Understanding the Brevity of Life

All this is temporary...

One of my best friends in college died when he was twenty-five, just a few years after we had finished Mississippi State University. I as in law school, and he called me one day and wanted to get together. So we had lunch, and he told me that he had terminal cancer.

I couldn't believe it. I asked him, "What do you do when you realize that you are about to die?"

He said, "It's real simple. You get things right with God, and you spend as much time with those you love as you can. Then you settle up with everybody else."

That left an impression on me.

-- John Grisham; Promises to Keep; August 8; p. 255

God Loves Even Us

The glorious message of Scripture is that we do not have to be perfect for our Maker to love us.  All through the great stories, heavenly love is lavished on visibly imperfect people. Scripture asks us to look at Jacob as he really is, to look at ourselves as we really are, and then realize that this is who God loves. God did not love Jacob because he was a cheat, but because he was Jacob. God love us in our complex isness, and when we get stuck on the image of the totally virtuous and morally perfect person we will never be, we are unable to accept this unqualified love, or to love other people in their rich complexity.

If God can love Jacob -- or any single one of us -- as we really are, then it is possible for us to turn in love to those who hurt of confuse us. Those we know and those we do not know. And that makes me take a new look at love.

Madeleine L'Engle: Glimpses of Grace; July 24; pp194-5

Expecting something to happen

 I came across this quote on my computer today and thought it was a good one for the blog. I don't know the source but its from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of my favorites. -- drs 

 
Possibly one of the most devastating things that can happen to us as Christians is that we cease to expect anything to happen. I am not sure but that this is not one of our greatest troubles today. We come to our services and they are orderly, they are nice ‒ we come, we go ‒ and sometimes they are timed almost to the minute, and there it is. But that is not Christianity, my friend. Where is the Lord of glory? Where is the one sitting by the well? Are we expecting him? Do we anticipate this? Are we open to it? Are we aware that we are ever facing this glorious possibility of having the greatest surprise of our life?
Or let me put it like this. You may feel and say ‒ as many do ‒ ‘I was converted and became a Christian. I’ve grown ‒ yes, I’ve grown in knowledge, I’ve been reading books, I’ve been listening to sermons, but I’ve arrived now at a sort of peak and all I do is maintain that. For the rest of my life I will just go on like this.’
Now, my friend, you must get rid of that attitude; you must get rid of it once and for ever. That is ‘religion’, it is not Christianity. This is Christianity: the Lord appears! Suddenly, in the midst of the drudgery and the routine and the sameness and the dullness and the drabness, unexpectedly, surprisingly, he meets with you and he says something to you that changes the whole of your life and your outlook and lifts you to a level that you had never conceived could be possible for you. Oh, if we get nothing else from this story, I hope we will get this. Do not let the devil persuade you that you have got all you are going to get, still less that you received all you were ever going to receive when you were converted. That has been a popular teaching, even among evangelicals. You get everything at your conversion, it is said, including baptism with the Spirit, and nothing further, ever. Oh, do not believe it; it is not true. It is not true to the teaching of the Scriptures, it is not true in the experience of the saints running down the centuries. There is always this glorious possibility of meeting with him in a new and a dynamic way.

Mockingbird quotes Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor on Emotional Jellyfish and the Repulsiveness of Truth (and Incarnation)

From the collection of her letters, The Habit of Being, pgs 99-100, ht WH:

I can never agree with you that the Incarnation, or any truth, has to satisfy emotionally to be right (and I would not agree that for the natural man the Incarnation does not satisfy emotionally). It does not satisfy emotionally for the person brought up under many forms of false intellectual discipline such as nineteenth century mechanism, for instance. Leaving the Incarnation aside, the very notion of God’s existence is not emotionally satisfactory anymore for great numbers of people, which does not mean the God ceases to exist. M. Jean-Paul Sartre finds God emotionally unsatisfactory in the extreme, as do most of my friends of less stature than he. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
There is question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say the thought of everybody lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion. I don’t think you are a jellyfish. But I suspect you of being a Romantic.

-- How rich is that?! : )  drs

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