Bible

If You Do Or If You Don’t

There’s a passage in 1 Corinthians 10 that has taken up residence in my head & heart, and to tell you the truth, I hope it stays and makes a home. (This is in the letter we’re studying on Sunday mornings, but it is in chapter 10, so that means we’ll only get there in 2 or 3 years. You probably won’t remember if I make this post the message, word for word. Of course, I won’t. The me that writes this will not be the me that gives that message. You can’t read the same book twice, right? You’re a different person, so the book takes on a different personality through the lenses of your experiences, thoughts, ideas, and passions. I’ll be different then.)

Here it is: 1 Corinthians 10:31 So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

Right? It’s a mind bomb, a seriously illuminating and convicting verse. We might spend 2 or 3 years on that alone. Or it might just take me 2 or 3 years to unpack.

It’s in a chapter about idolatry and the food dedicated to idols, in a bigger section asking Why do you do the things you do?

So, here we are, in a place (Corinth, America, Earth) where the answers to that question are “because I want to,” “because I like it,” “it feels good,” a million variations of the real answer: “ME.” Paul is writing to ask us to change that answer.

Maybe this is the main point of this letter. Maybe it’s the main point of allllll the letters. Maybe it’s the main point in living any sort of obedient life of faith.

That thing you’re doing (whether working out, doing the dishes, taking a Zoom call, sleeping, making dinner, putting a puzzle together, singing, working, driving to the grocery store, eating, having sex, watching tv, listening to music, writing emails, playing video games, playing the guitar, posting on social media, and on and on and on), do it for the glory of God.

Now, am I? Whatever I do? Everything? Really? Are the things I’m doing for His glory? Or mine?

Maybe the things don’t have to change, just the intention.

It reminds me of the Great Commission – “As you’re going, make disciples.” We don’t have to add a million things to our schedules, just inject purpose into the things already there.

Whatever we do, do it with intention, with purpose, for something, for someOne.

Of course, maybe the thing has to change, but that doesn’t seem to be the focus here. He just said, “Eat that thing…or don’t.” “Do that thing…or don’t.” “If you do OR if you don’t, make it for His glory.”

If the gym is to make me awesome so I can impress you, if it’s simple vanity – that cannot be for His glory. The gym has to change – either the going or the why. And that is something we can only work out WITH; with the Holy Spirit and with our trusted brothers & sisters. It’s a revolutionary shift in perspective, and revolutions happen in moments, in baby steps, and can’t happen alone.

D.B. Cooper Conventions & Monopoly Tournaments

I saw The Batman and the 3rd Fantastic Beasts films in the last few weeks and really loved them both. As a matter of fact, as far as Fantastic Beasts, it would be impossible to express just how much. Maybe I’ll try sometime. Maybe not. The Batman was awfully good, but I say that knowing full well that I am the target market, so it’s possible my opinion wouldn’t be the most objective. 

We will talk about 2 other films: Under the Boardwalk: A Monopoly Story, and D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?! Now, what could these 2 possibly have in common, right? Not surprisingly, they also share it with Bikram, Holy Hell, and the Rajneeshees of Wild, Wild Country. The more I think about it, they share it with The Batman and Fantastic Beasts, Thor, The Avengers, Stand By Me and Stranger Things, too. 

D.B. Cooper was the alias of a guy who hi-jacked an airplane in the 70’s, took $200,000, jumped out somewhere in Oregon, and was never found. The thing that makes it a cool story instead of a terrible story is that no one was harmed, outside of a minor inconvenience for the passengers. Some think he is still alive, may or may not be living in Florida, or that he fell to his death. None of that matters too much to me, it’s an interesting piece of pop culture, a mysterious American outlaw very much of a time.

Monopoly is a 100+ year-old board game that we’ve all played and that the Angel HATES. I was pretty neutral, but I like it very much since this documentary. 

There are D.B. Cooper conventions, where people from all over get together and geek out over conspiracy theories, police sketches, and an inch of decayed nylon found in a forest. There are also Monopoly championship tournaments, which are exactly what you think they are. Rooms full of tables where the best players battle over rent, mortgage values and property trades. These people are weirdos, in the very best sense of the word. I know they are, because I’m one of them. We all are. We may not participate in these particular events, but we all have our D.B. Cooper conventions. (If we don’t, we should by all means immediately get one!)

