I’ve been thinking about church a lot lately. Not my current congregation and not church in general. Rather, I’ve been thinking about the Fairlawn Church of Christ in Muncie, Indiana. I attended there from sometime around 1974 until August of 1986, and it will always be a special place for me.
For many I think, church represents sort of sterile, holy place…maybe a little cold and dark. For others, church is just a place to go once in a while to keep your spiritual credit in good standing. Perhaps church is synonymous with dogma, ritual, and inhibition.
I see it differently.
For me, church is about relationships.
My first experience at Fairlawn was as a child attending Vacation Bible School with my neighbor. Later, that same neighbor asked the minister to visit my mother in the hospital; then the two of them conspired to have the youth minister reach out to me. Soon, I was riding a JOY Bus to church each Sunday. At first, I agreed to go so I could get the side benefits of going with the youth group to places like Kings Island, Cincinnati Reds games, and summer camp, but later on as I built some friendships, that began to change.
In essence, I went from being an unchurched child to a Christian man at the Fairlawn Church of Christ. The majority of my teenage friends were there. My first real girlfriend was there. I met my wife there. I learned to overcome my insecurities there. I learned sincere faith there.
But, for some reason, sometime in the late 1980’s, I let my relationships with my Fairlawn family wane. I didn’t plan it. I just didn’t make it a priority anymore. I had moved away to another city, and I had a family and career to consider. I was busy in another church in another city and I just made no effort toward maintaining those bonds.
Years went by with no contact. A whole decade passed with practically zero interactions.
Did the bonds of relationship fall away? Did they forget the young goofy kid who used to walk their halls?
In February of 2000, after over ten years of neglecting my former church family, my dad died. We were planning to hold the funeral in Muncie, and we had no place to gather after the funeral for a meal. Hotels are too impersonal. My sister’s house was too small. I thought it over and decided to approach Fairlawn to see if they would allow us to use their building. I was prepared to pay a fee. I was just hoping that someone would be willing to come by and let us in.
On February 8th, 2000, I walked into the office of Paul Cunningham…a man I had known from my many years at Fairlawn…I had been friends with a couple of his sons in the youth group. He was the administrator at the time. We hadn’t spoken in a long, long time.
I’m going to paraphrase the conversation:
“Paul, my dad has passed away.”
“I’m sorry, Mike. How can I help?”
“Well, we have the funeral planned, but we don’t have any place to hold the reception,” I explained.
“When is the funeral?” he asked.
“Wednesday.”
He turned back to his desk and opened a drawer. He reached inside and pulled something out. It wasn’t a datebook. It wasn’t a rental contract.
He handed it to me….a key…a key to the building.
I had not been a member of that congregation since August of 1986, and I hadn’t even visited them for church in over ten years. Yet, there he was holding out a key to the building.
“You’re giving me a key to the building?” I asked with some disbelief.
“Of course,” he replied. “You’re one of us.”
I can’t think about that meeting with Paul without feeling the tears well up in my eyes. It moved me. It gave me new insight into what it really means to be in the family of God and the body of Christ.
You see…church, when it’s done right…is really about relationships.
And, by the way, I didn’t really need the key because on the day of the funeral, when we arrived at the building…Paul had arranged for several women to be there to serve the food to my family…and they had made the food too. They really took care of us that day....because I was still one of them.
Let me just say that if you live near Muncie, Indiana and you’re looking for a church family, you can’t do better than the people that call Fairlawn their home.
Link to the Fairlawn Church of Christ
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
A Muncie Boyhood: Stock Boy in Ladies Apparel
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| The old K-Mart South building on South Walnut Street in Muncie, Indiana |
I had two jobs before I graduated from high school. First, I worked at my uncle’s gas station…Keith’s Union 76…located at 18th and Macedonia Avenue. I pumped gas, added oil, sprayed off the lot, and played poker with Roach, the old guy that usually ran the place. It was a pretty easy job most of the time, but I did have a couple of interesting situations.
For example, I was asked to drive down to some lady’s house to charge her car battery. I was given the electric charger and sent on my way. The trouble was that I was never trained on how to operate the charger, so I hooked up the cables opposite of how they were supposed to be hooked. I knew something was wrong when the little needle that was to show the progress of the charge was popping back and forth instead of just steadily moving to the right. It all worked out. No harm, no foul. But, I think someone told me later that I could have caused the battery to explode.
That would have been bad.
My second job was at K-Mart South in Muncie, Indiana. As a teen boy in the late seventies, there weren’t a huge number of options for jobs. My cousin worked at one of the grocery stores, and he did really well. He earned enough money to buy his own brand new Chevy Camaro! Cherry red! Can you spell J.E.A.L.O.U.S? After I saw that, and the fact that I got tired of bumming money off of my dad every time I wanted to go out on a date, I decided I needed a job. K-Mart was a logical choice, so I went and filled out an application. Soon, the phone rang, I had an interview, and I got the job…
Stockboy in Ladies Apparel!
Now, depending on how you look at it, this could be a teenage boy’s dream or a teenage boy’s nightmare. I mean, I had to hang, tag, and display women’s clothing, lingerie, and underwear. On the other hand, I had to hang, tag, and display women’s clothing, lingerie, and underwear. Both exciting and embarrassing at the same time.
K-Mart was set up in departments. Each department had a manager, sales staff, and often a stockperson. In addition to the departmental stocking staff, there was a set of storewide stock boys and general managers. This fact will be important a few paragraphs down.
Ladies Apparel had one stock boy. Me. I had a number of general duties, but the primary reason for my existence was to carry the heavy boxes of clothing up and down the stairs. A shipment would arrive, and I would have to carry all the bulk boxes upstairs and stack them up. As we needed to replenish the display racks, I would have to carry the boxes back down, open them up, put the clothing on hangers as needed, and add the price tags.
Initially, I was supposed to only work maybe four days a week and only maybe three or four hours a night. Soon, that morphed into five hours every night, and then started to creep into Saturdays. After a while, I was working right up to the limit of the number of hours possible without being considered full-time. Good money for a teenage boy…too bad I had a little bit of a lazy streak.
Here’s a few stories from my Ladies Apparel days…
The first time I was asked to work on a Saturday, I learned that the crew had a meeting in the cafeteria an hour before the store opened. Part of the time was a meeting, and part of the time was a few games of bingo…played for prizes…and these folks took their bingo game seriously. So, here I am, the new guy, playing for the first time, playing the first game….and I won!
I thought.
I yelled “BINGO!”
I was wrong. Oops. My mistake, but by the time that was clear, everyone had dumped their cards. My name was mud.
“Stock boy to Ladies Apparel with a mop!”
An interesting feature of the Ladies Apparel stockroom was its proximity to the security office where they took people caught shoplifting. More than once, I was tagging clothes in my area and listening to interrogations at the same time:
“You’re in big trouble, son,” said the mean-sounding security guy.
“I’m sorry,” said the sobbing boy.
“It’s too late to be sorry kid!”
Another time, a boy called his mother:
“Mom,” the boy said meekly. “I’m at K-mart.”
Quiet moment.
“I got caught stealing.”
Loud crying.
“Stock boy to Ladies Apparel with a mop!”
It is amazing how many messes people can make in a department store. Gum on the floor. Spilled drinks. Dropped hotdogs. Puke.
“Stock boy to Ladies Apparel with a mop!”
My manager didn’t want me to spend my time tracking down a mop and bucket to clean it up, so I was supposed to use the storewide intercom to call for a “stock boy to Ladies Apparel with a mop…stockboy to Ladies Apparel with a mop.” I thought that was the way things were supposed to be done, and I was happy to not have to do the clean up, so I did what I was told. I don’t think that made me very popular with the other guys though.
One bright spot of working in this department was all the cute girls. They ALL came to my department to shop. Even one of the girls I worked with was cute…really cute. In fact, I thought she was the cutest one in the store…by far...and she even talked to me. We took our breaks together a lot and became kind of friendly. It didn’t take long for me to develop a little crush on her, but I was too chicken to ask her out. I wanted to. Even my boss knew I wanted to. But, nope…I was too scared.
After I quit K-Mart, I came back in for a visit and my boss asked me why I didn’t ask her out. I told her that I didn’t think she’d go out with me, and that I thought she liked another friend of mine who also worked in the store. “You oughta ask her out anyway,” she said.
I decided to do it. I was going to face my fears. I was going to ask her out.
“Hi Julie.”
“Hi Mike.”
“How ya doing?”
“Pretty good.”
“Hey. I was wonderin’…would you like to go out sometime?”
“Ah, thanks Mike, but I don’t want to mess up my chances to go out with Pat.”
Insert needle into balloon and let all of the air stream out. Deflation.
Under my breath, I said: “Well, you can’t say I didn’t ask.” (Insecurity talking.)
“What?” she said.
“Oh, nothing. See you later.”
At a ninety degree angle from my stock room were the dressing rooms where women would try on various garments. Now, it may come as a shock to you to know that some girls would take clothing in there to try on, and then just leave it on under their regular clothes when they walked out. Thieves. So, there were rules for dressing room use. The girl had to check in with no more than three items. If they had more than that, they had to leave the extra garments with the attendant. They could then step out and exchange items to finish the fitting.
As a rule, one of the girls in the department acted as the attendant, but once in a while, if everyone else had to be elsewhere, they would ask me to step over and check women in and out. Normally, this wasn’t a problem. After all, the attendant window was open to the store and open to the stock room. One day, though, wasn’t normal. The store was busy. Lots of customers. Heavy traffic in the fitting room. Women checked in. The attendant had to step away. I stepped up.
One woman had gone into the first room, but had one too many tops to try on, so she left one with the attendant. The thing is, since the attendant was another woman…or so she thought…she didn’t bother to put her own shirt back on before stepping out to exchange garments.
Ooops. Can you spell E.M.B.A.R.R.A.S.S.E.D?
I nearly snapped my own neck by turning away as fast as I could. The woman ducked back in, dressed, and quickly departed…leaving her garments with me.
“Stock boy to Ladies Apparel with a mop!”
Right before summer began, I decided to quit K-Mart and give up the bundles of cash (they paid us in actual cash, which often didn’t make it out of the store), so that I could enjoy all the summer activities with my youth group buddies. I gave my notice to my manager, and worked out my two weeks. On my last day, I found myself sitting in the break room in the rear of the store. I can’t remember what I was doing. I was just sitting at a little round table waiting for my free time to end on my final day hanging and tagging ladies clothing. In walked one of the storewide general managers.
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
“Okay.” I replied.
“From now on, you need to clean up your own messes. I don’t want you calling my guys with a mop anymore. You can clean up your own department. You got that?” He ordered.
“Sure. No problem. I won’t do it again, I promise.”
A couple of hours later I went home, and I’m sure that within a week there was a new guy just following orders on the intercom saying:
“Stock boy to Ladies Apparel with a mop. Stock boy to Ladies Apparel with a mop.”
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Christianity 101: Baptism
We’ve reached a critical point. If you’ve followed these Christianity 101 posts, then you’ve learned that God is all about the relationship with us. You know that each of us have sinned and broken that relationship. However, God took the necessary steps of Grace through Jesus Christ to arrange for our redemption because regardless of our lack of faithfulness to Him, He still loves us and wants that relationship. We’ve come to our part, and we’ve learned what it means to repent. Now, we take a look at baptism.
Before we do, if you haven’t read the previous posts in this series, please go back and review them. This post will make more sense to you if you do.
Acts 2:36-39
Peter: Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.
The Cut-to-the-Heart People: Brothers, what shall we do?
Peter: Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.
Let me rephrase this exchange. I’m going to take some liberties to try to express how this strikes me.
Peter: Well, all of you can be sure of one thing: God has made Jesus…the one YOU killed on a cross…both Lord (Your Master. Your King.) and Christ (Messiah. Savior.).
The “What-Have-We-Done” People: What do we do now?
Peter: Change the direction of how you are living your life and be submerged in water by the authority of Jesus…the Messiah, the Savior…so that your sins will be forgiven and the Spirit of God will live within you. This is not just for you, but for your kids, and everyone who comes after you too.
So, what’s the deal with this baptism thing? I called it being submerged. In the original Greek, that’s what the word means…to be submerged or immersed in water. What’s the big deal? Is there something magical in the act? Or, is it just a symbol? Can we do without it? Or, is it necessary? People in religious circles often fight over these questions. Book after book has been written to support one view or another…over and over again.
I’m going to try to skip all of that. Let’s just look at what we can know for sure that these people understood as they heard this in Acts 2.
Here they are just going through their lives. They thought they were doing the right things. They thought that they had brought about the death of a heretic who was threatening the relative peace that Israel was enjoying under Roman rule…cruel as it was. They felt justified.
