Month: April 2024

Something Happened

So, a bad thing happened. One of us had a car accident, and that happens. It’s an expensive lesson, but it is a space where life teaches out loud, and maybe someday, we’ll be very thankful for the lesson and the cost will be very low.

Before the sermon yesterday, I read the account of Jacob & his dream, from Genesis. This is not unusual, I refer to it often. But sometimes, the message of “surely God was in this place and I was unaware (Gen 28:16),” or, as I paraphrase, “don’t miss your life and the people in it (Chad 24:365),” hits differently.

Everything valuable in that accident was ok. The most valuable to me got in our car & came home with the Angel & I. The other valuables had minor damage to their vehicles, but went home, as well. There are a million ways that day ends where everyone doesn’t come home. I am grateful, in ways I can’t express.

When I read that passage yesterday, I nearly began to weep, because “What if…” The beautiful gift of this life we’ve been given, the beautiful gift of each other, can be very fragile, and what if (one of those million inexplicably horrific ways that too many have to endure)? Our hearts don’t seem big and/or strong enough to hold all of this love. But they are – we’ve been made in the image of our God.

We keep loving, and keep loving, and keep loving. Of course, it can hurt like crazy, where it feels like the pain won’t ever stop. And we love anyway. The only way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to be alone, and that won’t do at all. Being made in the image of a triune God means being alone is “not good,” according to Genesis 1 & 2. Loving with a whole heart, mind, and soul requires living with the possibility of the dreaded “what ifs.” I hope the “what ifs” never, ever happen to anybody. But I certainly do hope we all know the love that makes the “what if” so vicious.

The tears are an offering poured out from a fully present, engaged, working, thankful heart. A heart that is created to keep loving and loving and loving.

Instead, Offense

After the message yesterday, the Angel graciously (as softly as possible) informed me that, “You said 3 points, but I have no idea what they were. I only had 1.” This is not a strength of mine. I have lots of strengths, (well, several strengths), but easy steps to enlightenment isn’t one of them. So, here they are:

1. Embrace Your Humanness. We are human. We will fail. Julie Z. says, “Humble people have an ability to withstand failure/criticism because they have an inner sense of the value of being human rather than externals.” Externals are bumps, obstacles, utter failures, and they don’t mean there is something wrong with us, that we’re broken, or that we’ve let everyone down and have no value in the universe. It simply means we’re human, and we’ve taken a shot. That’s a very, very good thing.

The Gospel Equation is: God, Scripture, the Helmet of Salvation, our Value, Identity in Him > (is greater than) our circumstances and/or performance. For instance, my love for my son is exactly the same if he has 40 and hits a game-winner at the buzzer, OR if he goes 1-28 and they lose by 1,000,000. In fact, my love for him doesn’t change if he doesn’t play basketball at all.

The Action Step is to: Try something you don’t know how to do (learn something new) AND fail a lot.

2. Practice Mindfulness and Self-Compassion. “Mindfulness grows our self-awareness,” Julie Z writes, “by giving us permission to stop and notice our thoughts and emotions without judgment. If we judge what’s going on inside us, we paint a distorted view of ourselves.” We can change only if we can learn to see ourselves kindly and discover where our unhealthy/limiting beliefs are, accept them (and ourselves), and then transform them with Jesus.

Our Action Step is to ask ourselves what we think (about anything & everything). Why do we think that? Is it helping, hurting, limiting, or freeing? Be introduced to and pleased to meet you.

3. Express gratitude. Gratitude makes us less self-focused and more focused on those around us. In other words, gratitude makes us more humble and much less awful. The Action Step: Say Thanks…often.

In a sentence, learn who you are, learn who they are, take care of you & each other, and be thankful for all of it. You are created in God’s image…and so are they, and that is awesome. That’s probably why she couldn’t tell the difference between 1, 2 & 3. I can’t. Each gives and takes from the other, the lines that divide are blurred, and it becomes a kind of circle that feeds the circle.

Now, I’m writing today, not to restate yesterday’s bullet points, but because of a conversation over lunch. A man said to me that what he thought during the message is how he’d been playing defense, almost exclusively, and how he needed to send the offense on the field. (Maybe we all use and understand sports metaphors is because Sports are, without question, the American Religion.) What he meant is that he had been reacting to the changing landscape of his life – like we all do. When our schedules or circumstances shift, our days look different, our routines & practices are altered, and we adjust. When we finally adjust, things change again, and we return to GO.

