:30 AM, the neighbor you don’t know, met me at the back of my house. I was letting the dogs out, and this neighbor that you don’t know, said, “I saw some theatre chairs in the newspaper at a yard sale in SW Decatur. We should buy them.”

“Buy them for what?” I said.
She said, “To put in the church.”

And I was thinking to myself Yeah, right. Ho-ho. You’re not getting me again. You lying next door neighbor that none of you know.

I was thinking about the night before. I was thinking about how Jill would team up with them and laugh about how I thought theatre seats would be hip. Cool. Vintage. You can make mistakes and will make mistakes in church.

Event defines you or you define the event. You choose what to think about the event or you allow the event to make you feel a certain way. If the event has power over you, then it can cause a faulty view of things. This is why experience when it comes to God is not the final answer about His nature. The Bible is the final answer to how you experience God. Because God is trying to make us into people who won’t be comfortable here, but will be at home in heaven.

I told you about being blindsided as a kid. What’s creating an emotion in you? Discover this and you will be able to assign truth to it.

Getting Over It vs. Getting Off It

1. We follow Him when we have a clear understanding of God’s nature.

2. We follow Him when we trust Him.

Psalm 27:14 Wait patiently for the LORD; be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the LORD.

When you believe you will never obtain the thing you most desire in your life, you must remember that God works behind the scene. Wait patiently for the Lord. The way you do this is by doing what Henri Nouwen says to do in his book.

Nouwen says he became friends with some flying trapeze circus people. He was fascinated by the way they moved through the air, flying and catching as elegant dancers. He even traveled with them for a week, watching, viewing what it is that makes them so unique. He writes in a section of his book, called Let the Catcher Catch, these words:

One day I was sitting with Rodleigh, the leader of the troupe, in his caravan, talking about flying. He said, “As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. The public might think that I am a great star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe,

my catcher. He has to be there for me with spilt second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him in a long jump.” “How does it work?” I asked.

“The secret,” Rodleigh said, “is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me and pull me safely over the apron behind the catch bar.

“You do nothing!” I said, surprised. “Nothing,” Rodleigh repeated. “The worst thing the flyer can do is to try to catch the catcher. I am not supposed to catch Joe. It’s Joe’s task to catch me. A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms that his catcher will be there for him.”(end)

Most of our problems are a result of trying to catch God. We get desperate and grab for a limb and we’re hanging there wishing we could let go of our spouse’s behavior and stop controlling; we wish we could let go of the job we hate and find another one, but we hold on to it out of fear; we wish we could just let go of fear.

(Story about man falling and grabbing limb)

It’s like the man who got too close to the edge of a cliff and fell
off. As he was tumbling down the side of that cliff, he just happened to grab a tree limb. He stopped instantaneously.

Hanging there, he began to cry out, “Is anybody up there?” God answered him and said, “I’m here.” The man said, “Please help me, rescue me.” God said, “Let go and I’ll catch you.” The man said, “Is anybody else up there?”

To believe in God is “to let God be God.” This is the chief business of Vintage Faith. It’s about going back to that moment when God was real to you, when God was so clear and so near that the hairs stood on the back of your neck, because, over time, we can write a faulty two paragraphs about God.

Because when God doesn’t answer the way we want him to we keep trying to work life behind the scenes and start catching

what he’s supposed to catch.

So what are we about around here? We’re about going back to that moment when God was so real to us.

It’s to let God be God without our Americana modern thinking.

Titus 3:3-7
Vintage Faith Creed
Titus 3:3-7 - “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, we might have the hope of eternal life.”

Fake Blood and the Da Vinci Code

2006-04-27T11:34:00.000-05:00

When we were in early teens, a bunch of us boys in Green Acres subdivision in Franklin, Tennessee thought it would be cool to steal Mrs. Erwin’s scarecrow she had in a rocking chair on her front porch. We had plans for the lifeless dummy. We wanted to make it look real by squirting it with ketchup. We’d seen fake blood when the wrestlers out of Nashville put on a match at a school.

Jackie Fargo, Koko B. Ware, ToJo Yamamoto, and Jerry Lawler would always bust open a few skulls as we sat at the edge of the bleachers anticipating blood. When it happened, when blood trickled down the face of a wrestler, we’d cheer for more. We’d jump to our feet and put each other in headlocks or throw our own phony punches, laughing and forgetting our own lives were so screwed up.

And once the blood was let, they’d mingle it with sweat and sling it around, trying to shake the bogus cobwebs from their heads. So we knew what fake blood looked like. We knew it made the girls squeamish. We thought it would make our stolen dummy look real. So we drug it behind the dumpster at Jewell’s Market at the edge of the neighborhood, and we bought ketchup and soaked our dummy with fake blood.

Smug in our blood letting ability, we took the bloody dummy to the bridge that led through the neighborhood and laid him in the middle of the road. Then we hid in the bushes and watched like the producers of Candid Camera or Punk’d.

We wanted to see horror on faces. We wanted them to believe they’d nearly killed an already dead man. I can remember how my heart raced while I remained hidden and watched. It was exhilarating to watch cars approaching, wondering what would be the reaction.

