Forwarding Address

I’ve moved my content and all future posts onto my wife’s “Family Blog”. If you’re curious as to why, here’s the post on her, er, our blog about why I did it.

The recently ingested quote.

Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone. The mere presence of the special someone in a crowded room brings an inward sigh of relief and a strong sense of feeling safe. The experience of a warm, caring, affective presence banishes our fears. The defense mechanisms of the impostor –sarcasm, name-dropping, self-righteousness, the need to impress others– fall away. We become more open, real, vulnerable, and affectionate. We grow tender.

– Brennan Manning

Her Name is Eden

For those of you that don’t live in The South, the way a Minnesotan feels at the end of Winter, when the thermometer reaches a high of 60, is the same jubilation we feel down here once the mercury stops rising above 90 degrees. That happened about two weeks ago and Carrie and I immediately moved supper outside. Our evening meal will remain outside until Winter causes our retreat in about two months. It is an experience I highly recommend for anyone living on the Gulf Coast.

This is the time of year that people in the Northeast start shutting down life on patios. For us, however, this is the time that we awaken from the lethargic slumber of our air-conditioned cocoons. We’ve been hiding from the heat for months and this is the time to celebrate The Beginning of the Long Ending of Summer.

Grab a backpack and go hiking. Head to Girard Park for Festivals Acadiens. Or, just grab a plate and a blanket and join me in celebrating the simple pleasure of eating outside. There is something deeply calming to me about eating in nature. Every bite is savored just a little longer. Every laugh of my boys has more resonance. Every breath of wind on the back of my neck is a gift from God, reminding me that, as with all withering things in life, this oppressive season does have an end.

We were not made for cubicles.

I was talking with “Big Tuna” at work last week. He’s a mellow guy but his wit is sharp. He’s the only person who has ever truly come up with a great way to make fun of the name Dallas: Phallas , as in a phallic symbol. Anyway, I told him I finally pegged my biggest gripe with the way Industrialism treats people: you must fit into a box. It doesn’t matter if you like the box or not, or if you are good at what that box does, you are simply a box-sized unit and, therefore, must work within that box in order that The Organization may function efficiently.

I must give credit where credit is due: Industrialism is highly efficient. It has rapidly increased the speeds of production and volumes produced. And, that isn’t always a bad thing. However, oftentimes, there is a point where the soul is taken out of something. A point where the object being made is simply a “thing” and the people making it also become “things”. Wonder Bread, for example, has no soul. It is mass produced, quite cheaply and efficiently I might add, and tastes more efficient and cheap than bread-like. Great Harvest bread, while produced quickly, doesn’t taste of efficiency. It is imperfect because it was shaped by actual human hands. It is slightly different every time you have a loaf because different people have made it… it has their specific imprint. When Emily makes a dough, it is different than when I make a dough. When Jude kneads a loaf, it gets different design and different toughness than when I knead one. When I bake, I let the loaves rise and bake at slightly different times than Mac. Some combination of our imprints are on each loaf. I doubt that is the case with Wonder Bread and its mechanically produced food products.

I read online that Wonder Bread closed three factories and laid off 1,300 people recently. The shareholders and CEO of Wonder Bread, Inc. do not know the names of those people. Great Harvest, on the other hand, is small enough that the owners know each other and, on top of that, I know the names of the corporate level employees… and some of them know mine.

Both are corporations. One has run to its logical extreme. The other has been reigned in by humanity.

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For about 100 years, the church has increasingly mimicked corporations (as opposed to the Imperial/Feudal governments it mimicked before that [Roman Catholicism and Mainline Protestant denominations still do]) in its leadership structuring and the way it “funnels” people into “the body”. My concern is that, decades ago, Christendom crossed a line and sacrificed its core to this new way of doing things. I feel that a fundamental question was lacking from the get go: how much do an institution that exists to make a profit and a spiritual being rooted in upside down spirituality have in common?

How much harm is done when a corporate, winner-take-all mindset enters into Christianity? For starters, the Wal-Martization of churches is happening with ever-growing buildings that resemble gated communities and amusement parks more than they resemble Jesus popping up in every major city in America. These Mega-churches feed off of smaller communities the way that Wal-Mart (or Target) have killed mainstreet America. They also foster a consumer class that rates a church service the way someone rates a theater performance (A for the monologue, C for the music, D for the flavor of the communion bread).

How much harm is done when a person cannot be themselves but must funnel into a spiritual machine that has a mold the person is supposed to conform to?

What does is say that churches often call households “giving units” in business meetings?

Christendom has done away with Christianity without quite being aware of it. – Soren Kierkegaard

Some people are angered and/or saddened by my current state of “Church Involvement”, meaning the level to which I commit myself to an organization that revolves around Jesus. I had a conversation earlier this year where someone chided me for not working harder to further the “progress” (numeric growth) of a church. What these people do not understand is that, in case you haven’t picked up on it yet, I have lost faith in Institutional Christianity.

