Above the Fog

It was a good day for a hike with friends and as I looked out of my upstairs window I could see a gray on gray morning, gray sky above a fog and I could just make out the trees in a silhouette across the street. As I drove down Briggs to hit the cross-street that would take me over to New York Avenue I was first immersed in the fog and just as I turned right onto Whittier Avenue it started to thin out and I could see the underbelly of the cloud cover. Whittier soon became Orange Avenue with early morning walkers; couples with dogs, singles with and without, and a jogger or two. As I made my way across the little valley squid like tendrils felt their way over the street, reaching for my Subaru like I was Captain Nemo cruising the depths of the sea.

From Mt. Lukens

I survived the fog’s attempt to draw me deeper into the shroud and reached Deukmejian Park, the trailhead where I met with my friends of faith, Scott, Steve, and Greg; it turned out that Geoff went on ahead earlier to avoid holding us up, the task that now would be left up to me. Somebody had to slow these guys down. I fell in with Scott, or rather, he fell behind to keep me company and we talked; mostly about our kids and their triumphs and struggles, my Lauren’s upcoming wedding to Taylor, his Lauren’s sprouting career and blossoming life of faith in the her new church. We talked about our sons winding paths that we believe will bring them to a solid footing of faith in our Lord. While we traversed the switchbacks climbing the face of Mount Lukens we came to the spot we’ve named John’s Point in remembrance of our late friend and fellow hiker, John Olson where we found ourselves well above the fog; we noted that we live in the valley, work there, and travel to and from all the places that we need to be and only occasionally climb up above for the vistas and a clear view over the Verdugos, over L.A. and on to Catalina Island as it peeked up above the fog out in the Pacific.

Our spiritual lives are often like that; down in the valley and so often in the fog, we need to cling to Jesus to take us through all the day-to-day foggy moments. I find that for myself, I often times have to find some way to rise above the fog to see that He has been with me all along. I got lost there for awhile in my own thoughts and reflected on “Squinting Through Fog”, a faith-blog by Cameron Lee that I’ve been enjoying for his insightful and often times witty commentary on life and the Scriptures. I recommend it: http://the-fog-blog.com. At this point in our hike I really liked Cameron’s explanation of his blog name and here, with his permission, I cut and paste that explanation: “The name of the blog comes from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of 1 Cor 13:12 in The Message: ‘We don’t yet see things clearly.  We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist.  But it won’t be long before the weather clears…’  Each post is thus an attempt at faithful “squinting,” an exercise of biblical and theological imagination in the midst of the sometimes ambiguous journey we call the Christian life.”

I recommend that you squint in the fog and peer into the mist to find the risen Christ in everything you do and I recommend that you find a way above the fog and take in the wonders of His vast creation to find your place in it and how you fit into God’s story.

Sometime you have to go to more extreme measures to get above the fog only to find out once you get there the fog lifted while you were on your way up.

Flying over San Clemente Island, coming in for a landing.

Something Borrowed – Commitment to What Love Is

This is the second of possibly three posts that I am taking from the commitment ceremony that I presided over a few weeks ago. While considering scripture references for the message I automatically shied away from some passages that some folks might consider overused and tired but as I further considered the two who were committing themselves to each other, babes in faith, and the likelihood that there would be those who would benefit from the milk of the scriptures instead of the bread or meat amongst their work friends it seemed fitting to use the one that I felt led to go with.

 

From my ceremony text with the names changed to offer the participants’ privacy:

      The Apostle Paul told us what love is in 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8a “Love is patient and kind. It does not envy, nor does it boast; it is not proud. Love is not rude and is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, trusts, hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails.”

      For love to do all of those things it takes effort and a commitment to make the effort to love well. To be really good at it takes practice. Like anything else we want to be good at, we must commit to practice and commit to be humble when we don’t love as well as we should.

      I don’t believe that Jesus is in love with us. He is the greatest example of commitment to love that we have. The scriptures are full of how He acted towards us and His final sacrifice that he freely gave for us is the perfect example of what love is, he totally committed Himself to love us.

      Love is a commitment to sacrifice what we want so that we can give to another and be that person the other wants and needs us to be.

      Mary grew in her love for John; first as friends and then over time she grew to love him as a woman loves a man and committed her heart to him.

We need to commit ourselves to what love is, not what we think it should look like using the world’s standards, but by what the Word of God says. Anything less than a full commitment allows us too wide of an opening to deviate to serve our own needs.