Then, on the Day of Pentecost, God flips their lives upside down.
A crazy sound of a wild, rushing wind. Tongues of fire. People who shouldn’t be able to speak other languages are speaking clearly in tongues not their own.
"What is this? This is a fulfillment of a prophecy? Joel? Really?
The heretic is not a heretic? He has risen from the dead? Not only that, but he was the Messiah? We killed the Messiah? But, he didn’t stay dead? Now, he’s more….now, he’s the Lord….the king?
Where can I hide? How can you hide from a king who has risen from the dead?
But wait! Not only is he the Lord…he’s also the savior.
Is there any hope?...any hope for me?"
"Sure there is. Repent…change. Be immersed. Your sins will be forgiven and God will live inside you!"
"That’s all? That’s it? Geesh! Where do I sign up?"
3000 people did. 3000 people repented and were baptized that SAME DAY. They didn’t fuss about it. They just responded to what they were told. They put their faith in Jesus through the words they were told....those same words that we have been told in every generation since in the Book of Acts.
The problem is that we want to fuss about it.
All they knew is that they’d messed up and this was the answer. Isn’t that true for us? We’ve messed up, and we have an answer that Peter said was for “all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
Us.
We do have an advantage over the folks in Acts 2, however. We can read other passages that can broaden our understanding of what GOD DOES when we submit to baptism. It can give us a clearer picture of the beautiful union that occurs…or, should I say reunion?
Romans 6:3-4
Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
When we are baptized, God buries us with His son, and then raises us up with a whole new life…a fresh start…free from the burden of our sin. Keep in mind that God does this. All we do is submit ourselves to what He is doing.
Galatians 3:26-27
You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
If you have enough faith in Jesus Christ to submit yourself to baptism, then you are covering your life up in His. He is covering your sinfulness much like clothing covers your nakedness…making you acceptable to being seen by God.
I Peter 3:21
…and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge (response) of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ,…
By submitting to the process of baptism, we are responding to God’s call in good conscience. We are giving ourselves in pledge to Him.
It is the great reunion of a lost person with the God who loves him.
Let us simply relish in the beauty of this gift of Grace that God has provided.
In conclusion, I want to say that baptism is neither nothing, nor is it everything. There are some who discount it completely as only a ceremonial act that we have no need to do. There are others who think that everything revolves around this one step. For me, it is a culmination. Loving God is the prime ingredient. God has done the work. It is up to us to both repent (change) and submit (be baptized) into the grand reunion.
This promise is for ALL whom the Lord will call. Do I hear your phone ringing?
Before we do, if you haven’t read the previous posts in this series, please go back and review them. This post will make more sense to you if you do.
Acts 2:36-39
Peter: Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.
The Cut-to-the-Heart People: Brothers, what shall we do?
Peter: Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.
Let me rephrase this exchange. I’m going to take some liberties to try to express how this strikes me.
Peter: Well, all of you can be sure of one thing: God has made Jesus…the one YOU killed on a cross…both Lord (Your Master. Your King.) and Christ (Messiah. Savior.).
The “What-Have-We-Done” People: What do we do now?
Peter: Change the direction of how you are living your life and be submerged in water by the authority of Jesus…the Messiah, the Savior…so that your sins will be forgiven and the Spirit of God will live within you. This is not just for you, but for your kids, and everyone who comes after you too.
So, what’s the deal with this baptism thing? I called it being submerged. In the original Greek, that’s what the word means…to be submerged or immersed in water. What’s the big deal? Is there something magical in the act? Or, is it just a symbol? Can we do without it? Or, is it necessary? People in religious circles often fight over these questions. Book after book has been written to support one view or another…over and over again.
I’m going to try to skip all of that. Let’s just look at what we can know for sure that these people understood as they heard this in Acts 2.
Here they are just going through their lives. They thought they were doing the right things. They thought that they had brought about the death of a heretic who was threatening the relative peace that Israel was enjoying under Roman rule…cruel as it was. They felt justified.
Then, on the Day of Pentecost, God flips their lives upside down.
A crazy sound of a wild, rushing wind. Tongues of fire. People who shouldn’t be able to speak other languages are speaking clearly in tongues not their own.
"What is this? This is a fulfillment of a prophecy? Joel? Really?
The heretic is not a heretic? He has risen from the dead? Not only that, but he was the Messiah? We killed the Messiah? But, he didn’t stay dead? Now, he’s more….now, he’s the Lord….the king?
Where can I hide? How can you hide from a king who has risen from the dead?
But wait! Not only is he the Lord…he’s also the savior.
Is there any hope?...any hope for me?"
"Sure there is. Repent…change. Be immersed. Your sins will be forgiven and God will live inside you!"
"That’s all? That’s it? Geesh! Where do I sign up?"
3000 people did. 3000 people repented and were baptized that SAME DAY. They didn’t fuss about it. They just responded to what they were told. They put their faith in Jesus through the words they were told....those same words that we have been told in every generation since in the Book of Acts.
The problem is that we want to fuss about it.
All they knew is that they’d messed up and this was the answer. Isn’t that true for us? We’ve messed up, and we have an answer that Peter said was for “all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
Us.
We do have an advantage over the folks in Acts 2, however. We can read other passages that can broaden our understanding of what GOD DOES when we submit to baptism. It can give us a clearer picture of the beautiful union that occurs…or, should I say reunion?
Romans 6:3-4
Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
When we are baptized, God buries us with His son, and then raises us up with a whole new life…a fresh start…free from the burden of our sin. Keep in mind that God does this. All we do is submit ourselves to what He is doing.
Galatians 3:26-27
You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
If you have enough faith in Jesus Christ to submit yourself to baptism, then you are covering your life up in His. He is covering your sinfulness much like clothing covers your nakedness…making you acceptable to being seen by God.
I Peter 3:21
…and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge (response) of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ,…
By submitting to the process of baptism, we are responding to God’s call in good conscience. We are giving ourselves in pledge to Him.
It is the great reunion of a lost person with the God who loves him.
Let us simply relish in the beauty of this gift of Grace that God has provided.
In conclusion, I want to say that baptism is neither nothing, nor is it everything. There are some who discount it completely as only a ceremonial act that we have no need to do. There are others who think that everything revolves around this one step. For me, it is a culmination. Loving God is the prime ingredient. God has done the work. It is up to us to both repent (change) and submit (be baptized) into the grand reunion.
This promise is for ALL whom the Lord will call. Do I hear your phone ringing?
Monday, October 17, 2011
To Ramble or Not to Ramble? A Ramble.
Okay. So here’s the deal. For over a year, I was prolifically writing blog posts. Well, prolifically for me anyway. It seemed that I had something to say about every other day. Idea after idea came to me, and I typed and posted away. Then….all of the sudden….poof. All of the ideas just came to an end. Ugh. Putting together a blog post became work. No energy. No fun.
So, I thought: Mike, you’ve just got to slow it down. Give yourself a break. Take some time and allow the creative batteries to recharge. Well, time has gone by. Weeks in fact. However, I’m still finding myself lacking in defined inspiration.
I’ll think about an idea during the day (when writing isn’t really an option), but by the time I have a few moments to create it’s all gone.
Now, I’m left with a choice. Do I just hang it up? Consider the blog a passing fancy? Or, do I act like a baseball hitter who’s in a slump and keep swinging until I work myself through this?
What do you think?
For now, I’m left with random thoughts. Just little snippets of opinions and views that I can’t seem to develop into something more substantial. Here are a few examples:
1. Occupy Wall Street. Somehow, I think these protesters are somewhat naïve about what they are trying to do. I don’t want our country to veer totally into the direction they are trying to pull it. People need to feel a sense of ambition to succeed, and an expectation that they will reap the benefits of that success without the concern that the government is going to ‘redistribute’ their earned reward. On the other hand, have you ever looked at an annual report and considered what the CEOs of major corporations make per year? I saw one the other day, and the guy’s annual compensation package reached $1.5 million. 1.5 million dollars! He’s just like you and me. He has two legs, two arms, one brain, and 24 hours in a day…and, somehow he’s worth that much? I don’t blame him for taking what’s offered to him, but the question is begged….why is it offered? Why do American corporations feel so obligated to be the so profitable and so successful that they lay off their fellow citizens and move those jobs to other parts of the world? Sure, they can automate every function and save on human overhead, but do they really need to? You've got to wonder why to save a few million, they'll lay off dedicated workers and move factories to foreign countries, and then on the other hand pay ONE GUY well over a million dollars? If the Occupy Wall Street protests do nothing more than pull back on the reins of greed, then they’ve done something good for this country. I just don’t want them to stop the wagon altogether and park it in the barn. Balance, folks. Balance.
2. Dan Weldon’s Death. I’m a guy who cannot view someone else’s grief without struggling to contain my own emotions and I usually lose that battle. Watching the pain in the faces of the crews in Las Vegas was tough to take. Also, I was touched by how they all banded together and honored their fallen fellow racer in such a fitting manner. That said, I think I’ve seen that wicked crashed just a few too many times in the last 24 hours. Why do the news channels feel so obligated to show a man’s death over and over and over? Lastly, I’ve heard it mentioned on the news today that maybe the IRL should stop racing on oval tracks, or that they need to change the rules to make it more safe. Slow things down. Etc, etc. Folks, part of the excitement of racing for both the racers and the fans is the danger. I hope I never see another driver die in my lifetime, however, they know the risks. It is their choice. Let them make it.
3. Politics. I am completely sick of both the Republicans and the Democrats. I don’t think either party has a clue of what to do. One side doesn’t want to stop spending, and the other side doesn’t want to sacrifice. Are we going to have to collapse as a nation before things change? Or, is it finally time for a new party to arise and lead our country down a reasonable path. Is it time for one of the traditional parties to go the way of the Whigs? I think it is possible today for that to happen. As a society, we are much less dependent on TV and the costs incurred by advertizing there. Now we have the internet. Just look at what the protesters are doing with the social media. What if that got harnessed for a fraction of the cost of TV to create a reasonable new choice for leadership in our country? Notice I’m not saying a “third” party. I want a new party. One or both of the current ones need to go. And, I’m about sick to death of the TV pundits on both sides. Geesh, enough already!
4. The Proposed 9. 9. 9. Maybe it’s not the answer for our tax system, but none of the traditional candidates seem to be able to think outside the box. Right now, we need someone thinking outside the norm. We need a game-changer. Is Herman Cain the guy? I don’t know, but I like the fact that he’s not just the same old stuff. If point 3 above doesn’t come about before November 2012, I’m going to have a difficult set of choices to make and maybe Herman's the guy.
5. Bank Fees. Recently, it was announced by several major banks that they are going to institute a monthly fee for people to use their debit cards to make purchases. They claim they NEED those fees because of changing regulations that have caused them to lose profits on credit card charges to retailers. REALLY? Come on now. Seems to me that I’ve recently heard of the billions of dollars in net annual profits reported in annual reports. So, they need my $4 or $5 per month? Maybe they could drop the salaries of their CEOs by a million or so, and let us keep our money as a show of good faith after we bailed them out a couple of years ago. Just a thought. Besides, I thought that debit cards were saving them oodles of money since they didn’t have to handle all those paper checks anymore. What happened to that? If I get hit with a fee, maybe I’ll go back to paper checks in protest. I think what I hate most about the major banks is how they make you feel powerless. They are like towering tyrants pushing the peons around. No wonder people are protesting on Wall Street.
I guess that’s enough rambling for now. Pray for my creative streak to return. I like to write, but I just need something to say.
Until my next ramble….
Mike
PS. My dog, Xena is snoring on the couch. Do they make those Breathe Rite Strips for dogs too?
So, I thought: Mike, you’ve just got to slow it down. Give yourself a break. Take some time and allow the creative batteries to recharge. Well, time has gone by. Weeks in fact. However, I’m still finding myself lacking in defined inspiration.
I’ll think about an idea during the day (when writing isn’t really an option), but by the time I have a few moments to create it’s all gone.
Now, I’m left with a choice. Do I just hang it up? Consider the blog a passing fancy? Or, do I act like a baseball hitter who’s in a slump and keep swinging until I work myself through this?
What do you think?
