Month: August 2019

I love my friends but it concerned me a little when I realized that out of the four of us that were hanging out together this evening shooting our bows to get ready for deer season I was the only one NOT wearing camo Crocs. When I am the most fashionable person in a group you know something is seriously wrong. 🙂

I believe my brother-in-law (hey Jim) will disagree with me on how amazingly valuable they are, but it is a free country and he is free to be wrong 😁. I love credit unions. I think they are great and everyone should be a member of a good credit union.

I watched the video below during some new employee training at the credit union at which I serve and of which Pam and I are members (Yeah Connexus Credit Union) and it reminded me all the more of some of the reasons I love Credit Unions.

The video is very well done and is narrated by Edward Hermann, so that is a win too.

I believe a person should have at least two financial institutions with varying degrees of liquidity in them (one primary and a second one with enough money in it in case something really bad happens at the primary). Our other banking-type financial institution is a traditional bank and I keep seriously thinking of swapping to a second credit union just to get rid, as much as possible, of using a bank. I really like the cooperative nature of credit unions and it doesn’t hurt that they generally give better rates to their members since they are tax-exempt and aren’t needing to pay huge profits to their shareholders. If you aren’t a member of a credit union I would encourage you to find one that you can join (i.e. there are different types: community, associational, educational, etc.)

SIDE NOTE – in my opinion one should NEVER EVER bank with Wells Fargo. To quote my personal finance guru Clark Howard “They are a criminal enterprise masquerading as a bank.”

For the past 30 minutes I have been browsing through my Google Photos account looking at various photos trying to find the one that I wanted to post to say how thankful and grateful I am for the 29 years Pam and I have been married thus far. There are many, many photos I could post that partially demonstrate why I love this woman so much. Part of that is because she is so awesome, part of that is that we’ve been together for a long time (29 years plus 5 1/2 year dating from High School), and part of it is that as a family we tend to take a lot of photos.

Looking through thousands of photos has been a good reminder that I am incredibly thankful for this amazing woman and her part in shaping a family that I absolutely adore. We’ve been lucky in some ways and worked incredibly hard in others to make sure that our marriage and family are strong. I bring up both because I believe both are true. Sometimes our work on making our marriage the best it could be was what accomplished the goal of a healthy marriage and other times we didn’t have to face challenges that others have had to face and for that I am thankful. In a marriage you can’t guarantee everything, but you can work hard to make sure you put yourself in the best circumstances for health in your relationship. I am very thankful for the luck and the work. It has been worth it.

Happy Anniversary my love (actually I’ve told her that in person so I don’t really know why I am writing it here).

G.K. Chesterton possibly wrote:

“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”

I wrote “possibly” above because I can’t find a citation where Chesterton actually said or wrote this so I’m not sure he did write or say it. I did find a discussion here concerning whether Chesterton wrote this exact phrase or not. Regardless of whether or not Chesterton actually wrote the statement I really like the point of the sentence so I’m going to use it as a starting point and admit that it might be apocryphal that he wrote the saying.

I’m not sure that you can rate sacredness but if you could I grow to believe a little more each day that ordinary moments done well (in light of God and others) are among the most sacred. The special or “mountain top” moments sure feel holy and majestic but I don’t actually think that their feel counts for much. The holiest moment of Christendom was the time Jesus spent on the cross and while we modern believers may get goose bumps thinking about it or during passion plays I don’t get the impression from scripture that anyone involved thought anything special was going on. Mainly people responded in fear, pain, and most sad of all, just plain ordinariness. For the vast majority of people who looked upon the crucified Son of God He was just another of thousands of crucifixions they may have seen during their lifetime. God was brutalized and hung upon a cross and Jerusalem went along with the typical business of the festival week. Nothing stopped. Ordinary life continued.

Jesus’s life before His ministry was probably amazingly normal and ordinary. The vast majority of Jesus’ life was made of activities that though sacred, because the Divine was involved in them, were so ordinary that no one considered writing them down. Almost nothing, other than one scene when He was a pre-teen, is written of Jesus from the age of 2 to 30. We expected God to come down and for everything He did to be extraordinary but instead most of what He did ordinary, which is so extraordinary that we struggle to comprehend it.

I am presently in love with a song by Waterdeep titled “Why Does God Have to Look So Human” from their musical “The Unusual Tale of Mary & Joseph’s Baby“. In this song Mary sings of the struggle she has when God presenting Himself within humanity and especially within humanity as a baby. To quote from last lyric of the song, “And he doesn’t look like power, oh no. Instead… He looks like me.” What I love about this song is its description of how the Incarnation brought humanity into God. When God chose to be Incarnate suddenly the ordinary became sacred because it became part of what God did. Eating, cleaning, working, napping, laughing, crying , etc. all became a part of the sacred because they were activities that Jesus, God incarnate, did. All of these became moments in which we can interact with the Divine.