God is Love. (1 John 4: 8)

 

Something Borrowed – Love is a Verb

A few weeks ago I had the great privilege to officiate over the commitment ceremony for two of my friends and have been very blessed by the experience. Something borrowed? I decided on using “Love is a Verb” as the central theme of the message for the ceremony. I “borrowed” the theme from a couple of sources; one being the sermon Dr. Rick Lyon while the other being the outline for a sermon that I carried in my bible for a long time before Dr. Lyon used it.  I was encouraged by the previous uses of the theme and I took them as confirmation that the concept was solid, even if I was my own source…

My plan for the next two or three posts is to borrow from the ceremony by using excerpts from the text and either expound a bit more or let them stand as is for comment and the hoped for blessing they could be to you the reader and me the writer. The title of the message is “Love is a Verb; Commitment a Higher Calling”

From the text with the names changed to offer the participants’ privacy:

      Love is a verb. Love is the action that we take, how we treat each other, and how we care for each other.

 

      Being “in love” is something that happens to us and it is a fine thing, a wonderful thing. Still, even when we are in love, we must choose how we will love someone:

      As a friend

      As a brother or sister

      Or, as men and women are meant to love each other

      In Mathew 22: 37-40 Jesus said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

      Jesus didn’t say “be in love with everyone”, he told us to love them and act like it.

      John fell in love with Mary right from the start; he looked for ways to spend time with her and get to know her and to find some way to express his feelings for her. He grew in his love for Mary and committed in his heart to love her as a man is meant to love.

I think I’ll stand by this as is and simply wonder what would happen if a church preached the two great commandments while the congregation found and made great ways to implement them. It would be simple and yet simply powerful.

Cindy and I 37 years ago this past week exiting our ceremony.

 

for the wondering heart…

Hebrews 10: 25 “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another-and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” (NIV)

During the past few years I’ve talked with friends who told me that their home church just “doesn’t feel like their church anymore”. There are a number of reasons leading up to this; some of them walked away with levels of disillusionment due to some sort of disagreement within the church or between themselves and different leadership areas within the church, or the worship and word changed in ways they can’t identify with, or the person themselves feel that they are changing and can’t relate to the home church any longer…  I can well understand much of what they are going through having left a church in near complete disillusionment to be without a home church for several years. It is a painful and numbing process.

I recommend that anyone leaving a church body not to wait too long to begin an intense search for where God is leading you; we really don’t have all that much time to waste on the sidelines of our faith. We don’t want to spend some of our prime time to be a blessing and to be blessed wasting away in the wilderness. We need other Christians around us for encouragement or as Hebrews 10: 24 says “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”

Searching is not a bad thing to do as long as we keep in mind that we are looking for direction from the Holy Spirit. In fact, if we are not searching for that direction we could very well stop growing and stagnate to become lukewarm. Consider two lines on a graph, one being a state of contentment for where we are spiritually and the other our need for community and growth. While our contentment is riding high and our need for the body is running low we are in danger of being lukewarm. Over time our contentment will lag and our need for growth will increase and at some point they will intersect. It is then that we are spurred to search, to strive to belong, and our crying out for the Spirit will intensify. Then we can be led and then we can be open to the revelation that God has a purpose and place for us.

1 Corinthians 12: 18: “But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.” (NIV)

Let the Spirit set us in the body as He will, let us keep searching and striving to know His will.

…as a little child

Mark 10: 13-16 (NASV) “¹³And they began bringing children to Him, so that He might touch them; and the disciples rebuked them. ¹⁴ But when Jesus saw this, He was indignant and said to them, ‘Permit the children to come to Me; do not hinder them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. ¹⁵ Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it at all.’ ¹⁶ And He took them in His arms and began blessing them, laying His hands upon them.”

This past weekend we celebrated my granddaughters sixth birthday with a dinner out at the “E-bar” in Santa Barbara, and sitting at a long table for dinner that evening were four generations; two sets of great grandparents, the two sets of grandparents, the parents, a great aunt, the birthday girl, and her two and a half year old brother. Our seating was adjacent to a grassy knoll that separated us from the asphalt and chain link fence of the Santa Barbara Airport; we were able to watch (and hear) the small planes come and go. It wasn’t long before a little boy about the age of our granddaughter found our two kids on the berm for grand adventures that started with observing gophers at work just below the surface of their entry holes and proceeded from there to running up and down the grassy area while letting their imaginations run wild. The little boy’s family was leaving and there was a great deal of commotion about him wanting to stay with his new friends that only ended with him being carried away which gave our party a chance to receive the food and begin eating. But with such an adventurous place at hand, eating really could only occur between unwrapping presents.

It wasn’t too long after taking a couple of bites and all the presents were opened that another little boy appeared and a new trio of adventurers was formed. Off they went; there were no negotiations, no questions, just sharing the excitement and creating toys from plants and other items found nearby.

