"Spanning the Gulf......................."

It being Mother’s Day this past weekend, one fellow in my group cancelled his participation in our bi-monthly scheduled visit to the Youth Detention Center. He and his wife suffered the loss of their only son, eighteen years old, in a traffic accident over a decade ago, the tragedy yet fresh on occasions like this and the need to just get away together understandable. Saturday evening, my own family had a scare: three of our grandsons, along with several other companions, were forced into the expressway guardrail at about 55 mph, the van totaled, but all occupants walking away with no injuries. Life happens. We thank God when it seems that His hand somehow kept all safe. We turn to Him in our grief when, for whatever reason, finality cuts deep into the heart of our existence, His anchor-line giving support in the midst of what we cannot change. How, I wonder, does one get that message across to the other end of this journey? What does one say to a group of kids, none of them yet out of their teens, a few looking like it’s impossible that they’re yet twelve, and on this occasion one small boy about nine who has been seated with the girls, a “ward of the court” they tell us, positioned here until something else can be arranged. Standing before them, you ask yourself if any of these young men and women before you have any sound stability in the way of parental guidance. In such prayer as we can draw from them after an hour of sharing, our women learn that one that she has no relatives at all, mom and dad deceased, she simply assigned to the system. The male population seldom gives us as much “release”, no one about to show “weakness”; but it’s not hard to look in their eyes and find evidence of God’s tug on their heart, often a tear or two sliding down their face, unable to be contained. One man did raise his hand to ask that we remember his mom who passed when he was just five; and, as the others were escorted to other spaces, he came forward for that request to be met. Do they “get it” at all? The guards have told us at different times how it is expressly after our meetings that they have noticed a change in the spirit there, no arguments, discussions about that which we brought forth rising between our former congregation. I’ll take that. The mission is His. Our charge isn’t to prove we, alone, have conquered the Book, but to point them to the truth of a risen Savior who is willing to meet them where they are. We fold up our tents and go home in about an hour. The Holy Ghost remains……

"Interrogatives............"

I’m five chapters into the autobiography of Malcolm X, a life violently taken in 1965, his name familiar to me only through the report of his death. I was twenty-three years old, going through a year of learning Russian in Monterey, California, courtesy of the United States Navy, married but ten months and my wife already pregnant carrying our first daughter. He was merely a black man in the news, another element of the racial upheaval taking place in this country, someone involved in “radical” protest, killed by his own people. Beth and I would spend a tour on a hunk of rock out in the Aleutian Islands before returning to Washington, D.C. and witnessing firsthand a bit of the “dream”, the anger, indeed history unfolding. It would be over a decade, however, before coming to Christ would open my eyes to the world around me, humanity in general, and my responsibility in the midst of it all. Now, in perusing this man’s life as he lays it out before me, I can see myself in his shoes and understand a bit of what brought him to his early hatred of white America and a rejection of Christianity as a whole. It was a different era, his culture and childhood environment nothing like my own. The Caucasian church in his neck of the woods worshipped on Sundays and lynched “misbehaving negroes” on Monday. Completing that picture, his own father was a pastor, one that would “preach the house down” and then come home to beat and abuse the wife and kids. Malcolm would become a teenage drug-addicted hustler on the streets of Harlem and eventually do time in prison, a Muslim group called “The Nation of Islam” gaining his allegiance, he rising within its ranks before finally walking away from the violence it advocated. Such action prompted his assassination. Just another ghetto casualty? No concern of mine? There are many questions we might ask, no real answers if we are honest. Some would be quick to condemn him, there being no evidence of him ever coming to Christ; but, as for me, such judgment belongs to the Creator. He who knows all things, a man’s history, a man’s heart, and a man’s head, points to finality, in that day, beginning at the house of God…….

"Dancing With the Star............."

