Jamie played the Ethiopian to my Phillip

I hate being in the last boarding group on Southwest.  Every window and aisle seat is taken.  Everyone seated has their head down to avoid eye contact lest I take that as an invitation to squeeze into the middle seat.  I delay the inevitable and eventually invade the personal space between two people on Aisle 18.

I try to make the process as painless as possible for my two new travel companions.  I have no overhead luggage and only bringing my iPad to my quick trip to Houston.  No backpacks.  No big jug of water.  No bag of food.  Trying to be user-friendly.  I even avoid putting my elbows on the arm rest to allow them their personal space.  Moments later my two new friends settle back into their routine.  My aisle friend is back asleep with his neck brace and headphone.  My window friend is back to reading her book.  A book entitled, “The Existence of God.”  She is on page 5.  She is using a receipt as a bookmark.  From the date and time on the receipt she apparently bought the book about 20 minutes earlier in the airport.  Hmmmmmmm.  Really?  I smiled.

As we back away from the gate she closes the book.  Closes her eyes.  Opens her eyes.  Looks at me and smiles.  I smile back and say, “my name is Drew”…”hi, my name is Jamie.”  I told her I noticed her book and asked what prompted her to start reading it.

She told me her story.  Raising her hand at VBS when she was 12.  Getting baptized.  Trying to read the bible.  Never really understanding.  Drifting.  Then off to college and drifting further.  Now in a successful career and wondering if there is more.  “Please let there be more than this.”  She had found a few books on the topic of heaven and had just found this one about God in the airport.  She was reading it but didn’t have any context to understand.

I smiled and opened up my HolyBible app for her to read Acts 8 about Phillip and the Ethiopian.  Phillip crawled into a chariot.  I crawled into a airplane seat.  The Ethiopian was reading Isaiah.  Jamie was reading about the existence of God.

For an hour we started in Genesis and walked into Romans.  Sharing the narrative of the Gospel.  Showing her how she is His.  How He has called her to Him.  How she has victory over sin and assurance of eternity in Him.

From my middle seat God gave me the blessing of being Phillip to this Ethiopian.

Jamie, may the Lord bless you, keep you, smile upon you, and bring you His peace.

Alone in a Crowded Room

I got an unexpected email from an old friend tonight.

It was so fun to reconnect.  I had thought of them so many times before.  Curious where they were.  How things were going.  How life had changed.  So many unanswered questions still.  Tonight brought some closure but left me feeling a bit empty too.  Wanting more.  Can a few lines in an email really close the distance?

I cant help but wonder how social media has redefined our relationships.  Have we lost depth?  Have we forgotten how to be still and find joy just from being in the presence of a true friend?

I was at dinner the other night and watched how many couples spend a significant portion of his or her time with their partner texting someone else.  I do the same.  We all do.  Why?

I cant help but wonder if the glimmering realm of interruption and distraction on the device that never leaves our hand impedes the sort of comprehension and retention that “deep reading” brings.  We’ve replaced books with summaries.  We’ve replaced relationships with “friends.”

Let me be clear…there is no more obsessed “early adopter” than myself.  I have 1.0 of every new piece of technology and app that lands in iTunes.  But I wonder about the consequences of my habits that abandon sustained immersion and concentration for the 140 character tweet.  What is gained and what is lost?

And it brings me to how it must surely effect my interaction with God.  We were designed for relationship.  Divine relationship.  God the Father, Spirit, and Son all existed perfectly in relation before time began.  There is no better example of His grace than when He invited us to join that relationship.

My digital life leaves me always wanting more.  It leaves me feeling alone in a crowded room.  It leaves me wanting something closer, deeper, special.  Something divine that I was created for.  They have offered me a seat at the eternal communion table.  The wedding feast.  My response…my RSVP deserves more than a “like.”

Idea.  Don’t just read someone’s “verse of the day” post on Facebook today and think you “meditated on the Word both day and night.”  Read the verse…take some time to read the chapter…and maybe even chase a cross reference or two.   You aren’t alone.

My talk with Victor…

“Sleep comes more easily than it returns.”

– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

I will confess that sometimes sleep is a luxury which I cant afford.  The glowing 4:00 a.m. on my phone knows all of my secrets.  And while rare, last night was one such occurrence.

I sat in the back yard in the cool night air for a while.  Tried reading because it’s a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.  But to no avail.  Then it occurred to me to log in to ECHO…our new response platform at Need Him.  It integrates all means of live response (live voice, chat, text, SMS, and social media) into one system for our volunteers to use to speak to people about Jesus.

I logged in at 4:00 a.m.  The que was understandably quiet but only for a moment.  Then I heard the <ping> notifying me that someone was waiting to chat with me.  His name was Victor.  His topic was simply “religion.”  I was intrigued.

His first question was simple and quite profound…”what is the point of religion?”  I first attempted to separate the topic of “religion” from biblical Christianity.   But he kept pressing on the topic of faith.

He asked, “but why put faith in something you cannot see or feel?”

It is a very common question.  How would you answer that?  I was immediately reminded of Hebrews 11:1 where it says that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction (evidence) of things not seen.

 

Then this example occurred to me.

Say you are the first car at a red light.  When the light turns green what do you do?  You drive on through.  Do you first get out to make sure the opposite light had first turned red to protect you from traffic approaching on your left and right?  Probably not.  But why not?

You drive on through on a green light based on faith that the other light is red.  Faith is based on experience, history, observation, and reasoning.   We are all people of faith.  We take steps of faith every day.  The greater question is “what is the foundation of that faith?”

Victor had his faith in himself and his own creation.  He claimed that the world is out of control and we created God to bring reason to the chaos.  He reasoned that “God is the collective creation of individual creative thought and consciousness of all mankind…we created god but we are also god.”

I told him that sounds like a very weak god.  He paused and replied, “give me a moment to put that into perspective.”

Amen for little victories in conversations.

It was St. Augustine that said, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

Pray Victor sees.  Pray he is given the faith to believe.  Pray we all are…

 

Higgs boson particle…meet God.

Sitting alone on the porch of a friends cabin in Wisconsin staring out at 106 degrees due east (thanks iPad compass app) over Lake Michigan.  Imagining the shoreline of Michigan 118 miles away (thanks Google).  Imagining the volume.  The expanse.  Watching one wave hit the shore and imagining the potential of trillions more in the expanse.  Imagining eternity.  I got dizzy.  So I stopped.

 

I went back to reading the news and came across an interesting article on the $4 billion dollar Hadron Large Collider and particle accelerator in France built in 2008 to search for the elusive Higgs boson particle.  (see photo)

 

“Higgs boson” is the only subatomic particle predicted to exist but still not yet discovered. Other particles including quarks, electrons, and neutrons have all been discovered, but the theory of Higgs boson is so key to fundamental physics that Nobel Laureate scientist Leon Lederman nicknamed it the “God Particle.”

 

Lederman claims he named it the “God Particle” in 1994 because it was “so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive.” Lets be clear.  Nobody saw it when the Hadron turned on in 2008. Nobody has seen it yet.  Apparently there is an update next week.  But even then, “even if we see strong evidence of a Higgs-like particle … the correct understanding of that particle — in particular, determining whether it is or isn’t a ‘simplest Higgs’ — may take years.”

 

So apparently the observations and tests don’t prove that Higgs boson exists. But instead, the concept of Higgs boson explains the observations and tests so well that it must exist and be the only answer. It’s almost as though high-energy-particle physicists don’t need to wait to see Higgs boson before they start believing in it.

 

Hmmmmmmmm.  Sounds familiar.  Sounds like what I’m so often accused of when I share my “simplistic faith in God” to an atheist.

 

I am constantly told that for God to be real then He must be proved by the empirical and measurable results from the scientific method.  “I can’t believe in anything that can’t be proven,” I’m told.  But it seems to me that the scientific method is really about offering the best theoretical explanation to a question.  Furthermore, understanding that our scientific explanations often cant be firmly proven, may lie beyond proof, or at the very least will require constant scrutiny and further searching.