I can’t help but believe that it is this quality of acceptance without question that so endears our Lord to children. Also, their simple faith in what we tell them, what they hear from God, or other teachers must be characteristics that are required for entrance to the Kingdom. This puts a great deal of responsibility on earthly parents and adults to be as truthful as we possibly can. If I were to have told them that there were 20 or so gophers lined up waiting to come out and start dancing, these kids would not only have believed it, they would have positioned themselves in such a way as to be able to observe them in the hope that they would be allowed to join in the dance. Faith, acceptance, action based on faith… These are the things that make working with children both exciting and frightening at the same time.

What other aspects of children is Jesus looking for? Do we have it and, if not, can we find it again?

Set a Fire – A Youth Sunday

1 Timothy 4: 12 “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith, and in purity.” (NIV) Yes, I’m using a student bible.

I’ll preface this post with a simple statement that my favorite church service is one in which I feel like I could have reached out and touched the hem Jesus’ garment. The reaching would have been up to me. Youth Sunday nearly always provides such a moment and I always look forward to them and am rarely disappointed. I know what you should be thinking; what would it be like if we looked forward to each service, every class, and all the service opportunities with anticipation of the opportunity to touch the Lord? We would rarely be disappointed.

This past Youth Sunday I was met again and was not disappointed. I was the only one of my earthly family able to come for the early service and was surrounded by my spiritual family and joined in the pew by several middle school girls who would be taking part in the service. As we sang the praise song More, “This is more than my obsession…this is more than my confession…All of my fears and failures, I lay them down for something more” I was struck by the honesty of the worship that my young friend next to me was displaying. That broke my heart which for me is a sure sign of God’s presence and the surest way for me to reach out and touch Him.

Psalm 51: 17 “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (NIV)

The next praise song: Set a Fire, “Set a fire down in my soul that I can’t contain that I can’t control. I want more of you God.” We all want more; we need to make sure it’s God we want more of.

The student testimonies by Emily, George, and Xavier carried that same honesty, the same desire for more of Him. Through their simple stories, I was again blessed; by the nervousness at sharing, I was moved to pray for them and thank Jesus for their lives. The Cardboard Testimonies with Katie’s violin were a wonderful opportunity to meditate and bask in the healing touch of the Spirit.

Thank you to all the Timothies; I am blessed to know you because you are doing it, you’ve set the example in simple speech, in your lives, in the way you love each other, and in your impassioned faith. Pursue purity.

 

Why him Lord? Why now?

It has been over twenty years since I sat with a small group of seventh and eighth graders and the other adult leaders of my first Mission Arizona trip and told them a story that had begun nearly twenty years before that and, unbeknown to me, was about to take a blessed turn. I shared with them how I’d lost one of my best friends, Doug Clark, in some freak accident with a drunk driver getting on the freeway the wrong way. Doug was the only one in his car to be killed and the only one in the car not to have a broken bone. I couldn’t understand why this had happened, what good purpose could there be in it? He was the first person that I had prayed with leading him to accept Christ as his Savior. I told the little group about how angry I was and how that I held on to the first question I thought I would ask when I got to heaven myself, “Why him Lord; why then? Why did you take him from me?” Over the years, through a disillusioned breakup of the little church Cindy and our family were in and through years of being outside the church altogether, my anger turned to a bitterness that drove a wedge between me and God.

I wasn’t aware of the tears until I’d been sitting there for a moment after finishing my story when the young intern and my friend, Darren Bottino, gathered the others around me and they laid hands on me to pray. I was healed then of all the bitterness, God seemed so close that I could touch Him, and in all truth, He was touching me with the laying on of their hands. It was a bona fide miracle and the first thing I’ll do when I get to heaven is to thank Him for this small group of believers, their faith, and the sacrifice He made for me. Is it any wonder that I gladly answered His call to go back to Arizona and spend as much time with youth groups and sports teams as I have? My son was a part of that group and I hope that he reads this and understands what a big part he played in setting my feet back on the path God had chosen for me. I hope that many of my young friends read this and understand what a great impact they can have on other’s lives.

I still don’t know the answers to those questions I was going to ask; they don’t seem so important now. I feel like that by giving up the bitterness and anger over it that I’ve somehow honored my friend in it as well as honoring God’s call. I wouldn’t necessarily know what to say to someone else who’s lost someone they love so much, a family member, a best friend, a spouse, a parent…all the old clichés seem so trite when I think of them here. I believe that what I’d do is to simply be there as much as I could, let them vent or just sit there quietly reviewing the life they had with the lost one and what life might be like without them. For certain, I would offer a quiet warning about holding it in and being comforted by the heat of anger and how those things could spread like a disease and affect all their relationships. I can only bring two ears and an open heart to the mourner and help them grieve.

How about you? What things could you do beyond the “He’s in a better place now” solace? What would you bring? What have you already experienced that has shown good effect?

Bless you all to be there when needed, present and in the moment, a representative of Jesus' great peace.