Some slowed and swerved before gassing back to the neighborhood speed limit, which caused us to yell at their taillights, “Hey! You about ran over a man here!” Others stopped and rolled down their windows and quickly realized they’d been snookered by a dummy covered with ketchup. This hurt us. Even though Mrs. Erwin’s scarecrow-dummy wasn’t that realistic, we felt our fake blood was convincing.

A lot of people see the body and blood of Christ as a dead body with fake blood. No reason to stop and think twice. No resurrection. No eternal life caused by his blood. And if the new movie based on the Da Vinci Code book says anything, then it says, “Let us throw out a dead Jesus with fake blood. Let us remake him in our own image. For Jesus is not divine. He’s a prophet, a good teacher, but not God.”

Sad to say but there are many who are slamming on their brakes and falling for the movie’s claim. Others are rolling slowly past with their windows down, while Dan Brown and others like him are hidden in the bushes, loving the impact of their dead Jesus with fake blood.

Regrettably, all of us must consider the movie’s claim that Jesus wasn’t divine, that he wasn’t a savior at all, but part of a conspiracy that the church has covered up. They believe inside Da Vinci’s painting lies the truth in codes.

Maybe our reaction should be like one man who saw our dead-dummy with fake blood and stopped one humid night as the creek flowed below the bridge, as we hid in the bushes. He got out of his car and yelled, “Hey, you bunch of morons! This doesn’t even look real from a block away.” We didn’t throw rocks or come out of hiding. We breathed through our noses and watched as he kicked the dummy off the bridge and into the creek, and then climbed inside his car and motored away.

So, come on, people. Who are these guys kidding with their dead Jesus covered in fake blood? Jesus was more than a prophet, more than a good man. He was God of very God. He was the real Son of God with divinity coursing through his veins. Without his death and shed blood there would be no remittance of sins. Without divinity, Jesus would be just a mere man who came to say, “Everyone must get better. Everyone must live holier lives to get to heaven.”

But anyone who has tried to be holy for more than an hour knows it can’t fully be done. We don’t need a great teacher, which Jesus clearly was. We don’t need a prophet to tell us to live holier lives, which Jesus clearly taught. Because to stop here makes everything depend on us.

What are the consequences if the Da Vinci Code is right about Jesus being only a great teacher without divinity? Those who believe this will have to stand before God on the merits of their own strength. Am I good enough? Did I live a righteous life? Did I observe Christ’s teachings rigidly? Did I sacrifice my life to follow these teachings? Was I good enough? And of course, there is a lot of ambiguity and chance, a roll of the dice with tremendous odds.

What are the consequences if I am wrong about Jesus’ divinity? I will stand in line with everyone else to find out if I was good enough. What are the consequences if I’m right? Eternal life based upon the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. I’m not on trial before God. Christ is. And He conquered death and the grave for me. I live on the basis of Christ’s death.

You have to think about this, because this is the choice that Dan Brown’s, The Da Vinci Code claims. It has nothing to do with how it interprets history. It has everything to do with how you interpret Jesus in history.

Their history debacle is a smokescreen meant to throw you off the trail of grace. Without grace, we are bumbling idiots with no hope. Who can keep the whole Law? Of course, the answer is no one. This is why we need a Savior who makes us holy by his death on a cross. Because anything less is a dead-dummy with fake blood.

(For further reading on this subject, see the second chapter in my new book, God, How Much Longer? Click link to buy: http://snipurl.com/pqxx ).

(Below is my message at a communion service for Vintage Faith Church 3/29/06)

2006-03-30T13:18:00.000-06:00

Service for Vintage Faith Church 3/29/06

Last Thursday Sloan, my youngest daughter, turned sixteen. She’s an adult. She will have to get a job. She might even have to pay taxes. She will have to save lives this summer at Point Mallard’s wave pool, and it all makes a father sad.

His little girl—last little girl—is growing up. And when your child turns sixteen it’s the last time you’ll drive and the last time they’ll need your signature, until they get married and want you to help with their bills. And I hated to obey this sad moment and take her to get her driver’s license. But I’d promised I would. But I never realized how hard it would be.

When we got up last Thursday, some one had taken my little girl and left me one that was bubbly and appreciative—all in the same moment. It was actually scary. The thought of being an official driver made her giddy.

“Let’s go, Dad,” she said with a pop tart in her hand. “Let’s move it!”
I said, “Give an old man a moment. I’ve got to have my pot of coffee.”

I don’t face the world without my Starbucks coffee. Ever. Plus, it was only 8:00 AM, and I had a half a pot left to drink.

“Dad, we’ve got to go,” she said. “You promised.”

And I had promised, so I did, and we got there about 8:30 AM. The place was loaded with people. It looked like a crowded phone booth—arms and legs of people everywhere. And we learned that they take forty names and that’s it for the day, the guard behind the security check point told us so.

“You have to be kidding,” I said.
Sloan said, “Dad, I told you.”

Don’t you hate to be wrong? So I asked, “Can you take the test somewhere else?”

“Yeah, you can take it in Cullman, Athens, or Moulton. And I’d probably go to Moulton,” the security guard said.

So off to Moulton we went with Sloan whining and crying. “I’m not going to get my license today, am I?”