The last 15 minutes (or episode) of the cult docs we all adore the former members are interviewed, and there is always an unmistakable air of melancholy. They miss the time they were involved (before the true insanity of everything was exposed). Thor & Hulk need a team, Batman finds he can not, and should not, be the lone hero vigilante forever. It is the relationships between characters in Fantastic Beasts that remain, none of us really care about wands or spells or CGI creatures.

The biggest lie that most of us know is a lie but tell as truth, and that we all apparently agree to let slide, even though we know nobody actually believes is that we are islands. We don’t need, or want, other people. We are wholely independent. We prefer riding alone. 

Except we’ll do pretty much anything to find a community. We’ll drink Kool Aid, let a yogi behave like a complete maniac, play in Monopoly tournaments, or go to conventions for a 50 year old historical footnote. None of this is surprising in the least. I happen to believe we are created for each other, wired for relationship. 

In Christian circles, it can be quite tempting to sound super-spiritual and say some variation of “all I need is God.” It sounds awesome and we all ooh and ahh, but can you take a wild guess where that sort of doctrine isn’t? The Bible. In Genesis 1 & 2, before the Fall, everything is “good” except 1 thing: the man is alone. The man isn’t alone, he has God and they walk in the Garden in the cool of the evening, but God still says, “it is not good for the man to be alone,” so He makes a woman. Then in the New Testament, He makes the Church.

Maybe you don’t believe in God or Genesis or the Church, or maybe you do, but don’t think it happened exactly like it’s written. A thing doesn’t have to have happened for it to be True. This Genesis account is as true as anything has ever been, we are made to be together. And I know this, without a doubt, because D.B. Cooper conventions and Monopoly tournaments exist.

Sausage

There’s a saying I love about “seeing how the sausage is made.” We usually only consume the final product, without a thought as to how it gets to that point. We eat and love sausage, but most of us have no idea how that delicious meat gets to the shelves of our supermarket (and in the case of sausage, maybe that’s a good thing.) Hot dogs, McDonald’s ‘chicken’ McNuggets, any number of foods fall into this category, but this expression fits many more areas. You have a beautiful garden that we all admire and appreciate, but have no idea how many hours went into the planting and care to achieve such beauty. Slash is the guitarist for Guns N’ Roses and his solos are transcendent. His playing looks glamorous and natural, but we don’t see the 10,000+ hours of practice in his bedroom alone that makes it possible.

I’m not Slash, not particularly glamorous, and this isn’t a beautiful garden, but I wanted to give you a small peek behind the metaphorical curtain for the upcoming series at the Bridge.

I decided months ago that we would study the epistle to the Ephesians after the Sermon on the Mount concludes (which will be this week). I asked for suggestions, because if there was an interest, maybe we could adapt. I also mentioned we would jump into Ephesians or 1 Corinthians (and I don’t know why that came out of my mouth that morning 2 weeks ago, it was totally unplanned and I thought, “that’s interesting. I wonder what that’s about.”)

So I finished reading Job (the book I had been reading) and turned to Ephesians. Why I never got there, again, I can’t say. But I flipped to 1 Corinthians and went no further.

My Bible has introductions to each book, and in this particular one, it read: “The Christians in Corinth were struggling with their environment. Surrounded by corruption and every conceivable sin, they felt pressure to adapt…They were free in Christ, but what did this freedom mean?”

Then, in some specific notes on chapter 1: “[Corinth was] fiercely independent and as decadent as any city,” and “arguments and divisions arose [within the church.]”

Yet, the people were “called…made holy…given every spiritual gift.”

And now I know why.

Looking at the notes in my Bible and the ones I took, I can’t tell where they’re describing, Corinth or America. There, then, or here, now? They were called and given every spiritual gift, yet also fiercely independent, decadent, with all sorts of questions about what being “called” means and why it matters.