For now, I’m left with random thoughts. Just little snippets of opinions and views that I can’t seem to develop into something more substantial. Here are a few examples:
1. Occupy Wall Street. Somehow, I think these protesters are somewhat naïve about what they are trying to do. I don’t want our country to veer totally into the direction they are trying to pull it. People need to feel a sense of ambition to succeed, and an expectation that they will reap the benefits of that success without the concern that the government is going to ‘redistribute’ their earned reward. On the other hand, have you ever looked at an annual report and considered what the CEOs of major corporations make per year? I saw one the other day, and the guy’s annual compensation package reached $1.5 million. 1.5 million dollars! He’s just like you and me. He has two legs, two arms, one brain, and 24 hours in a day…and, somehow he’s worth that much? I don’t blame him for taking what’s offered to him, but the question is begged….why is it offered? Why do American corporations feel so obligated to be the so profitable and so successful that they lay off their fellow citizens and move those jobs to other parts of the world? Sure, they can automate every function and save on human overhead, but do they really need to? You've got to wonder why to save a few million, they'll lay off dedicated workers and move factories to foreign countries, and then on the other hand pay ONE GUY well over a million dollars? If the Occupy Wall Street protests do nothing more than pull back on the reins of greed, then they’ve done something good for this country. I just don’t want them to stop the wagon altogether and park it in the barn. Balance, folks. Balance.
2. Dan Weldon’s Death. I’m a guy who cannot view someone else’s grief without struggling to contain my own emotions and I usually lose that battle. Watching the pain in the faces of the crews in Las Vegas was tough to take. Also, I was touched by how they all banded together and honored their fallen fellow racer in such a fitting manner. That said, I think I’ve seen that wicked crashed just a few too many times in the last 24 hours. Why do the news channels feel so obligated to show a man’s death over and over and over? Lastly, I’ve heard it mentioned on the news today that maybe the IRL should stop racing on oval tracks, or that they need to change the rules to make it more safe. Slow things down. Etc, etc. Folks, part of the excitement of racing for both the racers and the fans is the danger. I hope I never see another driver die in my lifetime, however, they know the risks. It is their choice. Let them make it.
3. Politics. I am completely sick of both the Republicans and the Democrats. I don’t think either party has a clue of what to do. One side doesn’t want to stop spending, and the other side doesn’t want to sacrifice. Are we going to have to collapse as a nation before things change? Or, is it finally time for a new party to arise and lead our country down a reasonable path. Is it time for one of the traditional parties to go the way of the Whigs? I think it is possible today for that to happen. As a society, we are much less dependent on TV and the costs incurred by advertizing there. Now we have the internet. Just look at what the protesters are doing with the social media. What if that got harnessed for a fraction of the cost of TV to create a reasonable new choice for leadership in our country? Notice I’m not saying a “third” party. I want a new party. One or both of the current ones need to go. And, I’m about sick to death of the TV pundits on both sides. Geesh, enough already!
4. The Proposed 9. 9. 9. Maybe it’s not the answer for our tax system, but none of the traditional candidates seem to be able to think outside the box. Right now, we need someone thinking outside the norm. We need a game-changer. Is Herman Cain the guy? I don’t know, but I like the fact that he’s not just the same old stuff. If point 3 above doesn’t come about before November 2012, I’m going to have a difficult set of choices to make and maybe Herman's the guy.
5. Bank Fees. Recently, it was announced by several major banks that they are going to institute a monthly fee for people to use their debit cards to make purchases. They claim they NEED those fees because of changing regulations that have caused them to lose profits on credit card charges to retailers. REALLY? Come on now. Seems to me that I’ve recently heard of the billions of dollars in net annual profits reported in annual reports. So, they need my $4 or $5 per month? Maybe they could drop the salaries of their CEOs by a million or so, and let us keep our money as a show of good faith after we bailed them out a couple of years ago. Just a thought. Besides, I thought that debit cards were saving them oodles of money since they didn’t have to handle all those paper checks anymore. What happened to that? If I get hit with a fee, maybe I’ll go back to paper checks in protest. I think what I hate most about the major banks is how they make you feel powerless. They are like towering tyrants pushing the peons around. No wonder people are protesting on Wall Street.
I guess that’s enough rambling for now. Pray for my creative streak to return. I like to write, but I just need something to say.
Until my next ramble….
Mike
PS. My dog, Xena is snoring on the couch. Do they make those Breathe Rite Strips for dogs too?
Sunday, October 2, 2011
A Muncie Boyhood-Bullies and Bumblebees
I’ve been hearing a great deal in the media these days about bullying. It seems to be a popular drum to beat, and it’s played up as if this were something new or as if it were a problem unique to a certain subset of society. The fact is that bullying is as old as humanity. For as long as there have been people, I’d be willing to bet that there have been bullies.
As a boy of the sixties and seventies in Muncie, Indiana, I interacted with any number of bullies. In elementary school, the kids to avoid lived down on 24th Street, east of Hackley. A good punch in the gut seemed to be Kenneth’s favorite game. I avoided him at all costs.
In those days, I walked to school. It was only five blocks straight up 21st Street, but I was only about six or seven years old at the time. One day, I headed off to school, and being wary of the bullies that were lurking in the area, I didn’t take the direct path. Instead, I slipped over away from the road to cut through people’s yards, hoping to make the trip unnoticed. My dad noticed because he tracked me down after a couple of blocks to find out what I was doing.
Besides the fear of the brutal punch in the gut, there were the insults…
“Hey fatty!”
“Are ya chicken?”
“Your hair looks like somebody put a bowl over your head before they cut it.”
“You’re stupid!”
And, the list could go on.
How about always being picked last for….just about everything?
That was elementary school. Then middle school arrived with gym classes that included locker rooms and showers. The athletically insufficient meets the sports stud. Not a good combination.
One example of being bullied stayed with me for about thirty years. Let me paint the picture: 8th grade at Wilson Middle School. Math class. I’m at the heaviest point of my life to that date, and haven’t yet hit my growth spurt. We get a new kid in class. Jimmy.
I remember Jimmy from Roosevelt Elementary. I hadn’t seen him in years because he gone on to another school, but he was memorable because he was a bully and was good at fighting. He was like that old Jim Croce song: “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with Jim!”
Of course, the teacher rearranged the seating chart and put me right next to Jimmy. I thought I was safe because we were basically two feet from the teacher’s desk, but that was not the case. He turned out to be oblivious to the situation, and Jimmy had become an expert at subtle, covert terrorizing and humiliation. His favorite tool was a little synthetic bumblebee attached to an elastic band, and he sat there everyday flipping me with it…constantly.
Flip, flip.
“What ya gonna do ‘bout it? Huh? Am I bothering you? Ah, too bad.”
Flip, flip.
"What's the matter? Can't you concentrate? Having trouble with that problem? Too bad. Hahaha!"
Flip, flip.
I tried ignoring it. I tried to make friends with him. I didn’t dare complain to the teacher because that would be grounds for an after school sneak attack. I had two choices, either I could sit there and take it or I could turn around and punch him in the face. In retrospect, I should have drilled him. There would have been consequences with the school, with my dad, and with Jimmy, but it would have ended the situation, and maybe gained me some personal self-respect and the respect of my classmates. Instead, I just bore the burden…for weeks on end. I just put up with it, and inside I struggled with hating him.
Of course time changes all circumstances. Eventually, that school year ended. Jimmy and I parted company. I saw him rarely through the high school years, and I can’t even remember if we went to the same high school. In high school, I grew enough that I finally got bigger, and the direct bullying ended.
The problem was that I carried that pain for years afterward. On the one hand, I gained some strength of personal endurance by bearing the situation, but on the other hand I suffered for years from a lack of self-respect, AND I couldn’t shake my anger with Jimmy. As a Christian, I wanted to forgive him, but as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t find the way to get there. I tried. I failed. I kept trying, but the pain kept creeping back in.
Fast forward about thirty years. I’m now in my mid-forties and a successful industrial sales leader in my industry. I’ve matured past my youthful insecurities, and have gained a measure of personal toughness I didn’t have as a kid. I live in Indianapolis, but I’m in Muncie on business. It is lunchtime, and I’m enjoying my Ham-n-Cheese sandwiches at Mac’s Restaurant on south Madison Street. At the table next to mine is a face I recognize, but I can’t quite place. He looks so familiar. We must have gone to school together. We start to talk.
It was Jimmy!
It is interesting how time changes people. My mind still had him in eighth grade, and still an obnoxious bully. Now, he’s a middle-aged man just trying to live life like everyone else. Despite the image in my mind, time had not frozen him in place.
Jimmy starts to tell me how his life has changed. He’d had some rough times in his life, but he had found God. He was a Christian, and he was doing his best to live right. He was oozing with humility. He knew he’d done a lot of wrong things back when he was younger…
“Yeah, you were pretty hard on me,” I interjected.
He looked me in the eye. “I’m really sorry about that.”
Two things happened at that instant. 1. I found that place of forgiveness, and my entire burden of anger toward him had dissipated. 2. I gained a much better understanding of the meaning of GRACE.
I can tell you this….Grace feels much, much better than hatred and resentment combined. No wonder God is so eager to give it out.
All that said, I don’t like bullies. Bullying is wrong no matter the target or the reason. It causes a great deal of pain, pain that lasts for years and even decades.
If you are the target of a bully, it won’t always be like it is. Talk to some folks and get some help, but don’t despair. Time changes things, but be proactive. Maybe society would frown on you taking direct action like punching someone in the face, but still you have other options. Go to a person in authority and get help. Confront the situation head on.
And, if you are an idiot math teacher who is sitting two feet away from a kid who is being terrorized with a synthetic bumblebee on an elastic band…do your stinkin’ job!
Maybe I’ve got someone else to forgive now. What do you think?
As a boy of the sixties and seventies in Muncie, Indiana, I interacted with any number of bullies. In elementary school, the kids to avoid lived down on 24th Street, east of Hackley. A good punch in the gut seemed to be Kenneth’s favorite game. I avoided him at all costs.
In those days, I walked to school. It was only five blocks straight up 21st Street, but I was only about six or seven years old at the time. One day, I headed off to school, and being wary of the bullies that were lurking in the area, I didn’t take the direct path. Instead, I slipped over away from the road to cut through people’s yards, hoping to make the trip unnoticed. My dad noticed because he tracked me down after a couple of blocks to find out what I was doing.
Besides the fear of the brutal punch in the gut, there were the insults…
“Hey fatty!”
“Are ya chicken?”
“Your hair looks like somebody put a bowl over your head before they cut it.”
“You’re stupid!”
And, the list could go on.
How about always being picked last for….just about everything?
That was elementary school. Then middle school arrived with gym classes that included locker rooms and showers. The athletically insufficient meets the sports stud. Not a good combination.
One example of being bullied stayed with me for about thirty years. Let me paint the picture: 8th grade at Wilson Middle School. Math class. I’m at the heaviest point of my life to that date, and haven’t yet hit my growth spurt. We get a new kid in class. Jimmy.
I remember Jimmy from Roosevelt Elementary. I hadn’t seen him in years because he gone on to another school, but he was memorable because he was a bully and was good at fighting. He was like that old Jim Croce song: “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with Jim!”
Of course, the teacher rearranged the seating chart and put me right next to Jimmy. I thought I was safe because we were basically two feet from the teacher’s desk, but that was not the case. He turned out to be oblivious to the situation, and Jimmy had become an expert at subtle, covert terrorizing and humiliation. His favorite tool was a little synthetic bumblebee attached to an elastic band, and he sat there everyday flipping me with it…constantly.
Flip, flip.
“What ya gonna do ‘bout it? Huh? Am I bothering you? Ah, too bad.”
Flip, flip.
"What's the matter? Can't you concentrate? Having trouble with that problem? Too bad. Hahaha!"
Flip, flip.
I tried ignoring it. I tried to make friends with him. I didn’t dare complain to the teacher because that would be grounds for an after school sneak attack. I had two choices, either I could sit there and take it or I could turn around and punch him in the face. In retrospect, I should have drilled him. There would have been consequences with the school, with my dad, and with Jimmy, but it would have ended the situation, and maybe gained me some personal self-respect and the respect of my classmates. Instead, I just bore the burden…for weeks on end. I just put up with it, and inside I struggled with hating him.
Of course time changes all circumstances. Eventually, that school year ended. Jimmy and I parted company. I saw him rarely through the high school years, and I can’t even remember if we went to the same high school. In high school, I grew enough that I finally got bigger, and the direct bullying ended.
The problem was that I carried that pain for years afterward. On the one hand, I gained some strength of personal endurance by bearing the situation, but on the other hand I suffered for years from a lack of self-respect, AND I couldn’t shake my anger with Jimmy. As a Christian, I wanted to forgive him, but as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t find the way to get there. I tried. I failed. I kept trying, but the pain kept creeping back in.
Fast forward about thirty years. I’m now in my mid-forties and a successful industrial sales leader in my industry. I’ve matured past my youthful insecurities, and have gained a measure of personal toughness I didn’t have as a kid. I live in Indianapolis, but I’m in Muncie on business. It is lunchtime, and I’m enjoying my Ham-n-Cheese sandwiches at Mac’s Restaurant on south Madison Street. At the table next to mine is a face I recognize, but I can’t quite place. He looks so familiar. We must have gone to school together. We start to talk.
