Evil

I don't know why he did it but Jesse took his own life last night. He was a gang-banger from Lansing, did 6 years for manslaughter starting at 18 yrs. old. He started following Christ while he was inside. Worked on a roofing crew and did youth ministry when he got out. He was one of my best friend's nephews. He called my friend his mentor. I met him a couple years ago. He was a little guy, engaging but humble. His eyes shown brightly with life. He was one person that could describe freedom.

He lived with two of his brothers. In the past month he'd been withdrawn, coming home from work and retreating to his room to study the bible. Just in the past couple of days he started talking again but only surface stuff, nothing too deep. This morning he's gone, in the physical, reach-out-and-hug sense.

He had so much to offer a world of black and white. His life was every shade of gray.

Oh God hear me. Please do not let this tragic event be swept away without your sweet redemption. I pray you move in power among Jesse's brothers and his parents to move them to a new reality in you.

It got me thinking about sin. Yes it is wrong to take your own life but it is no more wrong than materialism, sloth, or unforgiveness. Oh Jesse my heart grieves for you and your family.

Child Theology

I stood in the long wet grass in my bare feet beside my sister. I held the plastic knife in my fat little hand and looked into the deep blue sky. I can still smell the chemical residue of the huge green pipe my dad scrounged from the chemical plant, the dog shit, and the fresh spring breeze that insisted on putting itself on record in spite of the gloom we felt beneath the low but warm May sun. Were it not for that breeze I'm sure the whole memory would be in moldy sepia. Instead, my sister's sleeveless white sundress with the periwinkle flowers, my blue elastic-waste shorts and the dandelion-infested rich green grass lay imprinted on my life. I don't know why she was angry with us. I don't know why she screamed at us to get outside before she brained us but whatever it was seemed so painful at the time. It must have been for me to grab that plastic knife on my way through her kitchen.

"I jus' wanna go see God, I'm tired of being alive" I told my sister. "I'll cut my wrist first and you can do yours next and then we'll go to heaven together!" "No, God don't like us to bleed and I don't like it either so we can't" she scolded me. "It'll be okay, lets go swing" and we did.

New Chapter

When my son left home to go to boarding school never to return to live with us again it was a depth of emotion and pain that I'm not sure I really have felt before. Last night a new chapter was written when my 16 yr. old daughter came into the room I was busily writing in and just stood there grinning. She asked me what I was writing and sat down and read some of it and somehow she turned the conversation to the family down the street that moved in about a year ago. The father of the family is a fiction writer, songwriter, singer, and pastor of a church that meets in a theatre in a nearby city. He has a son a year older than my daughter. I've met him and he seems like a nice kid. BUT, I am not ready to release my little girl's hand into some pimple-faced, hormone-powered, bible-thumping, son of an evangelizard. There, now that I've got that off my chest I want to say that I'm excited for her. She's liked this kid for awhile now, went to his bible studies where he preaches to other teens (and usually draws anywhere between a dozen and two dozen kids - but not the ones you'd think, the ones that seem to be the outcasts and you'd think they'd be too cool to buy this God stuff) about purity and living their lives to God's glory, and she has spent quite a bit of time with his parents as well. She wasn't allowed to date until she turned 16, which was less than a month ago, and remarkably his dad had told him he couldn't until he was 18 but he must have caved in. Anyway, my heart is broken at the thought of my little girl, who suffered through her daddy french-braiding her hair at 5:00 a.m. just to be the "best" daddy I could in others eyes, becoming a woman. We had a tough year together last year but we rode out the storm and we are closer because of it.

You know, we have no money, we have one car working right now and we're two months behind in our mortgage. The Michigan economy is slow and we are having to change our lifestyle drastically because of it. I would love to try and call that suffering but I can't. I have no friends with time to sit around and talk. I can't get the book written that is inside me and no goal that I have set seems even worth looking at right now but there are little things. Little things like last night with my daughter. Little things like the birds that come to the feeder. Little things like wondering at how so many people KNOW so much but really just have heard it from someone else and have these exponentially large number of tiers between really knowing and just believing, yet cannot accept that others DO exactly the same thing and cannot forgive them in their ignorance. I thought it ludicrous one time when a pastor friend told a troubled lady that she had to quit trying so hard and take some time to just "be". I believe he was right. I am thankful for being. I'm thankful for the loss and the gain and little Calvin sitting in the chair drifting off to sleep while I read. I'm thankful for the lit up faces of my little ones as they watch me scan a toy car into the computer. I'm thankful for the snowmen we built and the way that my heart has been ripped out every time I get the idea that I have a direction to head in. Its all worth it.

Shalom.

Persecution Alert

Dr. Peter Jones of "Christian Witness to a Pagan Planet". Listen to him on itunes on the Resurgence Podcast with Gary Shavey.