“Oh, yeah, we’ll get them,” I promised.

At Moulton’s courthouse we beeped through the little security check twice and there wasn’t a guard. We yelled, “Hey, we’re beeping out here.” No one came, so we just went to the basement and found the driver license examiner who told us he was full also.

Now we’ve moved from tears to all out drama. “This is the worse birthday of my life,” she said.

And this is when it all flashed before me. Someday when Sloan takes her own kids to get their license, she’ll tell them, “When I was sixteen, I didn’t even get to take my driver’s license. My father, your papa,” she’ll say, “had to drink his pot of coffee before we could go get mine, and by the time we got there the list was full.”
They’ll ask, “And you didn’t get your driver’s license on your birthday? You had to wait? What do you mean full, like they only had one simulator?”

“Honey, this was back in the day when you really had to drive the car. You kids got it made these days. We had to drive around the block with an examiner sitting beside us with a clip board while we did a three-point turn.”

“You did?” they’ll say. “Your father must have been mean. Did he do it on purpose?”

Well, what father wants to be remembered like that? So when we got home, I got on the internet and found every driver’s examination place in 100 mile radius.

Athens—full
Cullman—full
Hartselle—full
Huntsville—full
Birmingham—full

Then we hit pay dirt in the small town of Double Springs. I called and the lady at the Double Springs Community Center said, “Yeah, she’s here today.”

“Is she full?”
“No, I don’t think so she’s out doing two road tests right now.”
“Great, we’ll be right there.”

Hope eternal. Redemption in Double Springs. And it was a long haul to Double Springs. And we found the community Center and the examiner’s office was a little hole in the wall in the back of the center.

We walked in and she said, “Do you have every item listed on the sign in the window?” She was a no nonsense kind of examiner—in her uniform with the stripe down the leg. Real fancy.

Then she barked, “You got to have a parent.”

Now I could’ve taken that in a couple of ways:
1. As a compliment
2. As an accusation, like you know, “You must be the poor, pitiful accuse for a father.”

I took it the first way, and said, “I’m her parent.”

After she looked at Sloan’s permit and SS card, she said, “Decatur! What are y’all doing here? Y’all come all the way from Decatur?”

I said,” Yeah, they were full. Then we went to Moulton and they were full. I promised her that I’d take her to get her license on her birthday.”

I thought this would bring some admiration. A father going the extra mile to make a birthday wish come true.

But she said, “Well, I hope she can drive.”
Sloan shot back, “I can.”

So off they go into the heart of Double Springs while I leaned against the wall outside the community center. When I asked if I could go, she said, “Nope, you can’t go.”

And I can’t describe to you the feeling I had watching her drive away with some one besides me in the car, and it seemed like forever before they popped over the rise.

And there they were like a Nazi officer and an orphaned child—the woman with her clip board and stern face, and Sloan with her birthday face and the steering wheel.

They parked in front of me and the driver’s test Nazi got out and I said in a jovial tone, “How’d she do?”

“Well, she did pretty good. She messed up on one thing.”

Then she started drawing me a diagram of a red light with a turning lane that veered off to the right. “Instead of taking the turning lane, she went to the red-light and made a sharp turn. So didn’t pass today. You can only take it once a day. Maybe tomorrow.” Then she pranced off, leaving us standing there in shock.

I wanted to yell, “You could have a little bit of compassion. You Nazi! You stinking road test flunky!”

We get in the car and drive off. Sloan is not crying. I’m speechless and we ride this way for about five miles. Then I got mad. I told Sloan that the woman would have flunked her, no matter what. “She didn’t want you to pass that test,” I said.

And we raged all the way home. I told her it was a bad idea to go to Double Springs and apologized, and she said, “Dad, it’s not your fault. I was the one who flunked the test.”

Of course I was off the hook. No longer did I have to worry about being slandered in front of her future kids and my future grandkids. I’d fulfilled my promise. Sloan had no one to blame but herself.

Tonight we sit here and have no one to blame about our guilt before God but ourselves. We have made choices. Some bad. Some good. But God fulfilled his promise to us. He so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, and if anyone believes on him they will not surely die.

Jesus has driven everyone of us to Double Springs, to the Cross. Christ went the extra mile. And the beauty of being a Christian is that we will never have to experience or fall into the hands of the examiner Nazi.

Because Christ took the test for us. He passed a new law. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

The beauty of being a Christian is that Christ changed everything. No longer does passing the test to get into heaven depend on our human effort. It depends on our belief in Christ’s work on the cross.

And tonight as we partake of communion, you don’t have to take a holiness test before you can partake. Everyone in this room would fail. Because the moment you make communion about yourself, then it’s the moment you fall into the hands of the Nazi devil who is going to flunk you no matter what.

So tonight is not a test of our holiness, but of our faith, of our response to the one who took the test for us. It’s about the one who abolished the law and made a new one.

So tonight is a response to this great love of God. If we all asked for a license to be in heaven tonight, Christ wouldn’t say something similar to the driver examination woman, “I hope you can be holy.”

The maker of heaven and earth would say, “I’ll give you your license based on my holiness skills, not yours. Believe on me and you will always pass the holiness test.”