It was Jimmy!
It is interesting how time changes people. My mind still had him in eighth grade, and still an obnoxious bully. Now, he’s a middle-aged man just trying to live life like everyone else. Despite the image in my mind, time had not frozen him in place.
Jimmy starts to tell me how his life has changed. He’d had some rough times in his life, but he had found God. He was a Christian, and he was doing his best to live right. He was oozing with humility. He knew he’d done a lot of wrong things back when he was younger…
“Yeah, you were pretty hard on me,” I interjected.
He looked me in the eye. “I’m really sorry about that.”
Two things happened at that instant. 1. I found that place of forgiveness, and my entire burden of anger toward him had dissipated. 2. I gained a much better understanding of the meaning of GRACE.
I can tell you this….Grace feels much, much better than hatred and resentment combined. No wonder God is so eager to give it out.
All that said, I don’t like bullies. Bullying is wrong no matter the target or the reason. It causes a great deal of pain, pain that lasts for years and even decades.
If you are the target of a bully, it won’t always be like it is. Talk to some folks and get some help, but don’t despair. Time changes things, but be proactive. Maybe society would frown on you taking direct action like punching someone in the face, but still you have other options. Go to a person in authority and get help. Confront the situation head on.
And, if you are an idiot math teacher who is sitting two feet away from a kid who is being terrorized with a synthetic bumblebee on an elastic band…do your stinkin’ job!
Maybe I’ve got someone else to forgive now. What do you think?
Friday, September 23, 2011
Angel in 22D
Over Labor Day weekend, my wife and I took an extra day off of work and flew to Denver to visit some friends. It was a fantastic time, a time of laughter, good food, and relaxation. We took in the Allison Krause and Union Station concert at Red Rocks. We drove up to our friends’ cabin in the mountains. We hiked the garden of the Gods. We saw Boulder. We saw Golden. We held our niece’s baby, our great niece. We had a wonderful time.
The flight out to Denver was uneventful….just the way you prefer that a flight be. We moved smoothly through security without the need of a personal pat-down, our flight took off and landed on time, and our friend was there to meet us.
It was the flight home that I’d like to share about.
But before I get to that, I want to say that I must have one of those faces. Some people have faces that others would just as soon avoid. Scary faces. Mean faces. Faces that make you want to look the other way.
I guess I have a face that makes you want to talk.
It’s not really new to me. I’m sort of getting used to it. Sometimes I go into a brand new restaurant and say “hi” to the waitress, and the next thing I know, she’s filled me in on the details of her life…where she’s from…why she’s where she’s at…what she’d like to become…
Sometimes it’s ordinary stuff. Sometimes it’s difficult stuff…stuff that breaks people down.
Once, on a flight home from Albany, New York, I caught a connecting flight in Detroit. The guy in the seat next to mine started talking to me as we taxied to take off, and he stopped talking to me as we exited the plane in Indy. He shared that he and his wife were separated. She’d had an affair with a friend who was staying with them. He claimed that he was to blame because he had gotten caught up with online porn. By the time we were done talking, I knew all about his business, I knew why he was coming to Indiana, and I knew that he loved his wife despite the mess.
I don’t really know why people feel so free to talk to me. I have friends that I sit down with at lunch, and the next thing they know, they are telling me stuff. I have customers that spill their personal lives into my lap. I’ve come to expect it and it just happens, and usually I am happy to listen and if needed, I try to help.
But, sometimes, I just don’t want it to happen.
Sometimes, I just want to relax. Sometimes, I just want to enjoy a trip with my wife.
Now back to my flight home from Denver. We were in the terminal, and we were early, so we found some seats facing our gate. My wife sat down first, there was an open seat next to her and then there was a seat that had a guy’s stuff on it. The guy with the stuff was in the next seat after that. He was taking up a bit of space, so being courteous, I said hello as I sat down.
I guess that opened the door.
He started talking to me. He said he flew a lot. He told me that he had been in the military. He used to be married, but he left when his wife got bossy. His brother was still in the military. He was coming to Indiana to go on a religious retreat. He thought Eli Manning was a much better quarterback than Peyton Manning. On and on.
He also fidgeted a lot. He couldn’t sit still very long, and kept rubbing his face, smoothing his straggly beard. It didn’t take me very long to decide that he didn’t have all of his mental screws tightened down.
He made me feel uncomfortable.
I really just didn’t want to talk to him, but I didn’t want to be rude. I didn’t want to outright shut him down. However, I also didn’t want to encourage the conversation, so I didn’t carry the conversation forward. I only spoke in response to something he would say or ask. I kept hoping he would sort of understand that I didn’t want to converse. Despite my stoicism, he kept talking to me.
Silently….I said a little prayer…
“Please God, don’t let him sit next to me on the plane.”
Now, there were dozens of people on this flight. It was basically full. The chances of him sitting next to me were 100 to 1, but I knew as soon as I said that silent prayer that he would be right next to me.
My seat was 22C. It wasn’t five minutes later that I learned that his seat was 22D. He was directly beside me, across the aisle.
Maybe I should have gotten the hint from that fact, but I still didn’t want to talk to him.
Our flight boarded. I sat down. He sat down. I was sort of in luck in that there were two cute young women who were sitting on the other side of him, so they got some of his attention also. I felt kind of lucky, but I also felt kind of guilty.
Still I didn’t want to talk to him. So, I took the freebee ear-buds that Frontier Airlines gives you so you can hear the sound from their little seatback TVs, and I put one in my ear on his side to discourage him from bothering me. I watched a little TV. I read my book. I ignored the slightly crazy guy in 22D.
For the most part it worked. He only nudged my arm a few times during the flight. The rest of the time he sat and fidgeted, or talked to the girls. I flew in peace, and….
…I failed the test!
When you think through this whole thing, does it really sound to you like a coincidence? I mean, what are the chances? I already shared the odds.
Now, maybe he was just a slightly wacked out former marine. Or, maybe he was something more. There’s just something about this thing that’s been gnawing at me.
Consider Hebrews 13:2…
“Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.”
Would it have been so bad to have spent some time talking to him? Could I have opened my heart up to a stranger and made him feel safe and cared about? Could I have taken some of the burden off of the two young college-age girls who sat on his other side? Did he need a friendly ear?
Would it have been too much to ask of me to sacrifice a little bit of my personal satisfaction on a two and a half hour flight home? In retrospect, I think not. I failed.
My “angel” in 22D is still on my mind. He reminds me that I have some growing to do…in compassion…and, in dealing with my own personal selfishness.
Next time, I’ll do better.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
The Cross and the Bumper Sticker
This is now my 100th post on this blog. I’ve wanted it to be a memorable one, but I think now I’ll just settle for it being interesting. You see, I haven’t posted for a while. I just haven’t felt “moved” to write anything. It’s been like I just haven’t had anything on my mind that I thought other people would care to read. You might call it “writer’s block,” or it could just simply be that I really haven’t had anything to say.
If you keep talking without really saying anything, you are simply wasting everyone’s time.
Today is September 11, 2011…the 10-year anniversary of the World Trade Center attack. I haven't watched much of the coverage. I'm too much of an emotional guy, and I got choked up a couple of times with what little I did watch.
This morning, as we drove to church, my wife and I discussed how things had changed in our lives in the last ten years…
1. Our small girls are now grown college women
2. My mother became a Christian, and then later that same year passed on
3. Our dog Sally died, and we have two new ones
4. We attend a different church
5. My wife has a different job
6. We have a different family car
7. Some friends and family members have married, and some friends have divorced
The list could go on and on.
Even technology is different. Flat screen TVs were waaaaay expensive ten years ago, and very few people had them. Now they are everywhere…even I have one. Whoever heard of a smart phone or an I-pad? In my job, I had a desktop computer, and I carried a paper calendar everywhere. Now, I have a laptop and a Blackberry. We had Mapquest, but GPS? What was that?
In the days that followed 9/11, one of the main catchphrases that seemed to be everywhere was: “God Bless America!”
For a very short time after the attacks, many otherwise lackluster Christians turned to their faith in earnest. It was a spiritual awakening for many people. As I look back on it now, it was kind of like spinning a bike wheel. You know, when you were a kid and you turned your bike over on its seat and handlebars and spun the wheels. You’d give one wheel a good hard spin and it would seem like it would go on forever. However, as the seconds ticked by, the wheel began to slow and unless you spun it again, it would eventually stop.
In essence, for many, it seems that their spiritual wheel has stopped spinning again.
“God Bless America!” became a popular bumper sticker. However, lately I’ve been seeing another one: “America, Bless God!”
I think this new version makes a good point. We. We. We. Want. Want. Want.
“God! Bless us!” Us. Us. Us. Don’t expect anything from us, God. Don’t go looking for our presence in church. Don’t expect us to GIVE TO YOU. Don’t expect our hearts to be drawn to you. But, please make sure you continue to bless us! We are special after all. We are America!
It’s a good thing that He loves us…along with everyone else. Why else would He ever put up with our obvious pride, self-indulgence, and spiritual ambivalence?
I want to share two more things with you. One is a bit of a coarse comment I made, but it really is a comment on the state of modern Christianity. The other is another bumper sticker I saw last week.
First, my comment….
This comment was made in the midst of some very close friends that my wife and I feel very comfortable around. It was a joke, of sorts, made as we were trying to unravel a tangled gold necklace that carried a cross as its focal point. One of the group jokingly said: “How would people know that I’m a Christian, if I don’t wear my cross?”
I replied as a comment on some women’s method of displaying their “faith”….
“Yeah, I could tell she was a Christian by the cross in her cleavage!”
We all burst out laughing. It was a funny moment. It’s funny because one obviously runs counter to the other. But, then….when you think about it…it’s not really funny is it? It’s true, but it’s not really funny. It’s not funny because that symbol of our faith that should draw us back to Christ and the amazing sacrifice that he made has been relegated to a piece of jewelry that apparently means very little to some of the very people who display it.
I’m not just picking on the girls. It was just how the cross is sometimes displayed by women that brought this to my mind. As a PEOPLE…men and women, many of us simply do not take Jesus Christ seriously enough to allow his sacrifice to affect how we live our daily lives. The cross is just some ambiguous symbol on church buildings and jewelry. Should it not, rather, be a beacon that calls us, that hearkens us back to humility at its foot? The foot of the cross on which the Savior of the world GAVE his life? Should it not drive us to change? To amend our lives into conformity to God’s direction?
Now, the bumper sticker…
As we were cruising around Denver with those same friends last weekend, I saw the following bumper sticker: “Try Jesus”
Now, I’m sure that the motive behind this saying is very good, and in the sense it was meant, it is a great statement to make. People are searching for fulfillment in their lives, and the suggestion to try Jesus for that fulfillment is good and right. However, it did bring to my mind another fault in our American version of Christianity. We tend to portray Jesus as the answer to every life problem. Try Jesus and your financial problems will be over. Try Jesus and your marriage problems will end. Try Jesus and your boss will love you. Try Jesus and you’ll never have a flat tire again! Try Jesus and you’ll never have another problem in your life!
In my mind that day, the saying struck me as kind of a test drive. “Take Jesus out for a spin.” “Doesn’t he just handle beautifully?” “This is the faith for you! It just fits your image!”
The trouble is, Jesus didn’t die so that we could USE him. He isn’t a tool for our manipulation. In fact, he wants us to change enough so that we can be the tool in his hands to reach others. Clearly, he never promised that our lives would be without trouble if we “tried him” out. Just examine the outcomes of the lives of the apostles and the early followers. Death and persecution followed them around everywhere they went.
However, he did die to save us. He did promise us a spiritual future that is beyond measure, and a spiritual family with God as the father, and the church as our brothers and sisters. We can have hope. We can have a purpose. We can have a mission. Like the old saying goes: “Working for God doesn’t pay very much, but the retirement benefits are out of this world!”
I guess that’s enough rambling for now. I’ll catch you all again soon.
If you keep talking without really saying anything, you are simply wasting everyone’s time.
Today is September 11, 2011…the 10-year anniversary of the World Trade Center attack. I haven't watched much of the coverage. I'm too much of an emotional guy, and I got choked up a couple of times with what little I did watch.
This morning, as we drove to church, my wife and I discussed how things had changed in our lives in the last ten years…
1. Our small girls are now grown college women
2. My mother became a Christian, and then later that same year passed on
3. Our dog Sally died, and we have two new ones
4. We attend a different church
5. My wife has a different job
6. We have a different family car
7. Some friends and family members have married, and some friends have divorced
The list could go on and on.
Even technology is different. Flat screen TVs were waaaaay expensive ten years ago, and very few people had them. Now they are everywhere…even I have one. Whoever heard of a smart phone or an I-pad? In my job, I had a desktop computer, and I carried a paper calendar everywhere. Now, I have a laptop and a Blackberry. We had Mapquest, but GPS? What was that?