I wanted to talk about being God’s “masterpiece” and the armor of God. Ephesians has some of the most gorgeous language and profound Gospel teaching, it’s no wonder I would want to spend some time there (and maybe we will afterwards.) But we’re not talking about the Ephesians. We’re going to dive into the letter to the Corinthian (American) church and splash around in this deep water that, I’m now convinced, will be absolutely vital to our lives.

Israel

The youth retreat was last Tuesday. This day, the youth was a group of high school aged boys (Only boys. Not because boys are the only ones welcome, but because that’s just how it was. There is one lovely young woman, but she happened to be on vacation, so we had all boys. I am not complaining or lamenting this fact.) This group spent 12 hours together with 2 adult facilitators swimming in a lake, reading the book of Mark, and eating. Towards the end of the evening, I had the opportunity to ask if there was anything they wanted to talk about, fully expecting silence or, if anything at all, I figured something about girls.

For some reason, the evangelical political-spiritual movement in this country has decided the 2 most important issues facing the Church are not grace, love, compassion, poverty, kindness, non-violence, addiction, or anything else. Abortion and Homosexuality are the big 2, and judging by the overwhelming amount of time & energy given to those 2, there isn’t a 3rd. I tell you this because one of these thoughtful, courageous boys chose to take my invitation to ask about homosexuality, which became a wildly fascinating hour long discussion.

These young men were engaging with the Scriptures – much more than just these two current hot buttons. What is the role of the Bible in our lives and in the lives of the country and culture? What did the Bible say about a subject, specifically? Do we actually care? Does context/translation matter? Is there a seeming conflict elsewhere, and if so, which weighs more? And we can’t forget the most important question: Now what?

In the book of Genesis, Jacob (whose name means, “he grasps the heel,” which doesn’t mean much to us now, but it also means “he deceives,” which does. Jacob’s story in Genesis illustrates this second meaning.) finds himself in the wilderness, all alone, with a “man.” Jacob asks this ‘man’ for a blessing, which gives us the clear hint that this is not an ordinary man. They wrestle all night and in the morning (after an unbelievably significant question about his name), the ‘man’ finally blesses Jacob, but not before he injures his hip. Jacob’s name is changed here, and becomes “Israel,” which means “one who wrestles/struggles with God.”

We can struggle with God, too. Right? And sometimes that struggle leaves us with a permanent limp. The Jewish people saw this struggle as absolutely vital to a life of faith. We don’t as much, we mostly want assent, agreement, conformity. I easily find doubt, questioning, and wrestling all over the Bible. It’s much more difficult to find assent and certainty.

Athol Dickson says: “What if God placed the paradoxes within the Scriptures to cause me to struggle for the truth? What if it is the struggle He desires as much as the truth itself?”

Haven’t you ever thought that Jesus could have pretty easily cleared up a lot of our questions? Maybe instead of answering with more questions (inviting the one who asks into a conversation, a struggle), he could’ve just given us the straight answer, in plain words, with bullet points. And why does the Bible sometimes contradict itself? Couldn’t it have been far more instruction manual and far less poetry? More fact and less story?

I could have said, “this is the answer,” if I felt like being that guy, and shut that discussion down immediately. As they wandered around in the dark, throwing guesses and opinions against the wall, I could have said, “no,” or “that’s wrong,” if I happened to disagree, (or even “yes,” or “that’s right”) and they would have learned that this was no safe place, no place where their authentic searching engagement was valued, only their quiet acquiescence, their right-ness.

That’s what’s so inspiring and encouraging about this youth group conversation. They aren’t content to just take what they’ve been offered, they want to turn it over, around and upside down. They aren’t cool with being “the one who grasps the heel,” they’re willing to fight for the truth, and in the process, become “Israel.” And that fills me with more hope for our homes, communities and world than I can even begin to tell you.

Not Better…

“I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.” Rom. 12:3 MSG

This is from the Eugene Peterson’s Message translation, and before we go one step further, let’s just take a quick second to think about what a gigantic undertaking it would be to write your own translation of the Bible!!! He’s writing his own translation of the Bible, and for me, some days the sink is so full of dishes, it’s hard to know where to start.