So tonight communion is about Him, not us. Yes, we come to this table with our sins ever before us, but we don’t make them a barrier. We ask for help with our sin. We ask for Christ’s strength.

What Shakil Taught Me

2005-12-30T13:11:00.000-06:00

Hello, Everyone! A couple of weeks ago, I told you about how my daughter, Blair, works with terminally-ill children, and how Shakil, one of the boys she worked with in New Jersey, when asked by the Make-A-Wish Foundation what he wanted, he responded, "I want Blair Stofel to come to my birthday party." (Blair now lives in Birmingham, AL and flew to New Jersey a couple of weeks ago on a Friday.)

This week I asked Blair to write something about her experience of going to New Jersey to Shakil's birthday party. (The poem she wrote for him is below this piece, if you'd like to read it again.)

What Shakil Taught Me
By Blair Stofel

Taking one loss and bereavement class at the University of Alabama does not adequately prepare you for what I experienced a couple of weeks ago when I was a dying boy’s wish.

Going back to New Jersey was a mixed bag of emotions, emotions I have never felt so strongly before. My New Jersey “mother” Linda (the hospital's infant massage therapist) picked me up from the airport. The last time I left her was at the train station in Glen Ridge. I was crying so hard a fellow passenger asked if she was my mother.

When I arrived, all the hem/onc doctors and my best friend Trish greeted me. I was so excited to be back, but also nervous to see the person that I flew all this way to surprise on his birthday. How do you prepare yourself to see someone you love on his deathbed and birthday?

I cannot tell you the pressure that comes from being someone’s wish. What was so special about me? I had no platform to stand on. All I had was the reassurance that the relationship I had with this twelve-year-old African-American boy from the projects was real and reciprocated.I had gathered a few birthday presents. I really didn’t know what to give him. Maybe your heart is enough, and I had been giving him a little piece of it everyday since he was diagnosed in May with leukemia.

I walked into his room that day representing Bama with a Roll Tide baseball cap. I’d made Shakil his very own bravery beads necklace that charts his courageous journey through the hospital and his battle with leukemia. I had even mounted the poem I had written to him on Shakil-friendly paper.I will not lie. I was scared to death when I entered the pediatric intensive care unit that Friday. I stepped into his room hidden behind $80 worth of balloons compliments of The Gift Shoppe downstairs. He looked weak, sick, swollen, and flat out exhausted. But he still had the same wise eyes and sweet smile.The best memory I went away with that day was not the moment of the surprise or the moment his father cried when he saw me and told me he had given his son permission to finish his fight and take a hold of God’s hand. It was during the few minutes I had alone with my friend that meant the most.

Everyone had left his room to prepare the birthday cake and I was given the job of answering the phone, so the crowd could walk back in and help sing Happy Birthday. It was while they were out of the room that I got to read Shakil his poem. I’d been home in Alabama for about an hour when I got the call that Shakil had passed away Sunday evening, the week before Christmas. He lived to see his twelfth birthday and that was enough for him. His aunt read the poem I’d written to him at his funeral. Somehow, I hoped this comforted them.Mother Teresa said, “There is no selfless act.” I think it’s true. I may have fulfilled Shakil’s wish, but he fulfilled mine too. I’ll never forget the precious time with him days before he left us.

When I got the news on Sunday, all I could picture was Shakil hanging out in heaven. I know that a crew of people who love him greeted him. I would also like to think my grandmother and aunt—who went before him—are loving him now.

I know he's probably up there talking trash, telling my grandmother and Aunt Gwen how country I sound when I talk and how I suck at card games and XBox. (

What I know about you

2005-12-13T10:50:00.000-06:00

Hello, Everyone! This week I'm sending along a poem that Blair, my daughter, wrote for one of her patients, Shakil. Blair works with terminally ill children, and Shakil is one of the boys she worked with in New Jersey who is dying. He doesn't have too many days left. This Friday is his birthday. He will be twelve.

When asked by the Make-A-Wish Foundation what he wanted, he responded, "I want Blair Stofel to come to my birthday party." (Blair now lives in Birmingham, AL and will be flying up to New Jersey Friday.)

He could've met someone great, such as Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Now that is a wish come true! He could've requested to see Shaquille O'Neal. But he asked to see Blair Stofel, which made us all cry, which made us all proud, which also made us all very, very sad.

(Please pray for Blair to have safe travel and for the family to have strength.)

What I know about you
By Blair Stofel

What I know about you

there are some things i know about you that everyone knows.
you are twelve today
You are an awarded fisherman
you have a smile that lights you from within
you have leukemia

there are other things i know about you that only your friends might know
you love to play on your psp
you are strong
you are a loyal friend
you can make anyone laugh no matter what the circumstance

then there are the things that I know about you
I know you cheat in uno, palace, and spit
I know that Karl taught you how to ride on your IV pole instead of walk
I know that you have put together about 50 puzzles while you have been in the hospital
I know that you got mad at me and tried to give me the silent treatment if i was late or skipped one of our appointments
but i also know it only took about five minuets of me bugging you for you to talk to me again.

The most important things I know about you are
you are the most amazing twelve year old i know
I miss losing every game we play to you
I think about you daily
You have deeply touched my heart with your friendship and I would not be the same if I could not call you my friend
Happy birthday Shakil

A Radiant Sliver

2005-11-01T15:48:00.000-06:00

Mark 14:7 - The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.