 

Science often offers explanations for the existence of invisible and undetectable mysteries such as black holes and dark matter, to explain what can’t be seen. It seems that the reason why Higgs boson is hypothesized to exist is not because it does exist, but because it makes so much sense based on other observations. The best indication that it exists seems to be the power it seems to have to effect its environment.  Again…hmmmmmm.

 

Just as the physicists at CERN believe Higgs exists because it’s the best explanation based on other observations I believe in the existence of God because He gives me the best framework for making sense of the world I see around me. Harvard psychologist William James wrote that, “religious faith is about inferring the existence of an unseen order in which the riddles of the natural order can be explained.”  Sure, OK.  Yes and Amen.  Sounds a bit like Hebrews 11:1-2 in The Message, “The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.”

 

I do think Christians need to learn a very valuable lesson from the physicists at CERN.  Never stop looking.  Never stop studying.  Never stop searching.  Never stop getting closer.  Never stop being open to other ideas.  Just like science, theology too is progressive.  Never stop asking why.

 

“Last December, the teams reported that they saw “tantalizing hints” of the Higgs’ existence at a mass of around 125 billion electron volts, or 125 GeV.”   I have no idea what that means, but I found “tantalizing hints” of the existence of the God that created Higgs this morning in prayer, scripture, and worship.

 

Taylor Swift and Pentecost

So Im pretty confident that no one has made this connection…but tonight on the porch I was listening to Taylor Swift’s song “Back to December” and I was reminded that last week was Pentecost Ascension Sunday.  Stick with me.

Apparently the song is about a girl who broke up with her boyfriend in December and now realizes how much she misses him but only after he has left her and its too late to go back. “It turns out freedom ain’t nothing but missing you. Wishing I’d realized what I had when you were mine. I’d go back to December, turn around and make it all right.
I go back to December all the time.”

Starting to see the connection?  🙂

So I was thinking how the disciples must have felt 2,000 years ago on Pentecost Ascension Sunday.  They had been following Jesus for 3 years.  Listening to His teaching.  Eating, laughing, crying, praying, fasting.  And listening some more.  But yet still they didn’t comprehend the entirety of His message.  In the last few days He even gave them hints that He would be leaving them soon.  But they didn’t listen.

Then came the crucifixion.  Then the resurrection.  Still they didn’t understand.  Peter most notably.  So in Matthew 28:16 Jesus told them, “Meet me in Galilee.”  Why Galilee?  It was a 7 day walk.  Why? Because it all started there.  Its where Jesus called them to follow Him 3 years earlier.  Its where everything made sense.  Everything was simple.  Everything was right.  Now 50 days after leaving for Galilee they were back in Jerusalem.  They still don’t fully understand whats happening.  Even as they watch Him ascend.

Ive always wondered what they must have thought that night after watching their Messiah, Savior, Lord, Rabbi, and friend ascend until He was hidden behind a cloud.  And thats where Taylor Swift comes in.   “”It turns out freedom ain’t nothing but missing you. Wishing I’d realized what I had when you were mine. I’d go back to December, turn around and make it all right. I go back to December all the time.”

Ever find yourself in that place?  Wanting to go back to when it made sense?  Back to when it was simple?   Back to December?  And maybe then you could make it all right?  Ive been there a lot lately it seems.

Well, the good news of the Gospel is that it does make sense.  It is simple.  And He has made it all right.  Even though our perfect union with God was fractured by our sin, He reached down to reconcile us back to Him through His son.  Its precisely why Jesus came, died, and ascended that now makes it all right.

Thanks Taylor for the strange connection.  Yes and Amen to the application.

Morning pew

I will be in the 5PM service tonight…but this morning, this is the view from my pew.  Quiet.  Still.  Peaceful.  Reflective.  And a bit misty.

One of my professors this week was discussing evangelism in light of Matthew 4:19.  “Follow Me and I will make you fishers of men.”  He was arguing that evangelism should be done with intent.  He said, “we go fishing to catch something so we should share Jesus with the intent to save.”  With all due respect, he doesn’t understand fishing.