In the days that followed 9/11, one of the main catchphrases that seemed to be everywhere was: “God Bless America!”
For a very short time after the attacks, many otherwise lackluster Christians turned to their faith in earnest. It was a spiritual awakening for many people. As I look back on it now, it was kind of like spinning a bike wheel. You know, when you were a kid and you turned your bike over on its seat and handlebars and spun the wheels. You’d give one wheel a good hard spin and it would seem like it would go on forever. However, as the seconds ticked by, the wheel began to slow and unless you spun it again, it would eventually stop.
In essence, for many, it seems that their spiritual wheel has stopped spinning again.
“God Bless America!” became a popular bumper sticker. However, lately I’ve been seeing another one: “America, Bless God!”
I think this new version makes a good point. We. We. We. Want. Want. Want.
“God! Bless us!” Us. Us. Us. Don’t expect anything from us, God. Don’t go looking for our presence in church. Don’t expect us to GIVE TO YOU. Don’t expect our hearts to be drawn to you. But, please make sure you continue to bless us! We are special after all. We are America!
It’s a good thing that He loves us…along with everyone else. Why else would He ever put up with our obvious pride, self-indulgence, and spiritual ambivalence?
I want to share two more things with you. One is a bit of a coarse comment I made, but it really is a comment on the state of modern Christianity. The other is another bumper sticker I saw last week.
First, my comment….
This comment was made in the midst of some very close friends that my wife and I feel very comfortable around. It was a joke, of sorts, made as we were trying to unravel a tangled gold necklace that carried a cross as its focal point. One of the group jokingly said: “How would people know that I’m a Christian, if I don’t wear my cross?”
I replied as a comment on some women’s method of displaying their “faith”….
“Yeah, I could tell she was a Christian by the cross in her cleavage!”
We all burst out laughing. It was a funny moment. It’s funny because one obviously runs counter to the other. But, then….when you think about it…it’s not really funny is it? It’s true, but it’s not really funny. It’s not funny because that symbol of our faith that should draw us back to Christ and the amazing sacrifice that he made has been relegated to a piece of jewelry that apparently means very little to some of the very people who display it.
I’m not just picking on the girls. It was just how the cross is sometimes displayed by women that brought this to my mind. As a PEOPLE…men and women, many of us simply do not take Jesus Christ seriously enough to allow his sacrifice to affect how we live our daily lives. The cross is just some ambiguous symbol on church buildings and jewelry. Should it not, rather, be a beacon that calls us, that hearkens us back to humility at its foot? The foot of the cross on which the Savior of the world GAVE his life? Should it not drive us to change? To amend our lives into conformity to God’s direction?
Now, the bumper sticker…
As we were cruising around Denver with those same friends last weekend, I saw the following bumper sticker: “Try Jesus”
Now, I’m sure that the motive behind this saying is very good, and in the sense it was meant, it is a great statement to make. People are searching for fulfillment in their lives, and the suggestion to try Jesus for that fulfillment is good and right. However, it did bring to my mind another fault in our American version of Christianity. We tend to portray Jesus as the answer to every life problem. Try Jesus and your financial problems will be over. Try Jesus and your marriage problems will end. Try Jesus and your boss will love you. Try Jesus and you’ll never have a flat tire again! Try Jesus and you’ll never have another problem in your life!
In my mind that day, the saying struck me as kind of a test drive. “Take Jesus out for a spin.” “Doesn’t he just handle beautifully?” “This is the faith for you! It just fits your image!”
The trouble is, Jesus didn’t die so that we could USE him. He isn’t a tool for our manipulation. In fact, he wants us to change enough so that we can be the tool in his hands to reach others. Clearly, he never promised that our lives would be without trouble if we “tried him” out. Just examine the outcomes of the lives of the apostles and the early followers. Death and persecution followed them around everywhere they went.
However, he did die to save us. He did promise us a spiritual future that is beyond measure, and a spiritual family with God as the father, and the church as our brothers and sisters. We can have hope. We can have a purpose. We can have a mission. Like the old saying goes: “Working for God doesn’t pay very much, but the retirement benefits are out of this world!”
I guess that’s enough rambling for now. I’ll catch you all again soon.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
A Fitness Ramble
So, it's been a while since I've given any sort of update on my fitness progress. You may have noticed. Maybe not. Well, that could be due to the word "progress" being involved. I might have posted a fitness "digress" maybe. Or, perhaps, a fitness "regress." However, my ego would not allow that sort of thing....thus, no reports at all.
If you've been following my blog for a while, you know that I started out 2011 with a bang. I set a lofty goal, and I set about trying to attain it. I was walking...outside...in the freezing cold...with icicles in my nose in January and February. It was successful. I was cranking out some mileage and I lost about 15 or so pounds. I kept it up as the temperature began to moderate, but then it was time to switch to the bike and just when I should have really been laying down the miles...the proverbial wheels fell off.
First, I got sick in May...I mean really, stinkin' sick. I was out of commission for a good two weeks. Then, lots of work travel in June. The final straw that broke the back of my goal for the year was a tweaked left calf/achilles in July in a failed attempt to play softball. That pretty much shut me down for the month of July and now into August. There is just no realistic way for me to hit my goal (2011 miles in the year 2011).
I have a decision to make. Do I get discouraged and give up altogether? Maybe eat what I want and see just how big I can get before Thanksgiving? (That is my default setting.) Or, do I hit the reset button and refocus on the real point of why I set the goal in the first place?
I didn't set that goal just because I thought it would be a cool thing to be able to tell people that I did it. Most people think I was nuts for attempting it anyway. Nope. I set the goal to force myself to get serious about fitness issues and to get my body in a better place. To be healthier. To lose weight. To lower my cholesterol. To keep my blood pressure at a good level. To wear the clothes I have and to not have to keep buying bigger ones. (I have smaller ones already.) To encourage my daughters...who worry about me. To be a better husband to my wife...who probably also worries about me. Etc.
So, the bottom line is that even though my year's goal is shot in the head, I still need to be healthy, lose weight, and be fit. I won't be posting weekly progress updates, and I'm not going to push myself to walk in the freezing cold this winter (the indoor treadmill will be just fine). (Stu, you can say "I told you so" anytime now.) However, I am going to refocus my eating habits. I am going to get back on the bike if my left calf/achilles will permit. And, I'm going to still attempt to "walk my butt off!" I don't think I've gained much weight in my recent inactivity. I haven't weighed in, but I can tell by how my clothes are fitting and how I feel that I'm within a couple of pounds of 260 which is close to where I was when I stopped tracking it. Still, I would feel much better at 240 and I'd feel stellar at 220. (If I could only remember that when I'm trying to order lunch!)
Enough said.
On a side note, I've come across a couple of websites that you might find interesting:
http://www.mapmyride.com/ This is a great tool for mapping out your bike rides. It keeps track of your routes, tracks the mileage, tracks the time, give you a report on the elevation changes, ets. Check it out.
http://www.mapmywalk.com/ This does the same thing for walks.
I've also noticed that they have some other versions like "mapmyrun" and "mapmyhike." Check them out.
See you on the road....come on out and join me. Let get fit together!
Mike
If you've been following my blog for a while, you know that I started out 2011 with a bang. I set a lofty goal, and I set about trying to attain it. I was walking...outside...in the freezing cold...with icicles in my nose in January and February. It was successful. I was cranking out some mileage and I lost about 15 or so pounds. I kept it up as the temperature began to moderate, but then it was time to switch to the bike and just when I should have really been laying down the miles...the proverbial wheels fell off.
First, I got sick in May...I mean really, stinkin' sick. I was out of commission for a good two weeks. Then, lots of work travel in June. The final straw that broke the back of my goal for the year was a tweaked left calf/achilles in July in a failed attempt to play softball. That pretty much shut me down for the month of July and now into August. There is just no realistic way for me to hit my goal (2011 miles in the year 2011).
I have a decision to make. Do I get discouraged and give up altogether? Maybe eat what I want and see just how big I can get before Thanksgiving? (That is my default setting.) Or, do I hit the reset button and refocus on the real point of why I set the goal in the first place?
I didn't set that goal just because I thought it would be a cool thing to be able to tell people that I did it. Most people think I was nuts for attempting it anyway. Nope. I set the goal to force myself to get serious about fitness issues and to get my body in a better place. To be healthier. To lose weight. To lower my cholesterol. To keep my blood pressure at a good level. To wear the clothes I have and to not have to keep buying bigger ones. (I have smaller ones already.) To encourage my daughters...who worry about me. To be a better husband to my wife...who probably also worries about me. Etc.
So, the bottom line is that even though my year's goal is shot in the head, I still need to be healthy, lose weight, and be fit. I won't be posting weekly progress updates, and I'm not going to push myself to walk in the freezing cold this winter (the indoor treadmill will be just fine). (Stu, you can say "I told you so" anytime now.) However, I am going to refocus my eating habits. I am going to get back on the bike if my left calf/achilles will permit. And, I'm going to still attempt to "walk my butt off!" I don't think I've gained much weight in my recent inactivity. I haven't weighed in, but I can tell by how my clothes are fitting and how I feel that I'm within a couple of pounds of 260 which is close to where I was when I stopped tracking it. Still, I would feel much better at 240 and I'd feel stellar at 220. (If I could only remember that when I'm trying to order lunch!)
Enough said.
On a side note, I've come across a couple of websites that you might find interesting:
http://www.mapmyride.com/ This is a great tool for mapping out your bike rides. It keeps track of your routes, tracks the mileage, tracks the time, give you a report on the elevation changes, ets. Check it out.
http://www.mapmywalk.com/ This does the same thing for walks.
I've also noticed that they have some other versions like "mapmyrun" and "mapmyhike." Check them out.
See you on the road....come on out and join me. Let get fit together!
Mike
Sunday, July 24, 2011
A Muncie Boyhood: The Year of the Squirt Gun
I was fifteen and a freshman at Muncie Southside High School. It was a time of high insecurity, blackheads, pimples, and voice changes. I had almost survived my first year of high school without getting a swirly, and I was still consumed by “The Crush.”
I don’t know how it started, but that May, Muncie South was overrun with squirt guns. They were everywhere. Wet shirts. Wet walls. Slick marble and tile floors. Rumors abounded that some of the hoodlums were putting bleach in the guns, but I never saw any real evidence of that little bit of craziness. I didn’t bring one to school. I was too chicken.
I was convinced that as surely as I brought one to school, I’d get caught. I’d never been in trouble in school, except for a couple of times at Roosevelt Elementary; once in second grade when Mrs. Birch gave me a whack for talking too much and another time when I got a whack for basically being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d never been in Southside's Dean’s office and I wasn’t about to risk that record just to carry in a Smith & Wesson knockoff loaded with water.
So, for the month of May, I walked around school dodging stray streams of water, and watching all the fun everyone else was having. I almost made it to the end of the school year.
We were down to the last week of school, and I was sitting in Study Hall. To my left was my good friend, Collin. Across from me was the one to which my heart was still bound…the object of “The Crush.” Of course, she didn’t know it. I was the only one privy to that little piece of information. Tena was studying. I was,…well…I was busy being a fifteen year-old boy.
In my puberty driven mind, a light bulb flashed on with a bright idea. It was brilliant. It was a stroke of genius.
You see, my buddy Collin, he had a squirt gun on him, and I just knew that if I borrowed the plastic weapon and shot a stream of water at Tena, she would….she would…well….she’d notice me. She’d look at me. Well, a guy can hope anyway.
“Hey,” I said in whispered tones. “Can I borrow your squirt gun?”
“Sure,” he whispered back, and he handed it over to me under the cover of the study table.
With stealth, I carefully angled it over the edge of the table. I took aim at the area where her beautiful brown locks of hair fell down across her homework paper.
I fired.
I missed.
The stream of water flew with a marvelous angle over her shoulder. It flew with grace, and it carried with it my avoidance of the Dean’s office. You see, it didn’t fall safely on the floor, nor did it harmlessly hit a wall. Nope. It hit a girl I didn’t know at the next table.
It would have been nice if she’d just said something like: “Darn. I’m a little wet, but it’ll dry. It’s only water.”
But, no. She said a bunch of other things…in a very loud voice. She said words that would scorch the earth. She said stuff that she wanted to do to me. Stuff that she thought ought to be done to me.
I said “I’m sorry. It was an accident!”
She screamed some more things that ought to happen to me. Stuff she was determined would happen to me.
By now, she had drawn the attention of the study hall monitor, a woman I wasn’t particularly fond of anyway. On the one hand, the woman intervened and prevented my premature death at the hands of a slightly wet teenage girl. On the other hand, I was busted.