Anyway. Romans 12 begins with offering ourselves, our bodies, as a living sacrifice, not conforming to the world but being transformed by the renewing of our minds, then moving into “understanding ourselves.” 

I have been sitting for the last few months thinking on the universal struggle between pleasing people and pleasing God, or just how big the audience is: either One or a million. The crazy thing with this ‘pleasing’ confusion is that it always circles back to that old familiar space, where I am “not good enough.” If the thing I want most is to please my neighbor and my boys and the Angel and you and the guy next to me at the gym and the driver in the car next to me and on and on, at some point, I won’t and then I’m forced to face the shocking fact that I am not, in fact, perfect at all. And if I’m not perfect, if I let them (anyone) down, if I am not good enough, then what am I? What is my value? What am I worth?

That’s when the rotten tapes begin to roll, deafening in my head, like they have a billion times before, with the answers. “You are worthless. You are nothing, pathetic. You will never be enough. (Repeat with different words, examples, tones, different levels of urgency.)” These answers very nearly irreparably broke middle school me. I still hear them from time to time, the difference is that I now see them as the lies they are. But if they aren’t true, then what is?

The NIV states verse 3 as: “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.” It was that “but rather think of yourself as…” that hooked me and kept me from thinking of anything else.

How am I to think of myself? That is exactly the question. The verse begins, “not too highly,” and that’s not a problem usually. Maybe some of us fight that battle, but mostly, I think we remain mired in the sludge of contempt. (I do recognize that this is another facet of idolatry – to think that we are the exception to God’s love/redemption/acceptance is awfully arrogant. Different sides of the same ugly coin.) But to be honest, I don’t understand the rest of the verse. I immediately thought it meant that maybe we should think of ourselves the way God does – but is that actually what this verse says?

That’s how I found myself in the Message, and as it turns out, I was sort of right. Generally, I think that is exactly how we should see that beautiful child of God in the mirror.

But this verse says, “by what God is and what He does for us.” As if we are covered with His skin, and it is no longer possible to see ourselves without the lens of Jesus Christ. And if we follow this line of thinking, we arrive at a surprising destination where all of the questions we’ve been asking have done nothing but prove how misguided we’ve been. 

Is our goal to please God or to please our co-workers?

Either way, we then “misinterpret ourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God,” seeing ourselves as “what we are and what we do for Him.” 

The passage continues with a cool body analogy, where we bring our gifts to the table for Our God and each other – and why? Because we have been set free from all of our have-to’s, all of our questions, where all that’s left is Him and His infinite grace. We are His and they are His gifts with which to bless us all.

Asking questions about worth and value, wasting time on perfection, seems to just keep us trapped in the old skins that simply don’t fit anymore. We are not better, we’re brand new.

3 Weeks

I think it’s been 3 weeks since we’ve connected here. 3 weeks!??! I wonder how many of us are having the same experience; our schedules are overflowing, and some very good, very important things are forced to wait. As we know too well, saying yes to something means saying no to many others. Having said that, I’m happy to say yes to this space today.

In Joshua 1:5, God says, “I will not fail you or abandon you.”

Then, in verses 6, 7, and 9, God says, respectively, “Be strong and courageous,” “Be staring and very courageous,” and “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged.”

Verse 9 ends with “For the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”

And one more, in the middle, verse 8, “Study this Book of the Law continually. Meditate on it day and night.”

Now, why am I simply listing Bible verses from the book of Joshua about violently conquering the Promised Land? Clouds have to be seen & observed before they can be tied together in 2022.

Joshua is told to be “strong and courageous” 3 times, bookended by promises that God would be with him, that Joshua would not be alone. Where does our strength begin and end? Where do we root our strength and courage? Where, in Whom, is our faith? These passages tell us that before we can stand, we know why and for Whom we are standing. We don’t stand in our own power, we find this strength and courage in Him.

It’s interesting, each time we are commanded to do anything, those commands begin & end with a promise from God. He acts first, decisively, mercifully. We can stand in strength and courage because we are not alone, because He is with us, because He will not abandon us.

We see this in the 10 commandments (before any command, He reminds us that He rescued us first) and the Beatitudes (before any command, Jesus announces that the “poor in spirit” are “blessed”), among many, many other examples.