My group is scheduled this Sunday for worship with the kids at the Youth Detention Center, and thus far, other than a thought or two, an inkling of where to go and what to say, my mind is fuzzy, unable to focus. Prayer is always the main ingredient, of course, but it isn’t like one simply steps into God's presence and begins to hear His voice framing your message. Last night I went rooting through my collection of quotes, a few Richard Rohr observations catching my interest, in particular the idea that nature, like an unruly child, both reveals and obscures the Creator. The author puts it in terms of creation “groaning” and warns that we must not go to her to construct our theology, for she will fail us every time. We can visit her once we have the details with our own grasp, allowing her to fill words like awe, glory, beauty, and terror with meaning; and it is, he continues, much like our relationship with the Church, there being a gap between what we are doing and what we are trying do, an imbalance between the incongruity of who we are and who we are trying to move with our petitions, one that resembles “a sort of dancing bear act”. I can relate to that latter analogy. Christianity, almost from my very entrance into its ranks, proved to be a walk through a maze of denominational dogmas. While, within my own bunch, I found His presence alive and working in our midst, it was also clear that our humanity stained the operation and, if that was true in our ecclesiastical identity, then surely it demanded an investigation of what we taught in our interpretation of the Word. No; I did not toss my belief in Pentecostal belief, as a whole, out the window; but I did look around at other groups within our faith and setting my eyes on the Cross, I did my best to follow the Holy Ghost within me. I also realized, at the same time, that I was just as capable of stagger as anybody else. What would remain with me in the journey, then, unbendable, unshakeable, and a promise kept every step of the way, was an assurance of His connection, an anchor-line that secured me to His love, an oasis to which I could return again and again. If only He enables me to somehow reach the kids with that gift his weekend……

"Clean-up......................."

“Spring is here, the grass has riz; I wonder where the birdies is?”… Who authored that one is beyond me, a phrase heard in childhood years that resurfaces annually in my brain. Keeping up with the lawn’s need to be mowed has been turned over to my grandsons, not so much that I couldn’t use the exercise, but more so that they need the wages. The house is quite another matter, however, Beth working herself much too hard last week going room to room battling that thin, minute film of grime that accumulates over winter. Saturday she assigned me some new blinds to hang in this “den” where the computer sits. Then, cleaning out the large storage closet by the front entrance also fell to this old man. Toward evening, with some rain clouds slowly gathering overhead, the two of us weeded the area under the magnolia tree in the front yard, setting out a few phlox plants in hope that they will spread. Life in one’s little corner of the world is not all that complicated. You sweep out a few cobwebs, tend our own garden, and then sit down with a good book before going to bed around eleven. It’s the bigger picture, the task of sharing this planet with humanity at large that brings chaos and confusion into Eden… Arising early this morning and with a few hours to myself before church, I sat down in the recliner and reached for my Bible. When it fell open to some notes penned in it long ago on some verses in Romans, Chapter Two, “breakfast was served”, my mind digesting once again something believed way back there. Paul, in trying to explain to the Jews God having “no respect of persons”, speaks of that which all of us will one day give answer for in the end: (a) how well the Creator’s rules were written upon our heart; (b) how well we listened to our own conscience in our stagger down the road; and (c) how well we adjusted our thinking and gave grace to one another. Too often, within the Church, it seems to me that we lock salvation into our own determined definition of the Word and forget He, not we, has the final say. My job is only to point you to Him, take care of my own mess, and extend to you help if needed…..

"Vision...............................

"I once watched a snake shed his skin. Discomfort apparently alternating with relief, he stretched and contracted, stretched and contracted, and slowly, slowly pushed himself out the front end of himself. His skin lay behind him, transparent. The writing of these notebooks has been like that for me."…Anne Truitt