What you may notice is that these 3 clear, easy to remember points require a tremendous intentionality. As far as I can tell, intention is the opposite of reaction. It’s hard to be thankful when work is upside down. And when the storms are raging, who has time to wonder what we think, or how we feel about it? Right? That’s why it’s so vital that we don’t just coast during the ordinary time.

We dive into Ephesians so that, when life flattens us, we either already have our helmets on, or we know to put them on right away, before we do anything else. We become the kind of people who see beauty, not for the perfect days like today, but for when it’s cold and rainy, so that our souls know to keep looking around for the divine. Our identity is deeply imprinted on us in practice, so that we don’t waver on game days, when we’re 0-4 with 4 strikeouts.

So now what? As always, the “now what?” is to love somebody. Reaction happens, there are sometimes entire seasons where we have to play defense, but maybe we can remember to turn the offense loose from time to time.

“Gifts”

The Buddhist saying, “the world is divided into those who are right,” is really tearing me up this week. A general rule of ministry is that we are given the “gift” of attack in the spaces we are most vulnerable, in those hard to reach places where we will be wildly uncomfortable. AND that these “gifts” will be given at the worst possible time.

I used to not really believe in spiritual warfare or the devil or demons or anything like that – I thought it was fiction to excuse our own poor decisions and behavior (which, of course, it is, sometimes). But I was wrong, I believe all of it now. I also believe that God can, and does, take these moments and transform them. We grow in/through the battlefield. And most importantly, in the fight, we see that He is there, that He has never left us alone.

Division is probably the greatest tactic of the enemy, constantly whispering our right-ness, our superiority, into our ears. Our heads and hearts are filled with “how they are,” or how to view “them.” That’s why humility is so important, and so impossibly hard.

Socrates says, “wisdom is, above all, knowing what we don’t know. He taught an intellectual form of humility that freely acknowledges the gaps in our knowledge and that humbly seeks to address our blind spots.” What we don’t know?? It’s hard to remain arrogantly superior with gaps in our knowledge, or blind spots.

And Aristotle understood humility as a “moral virtue, sandwiched between the vices of arrogance and moral weakness.” Like Socrates, he believed that humility must include “accurate self-knowledge and a generous acknowledgment of the qualities of others that avoids distortion and extremes.”

Division based on our being right is not generous. Instead, it ignores the qualities of others. And our supremacy thrives on distortions and extremes!

These “gifts,” and attacks can produce a result that is in direct opposition to the one intended. We can see them as the biggest & best evidence that we have much more work to do. We won’t need to prove or defend our imagined superiority, because we will be secure in our identity in him: loved, accepted, forgiven, and made holy. This knowledge will give is the courage to be vulnerable and uncomfortable. We won’t want to build any walls, because we will be too busy tearing them down. And we can keep taking a sledgehammer of love to the fear and inadequacy that draws these silly lines of division. And we can open our eyes to the peace of Jesus Christ, and as we do, we can encourage others to do the same.

This is (and we are) a New Creation, it’s time we act like it.

Todays

Last night, we went to a nearby Catholic school to watch a high school girls softball game. It was my first since I was at college, but that might not count. I was only there to see the Angel, so maybe a game happened, maybe our school won, maybe they played with NERF balls or in ball gowns, maybe, but who could possibly care? Not me, that’s for sure. I had been away for 2 months in California, wasting time post-graduation, and spent most of those 2 months with my brother, sister and their cats, listening to music, writing, and missing my special lady.

Anyway, last night. After an extra inning, our school won. How did I end up at a high school softball game? For a very similar reason to the one in which I previously found myself at a softball game; a girl. My son has a girlfriend who is a star. I know she’s a terrific athlete, but it’s one thing to hear it and another altogether to see it. In the extra inning, with runners on 2nd and 3rd, she came to the plate… I can’t remember anything in baseball being as much of a foregone conclusion. Baseball is a very difficult game, a “high-failure” sport, where nothing is certain. Except this. These runs would score, everyone there knew it, and a bases clearing triple later, we were all proven right.

Earlier in the day, I gave communion to some friends in their living room. (This is something I hadn’t done before, and it’s something I’ll do again.) The man is ill, the prognosis is not too great, but we shared that moment in our sadness and our care, giving each other and God our presence, the most priceless of gifts we ever truly have to offer. I told them I loved them, and left a couple of hours before the eclipse.

As far as the eclipse, the schools closed early, so my family (all 4 of us) and the softball superhero stood outside in those ridiculous looking glasses looking up through the clouds at the sun.