I know these guys are really trying but they are somehow getting it wrong. Putting a line between created and creator for the sake of mankind is like worshipping a painting of Jesus, no hands or feet. One of the reasons we are created in his image is because he uses us to get things done. If the world is to be saved we need to understand we are the ridiculous way that God will do it because any other way would not be like God. It would be like, put it on velvet with some blacklights.

Talking about 'blurring the lines' between Christian and pagan. Pagan means outsiders. I guess I'm one of them if to be inside means to only understand part of Christianity. The fruit of that remains to be seen. The fruit of name-calling like these guys are doing is called a witch hunt. It is ironic that that is what Peter Jones warns Gary Shavey about as they speak together. Check it out on itunes.

Transparency

Confession is for me, not them. Everyone else already knows my sin. They know yours too. Secrets are an illusion for those stuck on earth.

Marsupial Love

My son came home to visit last night. We had a wonderful evening but he spent plenty of time on his phone talking and texting. About 2 months ago his girlfriend of 18 mos. called their relationship quits. They spent so much time together that for all intents and purposes they were married, joined at the soul, a couple. So after about a month of grief and sorrow and anger he went out with another girl. They enjoyed spending time together too and soon they are a couple. Girlfriend number one hears through the grapevine that this is happening and wants to reconcile.

So last night I was sitting with my wife tearfully listening to some music that my friend Nektarios sent me, when Roman transforms the scene with tears of his own. Broken hearted, he has told girlfriend no. 1 and no. 2 that he will no longer be trying to maintain relationship, platonic or otherwise, with girlfriend no. 1. He left and went for a walk in the crisp frosty winter night to regroup and pray. Meanwhile I prayed too.

It looks like two marsupial's. When we are in love we take turns doting over that love, carrying it carefully around in our pouches, sharing the responsibility and joy as that love grows. Suddenly, as if someone flipped a switch, that love looks like a great big selfish thing eating us from the inside, eating parts we don't want to have eaten because we really do love ourselves like we were and are afraid of what we are becoming. Our first reaction is to hand the love off to the other party. It isn't getting the nourishment it needs so it gets even more ridiculously needy and hideous and we blame each other for its poor health. This is the time where we have to make a very difficult decision. We either have to succomb to that love and let it eat what parts it wants and discard the parts it doesn't of us until it becomes us and we are it and there no longer is anything to distinguish it apart from ourselves or..... we tear it out of our souls along with part of what we've become and throw it to the ground to lie there trembling and quivering and very much alive but already dead.

So the decision to throw it to the floor is made. But we take pity on that love and we continue to rip little pieces of us off and throw it to the thing lying on the floor - after all it was so cute and cuddly at one time and it is already house-trained and we've grown used to it's chewing....

Then along comes another marsupial with a little bundle of love of their own and even while we are ripping little pieces of our pouch off for the dieing love we begin to nurture and care for the new love all cuddly and sweet and everything and then.....

I guess that is why we are encouraged to love each other with an agape love instead of a storge' love. We just don't have enough of us for the storge' part. The agape type is like a constant spring, cool and clear and refreshing. It takes nothing for itself but gives all from the very beginning, no expectations of the future, no hauntings from the past. It is courageous and sacrificial. It looks like Jesus.

It has been far too long

I went to the city council meeting last night. I love to watch the people as their mouths open and hear whether they are trying to protect something or just being themselves (pretty arrogant of me to think I can even tell the difference). A friend approached me before the meeting. He's on the council and also goes to the church I haven't been going to. I can't say that I 'left the church' because how do you leave a church? The relationships continue, the cross continues, and you just live in this uncomfortable silence for a moment as you greet each other. Really you both know and just accept it - each others position that is.

Anyway, Jim and I talked about a short message that the pastor asked me to give last Sunday. He asked me to talk for five minutes on 'how' I live out my faith at work. It really was difficult to actually put words to the 'how' but I love talking about the 'why' so thats where I stayed with it. Well Jim was moved and expressed that at the meeting. He also told me that he misses the songs I used to write and share with the church. He told me about the church turning their back on him when he divorced his wife and how badly that hurt. How the rumors travelled in whispers and silenced rooms as he danced of the dirge that divorced people dance. That really threw me for a loop. He wasn't saying it as an invitation but really meant it. So I talked to my wife last night about it, in bed, best place to talk. I really thought that the music that was flowing out of me was temporary and that my heart and creativity was directed elsewhere. She told me that I am distracted and that my flow of creativity was being diverted into busyness.

So here I am, pounding out words on a screen and listening to how they sound in my head and praying (I'm constantly distracted but my wife says A.D.D.) for a little direction. I will say this, I haven't felt much more alive than I do right at this moment. Feelings cannot always be trusted though. How 'bout some fruit friend-Jesus? Can we get together on some fruit?

I love.....