The more research I do, the more I find that there is historical precedent for my conviction. Here’s an excerpt I recently stumbled upon:

Bishops Theodosius and Gratian (380) ordered that there should be only one state-recognized Orthodox church and one set of faith – the orthodox dogma. Each Roman citizen was forced to be a member and should be made to believe in the ”lex fidei,” the law of faith. Other groups and movements – including those meeting in homes – were forbidden. That meant the legal end of the housechurch. The law turned the rules upside down. Once, church buildings were not even allowed by the government until the rule of Severus around AD 222-235, and housechurches were the only way for Christians to meet. But from now on, to start a housechurch meant breaking the law and becoming a criminal. This started a new era: the persecution of the church in the name of the ”church.” – Wolfgang Simson

I occasionally attend a church in order to keep myself from being spiritually isolated but my long-term goal is simply to get together with a handful of people that want to have a life as robust as Jesus’. I want to be around people that tell me stories of their life and their faith that compel my family into deeper spirituality. I want to share meals with them on a weekly basis and let them join me in the pleasure of watching my children grow up.

I don’t need an institution for that. I don’t need a building for that. I don’t need a full-time minister for that.

In order for this miracle of a faith-family to form, I desperately need Jesus to speak it into existence. I desperately need to be around people that want to be his followers. And, just like Jesus-followers 1,800 years ago, I need food that we can share while we talk about the Jesus-Life.

Fall Fever

In places like Maine and Montana, they’re just now getting into “real” Summer. Here, on the Gulf Coast, we’ve been in Summer since mid-April. I don’t run the A/C in my minivan in order to save gas (you’ve got to keep the windows up, too, or else the drag from the wind eats up the gas) and work next to an oven, so I’ve been sick of the heat for about a month already.

Also, I’m just plain tired. I want to get away for a day or two… or three. Man, three would be great. The only problem with trying to get away now is the heat. One of my friends says that camping on the Gulf Coast has an October – April season. You don’t do it after April nor before October. Case in point, I got the itch to set up my tent two weeks ago. I dragged it out of the closet and set it up in the backyard, which meant that it immediately became a magnet for Elias and Deacon. We were all inside the tent, with the rain fly on. A Native American sweat lodge has nothing on that tent. My shirt went from dry to soaked in about one minute. Perspiration was dripping down my brow

I set up the tent mainly because I’ve got The Fever. I desperately need to decompress and as much as I love my in-law’s cabin on their pond, that is not the place my heart longs to be. I want to be under large trees, near a brook, in a place where the land has changes in elevation. I want to be alone in that place. Quiet. Listening. Observing.

I also want to hook my kids on camping at an early age. I just read Scraping Heaven, which is about a family that hiked the Continental Divide, starting with their kids at the ages of one and three. It was a great, easy read and convinced me of two things: (1) I’m not going to hike the Continental Divide and (2) Elias is already old enough to take on overnight trips.

One of the things my dad did right –Whether he fell backwards into it or not I don’t care. He did it right either way.– was taking our family camping in the Pecos wilderness of New Mexico. I was in Junior High, with puberty kicking in, and desperately uncomfortable in the no-man’s land between childhood and manhood. I was tested by hail, altitude, and wilderness and came out on the other side feeling more steadied on my journey into being a man.

Waking up to a vista like the above picture is truly a dream for someone like me who lives at 0 feet above sea level and 60% humidity. I plan on taking my family there at least once before the kids move out and hope that, by that point, Elias, Deacon, and the not-yet-born third child are hooked on the outdoors.

For now, though, I’ll settle for Kisatche National Forest on the weekend of October 20th – 22nd. It can’t get here soon enough.

I’m in the frontyard.

I consider this my Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy blog.  My wife, Carrie, has another blog that I am also a member of.  Since my deep thoughts haven’t been that deep lately, I’ve been writing more over there.  Feel free to stop by.

The recently ingested quote.

God has written me into a corner. He brilliantly inscribes our life to put us at a crossroads where we must either write with his glory to the extreme or douse the dream and refuse to imagine our future. – Dan Allender

Surrender the Church

Sometimes, there are things worth redeeming no matter how long or hard the fight will be. I feel that my horrible soil in my backyard is one of those things. It is clay and will take years to transform into beautiful loam through composting. Other times, the fight isn’t worth it and it’s better to just throw something away and start over. I’d put my beat up trash can, the current designs of American-made automobiles, and “church” in this category.

The fact that some of you are rolling your eyes at me, others of you just hissed a breath through clenched teeth, and others of you thought “hell yeah” is evidence of why I think throwing “church” away is worth writing about.

If you really care that much about trash cans or vehicles with horrible gas mileage that break down as often as, well, my trashcan, then maybe this blog isn’t for you.