It’s cool, right?

And in the middle of all of this, there is a reminder to study/meditate on Scripture. When things (storms, attacks, monsters) require strength and courage, we are easily distracted by the size of our fear, or the overwhelming nature of our enemy, or the desperate perception of impossibility. This seems like an invitation to focus (on the beginning & end, on the why or the because.)

Begin with God’s faithfulness. End with God’s faithfulness. Persevere in/with God’s guidance. And throughout, do the things. Show up. Stand. Speak. Risk. Take shots. Shine. Be strong and courageous.

So much of the Law is about here, now, today (even though we might not see it in the middle of ancient practices and outdated cultural norms). The Law is evidence that what we do matters. And not only does it matter, it affects our hearts. The spirit & physical body are inextricably tied. The Old Testament commands address our actions because we can often behave into new ways of living. This is why taking care of our bodies is so important. Taking care of our bodies is taking care of our spirits & souls.

That’s why rest, what we eat, and how we build altars or offer sacrifices are so important to God. It’s why we take days (or 3 weeks;) off or take slow morning walks or long family dinners. It’s why we do our jobs with integrity and character. It’s why we volunteer and coach youth sports. It’s why we call, why we hold, why we step, why we go, why we send heart emojis or tell each other we love them. Did you ever wonder why there are so many pages of maddeningly detailed instructions in the Bible? What we do matters. Everything matters.

We’re not earning anything anymore or bolstering our spiritual resumes in order to buy God’s acceptance or love. We already have all of that, we always have. But we do the things because through them, we walk out our faith, we respond to the boundless love that has been poured onto/into us, and we live out this radical design for life. We show our hope.

And that will take courage and strength.

And that will take reminders why and practices of focus.

And that will take Jesus.

Yield

Last Sunday at the Bridge around 9:30ish, after everything was ready, Gisy & Muriah were rehearsing, Mark was listening to his wife sing with hearts in his eyes, Donovan was dramatically overreacting to minor allergies, and no one else was there yet, I wrote this in my notebook:

“I wonder if the reason I have so little tolerance for pretense, acting, & hypocrisy is because the Truth is so much better? The Truth of who we actually are and that we are exactly where/who we are, that we are deeply, irrationally loved there, in that sometimes messy, sometimes ugly, sometimes painful, space. The Truth that we’ve been rescued.

See, the “show” is based in the belief that who we authentically are is somehow not enough, not accepted, not loved…that we are, first and foremost, NOT.

But instead, we ARE.

We don’t have to pretend any longer, we simply have to be us. We simply have to yield to His work, His grace, His love. Yield to Him, and that is all that is necessary, that is enough.

A need to create an image is a fundamental misunderstanding of who He is and what this story is (and how great that story really is.)

So when I see us hiding, masquerading, image-making, I actually see our empty parts, our missing parts, our misplaced belief in foundational NOT-ness

And Jesus has a different story, a different word.”

Then some people began to arrive and the thread was broken mid-sentence (here’s the sentence: The cross represents the old world and how far the empty ___ – I don’t know where I was going, I imagine the next word was ‘tomb,’ but I’m no longer sure.) I wanted to share it with you because we all so often struggle with our identity and our identity in Christ and how the 2 of them might not be the same. That disconnect causes us to contort ourselves into many unnatural positions, trying to be something we think we should be, or something we think they want us to be, or something whatever. Something else.

But it’s Easter, and what the cross represents is just how far Jesus would go to show & tell us who we are, show & tell us what we’re worth, most importantly show & tell us WHO HE IS and that all this pretending/hiding or how many shows we put on doesn’t change that at all. Maybe I wrote it then and maybe I’m writing it now is not because we didn’t know, but just because we need to hear it again.

Do Something

Late February and the month of March are very difficult weeks for me. It’s the end of winter, we’ve been inside for 3 months, it’s been dark, it’s cold, and then we tiptoe into March and immediately my heart breaks: the 3rd is the anniversary of my dad’s death. Once that is safely in the rear view, the 22nd was his birthday. He lived for baseball and that’s about to begin. On a normal year, pitchers & catchers have already reported. My son’s baseball season started yesterday, tryouts for the team I coach is next weekend. I miss my dad an lot.