"The door to infinity is somewhere in the room with you, right now."…Gina Rocca

“Whiskey River” has been a link on my sidebar for more than a decade now, the keeper of such quotes as the two above once approached in conversation, but while the knock on the door was answered, the personal identity of whomever was on the other end wasn’t revealed. The wish to remain anonymous, however, never interfered with my desire to return every now and then, his (or her) table always spread with an assortment of food. Who prepared it may sometimes give me pause, the “theology” shared perhaps clashing with my own; but seldom do I leave without a tidbit or two rolling around inside me, “shedding my skin” in these musings of my own being a condition that sounds familiar. Likewise, the idea of eternity never being beyond my touch is an admitted reality made clearer every day, the subject, though, at least for me, not just a matter of departure, but one defined by He who cannot be bound by temporal limits. Longevity may well account for at least some of my present proclivity toward probing the mystery of it all; but life, in truth, has always been a question mark I began pondering at an early age. People. Events. Me, the biggest piece of the puzzle. God was dismissed when my father died, my Navy dog tags, in fact, stamped “N O N E” in that space designated for “religion”. I still carry one of them on my keychain, a witness to a young man’s anger keeping him from Christ for more than a decade, it taking that long for me to admit my mess and find Him one Monday afternoon in my own living room. Molting, of course, is even yet a part of the process. Being “born-again” didn’t provide me with a sudden clarity about all things; but it did bring unto me an inner connection, One to walk with me through the fog……..

"The Tie That Binds................"

Our Bible study class began last night with a reference to “unity” in the Church at large, the body of Christ, splintered as we are into so many different dogmas, nonetheless tied together by the “umbilical cord” of God’s Spirit. My own contribution to such point, in an attempt to perhaps give better image of such reality, was to speak of the fact that, within any individual assembly, the only time we experience being completely one in our existence is when the Holy Ghost overflows in our midst, His presence in the sanctuary effecting a temporary merger. That connection, and that alone, the possibility of knowing it “en masse” albeit we are separated otherwise in many ways, is the scarlet thread hung from Rahab’s window on the wall of Jericho, the bond of who we are in Him. Surely where we, as a small group, less than twenty of us participating in the lesson, went from there would only confirm my suggestion, the subject of whether the “gifts” yet operate in believers today enough to generate several opinions from those there. When a definition for one particular item on Paul’s list in Corinthians was sought, there were two examples put forth with little or no similarity between them and the fellow who had given the first declaring it mattered not, to each their own perception of truth. Then, even though we had already discussed “arrogance” and the necessity of always remembering this part of the Promise is never about the individual being “special”, this same man noted that, because he had been anointed to possess the gift of prophesy, it was now his responsibility, upon entering into any service, to seek out people who needed to hear from God. Seated in the back row, hidden by three fairly new converts in front of me, I shook my head in silence, believing this not the time to air my opposition to his perspective. He has a good heart. Put the two of us in the same room when the Third Person of the Trinity begins to manifest His reality and we’ll both fall down before Him in worship. In the meantime, we each have to allow the other space for his own individual journey. This, too, is a gift from on high if the heart is willing to receive it……

"Treatment....................................."

The granddaughter is staying with us again for a few days. She visits almost weekly, enjoying our company for some reason, two old fogies and a seventh grade teenager in the making. I must admit, though, this occasion was purposed by a last minute school assignment. We’re approaching single digits in a countdown to summer vacation and one of her teachers has required a three-page report, due Friday, on whether violent video games can be held responsible in any way for all these acts of aggression taking place in America today. McKenna and I spent two hours last night gathering information and then decided to give it a rest with just the first sheet put to print. My own thoughts on the subject matter, however, have already been forged. While surely there can be no benefit to all the explicit gore configured into some of this sort of “amusement”, at the same time, statistics show the history of such tragedies as we’ve seen recently within our educational system goes as far back as the early beginnings of this country. What has changed is both the availability for almost anyone to acquire “weapons of mass destruction” and the media’s ability to almost immediately take us to the crime scene. No; I am not for repealing the Second Amendment. What possible need the normal citizen in this country might have for one of these multiple-rounds guns is beyond me; but, in truth, it seems to me that the solution to all this rests in a resurrected Savior, not legislation. Our best hope in the middle of all this mess we’ve made is His anchor-line attached in the depths of who and what we are. No; there are no guarantees. Even in Him, we remain human. Any quick examination of the Church at large will confirm that. Nonetheless, I believe that if we spent as much effort in allowing His reality full reign in our life as we do in pointing our finger at the world for all the sins we see in it, His grace could accomplish much more in the whole scenario. Indeed, it seems to me that if we focused more on the soul addicted to the disease, the Cure, itself, would eliminate the addiction….