I think this is part of the reason that I love Brother Lawrence‘s simple little book “The Practice of the Presence of God.” Lawrence tried to practice God’s presence in all that he did. Which is why it is said of Lawrence that “Peeling potatoes was more essential for Brother Lawrence’s spiritual growth than attending the evening prayer service because Brother Lawrence recognized that God was there in the kitchen as much as he was in the chapel. ” This wasn’t an excuse for Lawrence to miss evening prayer service as some people use similar phrases as excuses to miss their own religious duties. “I can connect with God while playing golf or fishing.” Yes you can but I would bet money that if you are using that as an excuse then you probably aren’t connecting with God during those times. You might feel a moment of the majestic but you aren’t really being connected with and changed by God. Lawrence recognized that God was in the kitchen and he allowed the divine to shape and change him even while he was peeling potatoes. Being in the kitchen was a prayer service for Brother Lawrence because the ordinary was sacred for him.

David Thoreau wrote “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

My understanding of what Thoreau meant by that line and the sentences around it in Walden is that the vast majority of us live lives of misplaced value and then try to make up for that misplaced value with things like money, possessions, experiences, etc. To put it into the point of this post we have lives full of the mundane and try to make up for it with big meaningful, exciting moments that we call memories because we think these big moments are the most meaningful parts and what life is all about. “Ah! This is life!” Nope.

The ordinary is the majority of our life and therefore as a Christian I believe it is where we probably most interact with God. So therefore my encouragement today is for us to experience God in the ordinary today.

For me that will probably look like recognizing God in the midst of…

• eating breakfast with my wife and thanking God for her and the ability to enjoy my nourishment – Thank you for these tastes Father.
• removing pegboard from our smashed garage and being thankful for the ability to work and that the tree didn’t hurt anyone – You created me to have tired muscles, thank You for this feeling.
• finalizing the sermon for tomorrow and thinking about how God has and wants to work in and through Tapestry – Father, I am so grateful for the community of faith of which I am a part.
• walking Clive and being reminded of a magnificent Creator – Help me to be as loyal to You as Clive is to me.
• hopefully fishing with Noah recognizing the beauty with which God made His world. – What beauty you have put into the world Oh God.
• riding with Clive in the Mustang and enjoying the weather that God has given us – This wind and Bob Marley music are so wonderfully enjoyable, Thanks.
• reading in bed and enjoying the new thoughts and experiences that God allows me to have – How many ideas and stories have you allowed Father?
• ending my day with a prayer thanking God for it all for the ordinary can be sacred and hopefully today mine will be – Ahhh. You were in this day.

What a wonderfully, sacred, ordinary day today is going to be!

Recently one of the companies I chaplain for went through active shooter training. This was your basic ADD training.

• Avoid – get away from the shooter
• Deny – hide and use attempted to block the shooter’s access to you
• Defend – attack the shooter as a last resort

I believe this was good training for us to go through as long as we understand the actual proportional risk we face of an active shooter. I think the danger with thinking about mass shootings is, as C.S. Lewis describes with the danger of the demonic in his classic work The Screwtape Letters, to think either too little or too much about them. Like a fire drill it is good for us to be prepared. After all there is a risk, though a an almost minusculely small one, that we will one day need this information. Unfortunately our wonderful, God-given instinct to fear danger can go hyperactive and lead us to unreasonably fear things to the point of being paralyzed by events that are extremely unlikely to ever happen to us. That unreasonable fear stops us from not only enjoying our daily lives but also responding in love to the opportunities around us. Fear paralyzes us, love mobilizes us.

For example, your chance of dying in a mass shooting is around 1 in 110,154 (2016 stats). That’s not something that I want to completely disregard but it also isn’t something that I want to shape my life around. To give you some comparisons that chance is close the same chance that you will die from a dog attach (1 in 112,400) or legal execution (1 in 119,012) but more likely than being killed by lightning (1 in 161,856). Whereas much more likely means of death include, obviously, hearts disease (1 in 6), cancer (1 in 7), and motor vehicle accident (1 in 103) but also death by fall ((1 in 114), drowning (1 in 1,117), fire/smoke (1 in 1,474), and death by hornet, wasp, or bee sting (1 in 46,045). I am much more concerned about tripping on one of the cats and falling to my death than I am of Clive the Basset turning vicious and killing me. Both could happen but one is definitely more probable.

I’m not sure about you but I don’t mess around with lightning, I’m not going to go running around in a lightning storm holding a big metal pole, but I also don’t fear it to the point that it keeps me from doing my daily activities or even running while it rains.

So all I am saying is try to let the facts reassure you that you don’t have to live in fear. As horrific as terrorist acts like mass shootings are our chance of being involved in one isn’t very great. Fear is usually what terrorist are hoping for. Be smart enough to know what to do if you are ever, God for bid, in one but don’t live in fear of something that you will probably never personally experience. So you don’t have to respond in fear of crowds and fear of every stranger because you most probably won’t ever be in an active shooter situation. You don’t have to walk around like you are in an active war zone or always sit with you back to the wall in an hyper-aware mindset even when you are out to dinner. You don’t have to live in fear and in my opinion if you are a Christian you shouldn’t live in fear.