So, I can get pretty sad about now.

This heartache, this spirit-ache, leaves a wide wake. I feel bored, uninspired, rudderless, you understand. I don’t work too much, choosing to watch tv, read, and feel generally awful. (It’s strange, I feel this and don’t know why, until I figure out that this is the exact same pattern every year! You’d think I’d get used to it.) I didn’t post anything last week, worked very little. I wait for it to pass.

I get monthly emails from Mark Manson, who you may or may not have heard of – he wrote a few books with clever, filthy titles that are impossible to forget. I like his perspective, even if I don’t always agree. That’s why I read him. If I agreed with everything, what need is there to read his work? Anyway, he (I think it was him, I can’t find it now – it might have been Aadam Ali or Matt McLeod, if you’re fact-checking my references) talks about a “Do Something Principle.” Motivation doesn’t matter, how you feel doesn’t matter, just do something. And it’s that something that leads to motivation rather than the other way around.

Then I was reading the 2 Kings books of the Bible and there’s this famous passage about the prophet Elijah and the prophets of Baal. It’s reads like a movie, like he wins the faith championship of the world, and then immediately he is crushingly depressed in a cave on the run from King Ahab and his wife Jezebel. How does that happen? Who knows, but it does to most of us at some time or another. Sometimes it’s after a mountaintop, too. Elijah is empty, saying “I have had enough, LORD.”

Twice the LORD asks him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Elijah complains, answers him with the same words (as if He didn’t hear the first time), detailing his hopelessness. I think if the LORD would ask me the same question now, “What are you doing here,” while I’m on the couch under a blanket thinking about pitchers & catchers and watching tv shows I don’t really like, I would do mostly the same thing. I’d talk about the cold, March 3rd, baseball, and anything/everything else that has me utterly lost and alone in this cave. And He’d probably ask me again. And I’d tell Him again. That’s why I’m not that judgy of Elijah. If you want to talk mountaintops, I’ll put a life the Angel, these 2 boys, and you up against any other, even Elijah’s Old Testament smack down. So what are we doing here?

God answers Elijah, and when I reference this passage I focus on the fact that He doesn’t really answer, He simply tells him he’s not alone. I say we don’t need answers, we need hands to hold. I’m right about that, too. But this time it was the verses before the one about the 7,000 others that jumped off the page.

He tells him to “Go back the way you came…anoint Hazael…anoint Jehu…and anoint Elisha.” You see, Elijah is a prophet. One of the main things prophets do is to anoint. He told Elijah to do his job. Do something. Remember your purpose, Elijah. And the people are obviously because life is nothing to do by yourself, for a legendary prophet or anyone else.

I’m still sad. There’s a war on the other side of the world that breaks our hearts each moment. People are still sick, divided, wondering where they’ll find their next meal or a shred of hope to keep moving. My dad is still gone and his birthday is in 2 weeks. These things are very true. Faith isn’t about pretending everything is peaches, it’s about seeing it, weeping, and getting up (whether He lifts us or just gives us the strength to lift ourselves doesn’t matter) to be the hands and feet of a God who loves you, me, Elijah, Ukraine, Russia, and Jezebel enough to find us in all of our caves, feed us, remind us of our purpose and people, and send us back in to love again.

Brown M&Ms

I post and talk a lot about showing up; to anything, work, relationships, baseball practice, the gym, church, mostly just showing up to our lives. This is the most important thing, and it can also be the heaviest, most intimidating step. Every body of water is deep and scary before we jump in (then sometimes it IS super deep and scary, but others are only up to our knees and we wonder why we didn’t do it sooner.) So, yes, we show up because we’ve been given a gift and we’re worth it.

But what I want to talk about today, though, is how we show up.

There’s a verse in 1 Kings (6:7): “In building the temple, only blocks dressed at the quarry were used, and no hammer, chisel or any other iron tool was heard at the temple site while it was being built.”