Of course, I had carefully slipped the gun back to Collin.
“Did you squirt that girl?” asked the monitor.
“Um, yeah. But, I didn't mean to. It was an accident and I said I was sorry,” I replied.
Turning to the raging mermaid, she asked: “Did he tell you he was sorry?”
“Yeah, but…”
“Be quiet and sit down.”
Whew! That crisis had passed.
“Give me the squirt gun,” she demanded.
Now, I’m in trouble. I didn’t have it anymore. Besides, it wasn’t mine to give to her, and I couldn’t rat out Collin. I was stuck.
“I don’t have it.”
“Where is it?”
I just looked at her.
She pressed on: “I said, ‘Where is it?’”
“Umm. I don’t have it.”
“Tell me where it is!”
By the way, Tena is definitely looking at me by this point. What a brilliant idea.
The pressure was mounting. The monitor’s temper was getting short. I was about to be in some major trouble.
“Where is it? Tell me right now!” She demanded!
“Ummm,…” I started.
Collin spoke up. “Ma’am, it’s mine,” and he handed it over. He gave himself up for me. Wow. I couldn’t believe it. I was amazed. I was relieved. I was sent to the Dean’s office, …where I was left to sit for an uncomfortable amount of time dreading my expulsion from school with only two days left in the year, ...before being released back to class.
I never got in real trouble from that event, but it just proved my original premise that I should have nothing to do with squirt guns in school. Later, I thanked Collin for fessing up.
“No problem,” he said. “That one leaked anyway.”
You would have thought that I would now be done with squirt guns, but that was not the case. I couldn’t have them at school, but I could still go crazy with them at home, so I went out and armed myself with one of the coolest water weapons I could find in the days before Super Soakers.
So, here I am wandering around the neighborhood looking for something to shoot. I could have been as mischievous as some of the other boys in the hood who targeted the gorgeous young woman who was lying in the sun…on her stomach…with the bikini top undone to avoid tan lines…but, I’m not that stupid. I’d learned that squirting nearby girls is not a good idea.
Nope. I’m not that stupid. Apparently, I’m even more stupid.
Instead, I learned that if you squirt a bumblebee, it gets waterlogged and can’t fly.
One wonderful sunny day, I was out in the back yard with my gun stalking helpless yellow and black critters, and enjoying the pleasure of seeing them struggle against the waves of water shoving them off of the clover blooms. Squirt, squirt, squirt! Bzzzzzzzz. Squirt, squirt, squirt! Bzzzzzzz.
Hours of fun.
Somehow, my stalking carried me over the fence into my neighbor, Betty’s yard. It had been her attractive daughter who had been lying in the sun previously, when I displayed enough sense not to fire at her lotioned up skin, but this day the yard was empty…except for me and the bumblebees. So, I soaked one up real good. I watched it struggle down in the grass and then crawl back up on the flower. Squirt, squirt, squirt. I did it again.
I had my fun and I sat down on the end of her carport that paralleled the side of her house. My feet were in the grass of the back yard.
I don’t know how I ended up with the large stick in my hand, but I had the gun in my left and a large stick in the right. I had probably been poking the bee with it. Anyway, there I sat relishing the joy of insect abuse, soaking up the rays of the springtime sun.
I looked down.
On my right leg…crawling over the side of my knee…ominously staring at me with tiny, hateful insectile eyes…was that water-logged bumblebee….threatening me with a wicked stinger!
“Aaaahhhhhhh!” I screamed like a little girl! I jumped up and began swinging that stick in self-defense!
Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Over and over again! As fast as I could! Hard!
I don’t know if I ever hit that bumblebee…but, I sure beat the crap out of my own right leg.
I never picked on a poor, helpless bumblebee again.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Christianity 101-Repentance
In the previous posts, we’ve been laying a foundation. Now, we are coming close to the point where we can truly put up the building. It is time for our part.
In review,…
God loves us and wants to have a relationship with us. However, we have all sinned. Because of His very nature, God cannot coexist with sin, and as a result we have separated ourselves from Him. Despite the sin on our part, God still desires that relationship, and He has devised a way for us. That way is collectively called Grace and is realized and provided in the person of Jesus Christ. The Grace of Jesus Christ is a gift, but we still have to respond to that gift. We have to take hold of it. In the last post, we read how Peter instructed those folks who were “cut to the heart” and ready to respond to the way that God had devised to REPENT and Be BAPTIZED.
(The Apostle Peter speaking…)
“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”
Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
Acts 2:36-39
Today’s topic is REPENTANCE.
What is it? Is it being sorry? Or, is it something more than that? Is there a difference between being sorry and really repenting? Since Peter said it should be done, I think it is critical that we each know and understand what it means to really repent. It isn’t a difficult concept, just one that has been watered down.
The word ‘repent’ is one of those religified words. What I mean by that is that it is a word that is a perfectly good English word, but its true meaning is lost because it has been relegated almost entirely to the realm of religion. These days, we are almost left to create our own definition.
The root of the word translated in the Bible as ‘repent’ means to turn or to return; to literally change directions. If I am walking east and I repent, then I am now walking west. I don’t just suddenly feel ‘sorry’ that I’m walking east. No, I have to go through a transition.
I realize that I am not going in the direction that I want to go.
I figure out what direction I should be going.
I decide to change directions.
And, I take action. I actually turn around and go the other way.
Repentance is an action word; not a feeling word.
So, what does this look like in action on a spiritual level?
The Apostle Paul gives us a very good description in 2 Corinthians:
Even if I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it—I see that my letter hurt you, but only for a little while—yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. At every point you have proved yourselves to be innocent in this matter. II Corinthians 7:8-11
In this particular case, Paul had taken the Corinthian church to task because they were allowing a terribly blatant sin to continue in their midst without dealing with it. (You can read I Corinthians for the details.) Their response wasn’t to just feel sorry. They didn’t sit around and mope and think about how much Paul was mad at them. No, they took action. They made changes. The status quo was no longer tolerated.
They started out with sorrow, but they took it further. It drove them to repentance. See the difference?
Today, people feel sorry, but that’s all that happens. “I’m sorry,” they say, but there’s no apparent change of personal direction.
In thinking through this post, I began to consider just how much repentance I do in my own life. I have my own set of problems and things that I struggle with as any normal human man does. I fight and I win, I fight and I fail. But, the other day, I realized that I’ve been spending too much time being ‘sorry’ and not enough time actually repenting. In my case, I knew what I needed. I needed a friend to talk to, someone I could share my struggles with that I could trust and who would help me.
Suddenly, I had a choice. I could continue to be sorry and just fight these things all by my lonesome. Or, I could change course and do the things that I knew I needed to do to truly repent. I could take the path of least resistance and continue the viscous cycle I was on, or I could do the harder thing and be open and honest, taking the needed actions to create change in my life.
Which would it be?
I headed up the more difficult road of repentance. Last weekend, I spent some time with one of my best friends in all the world. I asked him if we could be what used to be called “prayer partners.” I let him know that I needed someone in my life that I could talk to, and someone who would understand and help me to be who I needed to be. It was such a very encouraging and refreshing time.
What about you? What is your course of action?
See, here’s the thing. If you are going to repent, you can’t do it under the cover of darkness. You can’t repent in secret. If you are going to do it, it needs to be apparent, out in the open, obvious.
John (the Baptist) said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
“What should we do then?” the crowd asked.
John answered, “The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same.”
Tax collectors also came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “What should we do?”
“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.
Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”
He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.”
Luke 3:7-14
Trees do not bear fruit in secret. Real change can be seen.
Repentance is a simple concept.
For those just responding to the Grace of God found in Jesus Christ...
A. Realize you are on the wrong track
B. Decide to change tracks
C. Change
That is repentance.
The question is, are YOU ready to change?
Next topic: Baptism
In review,…
God loves us and wants to have a relationship with us. However, we have all sinned. Because of His very nature, God cannot coexist with sin, and as a result we have separated ourselves from Him. Despite the sin on our part, God still desires that relationship, and He has devised a way for us. That way is collectively called Grace and is realized and provided in the person of Jesus Christ. The Grace of Jesus Christ is a gift, but we still have to respond to that gift. We have to take hold of it. In the last post, we read how Peter instructed those folks who were “cut to the heart” and ready to respond to the way that God had devised to REPENT and Be BAPTIZED.
(The Apostle Peter speaking…)
“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”
Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
Acts 2:36-39
Today’s topic is REPENTANCE.
What is it? Is it being sorry? Or, is it something more than that? Is there a difference between being sorry and really repenting? Since Peter said it should be done, I think it is critical that we each know and understand what it means to really repent. It isn’t a difficult concept, just one that has been watered down.
The word ‘repent’ is one of those religified words. What I mean by that is that it is a word that is a perfectly good English word, but its true meaning is lost because it has been relegated almost entirely to the realm of religion. These days, we are almost left to create our own definition.
The root of the word translated in the Bible as ‘repent’ means to turn or to return; to literally change directions. If I am walking east and I repent, then I am now walking west. I don’t just suddenly feel ‘sorry’ that I’m walking east. No, I have to go through a transition.
I realize that I am not going in the direction that I want to go.
I figure out what direction I should be going.
I decide to change directions.
And, I take action. I actually turn around and go the other way.
Repentance is an action word; not a feeling word.
So, what does this look like in action on a spiritual level?
The Apostle Paul gives us a very good description in 2 Corinthians:
Even if I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it—I see that my letter hurt you, but only for a little while—yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. At every point you have proved yourselves to be innocent in this matter. II Corinthians 7:8-11
In this particular case, Paul had taken the Corinthian church to task because they were allowing a terribly blatant sin to continue in their midst without dealing with it. (You can read I Corinthians for the details.) Their response wasn’t to just feel sorry. They didn’t sit around and mope and think about how much Paul was mad at them. No, they took action. They made changes. The status quo was no longer tolerated.
They started out with sorrow, but they took it further. It drove them to repentance. See the difference?
Today, people feel sorry, but that’s all that happens. “I’m sorry,” they say, but there’s no apparent change of personal direction.
In thinking through this post, I began to consider just how much repentance I do in my own life. I have my own set of problems and things that I struggle with as any normal human man does. I fight and I win, I fight and I fail. But, the other day, I realized that I’ve been spending too much time being ‘sorry’ and not enough time actually repenting. In my case, I knew what I needed. I needed a friend to talk to, someone I could share my struggles with that I could trust and who would help me.
Suddenly, I had a choice. I could continue to be sorry and just fight these things all by my lonesome. Or, I could change course and do the things that I knew I needed to do to truly repent. I could take the path of least resistance and continue the viscous cycle I was on, or I could do the harder thing and be open and honest, taking the needed actions to create change in my life.
Which would it be?
I headed up the more difficult road of repentance. Last weekend, I spent some time with one of my best friends in all the world. I asked him if we could be what used to be called “prayer partners.” I let him know that I needed someone in my life that I could talk to, and someone who would understand and help me to be who I needed to be. It was such a very encouraging and refreshing time.
What about you? What is your course of action?
See, here’s the thing. If you are going to repent, you can’t do it under the cover of darkness. You can’t repent in secret. If you are going to do it, it needs to be apparent, out in the open, obvious.
John (the Baptist) said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
“What should we do then?” the crowd asked.
John answered, “The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same.”
Tax collectors also came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “What should we do?”
“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.
Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”
He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.”
Luke 3:7-14
Trees do not bear fruit in secret. Real change can be seen.
Repentance is a simple concept.
For those just responding to the Grace of God found in Jesus Christ...
A. Realize you are on the wrong track
B. Decide to change tracks
C. Change
That is repentance.
The question is, are YOU ready to change?
Next topic: Baptism
Sunday, July 10, 2011
A Muncie Boyhood: The Plight of the Enumerator
My youngest daughter is headed to college in just a few weeks. This summer, she has been trying without success to find a job to supplement her spending money while she is away at school. (If you are in the Indy area and you have a babysitting need or an odd job she could do for you, let me know.) Her plight has brought back some memories.
Thirty-one years ago, in the summer of 1980, I was doing the same thing in Muncie, Indiana.
Jimmy Carter was still President, and the economy was in awful shape. Iran was holding our people hostage, and we were learning the meaning of the word “malaise.” I was headed to college in West Virginia in August, and I desperately needed to find a short-term job so that I could get some money ahead.
That’s where the R.L. Polk Company entered my life, and I became an “Enumerator.”
The R.L. Polk Company was in town to gather detailed data from every single address in the entire city so that they could publish a new Muncie City Directory. They needed guys like me to go door to door to collect the necessary information. I found the ad in the Muncie Star and jumped on the job.