Some people read their bible in the morning with a cup of coffee.  Im sitting here with a cane pole watching a bobber wiggle in the water.  Wondering.  Whats making the bobber move?  Fish? Turtle?  What kind of fish? Is it big or little?  Does it like the little piece of corn?  Is the hook to big?  Did it eat the bait?  Do I set the hook?  Do I lift it up to see if the bait is gone?

Fishing isn’t about catching something.  Its about the unexpected wonder of catching something.

It seems that conversations with people can be the same.

Reminds me of hearing from an old friend and wondering how they have been.  Hoping perhaps to rekindle a conversation from days long ago. But not knowing if they like the little piece of corn on the new hook.  The bobber is moving but are they only playing with it?  Then the bobber stops.  Did they move on?  Are they still there?

Fishing…and conversations…are delicate.

So I don’t think that Jesus used “fishers of men” to imply that we should always speak of Him with the intent to save.  We cant save or convict.  That’s the divine task of the Son and Spirit.  I think He was speaking to fishermen about fishing because they understood that when you fish…as when you speak to people…it requires patience, hope, and a little bit of wonder about the process.

 

Its 4’OClock in the morning…

 

“Its 4’OClock in the morning damnit!  Listen to me good”! –Elton John

 

Yesterday morning I woke up early.  No light coming yet from the rising sun.  No sounds yet of our neighborhood waking up. My eyes were bleary and blinking hard.  Waiting patiently for them to focus before I finally rolled over to look at the clock.

 

4:00AM.

 

I heard this presentation a few years ago at a TED conference and I thought it was brilliant.  http://www.ted.com/talks/rives_on_4_a_m.html.  How did 4 A.M. come to represent the absolute worst, isolated, and most lonely time of day?

 

So 4:00AM is still a bit early for me but I could not go back to sleep.  So I logged in to our new ECHO system our ministry uses for global evangelism response to see if anyone was interested in learning more about Jesus.  Apparently one of our commercials had just run on MTV and I immediately got connected with two guys…John and Finn.  Let me start with John.

 

He was up early too getting ready to drive out to California.  He had just graduated from high school.  So we started chatting.  He started with…”I have difficulty believing in Jesus” We chatted for over an hour.  What a joy to share the narrative of the Gospel with someone who had never heard it and have them respond…”yeah, I understand what you’re saying…I understand what you mean now.”

 

Not a bad way for me to start my morning.  Praising God for the blessing He has given me, our staff, and our volunteers for allowing us to watch Him share the Good News of His son to millions of people since 1996.

 

So now let me tell you about Finn. He is a junior in college.  Up early too.  Wrestling with spiritual questions with nowhere to turn.  Watching MTV and he saw one of our commercials.  He had amazing questions.  After chatting for two hours I asked if he finally understood our separation from God and His plan to heal us back to Him.  Do you believe Finn? “do I what?  Do I believe?  Of course I do!”  Yes and Amen.

 

Not everything that happens at 4:00AM is dark.  Sometimes the light shines through.

 

the real problem behind KONY2012

My youngest son sent me the link to Kony2012 on the morning that it launched last week and it had only been viewed 2,000 times.  He always seems to be on the leading edge of all things youtube.  A few hours later our pastor tweeted it, then it started showing up all over my feed.  By the time I checked it again that night it was in the millions.  As of press time its been seen by 81,151,593 million people (2% of the worlds population).

If you are one of the 98% that haven’t seen it…Kony2012 is a viral video campaign hosted by Invisible Children, Inc.  They are a non-profit organization on task to highlight and advocate for the arrest of Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan guerilla group.  He is under indictment by the International Criminal Court on war crimes and charges against humanity.

I think the phenomenal growth of Kony2012 over the last 7 days has less to do with the cause, or the atrocities of Joseph Kony and more to do with us.  More to do with our need to look relevant to our peer group.  More to do with our voyeuristic addiction to what others are doing…from a sterile distance.  The video shows young adults (predominantly white middle-class American youth) wanting to make a difference.  Do they?  Do we?  Or do we want to just look like we are making a difference. According to the claims in the video there are tens of thousands of children being abused by the LRA.  What effort do they ask us to make to help them?  Buy a rubber wristband. Really?  We want to make just enough effort to make us look relevant on Facebook and Twitter.