This is a relatively innocuous verse, easily missed, except for possibly to say, “who cares?” Right? Why do we care where the blocks were “dressed,” or if anything was heard (my translation says, “the entire structure was built without the sound of hammer, ax, or any other iron tool at the building site”) during it’s construction? Mostly, we don’t.

Unless there’s something else here.

I heard a story once about the band Van Halen. A contract rider is a list of demands by the artist or band for the venue/promoter. Van Halen stipulated that they have a bowl of M&Ms WITH ALL OF THE BROWN ONES REMOVED, or the entire show would be forfeited at full price. This sounds like egos running wild, simple garden variety arrogance, and it made me really dislike them for quite a while. I don’t anymore. See, the point is that the venue read the rider. Van Halen wanted tons and tons of bells and whistles, it was the “most sophisticated stage setup” at the time and most places were too old & outdated to comply. This would at the very least compromise the band’s vision and possibly create a safety issue. So they would look at the bowl of M&Ms ad if they saw brown, they would know the venue didn’t bother, and if they didn’t bother here, they wouldn’t bother in other areas.

The brown M&Ms didn’t matter, they all taste the same, and the sound doesn’t really matter here. These aren’t instruction plans, directions for building our own churches in 2022. It illustrates us the importance of demonstrating care, concern, honor and respect for God and His temple. It’s like saying, good, now that we’ve shown up, we can talk about if it matters how we show up. And it does.

If I sit down to dinner with you with my phone out on the table, volume up, watching the door, thinking about what else I have to do, totally absent except for my physical body, it shows a decided lack of care and honor for our meal, our time, our relationship. (Of course there are times where exceptions exist, and just showing up in the middle of a tsunami of responsibilities and chaos is the peak of care and honor for our relationship.) Showing up becomes just the last in a string of moves in preparation.

I guess the verse asks the question, are we demonstrating care, concern, honor and respect for God and His temple? (Maybe here’s a great time to be reminded that what “His temple” has changed, no longer a building and instead refers to His people – you & me & the guy who cut us off in traffic & the snotty worker at the grocery store & …) So, are we? How are we showing up to Our Creator? How about to the ‘temples’ in our lives? Are we dressing the blocks at the quarry, whatever dressing means? Are we removing the brown M&Ms?

More Catfishing

I just posted a mini on Facebook about Hebrews 12, and the countless mentions in the first several verses of us, our and we. Well, it’s not countless, it’s 9, but you get the picture. 10 if you count the reference to the huge cloud of witnesses. The point was that we’re called into relationship, into running together, into connection, but nobody has to tell any of us that, no matter how much we pretend that we are islands.

Today is Catfish reruns all day on MTV, until the new episode on tonight at 8. The one on right now is about a woman having an online romance with a super-hot model with a broken phone (always a super-hot model and ALWAYS a broken phone which makes a video chat impossible) to whom she has been sending mountains of money. If you were watching, you’d be thinking the same thing I am: What is wrong with this woman?!!?

But we already know. These thoughts tie together neatly. We are called into relationship and will do most anything to have it. These people just acknowledge this fact and are actually doing anything to have it, including trying to buy it.

The stories of our lives are defined by the people in them (or the lack of people in them.) I say it all the time, you can surely finish this sentence for me, one of the biggest wounds COVID inflicted was/is the isolation. In addition to the depression and every other kind of mental unhealth, the lie that we don’t need each other desperately is the worst and most damaging.

The other thing about Catfish is when the scales from this woman’s eyes and she sees she’s been manipulated, when her heart is breaking out loud, she turns into Nev (the tender-hearted host of the show) and they wrap their arms around each other. She’ll cry and he’ll comfort her. He’ll tell her she’s beautiful and convince her there’s nothing wrong with her. She loved, and trusted the object of that love. The show always ends with hope, that’s why it’s so great.

The story of Elijah in the Bible takes us to a cave where the prophet is crying out. He’s isolated. He’s broken. He’s alone. He’s asking all of the questions. When God answers, He doesn’t answer the questions, He says, “there are 7,000 others…”

Catfish reminds me of Elijah. This woman will feel totally alone, will cry until there she doesn’t have any tears left, will not get any answers that make this heartbreak any better, but she will get a person to hold her up.

And that is enough.