Category: personal

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Singing the Doxology with Tapestry

I am presently sitting outside in our backyard listening to Sandra McCraken’s live album “Steadfast Live” and hoping that the Thermacell Lamp I just lit will start chasing away the mosquitoes quickly. Seriously, Thermacell is great – I attract mosquitoes like I’m a free steak dinner and two lamps pretty much keep our whole patio free of these stupid little creatures, even when I am around. I just reached the point in the album where she stops singing into her mic and everyone there sings the doxology. It reminded that my favorite part of gathering with the “threads” of Tapestry each week is when we sing the doxology together as our ending prayer (well that and setup – I really like setup too. It is pretty awesome and fun). I’ve written before concerning why ending the doxology is so meaningful to me.

The sound of us singing the Doxology is one of the things that I have missed with us gathering at the IDEA Center during the Summer. Though I am very thankful for the IDEA Center letting us meet there during the Summer and I will continue to support Create Portage County because it is a great organization, the acoustics in the IDEA Center aren’t as amazing for the a cappella singing of the Doxology each week. I love it when the words “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow” echo around the hardwood basketball court and mason brick walls of the gym. That floor and those walls may make hearing the rest of our gatherings pretty difficult sometimes but they make the Doxology sound amazing. “Praise God” bounces around and around on all those hard surfaces.

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Amen.

While I sit here watching the fire burn down, enjoying the fact that the Thermacell is now working to the point that I haven’t been bitten by a mosquito in a while, and sadly not seeing any flying squirrels because I ran out of corn Thursday and apparently I am nothing more than a free meal to these cute flying rodents, I am also smiling while thinking about singing the Doxology with my friends and family. Today’s message was about Jesus being raised on the 1st day of the week, the 8th day, a new 1st day of the New Creation. If you are bored or need some good sleep producing reading material you can find the written version of the message here (typos and all). In my opinion, remembering the Doxology and living it out is a pretty good way to live out the joy and hope that are a part of the dawn of the 8th day, the 1st day of the New Creation that we will continue to live in till Jesus makes the day finally break and we live in God’s Kingdom face to face and no longer see His Kingdom through a glass darkly. When people who proclaim Jesus to be Lord live the Doxolgy we will remember the rules of the 8th day, the 1st day of the New Creation, (the Beatitudes). We will live hope instead of fear, love instead of hate, we forgive instead of judging, we welcome the other instead of despising the stranger, we welcome in our neighbor instead of turning our backs to needs both big and small, etc., etc.

Praise God from Whom all blessings flow. May it echo through my, and your, week.

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EOG Rant – Too Many Choices Coke Dispenser

I have mentioned before the Pamela thinks that I have EOG (Early Onset Grumpiness), as described in this great Portlandia sketch.

Well according to Pamela my EOG came out today.

You see the power went out at our house so we decided to go out to eat after church rather than open our refrigerator and let the cold air out. We went to Qdoba. I like Qdoba, it serves a good product, fast, in a nice environment. Unfortunately the Qdoba in Stevens Point, Wisconsin also has this type of Coke dispenser.

Too many choices, not enough spouts, and touchscreens that almost never work. ARGH!!!!!

I HATE these Coke dispensers (I know my Midwestern friends would say “Soda dispensers” but I’m sticking with Coke for this post so you can deal with it – see my EOG is coming out) . These single spout, tons of choices dispensers drive me CRAZY! They slow everything down. Don’t give people all these choices. We can’t handle all these choices. All that happens is that someone is going to look through all the choices, be overwhelmed by it all, and then just go ahead and pick Cherry Coke. ARGH!!!!!! You wasted all that time just to get something that most normal dispensers have!!!!!! Just give us a regular multi-spout Coke dispenser with Water, Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, and throw in a surprise flavor every now and then as a treat. “Hey look this dispenser has raspberry flavored half Dr. Pepper/half Spite. That could be interesting.” See that’s fun and fast!

Breathe Robert. Breathe.