Now, on the face of it, it doesn’t seem like too difficult of a job. The way it worked is that the enumerators would show up at the Polk office out on Wheeling Avenue first thing each morning to get the sheets that listed the addresses that were to be covered that day. Then, he or she would head immediately to the appropriate area to begin the canvas. At the end of the day, we were supposed to just bring the papers back and turn them in.
Simple, right?
In concept, it was. In reality, they always gave you considerably more addresses to cover than any reasonable person could actually hit in a given day, and when you returned without completing your area….well, you’d have thought that you’d stolen the manager’s underwear or something. Or maybe I'd started the Enumerating Apocalypse!
“You need to get this covered! If you don’t do better than that, we’ll have to fire you! Pick it up!”
The next day, you got your unfinished area, and then the next area too. Within a couple of days, I realized that I didn’t have time to walk from door to door. No. Rather, I was basically jogging or running pretty much the entire day, every day! By the end of the summer, I was in the best physical shape of my life!
Still, it was never enough. They constantly hounded me to get more done accompanied by more threats about my job. The whole month of July in 1980 I thought I was about to be fired.
When I started this job, I was one of maybe twenty or thirty enumerators and they had a constant flow of new people, but despite the constant threats, I was one of the last three that they held onto until the project was completed. I made it all the way to the end, and despite the threats, the company was a life-saver with regard to my money for school.
Along the way, I had a few interesting interactions in my door to door enumerating.
In a neighborhood near the Ball State University campus at a nicely kept older bungalow, I stood on a large porch and attempted to gain the personal information I needed from a guy who looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. Today, it would be even more difficult to do this job because people are more careful about giving out personal information, but back then, I was expected to find out the names of all occupants. Their ages/dates of birth. Occupations. Did they own or rent. Phone numbers. Marital status. Etc.
So, I’m running down this list with this professional looking young fellow, and we get to the question about occupation.
“What is your occupation?” I asked.
“Jeweler,” he replied.
Time for a brain fart. I could not for the life of me remember how to spell the word jeweler. On top of that, being from the south side of Muncie, chances are that I was pronouncing it with one less syllable than the word actually contains… “Jewler.” So, I’m standing there a bit frozen in the process, trying to figure out how to spell the man’s occupation. He’s standing there watching me. I’ve got the paper on my clipboard held so that he could see what I’m doing.
I had a moment of brilliant stupidity. I thoughtlessly wrote the following:
OCCUPATION: Jew.
Without thinking, I had abbreviated the man’s occupational status as a jeweler with a simple “Jew.” To make matters worse, what I had done sort of occurred to me as I finished so I gave a short little chuckle at what seemed to me to be a simple mistake. However, before I could acknowledge the error in judgment, the man said: “We’re done talking!” Then abruptly, he angrily stepped back inside and slammed the door.
I was left standing there, unsure of what to do next. Should I knock and try to apologize, or just leave? I can’t remember if I tried to knock or not, but I know I never spoke to him again. I felt really bad that I had so offended him.
I promise, I’m not anti-Semitic. I was just a goofy teenage boy from the south side of Muncie who forgot how to spell jeweler.
In another occurrence, I found myself canvassing a little neighborhood of tiny two-room rentals on the east side of town, just off of 18th Street between Macedonia Avenue and Mock Street. In retrospect, it was probably ridiculous to even canvas these because I’m sure the turn-over there was fast and furious and the occupants would be completely different by the time the book was published, but there was no skipping it if I wanted to keep my job. After all, I was always on the edge of being fired.
As just a bit of background, I lived at 21st and Hackley Streets, which was just under a mile from this spot. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to park at home and walk over to this one, which was a mistake because it was further than I had really thought, and that turned out to be a major time-waster for me for that day.
The decision to park at home that day also gave me what I believe was a real brush with death. I had knocked my way into a few other uncomfortable situations, but this was the one as I look back that was the most serious.
I entered the little community of tiny rentals and began my job. I worked my way around to the back, stopping at each little house and gleaning what useful (or useless) information I could along the way. About two-thirds of the way around, I stepped up to a tiny porch on which a rough-looking guy was standing, smoking a cigarette, and watching me approach.
“Good morning,” I said. “I’m with the R.L. Polk Company, and I’m going around getting information for a new city directory. Could I ask you a few questions?”
“No.”
“Are you sure, sir?” I replied. “This is an important project because it helps the police and fire departments in the case of an emergency.”
“No! I don’t want to be in your directory! Don’t put anything about me in that book!”
“Um, okay.” As I handed him a piece of paper, I added, “Here’s an information sheet. If you change your mind, just call the number.”
“I’m not going to change my mind. You’re not going to put me in there, right?”
“No sir, participation is completely voluntary.”
“Okay, then.”
I couldn't put anything in there about him if I wanted to because other than the obvious fact that he was paranoid, I didn't know anything about him.
I went on to the next door and put the man out of my mind. After all, I’d been doing this for a few weeks and he wasn’t the first one to refuse to participate. You just learned to move on. There was no time to dwell on the rejections. In the next fifteen minutes or so, I finished up enumerating the tiny collection of what looked like Monopoly houses and headed back to my house where my car was waiting to take me to the next neighborhood on my list.
I was walking briskly west on 18th Street and mumbling to myself about being so stupid as to park at home, when a car rolled up next to me. I looked over at the older, plain-looking sedan as it slowly paced me. It was the man from the little rental house who had adamantly rejected participating.
“Hey! You’re not going to put me in that book are you?” he asked with a serious and somewhat scary look on his face.
“No sir.”
“Are you sure? Because I really don’t want to be in that book!”
“No problem, sir,” I replied. “We won’t put you in there unless you want to be in it.”
“You’re sure now?” he pressed me a bit more.
“I’m sure.”
Frankly, I was significantly uncomfortable by this point. I had never had anyone act like this before, and the company had not prepped me on what to do with a reaction like the one I was facing. It was the middle of the day, but I was on foot with my car almost a mile away.
“Well, okay,” he said. And then, he seemed to think about it for a moment, and he asked, “Do you need a ride?”
“Um, no sir. No thanks.”
He looked at me a moment longer, and then drove off.
In the years since then, I have often wondered who that guy was. Was he a serial killer? Based on his reaction, he was obviously hiding. Hiding from whom? Hiding why? What would have happened if I’d been naïve enough to jump into that car with him expecting a quick ride over to my house?
Somehow, I just don’t get the feeling that he would have taken me home.
In August, my job with the R.L. Polk Company came to an end. I never got fired even though I was threatened with it right up to the last. In fact, about a week before I was to move to Williamstown, West Virginia for my first semester of college, I got a phone call from someone at the R.L. Polk Company.
“We were wondering if you’d be interested in considering a career with the R.L. Polk Company?”
My response? “Um, no thanks.”
Thirty-one years ago, in the summer of 1980, I was doing the same thing in Muncie, Indiana.
Jimmy Carter was still President, and the economy was in awful shape. Iran was holding our people hostage, and we were learning the meaning of the word “malaise.” I was headed to college in West Virginia in August, and I desperately needed to find a short-term job so that I could get some money ahead.
That’s where the R.L. Polk Company entered my life, and I became an “Enumerator.”
The R.L. Polk Company was in town to gather detailed data from every single address in the entire city so that they could publish a new Muncie City Directory. They needed guys like me to go door to door to collect the necessary information. I found the ad in the Muncie Star and jumped on the job.
Now, on the face of it, it doesn’t seem like too difficult of a job. The way it worked is that the enumerators would show up at the Polk office out on Wheeling Avenue first thing each morning to get the sheets that listed the addresses that were to be covered that day. Then, he or she would head immediately to the appropriate area to begin the canvas. At the end of the day, we were supposed to just bring the papers back and turn them in.
Simple, right?
In concept, it was. In reality, they always gave you considerably more addresses to cover than any reasonable person could actually hit in a given day, and when you returned without completing your area….well, you’d have thought that you’d stolen the manager’s underwear or something. Or maybe I'd started the Enumerating Apocalypse!
“You need to get this covered! If you don’t do better than that, we’ll have to fire you! Pick it up!”
The next day, you got your unfinished area, and then the next area too. Within a couple of days, I realized that I didn’t have time to walk from door to door. No. Rather, I was basically jogging or running pretty much the entire day, every day! By the end of the summer, I was in the best physical shape of my life!
Still, it was never enough. They constantly hounded me to get more done accompanied by more threats about my job. The whole month of July in 1980 I thought I was about to be fired.
When I started this job, I was one of maybe twenty or thirty enumerators and they had a constant flow of new people, but despite the constant threats, I was one of the last three that they held onto until the project was completed. I made it all the way to the end, and despite the threats, the company was a life-saver with regard to my money for school.
Along the way, I had a few interesting interactions in my door to door enumerating.
In a neighborhood near the Ball State University campus at a nicely kept older bungalow, I stood on a large porch and attempted to gain the personal information I needed from a guy who looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. Today, it would be even more difficult to do this job because people are more careful about giving out personal information, but back then, I was expected to find out the names of all occupants. Their ages/dates of birth. Occupations. Did they own or rent. Phone numbers. Marital status. Etc.
So, I’m running down this list with this professional looking young fellow, and we get to the question about occupation.
“What is your occupation?” I asked.
“Jeweler,” he replied.
Time for a brain fart. I could not for the life of me remember how to spell the word jeweler. On top of that, being from the south side of Muncie, chances are that I was pronouncing it with one less syllable than the word actually contains… “Jewler.” So, I’m standing there a bit frozen in the process, trying to figure out how to spell the man’s occupation. He’s standing there watching me. I’ve got the paper on my clipboard held so that he could see what I’m doing.
I had a moment of brilliant stupidity. I thoughtlessly wrote the following:
OCCUPATION: Jew.
Without thinking, I had abbreviated the man’s occupational status as a jeweler with a simple “Jew.” To make matters worse, what I had done sort of occurred to me as I finished so I gave a short little chuckle at what seemed to me to be a simple mistake. However, before I could acknowledge the error in judgment, the man said: “We’re done talking!” Then abruptly, he angrily stepped back inside and slammed the door.
I was left standing there, unsure of what to do next. Should I knock and try to apologize, or just leave? I can’t remember if I tried to knock or not, but I know I never spoke to him again. I felt really bad that I had so offended him.
I promise, I’m not anti-Semitic. I was just a goofy teenage boy from the south side of Muncie who forgot how to spell jeweler.
In another occurrence, I found myself canvassing a little neighborhood of tiny two-room rentals on the east side of town, just off of 18th Street between Macedonia Avenue and Mock Street. In retrospect, it was probably ridiculous to even canvas these because I’m sure the turn-over there was fast and furious and the occupants would be completely different by the time the book was published, but there was no skipping it if I wanted to keep my job. After all, I was always on the edge of being fired.
As just a bit of background, I lived at 21st and Hackley Streets, which was just under a mile from this spot. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to park at home and walk over to this one, which was a mistake because it was further than I had really thought, and that turned out to be a major time-waster for me for that day.
The decision to park at home that day also gave me what I believe was a real brush with death. I had knocked my way into a few other uncomfortable situations, but this was the one as I look back that was the most serious.
 |
| 2011 E. 18th Street in Muncie. Sight of my dangerous encounter! |
I entered the little community of tiny rentals and began my job. I worked my way around to the back, stopping at each little house and gleaning what useful (or useless) information I could along the way. About two-thirds of the way around, I stepped up to a tiny porch on which a rough-looking guy was standing, smoking a cigarette, and watching me approach.
“Good morning,” I said. “I’m with the R.L. Polk Company, and I’m going around getting information for a new city directory. Could I ask you a few questions?”
“No.”
“Are you sure, sir?” I replied. “This is an important project because it helps the police and fire departments in the case of an emergency.”
“No! I don’t want to be in your directory! Don’t put anything about me in that book!”
“Um, okay.” As I handed him a piece of paper, I added, “Here’s an information sheet. If you change your mind, just call the number.”
“I’m not going to change my mind. You’re not going to put me in there, right?”
“No sir, participation is completely voluntary.”
“Okay, then.”
I couldn't put anything in there about him if I wanted to because other than the obvious fact that he was paranoid, I didn't know anything about him.
I went on to the next door and put the man out of my mind. After all, I’d been doing this for a few weeks and he wasn’t the first one to refuse to participate. You just learned to move on. There was no time to dwell on the rejections. In the next fifteen minutes or so, I finished up enumerating the tiny collection of what looked like Monopoly houses and headed back to my house where my car was waiting to take me to the next neighborhood on my list.
I was walking briskly west on 18th Street and mumbling to myself about being so stupid as to park at home, when a car rolled up next to me. I looked over at the older, plain-looking sedan as it slowly paced me. It was the man from the little rental house who had adamantly rejected participating.
