Cornerstone Festival... I remember.

Next week Benaiah and I will be attending our last Cornerstone Festival.  It has been a great run but it's time. Looking back on the years of heat, fellowship, music, seminars, people, mud, joy, deals.... growth and change makes me glad to have had so many Cstone experiences and a longer term perspective. I remember the crazy times back at the Lake County fairgrounds where a massive storm came through and knocked down the mainstage.  Then there was the Norman Geisler / Randall Terry standoff in the exhibition building and the amazing Charlie Peacock concert in the encore stage that was one of those magical evenings that seemed to take us all to a place of the presence of God.  I'm so glad that my son will have been to every Cornerstone in his 19+ years of life. He will always be able to say that he played Cornerstone...his cello on the new band stage when he was about 13. It makes me smile just to think about it and how he'd play it in the gallery stage in the morning while I was having my first cups of coffee in my Cstone mug and doing my morning devotions. There are people there who I know I won't see until we meet again in heaven. I get a lump in my throat just thinking about them.  I remember sitting in a soaked gallery chatting ministry with Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk who within a year went home to be with Jesus.  Meeting Steve Taylor after his sound check by the mainstage and him holding said son who was about 3 and knew most of the lyrics to Steve's songs. I remember seeing "The Call" with my wife and being shocked that it was around 2:00 a.m. when it ended and having them all sign her jeans. Michael Been and Gene Eugene, dudes I wish you had taken better care of yourselves. I remember the shock of hearing that Tom Peters had died of cancer after having taken his seminar class on Chesterton, such a sweet man.  I remember my first seminar with Vernon Grounds at Lake County, and the crazy antics of George Verwer and Mike Yaconelli. Vic will always be the Cornerstone Mainstage MC as far as I'm concerned. I remember the crazy straightline winds that blew through the camp about 5:00 a.m. one morning and then hearing that it hit Rockford and tornadoes had caused massive damage to the city.  I remember the crazy near tornado that hit as we were in line to enter the festival ripping the encore tents up and snapping the ropes like threads. It was a sight I will never forget.  Then we found my brother and family who had just gotten their tent up before the storm and seeing it flat and totally soaked.  Those times with my brother, sister-in-law and nephews was really precious, I think cornerstone is where we spent the most time together since we live so far apart. I remember the time my wife was promised the paper that Timothy Botts was demonstrating calligraphy on and another lady tried to take it, yeah, that wasn't happening. I remember Rosie exploding green beans early one morning while the wife was up at the porta potties and me yelling "DIAPER EMERGENCY!!!!" People in the neighborhood still talked about that a few years later.  I remember the Redeemer Lutheran Youth group Shangrila with their snow cone maker and crazy huge meals. The phantom ice truck and the water sprinkler tractor. Buck, Buck and shower trailers. Brian McClaren, Bradly Hathaway and Brad Culver, Philip Johnson, Oz Guiness, Lou Markos and Steve Matheson. Fred and Troll 2, Greg, Erik, Monte and the Ring of Fire -- SECURITY!!!! Creation Station and Artrageous Kids. Porta Pottie overflows and P.O.D., Lost Dogs, The Alarm with Benaiah and where is M.C. Hammer? Worship with Pastor Wille and A.C. breaks in the nurses' trailer. Long walks down to the beach and doing the labyrinth prayer walk with my whole family. Repeatedly scouring for used books and dusty CDs and waiting for the T-shirts to be marked down before buying the one for the year. Trying to wake Krystal up for the fireworks show. Interrupting Over the Rhine's photo shoot with Jimmy Abegg because our family needed to get our picture taken and we needed to get the kids over to the goodie gallop race in the pasture. I remember having a love / hate relationship with the total lack of structure for the camping spots and vehicle access. I realize that the lack of overcontrolling structure that is the Cornerstone Festival is me.  Cornerstone's sloppiness and lack of mainstream conformity; It's love of the "sinners" and the the grunge.  It's fearlessness, openness and quirky curiosity. It's love of Jesus on His terms and not mine. This is why I love Cornerstone and will miss it deeply. I know that it will always be a part of me and my family. For that I will always be grateful. Thank you Jesus for all those who worked so hard to make the Cornerstone Festival the greatest Christian festival there ever was or ever will be this side of Heaven. R.I.P. Cornerstone Festival. It's time.

Our Need for Mystery

A Russian priest, Father Anthony, told me, "To say to anyone, 'I love you' is tantamount to saying 'You shall live forever.'"

I am slowly beginning to learn something about immortality.

Our children are hungry for words like Father Anthony's. They have a passionate need for the dimension of transcendence, mysticism, way-outness. We're not offering it to them legitimately. The tendency of the churches to be relevant and more-secular-than-thou does not answer our need for the transcendent. As George Tyrrell wrote about a hundred years ago, "If [man's] craving for the mysterious, the wonderful, the supernatural, be not fed on true religion, it will feed itself on the garbage of any superstition that is offered to it."

Glimpses of Grace; June 12; p. 148

Joyous and Helpful Labor

Lord of my life, whose law I fain would keep, whose fellowship I fain would enjoy, and to whose service I would fain be loyal, I kneel before You as You send me forth to the work of another day.

     This day, O Lord --
     give me courtesy:
     give me meekness of bearing with decision of character:
     give me longsuffering:
     give me chastity:
     give me sincerity of speech:
     give me diligence in my allotted task.

     O You who in the fullness of time raised up our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to enlighten our hearts with the knowledge of Your love, Grant me the grace to be worthy of His name. Amen.

John Baillie; Devotional Classics; p.127

Living Mysteries

"To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist."  -- Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard; quoted in Glimpses of Grace; pp. 146-7

Literalism to Judgementalism...

If we take the Bible over-literally we may miss the truth of the poetry, the stories, the myths. Literalism can all too easily become judgementalism, and Jesus warned us not to judge, that we might not be judged.

How difficult it is! When I worry about those who castigate me for not agreeing with them, am I in my turn falling into judgementalism? it's hard not to. But not all the way, I hope. I don't want to wipe out those who disagree with me, consigning them to hell for all eternity. We are still God's children, together. At One. Even if I am angry, upset, confused, I must still see Christ and Christ's love in those whose opinions are very different from mine, or I won't find it in those whose view fits more comfortably with mine.

-- Madeleine L'Engle; Glimpses of Grace; p. 144; June 7

The World as an Object

Where man meets the world, not with the tools he has made but with the soul with which he was born; not like a hunter who seeks his prey but like a love to reciprocate love; where man and matter meet as equals before the mystery, both made, maintained and destined to pass away, it is not an object, a thing that is given to his sense, but a state of fellowship that embraces him and all things; not a particular fact but the startling situation that there are facts at all; being; the presence of a universe; the unfolding of time. The sense of the ineffable does not stand between man and mystery; rather than shutting him out of it, it brings him together with it.

Man is Not Alone; Abraham Joshua Heschel; p. 38