They came. They knocked. They said it. They walked away. All of this made my wife, Jill, happy. She filled their plastic pumpkins, plastic grocery bags, pillow cases, and even the inside pockets of a little boy’s suit. He smiled and held out his jacket while Jill dropped some candy inside. Then he hopped back on his bicycle and rode off down the sidewalk.

Everyone said thank you. They spoke again and again in the darkness. Some raised their masks and descended the three steps leading into the night, their night, our night so many years ago.

Jill shut the door after each visit with the slightest touch, the way you do when visiting friends leave for the night. You walk them to the door. You do not open it. You talk. You laugh. You talk some more. Then you open the door and follow them onto the porch. You talk. You laugh some more. They walk to their car. Stand beside it. Lift their hands, sometimes twice. They say goodbye. You watch them take the turn off your block. You walk back inside and close the door upon a moment of feeling alive. The wood of the door kisses the frame and the lock snaps.

Last night Jill closed the door with this gentleness each time one of the children came and left. She turned from the door with a smile as I sat removed from the moment. I swore off answering the door before the night started, and Jill said, “Alright, already. You don’t have to go to the door, Mr. Recluse.”

But watching Jill left me empty in my removed from the moment chair. I was missing something. So the next time the doorbell rang, I followed Jill. I sat on the edge of the desk near the door. I put myself in position. Their shapes and darkness stood on the porch, bringing back the glow on Jill’s face.

She shrieked when a teenager came to the door shrouded in a heavy overcoat and mask. He did not say anything. He did not move. Then the eyes of his mask squirted blood, and Jill almost fainted. But when the bloody mask laughed, she laughed with him.

I’ll admit it. I’m a Halloween scrooge. But watching Jill made me remember the one thing I’ve always wanted in my life—the freedom to love, to give without wanting anything in return. Jill gave to the darkness, knowing that it is in darkness that we truly give. We give because this world will always have its darkness and its poverty. “The poor you will always have with you,” Jesus said.

I knew Jill’s smile once. I knew it long ago. The smile endeared me, still endears me; it did so again last night. I sat on the edge of the desk as a sliver of light rushed upon the porch where ghouls, goblins, and even witches stood in darkness empty-handed, holding out their wishes in the presence of fright.

I’ve forgotten this gift of radiance. My door remains shut as darkness moves at the speed of light. But watching Jill made me think of Christ. I knocked once. He opened with a radiant sliver of light. I knew Christ’s smile once. I knew it long ago. The smile endeared me then; it did so again last night.

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The Wing of a Broken Butterfly

2005-10-25T07:08:00.000-05:00

1 Corinthians 13:12 - For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

A butterfly's wing floated along and dropped at my feet today. Only one wing, instead of two. The one wing I witnessed shared orange with black. Both colors shared a mixture of brown. What did the rest of the butterfly look like? This I will never know. Logic says it must look like the one at my feet. But how do I know? What tore the butterfly apart? This I will never know.

But it bothers me just the same. I should not care. I should just keep thinking about where I'm going and not about things that have happened before my last step. I know my future is a dark looking-glass. Robert Frost wrote in his poem, After Apple-Picking,

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

Scripture says that one day I will know as I'm fully known. What else is there to know? I already know too much. I already hate what I know of myself. But maybe what will be revealed about us is what Frost may have been getting at when the pane of glass fell and broke. Maybe it is this preoccupation with self that falls and breaks. The realization that we have been broken and torn apart no longer.

Maybe the one butterfly wing fell to the ground because the other wing no longer needed it. I hope this is what happened to the other wing. But I know just enough about life to believe that the other wing fell to the ground too. This is the tragedy of this place. We make assumptions based on past experience. We make life a place of death, a world of broken butterflies, a place where nothing comes together, only rips apart. The place of execution without knowing our full crime.

But what if we let the dark looking-glass fall and break? What would today look like if we knew everything, not only a part? What would we know? What would we think when one butterfly wing falls at our feet? Sadness? Confusion? Retrospect?

What if we knew broken things can be put back together--marriages healed, not lost; sickness healed, not death. What would the world look like without one wing of a broken butterfly?

Luciano de Cresenzo once said that "We are, each of us, angels with only one wing. And we can only fly embracing each other."

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Audio Post - Why We Don't Fall in Love

2005-10-22T11:48:00.000-05:00

Looking for love? Robert talks about the reasons why some of us may be sabotaging love.

Why You Should Quit This Church

2005-10-20T09:52:00.000-05:00

I laughed the first time my friend told me where he attends church. Sure, it was in jest, but mere reality for most of us. My friend told me he was a member of “The Church of Me, Myself, and I.” He greets himself, sings to himself, takes up an offering for himself, preaches to himself, has an altar call on his terms, and closes in prayer for himself.

I laughed when he actually told me this for the first time. But I was thinking this kind of church might be what I'm looking for. Maybe start a denomination. It could expand throughout the country. Something along the lines of Fight Club. Each year we could have a conference in My Town, Pennsylvania.