I think understanding unreasonable fears is incredibly important for those of us who profess Jesus as Lord because first we were not given a spirit of fear (2 Timothy 1:7) , and second unreasonable fears often keep us from doing the things that Jesus calls us to do such as caring for the foreigners in our midst. For example, consider the Ebola scare of 2014 (I wrote about the church and Ebola here). Remember the fear that was associated with helping people and countries sufferings from Ebola? Many people who claimed to be Christians responded in great fear rather than great love over a crisis that never really ended up affecting us very much. There was a great deal of sound and fury, but in the end nothing really for us to fear. Still that fear led some Christians to act in very unChristian manners toward those in need. When we respond in love instead of fear we tend to do great things. Again fear paralyzes us, love mobilizes us.

Try to listen to the voices of love rather than fear. I think it leads to a more God honoring life.

As a pastor and a chaplain I not only officiate many funerals but I also think that as a chaplain I probably attend more funerals than many other ministers. Seriously chaplains attend a lot of funerals because you have connections with lots of different people from many different areas of life, not just the people in your church or friend/family circle. When I first started writing this blog post (some months ago) I had attended /helped officiated 6 funerals in the four weeks prior to starting to write the post. Funerals are simply a normal part of my daily life. I have experienced some really amazing funerals and I have been present for some horrendous ones.

Before I give my thoughts let me just say these thoughts are from my white-middle class perspective. Other cultures have very different funeral practices and my thoughts might go against the grain for those practices. For example, Hmong funerals in our area. So just remember these are my thoughts from my perspective. I think they may be helpful but if their aren’t just ignore them.

So here are my few thoughts on some attributes that help to make for a life-giving funeral :

• It is personal – I don’t mean by this that it is small or intimate. I have watched as some officiants tried to talk personal about the deceased and I was fairly sure that every one in the room could tell that the minister had never actually met the person who he/she is eulogizing or spent anytime with the family members to hear stories about the deceased. The most amazing funerals I have ever been a part of have involved the minister also being one of the ones who grieves, but I have also seen some funerals where the minister didn’t know the deceased but had obviously spent enough time with the relatives to speak of the relatives’ thoughts and feelings and these were still wonderful funerals

• It is genuine – I am not suggesting that we speak ill of the dead, but I have been to a few funerals where all that was said about the deceased was overly positive, vague, overarching, and pretty much meaningless. Everyone’s a saint when they die is only true for those who really didn’t know the deceased. Some of the most amazing funerals I have ever been to have acknowledged the deceased’s faults in such a manner that you knew people loved him/her despite, and sometimes because of, their faults. Two people got up at my father’s funeral and talked about how cheap he was and all I did was smile because I knew that they actually knew and loved my dad and his cheap ways. I’ve been to funerals were lots of flowery words were said about the deceased that everyone in the room knew weren’t true. “He would give the shirt off his back,” but no one can name an example of him doing anything close. “She loved her family greatly,” except for the family members that she hurt over and over again. Cliché, cliché, cliché, ad infinitum because that what you say when you feel like you can’t say the truth.

• It acknowledges death – this one may seem a little strange because you would think that a funeral would obviously acknowledge death but often they don’t. We are so scared of death that we no longer like to even call them funerals. Nope, we call them “celebrations of life” and we talk about everything except the fact that we are going to miss our loved one and that their absence hurts. At funerals we gather together to help each grieve. Sometimes that grief involves laughter and smiles but those laughs and smiles come with sadness and pain. If we just run away from the pain then we don’t help anyone grieve.

• It points beyond itself – Yes I am a person of faith but I think this is true regardless of whether a person is actually a person of faith or not. I believe funerals should remind us of things that are bigger than ourselves. Specifically I believe there should be a connection with the divine but even if you aren’t a believer I think that funerals should help the living to have a long view of life. When it points beyond itself a good funeral allows those who have died before us to shape what we leave for those who will come after us. Funerals help us to think in terms greater than our own existence on this earth.

• It has some structure – The worst funerals I have ever been too have had no structure whatsoever. Everything doesn’t have to be written down and planned but please have a little structure. Have the people doing the eulogies think about and possibly write down what they are going to say. Figure out the music beforehand (seriously I have been to a funeral where people were scrolling through a phone trying to find a song that they thought the deceased would like to play on the sound system). Some structure recognizes that there are people at the funeral with varying degrees of grief. Some are just there for the family and want to let the family know that they hurt with them. Others are there to be comforted and need to be comforted for a long time. A horrific scene is when you can tell that a large group has taken off work to be there for the family and they begin to realize that this funeral isn’t going to end when they had been told and they are going to need to make other work or childcare arrangements or just duck out without giving their condolences to the family. I have seen people squirm. Whereas I have been to some highly structured funerals full where every word was prescribed that were still amazingly personal and meaningful.

These are just a few of my thoughts as someone who goes to many funerals. What I know is that I hope for those I love to have funerals that help all those who love them, including me, to grieve their loss , remember the deceased, and most importantly point to the God of life Who is there to comfort all who grieve.