“Hey! You’re not going to put me in that book are you?” he asked with a serious and somewhat scary look on his face.
“No sir.”
“Are you sure? Because I really don’t want to be in that book!”
“No problem, sir,” I replied. “We won’t put you in there unless you want to be in it.”
“You’re sure now?” he pressed me a bit more.
“I’m sure.”
Frankly, I was significantly uncomfortable by this point. I had never had anyone act like this before, and the company had not prepped me on what to do with a reaction like the one I was facing. It was the middle of the day, but I was on foot with my car almost a mile away.
“Well, okay,” he said. And then, he seemed to think about it for a moment, and he asked, “Do you need a ride?”
“Um, no sir. No thanks.”
He looked at me a moment longer, and then drove off.
In the years since then, I have often wondered who that guy was. Was he a serial killer? Based on his reaction, he was obviously hiding. Hiding from whom? Hiding why? What would have happened if I’d been naïve enough to jump into that car with him expecting a quick ride over to my house?
Somehow, I just don’t get the feeling that he would have taken me home.
In August, my job with the R.L. Polk Company came to an end. I never got fired even though I was threatened with it right up to the last. In fact, about a week before I was to move to Williamstown, West Virginia for my first semester of college, I got a phone call from someone at the R.L. Polk Company.
“We were wondering if you’d be interested in considering a career with the R.L. Polk Company?”
My response? “Um, no thanks.”
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Christianity 101-Responding to the Gift of Grace
For new readers of this series, if you are just finding this particular series, please don't start here. Go and find the other posts that pre-date this one, and start from the beginning. The basis for what I am sharing here is built there. Thanks!
Folks, it’s been a while, so let’s have a quick review.
A. God is all about the relationship. He loves us and He wants us to love Him back.
B. Sin separates us from God, not because He gets angry so much as because by His very nature, He cannot coexist with sin.
C. We have all sinned, resulting in a split with God. Our sin causes a separation with God.
D. We cannot fix this in and of ourselves.
E. God wants the relationship back so He has devised a way. That way is collectively called GRACE.
Grace is a gift, the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. In short, Jesus IS that gift of grace.
It is important that we understand the foundational concept of grace because a misunderstanding can send us spiraling off in a couple of different directions. One way leads you to the perception that it doesn’t really matter what we do or how we live; a concept that some have called “cheap grace.” The other direction discounts the importance of grace, focuses on legalistic performance, and murders spiritual motivation.
I’ve witnessed one and lived through the other.
We have to understand that we cannot earn this grace. We do not deserve it. We cannot be good enough to gain it for ourselves. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren't some expectations from our Lord as it pertains to our response to the gift. We do have to respond to the offer. We do need to act in such a way that shows our appreciation. Grace should act as a primary motivator in our lives, if not THE motivator.
A proper understanding of grace humbles the heart and motivates the life. Any other response is fed by a misunderstanding.
So, the questions arise: How does one receive this gift? What is our proper response to this offer from God?
God did not leave us hanging. Nope. He gave us some examples. There is one place in the Bible where there are specific instances of people actually starting from a point of separation, responding to the gift, and moving back into a relationship with the Father of Creation. That place is the Book of Acts. Examples galore!
Before we go there, I want to build in one more piece of foundation. Let’s look at Matthew 16:13-19.
When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
This is a famous verse; a famous interaction between Jesus and his friend Peter. There is a lot buried in that verse, and it could warrant its own post. In fact, that verse has inspired countless other writings over the centuries.
For now though, I only want to focus on two things: 1. Peter was given a set of keys, keys to the kingdom of heaven. 2. He was given the authority to BIND things on earth and LOOSE things in heaven.
Amazing. Keys are used to lock and unlock. Peter was told that he would have the authority to bind on earth and loose in heaven. Incredible responsibility. I wonder how he used that? Maybe we’ll see….take a look.
Now, to Acts, specifically Acts 2. For some background, as we enter the story, Jesus has been crucified, risen from the dead, and after spending some time with his followers, has ascended back into heaven. His followers now only number 120, and on this day, the Day of Pentecost, which is 50 days after the Passover (and roughly 50 days since Jesus’ crucifixion.), they are all gathered together. The church has not yet been established. It is still a loose fellowship of those left after the emotional events of the previous weeks.
There is a strange, rushing wind. There are tongues of fire. The Apostles begin to speak in various languages. And, then Peter stands to speak.
Acts 2:14-41
Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These men are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’
Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. David said about him:
‘I saw the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will live in hope, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the paths of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence.’
Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was ahead, he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said, ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”
Therefore let all of Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”
Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.
This is known as the beginning of the church as a body of believers. All Christians trace their heritage back to this point. What are the key points of Peter’s sermon?
1. Jesus was accredited by God—Verse 22
2. God gave Jesus into their hands—Verse 23 (They had to make a decision about Jesus…just as we do. We each need to decide what WE are going to do with him.)
3. They put Jesus to death—Verse 23 & Verse 36 (Why did Jesus need to go to the cross? Because of our sin, right? This makes us culpable for his death also. We made him the only answer to the problem of sin, which brought about his death.)
4. God raised him from the dead—Verse 24 & Verse 32 (Do you and I really believe this? Stop. Think about it.)
5. Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God—Verse 33
6. Jesus is BOTH Lord and Christ—Verse 36
Let’s take a side trip for a moment. Jesus is both Lord and Christ. Our western sensibilities like the concept of Jesus being the Christ or Messiah or Savior. We like the idea of someone saving us. It’s the ‘Lord’ part that we struggle with. Lord = Master = King = authority over our lives. That part we don’t like so much. We don’t want anyone…even Jesus…telling us what to do.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Even if we don’t like it…He’s still the Lord. He still has the authority. Self-denial won’t change that fact.
Back to the point. What did these people know at the end of this sermon?
A. God sent Jesus
B. They rejected him
C. God raised him
D. He is now their Lord and Christ
Think about that. How would you feel if you found out that the person you thought you had killed was in fact alive, and not only that, he was now your Lord/Master/King?
Ooops. Time to hide. There’s a problem, though. You can’t hide from God.
How did the people respond to the knowledge that they had sinned against their God and His son, their Lord and Savior?
"When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart…"
Cut to the heart.
Broken. Hurt deeply. In emotional pain because of their sin.
Have you been there? Ever? When was the last time? Now? What would it take to get you there?
“Brothers, what shall we do?” —What does this question tell us about these folks? I think the following:
1. They recognize their error (sin).
2. They are ready to change
3. They are open to whatever they are told…they aren’t going to fuss about the details.
Peter told them two things:
A. Repent
B. Be baptized
Would you fuss about those two things? The first one is hard to do, the second one is really easy. Typically, we ignor the first and argue about the second. Does God scratch His head and wonder why we are such goofballs?
He (Peter…the guy with the keys…the guy who can bind and loosen) said that giving those two responses would provide them with two things:
1. Forgiveness of sins (That thing that has caused the separation from God)
2. The Gift of the Holy Spirit
Those that did it were “added to their number.” At the end of that single day, the church went from 120 believers to 3120 believers.
What a day!
In our next installment, we’ll explore the word “Repentance.” We’ll follow that up with another post on “Baptism.” Look for those two posts in coming weeks.
Adios...or Go with God!
Folks, it’s been a while, so let’s have a quick review.
A. God is all about the relationship. He loves us and He wants us to love Him back.
B. Sin separates us from God, not because He gets angry so much as because by His very nature, He cannot coexist with sin.
C. We have all sinned, resulting in a split with God. Our sin causes a separation with God.
D. We cannot fix this in and of ourselves.
E. God wants the relationship back so He has devised a way. That way is collectively called GRACE.
Grace is a gift, the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. In short, Jesus IS that gift of grace.
It is important that we understand the foundational concept of grace because a misunderstanding can send us spiraling off in a couple of different directions. One way leads you to the perception that it doesn’t really matter what we do or how we live; a concept that some have called “cheap grace.” The other direction discounts the importance of grace, focuses on legalistic performance, and murders spiritual motivation.
I’ve witnessed one and lived through the other.
We have to understand that we cannot earn this grace. We do not deserve it. We cannot be good enough to gain it for ourselves. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren't some expectations from our Lord as it pertains to our response to the gift. We do have to respond to the offer. We do need to act in such a way that shows our appreciation. Grace should act as a primary motivator in our lives, if not THE motivator.
A proper understanding of grace humbles the heart and motivates the life. Any other response is fed by a misunderstanding.
So, the questions arise: How does one receive this gift? What is our proper response to this offer from God?
God did not leave us hanging. Nope. He gave us some examples. There is one place in the Bible where there are specific instances of people actually starting from a point of separation, responding to the gift, and moving back into a relationship with the Father of Creation. That place is the Book of Acts. Examples galore!
Before we go there, I want to build in one more piece of foundation. Let’s look at Matthew 16:13-19.
When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
This is a famous verse; a famous interaction between Jesus and his friend Peter. There is a lot buried in that verse, and it could warrant its own post. In fact, that verse has inspired countless other writings over the centuries.
For now though, I only want to focus on two things: 1. Peter was given a set of keys, keys to the kingdom of heaven. 2. He was given the authority to BIND things on earth and LOOSE things in heaven.
Amazing. Keys are used to lock and unlock. Peter was told that he would have the authority to bind on earth and loose in heaven. Incredible responsibility. I wonder how he used that? Maybe we’ll see….take a look.
Now, to Acts, specifically Acts 2. For some background, as we enter the story, Jesus has been crucified, risen from the dead, and after spending some time with his followers, has ascended back into heaven. His followers now only number 120, and on this day, the Day of Pentecost, which is 50 days after the Passover (and roughly 50 days since Jesus’ crucifixion.), they are all gathered together. The church has not yet been established. It is still a loose fellowship of those left after the emotional events of the previous weeks.
There is a strange, rushing wind. There are tongues of fire. The Apostles begin to speak in various languages. And, then Peter stands to speak.
Acts 2:14-41
Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These men are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’
Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. David said about him:
‘I saw the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will live in hope, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the paths of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence.’
Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was ahead, he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said, ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”
Therefore let all of Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”
Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.
This is known as the beginning of the church as a body of believers. All Christians trace their heritage back to this point. What are the key points of Peter’s sermon?
1. Jesus was accredited by God—Verse 22
2. God gave Jesus into their hands—Verse 23 (They had to make a decision about Jesus…just as we do. We each need to decide what WE are going to do with him.)
3. They put Jesus to death—Verse 23 & Verse 36 (Why did Jesus need to go to the cross? Because of our sin, right? This makes us culpable for his death also. We made him the only answer to the problem of sin, which brought about his death.)
4. God raised him from the dead—Verse 24 & Verse 32 (Do you and I really believe this? Stop. Think about it.)
5. Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God—Verse 33
6. Jesus is BOTH Lord and Christ—Verse 36
Let’s take a side trip for a moment. Jesus is both Lord and Christ. Our western sensibilities like the concept of Jesus being the Christ or Messiah or Savior. We like the idea of someone saving us. It’s the ‘Lord’ part that we struggle with. Lord = Master = King = authority over our lives. That part we don’t like so much. We don’t want anyone…even Jesus…telling us what to do.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Even if we don’t like it…He’s still the Lord. He still has the authority. Self-denial won’t change that fact.
Back to the point. What did these people know at the end of this sermon?
A. God sent Jesus
B. They rejected him
C. God raised him
D. He is now their Lord and Christ
Think about that. How would you feel if you found out that the person you thought you had killed was in fact alive, and not only that, he was now your Lord/Master/King?
Ooops. Time to hide. There’s a problem, though. You can’t hide from God.
How did the people respond to the knowledge that they had sinned against their God and His son, their Lord and Savior?
"When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart…"
Cut to the heart.
Broken. Hurt deeply. In emotional pain because of their sin.
Have you been there? Ever? When was the last time? Now? What would it take to get you there?
“Brothers, what shall we do?” —What does this question tell us about these folks? I think the following:
1. They recognize their error (sin).
2. They are ready to change
3. They are open to whatever they are told…they aren’t going to fuss about the details.
Peter told them two things:
A. Repent
B. Be baptized
Would you fuss about those two things? The first one is hard to do, the second one is really easy. Typically, we ignor the first and argue about the second. Does God scratch His head and wonder why we are such goofballs?
He (Peter…the guy with the keys…the guy who can bind and loosen) said that giving those two responses would provide them with two things:
1. Forgiveness of sins (That thing that has caused the separation from God)
2. The Gift of the Holy Spirit
Those that did it were “added to their number.” At the end of that single day, the church went from 120 believers to 3120 believers.
What a day!
In our next installment, we’ll explore the word “Repentance.” We’ll follow that up with another post on “Baptism.” Look for those two posts in coming weeks.
Adios...or Go with God!
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