Then again, maybe this is not a good idea. What would happen if one of the individual churches suffered a split? We would have a country and a denomination full of schizophrenics.

The first split would take place in my individual church because I hate myself. I can't stand to hear myself talk. So I couldn't listen to myself preach. I would get up and walkout of the service, leaving me no choice but to follow, because Myself doesn't always preach good sermons. The sermons revolve around what I should do.

Then there would be other points of contention. Me, Myself, and I would fight over how to spend the offering. It would be like any other church—fights, hurt feelings, questions about the amount of time the pastor actually works, disagreements about how the pastor’s sermons tend to sound condescending, disputes over the doctrine of red carpet vs. beige carpet, etc. You get the picture.

The Church of Me, Myself, and I never solves our problems, which is sad. But few have given up on it. We walk through its doors each day. We sing about ourselves, talk about ourselves, and spend money on ourselves because it makes us feel good. In some ways, we all worship at the feet of ourselves.

The way to tell is by paying attention to how much actual time we spend trying to get our way or trying to prove ourselves or spending time thinking about how nothing good ever happens to us, while it happens for everyone else.

Life can be difficult, but don’t allow your life to become a long complaint, where you utter such dumb slogans as, “I’m just not getting fed at my church.” People who say these type things should start their own church of Me, Myself, and I. Then they could feed themselves and disagree with themselves, and the rest of us would be a lot better off.

Evil that lurks in our hearts is hard to discern. We need God’s help. But one thing we can do is go through a day and write down how many times we say these three words—me, myself, and I. Then write down how many times we say God, Jesus, or Christ. What will our discovery be at the end of the day?

This can be one way to allow God to search our hearts. So get out pen and paper. Quit the Church of Me, Myself, and I. Just walk out.
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My Crack Addict Group

2005-10-13T06:34:00.000-05:00

Had a new guy in my group tonight. He doesn't have front teeth.

Maybe James Frey knocked them out. Who knows how he lost them? They're just gone. Hit the floor in some honky-tonk after some old guy's fist hit his mouth. Who knows? They're just gone.

But he smiled and he smiled. And I loved his smile. He raised his hand. He asked probing questions. He raised his hand. He raised it again. He asked probing questions. You could tell he wanted to overcome his addiction.

Said he'd been clean for over 2 years, then the fall. Now he sits in my group as someone's son, someone's father, someone's husband--a child of God.

How did we get to this broken point? How did a lush paradise in Eden become this?

Tonight Danny sat in one of the pews my ex-church donated when the church got different ones. These donated pews once sat in a flooded church back in the seventies. A watermark is on the legs. You can see it. You can bend down and spot it. You can pick it out.

But, like I said, Danny sat in one of them last night in much soul pain. Because pain is no gunslinger. It never aims to kill. It just rises and sets like the sun and moon. It picks up where it left off the day before. Just doing its impersonal duty. This is what we hate about life. It's so painful sometimes.

You would never really pick Danny out of a church line-up. He doesn't look like an addict. He looks like the guy sitting beside you in church last Sunday. He doesn't favor an addict. Who ever does? You would probably never know Danny's pain if he attended church with you.

We don't get too real in church. Hardly anyone goes to church to bare their soul. No one tells of their brokenness. We just go to church wishing we were just a little bit better than we actually are. We wish we had more money, a better looking face, a better voice, then we would sing. And the shocking thing is that God knows pain. We caused it. "The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain" (Genesis 6:6).

We never think of God's pain. The pain He feels when we go astray and get our teeth knocked out. And I'm not trying to be cute here either. Because most of us will never know the battle Danny wages with addiction, a battle that has wrecked his life and scarred his children.

Daddy is an addict.

Daddy has gone away.

Daddy is in a program.

Daddy, will you ever be okay?

If the gospel means anything, then let it mean everything to Danny. Please, Lord, make him a whole man, a different father, a dependable husband, a faithful man. And make us people who never cause God any pain.

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Narrative of the Blood Part Two

2005-10-04T22:02:00.000-05:00

The Ark, the Blood, the blemished narrative, links us together. Different DNA codes. Same substance. Different types. Same narrative with different minds. This is a problem. We can never let the Ark be the Ark without having to screw around with it, like the Giraffes demanding that every animal onboard become like them—a head above the rest. The Ark is not a civilization. It’s not a holy huddle of the likeminded and tall necks.

Two-by-two they came together because a storm was without. And, of course, in Christ the storm rages without. Because the “ark is wherever people come together because this is a stormy world where nothing stays put for long among the crazy waves and where at the end of every voyage there is a burial at sea.”[ii]

●●●

Take Kenny. Put him in your church. The smell of him in the Ark. Maybe even the blood of him dripping onto the floor. People won’t sit beside him. People don’t go to church to smell other people. They go to be heads above the rest. The dogs in the street. Incense is okay. It’s edgy. Probably better than the smell of Kenny. But maybe Kenny is edgy. Loving Kenny. Identifying with Kenny. Emerging from a modern wasteland without perfection on our breath.

The vision of greatness is now a broken epic. But narrative is not a direction. It’s not a concise definition of theology or a purpose-driven knowledge. It’s as Walker Percy says in his novel, The Moviegoer, “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” To be onto the possibility that the larger Narrative of the Blood is the storyline of authenticity.