Anyhow I think I have figured out how to allow these dispensers for those foolish enough to enjoy wasting their time and still take care of us normal people. You can have one of these “too many choices, not enough spouts, and touchscreens that almost never work” dispensers at your restaurant if you have at least one other multi-spout Coke dispenser in the restaurant too. That way I can go quickly grab my regular Diet Coke while you have to wait for your preteen to try every combination possible. See this would be a win for everyone.

Qdoba you should fix this. Your burrito bowls are great and all but the drink situation is horrendous.

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What Punishments of God are not Gifts?

I love me some Stephen Colbert. I am so glad he is a brother in Christ.

As best I can determine he is paraphrasing from a letter of Tolkien’s which state:

A divine ‘punishment’ is also a divine ‘gift’ (emphasis mine), if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make ‘punishments’ (that is changes of design) produce a good not otherwise to be attained: a ‘mortal’ Man has probably (an Elf would say) a higher if unrevealed destiny than a longeval one.

Dang that is good. Also really cool to see two grown men dealing with the emotions of loss and grief (ht to Pamela on that one)

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I Love Credit Unions

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.”

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Carpenter vs. Gardener

In a couple of weeks Pam and I are going to get to lead a parenting seminar for one of the companies that I chaplain. This company does a lot of training for their employees on how to improve their professional skills set and they have also begun to offer many seminars for their employees concerning aspects of life. For example, a year ago I did a seminar on relationships and marriage for any employees who were interested. We had around 40 that were. From the relationships and marriage seminar came a request for a parenting seminar and I told them that Pam might be willing to come in (I’m paying her with lunch) to help lead such a seminar. As a PhD Professor in Communicative Science & Disorders Pam is an invaluable resource on parenting. They agreed and we will be leading the seminar in a couple of weeks. I will just be there because I fit Will Roger’s definition of an expert “A man fifty miles from home with a briefcase.” Also I know a little bite about adolescents being as I was a Youth Minister for 20 years and I studied a good bit for that. But mainly I come from 50 miles away and I have a briefcase (actually it is a possible).

We haven’t map everything out yet but we are using a metaphor that Pam and I both love for parenting concerning carpentry and gardening. It comes from this Alison Gopnik’s book “The Gardener and the Carpenter” which we first learned about from this episode of Hidden Brain (a podcast I encourage you to listen to).

A brief description is that many people want to parent like being a carpenter, you have a set of plans and the end result is the product of whether or not you follow those plans accurately or whether or not the plans were accurate. In this model if your kid is “broken” (and I use that term merely for this example) then it probably means that you weren’t following the right plans or you didn’t have the correct skills to implement the correct plans. For a carpenter the end result is controllable if you have the right skills and plans. When a carpenter builds a house she chooses the materials to build the house and imposes her will on the material to achieve her desired results.

The gardener is different though, there aren’t set plans, though there are best practices. In gardening there are tons of uncontrollable factors. You can do everything right and everything still goes to pot. You can also do everything wrong and still, somehow, achieve tremendous results. Some times there is too much rain and other times not enough. Sometimes the soil is perfect and other times it has too much of one component in it. Sometimes the soil you have simply won’t grow what you were hoping for, but the gardener works with the soil he has to produce the best it can produce. Gardening means working with what you have and improvising with the environment, your circumstances, and your skills to put your garden in the best situation for the growth that fits that soil. In the end though the gardener never makes anything grow, he just encourages the growth. Gardening is like improvisational jazz.

Pam and I think parenting is more like this. You are helping kids to grow into who they are and can be, rather than imposing a set plan on them. It is a metaphor that I think works for and can give direction to lots of different situations and areas of life, not just parenting. I am looking forward to exploring this with Pam and the workers at one of the companies where I chaplain. Primarily I will be showing off my wife who is amazingly talented and one of the best gardeners I know in people’s lives. If you don’t know her you should. She’s pretty awesome.

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29 Years + 5 1/2

Pam and me at a High School dance. You can tell from the backdrop that our High School spared no expense when it came to dances.

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).

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The Ordinary Sacred

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!

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Active Shooter Training & Living in Fear

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.

The chance that Clive the basset will kill you is significantly less than the chance that Helen the cat will trip you and break your neck.

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.