I’m not sure I was overwhelmed by the eclipse, or what I was feeling, but it was big and heavy and significant. Saturday, we attended a funeral for my cousin. I had the honor of speaking, and I chose to speak about my favorite passage in the Scriptures: “Surely God was in this place, and I was unaware.”

Incidentally, I have quite a few favorite passages, but this one holds special meaning to me. You see, I missed so much of my dad before he passed. And I have missed so much of you, missed so much of my cousin, and missed so much of me.

This post is full of GREAT BIG MOMENTS, but our lives are made up of what is often mistakenly called “ordinary” time. This “ordinary” time is so easily missed, and only then do we realize that it was never ordinary at all, never common. It, and we, are wildly unique and spectacular. A ticket agent’s help in Dallas who was “just” doing her job, a softball dad’s handshake, a dog laying on the floor in a living room while 4 people share communion, laughing at the dinner table, and walking outside in the grass…when did we stop realizing these things were miracles of divine presence? Love isn’t only rose petals and grand gestures, and life isn’t always extra inning RBI triples, it’s sometimes pushing shopping carts & quiet nights reading in bed. It’s not always mountaintops, it’s simply ok. And I don’t have to tell you that other times, it’s heartbreaking.

But these are our lives, each of our todays are gifts, God is in all of these places, and it’s really time to stop missing them, stop taking them for granted, believing the lies that they are anything other than wonderfully, fantastically extraordinary.

Fruit

Do you know you can get married in AT&T Stadium (where the Dallas Cowboys play)? Or have a sweet sixteen party or quinceañera? These are just 2 of the things I learned on my tour of the stadium. And to answer your question, they never addressed why you’d want to.

My son & I went to Dallas earlier this week to see an NBA basketball game, except they had rescheduled the game (I’m still waiting for a response to my email that includes a heartfelt response from Mavericks owner Mark Cuban), so we just went to Dallas. While we were there, we toured the home stadium of everyone’s favorite football team, America’s Team, the Dallas Cowboys – I wrote about it on my other blog, lovewithacapitall.com. The spoiler is that I didn’t really love it like I thought I would, but I’m not writing about that, specifically, here.

Something else happened, while I was there, that I am writing about. In last week’s post, I shared about our disappointment with the game. I have very many people (i.e. you) in my life (much more than I could ever deserve) who are beautiful and care for me in such lovely ways. One of them has a Good Friend in Dallas and offered to reach out to help us, with what I expected to be suggestions, directions for an aimless trip. I was mistaken.

We were met at a cool lunch spot by a young woman, who had arranged our day for us, booking tours and making dinner reservations. She spent the day with us, enjoying the experience as much as we did. As it turned out, she was also paying for everything (as representative for the person she worked for, the Good Friend). I can only guess what everything cost, an extraordinary sum, but the actual amount was actually sort of irrelevant, as far as we’re concerned.

What IS important, and the sermon they were preaching to us was on generosity, on our relationship to our money.

You see, Jerry Jones (the owner of the stadium) chose to use his money to create an obscene tower to the heavens, a monument to himself and his own desperate bid for “greatness.” The Cowboys might play there, but there is no mistaking that it is the home of Jerry Jones.

(You don’t have to worry, I will continue to love my Cowboys…but I will not be back to that stadium, unless I’m giving the Sunday morning Gospel message there;)

The Good Friend chose to use his wealth to give to my son & I, 2 people he had not, and still has not, met. He chose to give what he had earned to us, to give what he had been blessed with, he chose to love us. It speaks to the relationship he has with the person we do know, but it speaks more to the character of both. They are conduits. What they have been given, they will give.

Their money is a way to connect, a way to provide, to pass along their faith. Their legacy is gratitude, experience, generosity, care, ministry, and beauty. The legacy of Jones is a massive silver egg in Arlington.

In a story in the Bible, Jesus tells a rich young man to give away all he has and follow Him. The young man can’t, and walks away with only his wealth. He has corporations and empires to build, bank balances that need to grow. Money isn’t evil, it’s just a thing, a tool, that can be used to connect or to destroy. The love of money is the problem; that love is a ravenous monster that devours everything in its path in its insatiable quest for More.

I don’t pretend to know Jerry Jones, and to infer things about his character and his god may be unfair. I am not his judge, thankfully. But I don’t know the Good Friend, either. Sometimes, all others have is our fruit to express our hearts. Our time in Dallas was just a day, but the questions it asked and the contrast in the answers, will last forever.