●●●

We made friends. Kenny and I. Not hanging out at my house kind of friends, but I’d sit beside him. I didn’t mind the smell. I’m not saying I was a good guy. I’m not saying that at all. I sat beside him in the dugout during little league games because I felt for him. This is when I could still feel. This is when I could still see his father standing by the fence at first base. He never sat in the bleachers with the rest of the parents. I’m sure he felt ostracized.

“Now which one is your son?”—one of them may have asked. “Oh, yeah, the one with the red dirt on his crouch. I see him.”
His father stood by the fence and yelled every now and then. I wondered about his father. What would it be like to have a leaky kid? Would I stand at the fence?

“Come on, son. Let’s go home. You played well tonight.” They walked into the matching darkness beyond the stadium lights.
I’d speak to Kenny at school. He’d just look at me, as if I were setting him up, waiting on the right moment to get revenge. But he never caught on to my distant friendship. You can get ostracized for so long that you stop looking for your own narrative. You believe you don’t have one.

I leak. I stink. Here my father comes. That was Kenny’s narrative.
I’ve seen this narrative play out in various ways. I love. I’m rejected. Here no father comes. It’s different. Same storyline, though. We never get a perfect narrative. We can fictionalize it. Make it fake. But being authentic is the last and holy thing.

Frederick Buechner says, "The stories Jesus tells are part of the story you and I are because Jesus has become so much a part of the world's story that it is impossible to imagine how any of our stories would have turned out without him, even the stories of people who don't believe in him or even know who he is or care about knowing. And my story and your story are all part of each other too if only because we have sung together and prayed together and seen each other's faces so that we are at least a footnote at the bottom of each other's story. In other words all our stories are in the end one story, one vast story about being human, being together, being here."
[i] Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark (New York: HarperCollins, 1969; Harper & Row,
1985), 42.
[ii] Ibid.

Narrative of the Blood Part One

2005-10-03T21:57:00.000-05:00

(I'm back. Sorry for the long goodbye. It's been crazy.)

Blood is important. Blood can judge. Ask Pilate. “I wash my hands of this man’s blood.” Jesus said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood live in me, and I live in them.”[i]

Thomas Merton said that the blood of Christ is contemplation. Focus. Meditate. Believe in its transforming power that cleanses the veins of Adam—that flowed to me—that flowed to you. Tainted and blemished—the blood from Jezebel pitched from a window. Licked up by dogs. The taste of her. The lapping of her. Past the tongue. Down inside the beasts.

Majesty and royalty consumed in the street. The lowest of temples. The darkest of all systems. She was there. Completely and literally void of existence. She thought she could exist anywhere—if she had to. But to let someone master you and demise you until you run like drops of rain down the gutter and into the mouth of dogs, then the narrative is not yours. The narrative belongs to the street.

And no street wants our narrative or our blood. The street desires the sweeper. Scratching—scrubbing—washing away what the dogs leave behind. She screamed when she went down. It felt like it did when she slid down an embankment in the mud when she was a small girl. The dog’s bark was deep. The gut of it vast. Then it clamped shut. Prophesy produced true consequences.

Only one tunnel out. She could not swim there, nor could she kill herself. She tried. This was the hell of it. She thought life was in the mind, but it was in the blood. The redness of her wound. She tried to pinch and bite, but things were not like that. Not there. Not in that place. She burned in the compensation of surprise. Left only for the meat and soul of a dog.

She heard someone laugh. She felt her face flush. Somehow she believed she heard God. Now the laugh was a deep chortle. The dog barked. Light. Then darkness. Silence. She heard questions. A bark. Light. She pushed up. A sandal. Then something attacked her. She fought, trying to hold the cells of her together. She held her breath. But realized she didn’t have breath.

She tried to swim away, but it kept pursuing with razor-sharp tendencies. She clung to the sidewalls, remembering the strength of a knot. She tied her cells together. Became one clot. She clogged the opening by expanding her elbows. Or at least what she thought were elbows.

She could move them anyway, whatever they were. Maybe they were fins. They could be two ends of a long spear. She wished she had a spear. She would run it long ways through whatever chased her. Then light. Muddy water swept the attacker away. The soft sensation relieved the burning. She relaxed her clot. A feeling of euphoria. She felt drunk. Not dizzy. Just drunk. Or was it a circular motion?

The first spilt blood cried. We don’t know what it said, but God heard Abel’s blood. When the death angel saw the blood, it passed over. It spilt its own blood. Blood of luxury. Blood of mother night. It rushed upon the hills of Egypt and brought stillness. It brought sorrow and barrenness. Now the two words have been joined in the middle—Passover.

Now the Blood of Christ separates and calls and beckons from the Cross. No Street can easily drink. No sweeper. No intellectual compensate or lone narratives beating in the heart of desire. Only broken parts longing for the whole.

The Apostle Paul warned about the dogs—“Watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh.”[ii] Those who love the sight of blood. They cut. They cut. Then blood. Dogs have never gotten enough. Jezebel tasted so good. But Christ’s Blood? Now there’s another matter.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon said Abel’s bleeding corpse must have been a terrible novelty. No warriors back then. No video games to depict. The crimson flood of veins has always enamored evil. It never tires of seeing it, touching it, tasting it too. But a mysterious voice went up beyond the skies. It reached the ears of God.