Here’s the first two entries from Dictionary.com when you search the word “church”.

church
-noun
1. a building for public Christian worship.
2. public worship of God or a religious service in such a building: to attend church regularly.

I can’t speak for Brits, Aussies, or South Africans but I know that in North American English, “church” is either a religious building or an event you go to once a week, or both. That’s not what you see in the scriptures, though. In the scriptures the greek word that we translate as church is ekklesia and it means “the ones called out”. The People of God would be a close enough translation to get away with.

We’ll never get the word “church” to mean that, which is why I advocate throwing the word into the trash heap. Go to church. Attend a church service. But, please, realize it isn’t a building or a 501C-3 Non-Profit Corporation when you see it in the scriptures. Every time you see it, replace it with something like “the people of God” and you’ll get a better picture of what followers of Jesus are supposed to be in this world – an organic being with a spiritual connection to their God that are chosen to play a redemptive role in the world around us.

Spiritual Practice: Gardening

I just went outside this morning and looked over my seedlings… I have lost a lot of them recently due to the poor decision of using paper pots instead of flats to start them in. Water loss is huge with the paper pots and most of my tomato seedlings are gone because I didn’t water them enough (Paper pots need to be watered every day, sometimes more than once a day. However, everything that I started in flats is thriving even though it started with much less water.). So, I went to Home Depot and bought some Creole tomatoes that were a little further along in the growing process and am now trying to salvage a few of my earlier, Cherokee Purple tomato seedlings. One of them has taken off since I’ve moved it to a larger, non-paper container. This morning, I was up early enough to see that seedling with a few drops of dew resting on its growing leaves. It’s a joy to watch it thrive in its new environment… I am still hopeful that I’ll get at least a handful of tomatoes from the twenty seedlings I started with.

My basil is doing really well. I’ve got five seedlings in pots and another four in one of my garden beds. In a few weeks, our food will be seasoned with fresh basil from our garden. It’s so nice to walk away from a dish simmering on the stove, clip the top off of one of the branches of basil, drop the clipping into that dish, and moments later smell the aroma of basil spreading through my home.

The Bush Snap Beans are flowering and Carrie observed with joy as I pointed out the first bean forming. Our corn is shorter than the corn in commercial fields around us since we don’t use inorganic fertilizer but it is growing well. I’m really looking forward to the sweet, juicy flavor of raw corn, straight off of the stalk.

…

When Jesus uses organic metaphors like soil, seeds, plants, and weeds there are layers and layers of subtlety behind those words that so many of us miss just because we don’t experience the annual rhythm of soil preparation, planting, cultivating, and reaping.

When Jesus talks about the different types of soil in one of his parables, we often miss one basic idea that was a given to the people that originally heard the story: it takes work to create good soil… it doesn’t just happen on its own. Soil preparation is hard, sweaty work. And long work. All season long, you compost. You turn the compost piles by hand every few months. In late winter, you turn the soil of your field and add your compost that you’ve been working on all year (you turn the soil by hand, too, if you want the worms that enrich and further “turn” the soil to not die in the blades of a mechanical tiller). If you have just one plant and use organic farming methods with it, Jesus’ farming metaphors open up even more. That is one of the reasons I call gardening a spiritual practice.

The other reason is quite simple: there is a joy to the work. Yes, it is tedious and requires much patience. That is true of most of the good things in life though, right? Good children don’t just appear. We cultivate them. The same is true of marriages, friendships, and spirituality. That shouldn’t be a great surprise. We are organic creatures and the same mechanical methods that make big plants with unhealthy fruit and sick soil won’t make us healthy people. We aren’t manufactured. We grow.

There is also a primal beauty to the garden. The seasonal images are such poetry if you take the time to marvel at them:
Spring. A seedling breaking through the soil, its leaves bowing in farewell to the earth before reaching up to the sun.
Summer. That same seedling transforming so slowly that you don’t see it until one day the reality of growth sneaks up on you like a child speaking.
Fall. The salty perspiration of winter and spring are transformed into harvested sweetness.
Winter . Plants, withered and brown. Tombstones, soon falling back into the earth to give new life to the coming spring.

Lent 2007: An Ordinary Obedience

Luke 19:28-40

We don’t know much about this man. We don’t know his name. We don’t know his occupation. We don’t know his social status. All we know is that he owned a young colt that had never been ridden.

And he gave it away.

I don’t believe that it really matters if it was one of 100 animals or the sole animal he owned. Men he never met were trying to steal his colt. Reading between the lines, he walked up to them and wanted to know what the hell they were doing. Their answer stopped him in his tracks: “His Master needs him.”

That was all he needed to hear. He knew who it was that asked for it and gave the animal away. Before this moment, he was an ordinary man, serving God in ordinary ways. After this moment he went back to that same life.

And we still read about this anonymous man’s action to this day.

May I have an ordinary obedience as glorious as his.