Doing something good takes effort.  It takes time.  Its hard.  Clicking “like” doesn’t fix the problem.  Kony2012 has shown us that the real problem is that that it’s just too easy now to look like we care.

How do I know?  Because a week later and Kony2012, the most viral video in the history of YouTube, has vanished from their trend.  Its been replaced by a video of a dog dressed like a gangster, a music video by Waka Flocka, and a video of a mom hitting her kid in the face with a soccer ball.

What happened to us caring about Invisible Children?

Stop.  Look someone in the eyes.  Invest.  Listen.  And Return.

 

The sacrificial leaf…

“Take an airboat ride through the everglades”…bucket list #27…check.

I took a tour of the everglades and mangrove forests this week on an airboat. On the tour the boat captain stopped to let us get up close and personal to a mangrove tree (and an alligator, but thats a different post). As it turns out, mangrove trees are the only trees known to be able to grow out of salt water. The tree actually has the ability to separate the salt from the water. The mangrove does this through a sacrificial yellow leaf that collects the salt from the salt water and sends the newly unsalted water to the rest of the tree. This sacrificial leaf is then released from the tree for a new one to grow, collect salt and also be sacrificed. Wow…that will preach. Story sound familiar?

Isaiah 64:6 tells the same story in that we are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind. But hope comes in Hebrews 10:10 when it reminds us that we will be sanctified, forgiven, and made right through the sacrificial offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all. He absorbs the impurity of our sin and dies sacrificially so that we may live.

In Luke 19:40 it says that if we keep quiet in telling people about the Gospel that even the stones will cry out…or as it turns out…even the Mangrove Trees too.

God Save King Obama

(WARNING: you will be disappointed if you think this blog has anything to do with partisan politics)

I have been texting, tweeting, and chatting with someone named SubconsciousGathering online at Need Him for the past few days about all matters of spirituality.  He claimed to be a believer who became enlightened and left the church to embrace atheism.  Everything he challenged me on I had heard before: “no evidence that can stand scrutiny of the scientific method except the writings of goat herders from the bronze age.”  But one topic he kept coming back to that fascinated me.  He asked me several times, “what did I do that got this god so angry and why should I care?”  Interesting question.

I was reminded of a sermon that a friend of mine, Bruce White, delivered many years ago.  He claimed that one of the issues specifically in America keeping us from fully understanding our own depravity and God’s wrath is that we have never lived under the reign of a king.  Excellent point.  Consider it.

The few times our land has been under foreign rule what did we do?  Revolt!  It’s in our genetic code as a nation.  To resist rule!  Live free or Die!  I was watching Fox News last night (fair and balanced) and wondering how long it would be on the air in Great Britain if they talked about Queen Elizabeth like that…or in the Russian Federation about Medvedev…or North Korea about Kim Jong Un.

Don’t misunderstand my point. I am blessed to live in such great a nation as ours and I cherish our freedom.  But I wonder if that freedom that we have as a “nation under God” has skewed our understanding of God and what it means to live under the rule of a King.

Consider how Christianity is exploding in China under the rule of Jintao, and in the Sudan under al Bashir.  And in Algeria, Congo, and Angola under the rule of dictators.  Why these nations?

Is it possible that the people in these countries better understand verses like Psalm 33:8-9, and Colossians 1:16-17.  Do they better understand submitting to a ruler and relying on them for their very existence?

Is it possible that they better understand verses like John 3:36 and Romans 1:18 and the weight of consequences for not following the rule of King?

Is it possible that they better understand verses like Galatians 5:1 and what it means to be free.

And how much more do they understand and long for verses like 1 John 4:9-11 to have a King that loves and does not condemn.  A King that has a plan to heal and reconcile their land.

So SubconsciousGathering, you have never understood living under a king. Perhaps our nation has forgotten.  Perhaps in forgetting we have forgotten.  And while I have never lived under the rule of an earthly king, by God’s grace I have lived and received mercy under the rule of a heavenly King.  By His grace He has given me desire for Him, understanding of Him, and forgiveness of my transgressions through His son.  I can only pray that He reveals the same to you.

In Jesus name, yes and Amen.

Selah.