Spurgeon said there was a tongue in every drop of vital essence flowing from Abel’s wound. Then there’s the voice of Christ’s Blood. Crimson, flowing from the throne—the Narrative of the Blood. Logos bleeds on the hill—silent and ferocious. Vicarious in its nature. Encompassing in its result. No prince of half-blood, but of the whole.

For blood is the cleanser. But there’s no magic pill. No nip or tuck. It takes us from the bellies of beasts where round-and-round is the motion with perils and fights. It places us inside a new system—the organism of the Spirit. The bringer of peace. The absence of flight. Protection is a closed system. It’s like the belly of a dog. But no demon—no past—no present—no future—nothing can take us from God’s protective hand. It’s a closed-system.

“Whether we are high above the sky or in the deepest ocean, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[iii] There’s without Christ—within Christ—with Christ. Past—present—future. But this is the ruins of a broken epic. A different and grafted one. Emerging in weakness. And the princes of this world, amidst scoffs and laughter, replied, “Is that all?” Nothing to dazzle—nothing to captivate—nothing to conquer. Not here. Not in this place.

[i] John 6:57-58, ncv
[ii] Philippians 3:2, niv
[iii] Romans 8:39, nlt

Christ is Feet Accessible

2005-08-27T09:45:00.000-05:00

A college student needed a small two-hour course to fill his schedule. The only one that fit was in Wildlife Zoology. He had some reservations as he heard the course was tough and the teacher a bit different. But, it seemed like the only choice so he signed up.

After one week and one chapter, the professor had a test for the class. He passed out a sheet of paper divided into squares and in each square was a carefully drawn picture of bird feet. Not bodies, not wings, not colors, not locales, only their feet. The students had to identify the birds from the pictures of their feet.

It shocked the student. He didn’t have a clue. The student stared at the test and got madder and madder. Finally, reaching the boiling point, he stomped up to the front of the classroom, threw the test on the teacher’s desk, and exclaimed, “This is the worst test I’ve ever seen, and this is the dumbest course I’ve ever taken.”

The teacher looked up at him and said, “Young man, you just flunked the test.” Then the teacher picked up the student’s paper, saw that he hadn’t put his name on it, and said, “By the way, young man, what’s your name?”

At this the student pulled off his shoes and socks—revealing his feet—and said, “You identify me!”

I think this student has captured the heart of why we don’t know one another better. I could not identify you by looking at your feet. I probably would not want to look at the feet of some of you. But it seems as if Christ had a thing with feet, especially his disciples’ feet. He got out a basin and a towel. Washed them. Dried them. Then told them the greatest one among you is the one who can identify people by their feet.

Because to serve Christ is to identify people at foot level. Think about it. If I serve you, I get to know you at a level I may not see on the surface. But when you pull off your shoes and let me wash your feet, I know you at a different level.

Now I’m not preaching foot washing. I’m pushing the idea of Christ’s feet—feet I cannot see right now, unless I’m serving people. Christ said when I was in prison you didn’t visit me. When I was cold and naked, you didn’t clothe me. His feet are all around us, longing for us to fall upon them and serve.

Remember the prostitute who came and cried on his feet and then wiped them dry with her hair. Christ is feet accessible. And that woman could probably pick Christ's feet out in a lineup. And eventually we will all get to fall at the feet of Christ. We will get to identify Him by His feet, because we will be too overwhelmed to look anywhere else.

May His feet be the first thing I recognize when I see Christ. May I fall at His feet. May I cry on them. May I wipe them dry with someone else’s hair. I don’t have enough. And people always talk about seeing Christ’s face. I don’t think I’ll see His face for a longtime when I get to heaven. I want to identify His feet first.

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” —Isaiah 52:7

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www.theblemished.com

“Autobiography in Five Short Chapters”

2005-08-18T19:42:00.000-05:00

“He who digs a hole and scoops it out falls into the pit he has made.” —Psalm 7:15

Leadership guru, John Maxwell, shares in his book, Failing Forward, a story written by Portia Nelson called “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters.”

It simply describes the process of recovery.

Chapter 1. I walked down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2. I walked down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I’m in the same place, but it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3. I walked down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in. It’s a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

Chapter 4. I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5. I walk down another street.

Ruin and recovery are alike from within.

—Epictetus

[1] John Maxwell, Failing Forward, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2000), 53.
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Emerging Voices from Addiction
www.theblemished.com

Audio Post: What's at the End of Day

2005-08-12T12:15:00.000-05:00

Have you ever wondered what should be in everyday? Click link below.

Audio Post - Fear Not!

2005-08-09T14:28:00.000-05:00

Jesus used the phrase, "Fear not," more than any other phrase in the Bible. Let this devotional soothe and take off the edge of your fear. May your worrying cease. (Click Link Below)

Audio: Fighting Tigers in the Dark

2005-08-08T20:01:00.000-05:00

This post gives us a vivid parable of life. At some point in our lives, all of us face the terrifying task of fighting tigers in the dark. (Clink audio bar below)