Thursday, December 29, 2011

Getting Fit in 2012

            The start of a new year is the perfect time for making some commitments about fitness. Need to take off a few pounds? Need to be more frugal in spending and more zealous about saving? Need to do some things to enhance your business and family life? Want to end 2012 with more spiritual muscle?
            Making a few changes in your life can really make a big difference in your savings and retirement. As 2011 draws to a close, for example, most financial advisers are telling their clients about a higher contribution limit for 401(k)s that goes into effect for 2012. If you discipline your financial life to add the extra $500 the law permits – that’s $42 per month – it can help your retirement prospects.
            Then there are basic suggestions about improving your health most of us think about at the turn of a new year. If cigarettes and alcohol are still part of your lifestyle, save yourself the fiscal, health, and social problems they cause by eliminating both. The same goes with the excessive junk food that tempts us all.
            For your life as a leader in your business, this is the time to review last year and to focus for 2012. Does your company have a mission? One that people can recall? Articulate? Maybe this is the time to sharpen your communication.
            What about your family? Are you finding yourself making too many apologies for being absent from family events and unavailable to the people you love most? Are you feeling alienated from your children? The start of a new year is a good time to reset priorities with your family. And just sitting down with them to say out loud what you are doing – and to ask their help – may help heal some wounds.
            Then don’t forget your spiritual life in framing a fitness plan. I once heard a lady express admiration for a Bible teacher she respected. "I'd give half my life to know the Bible so well!" she gushed. "That's about what it would take," a bystander replied. I'm not sure she got the point. Do you?
            We'd prefer instant Bible knowledge from a pill or potion. Most of us would pay well for self-control, peace of mind, or power in prayer. But spiritual life is like physical health or fiscal soundness in one critical way: All the positive steps you take, even the smallest ones, make a significant difference over time.
            The art of change begins with a plan. Even the things only God can change in us depend on our plan to be open to the work of his Holy Spirit. Pounds, pennies, and prayers — success with all of them begins with a plan.
            May you live within God’s daily grace in 2012 and have a Happy New Year.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Christmas: “Denying the Rest of the World”

            There is a wonderful line from the American scholar Stephen L. Carter that is appropriate to the Christmas season: "Religion is, at its heart, a way of denying the rest of the world." He is surely, astutely, and gloriously correct.
            Faith's view of this world is strangely skeptical. No, more than that. It is a posture of unequivocal distrust leading to rejection! When the world recites its mantras – you matter only if you are beautiful, the most important thing is money, winning is everything, Look Out for Number One – faith protests them all. It adopts a posture of doubt and incredulity. It lives in skepticism and disbelief.
            I refuse to believe that selfishness is acceptable or that it is permissible to resent another's good fortune. I will not swallow the world's way of thinking in order to justify prejudice, aggression, and hatred. No believer can be anything but incredulous about the claim of this world that she is entitled to anything she can get her hands on or that he should feel no guilt in exploiting others.
            So distrust the alleged certainties of sense that cancel the mysteries of faith. Dispute the tendency of the masses to look forward only for the sake of declaring the impossibility of living with hope. Deny altogether the inevitability of such greed, hatred, and violence that we cannot prove the reality of love.
            The Bible warns against being blinded by this world and speaks of the danger of the blind leading the blind. That warning puts us on notice that things, people, and ways of thinking totally rooted in the finite world of time, space, and matter will keep us from discovering, experiencing, and delighting in the greater realities of God, spirit, and eternity that can only be known by faith.
            Faith isn't self-deception. It is neither wish projection nor wishful thinking. It is our willingness to hear and stand with the things God has shown us through events and people as awe-inspiring as a trembling, smoking mountain in the desert and as modest as a baby's first cry in the village of Bethlehem.
            So let Christmas deny the hold of this world on your heart. Let it open your eyes to what the willfully blind will never see, your ears to things the incorrigibly deaf can never hear. See Immanuel – and know God is with us. Hear the song of angels – and receive God's peace given to anxious hearts. Hold the confusion, cynicism, and antagonisms of this troubled world suspect – and choose God's reign as your way of affirming the true realities. Merry Christmas to all!

Monday, December 12, 2011

A Christian Version of “Dear Virginia”

Dear Virginia,
            There are many things you are discovering as you grow up. One of them has to do with all the fantasies we adults have invented for your entertainment. Bugs Bunny is on TV every Saturday morning. The Easter Bunny brings chocolate eggs in colored foil in the spring. Frosty the Snowman comes to life and plays with children. And Santa Claus comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve to bring you presents.
            We mean no harm with our tales. Sometimes, though, we may go overboard and try to convince you they are more than imaginary. We blur the line for you between “real” and “pretend.” Talking bunnies, snowmen coming to life, Santa coming down the chimney – these are fun characters for your pleasure.  But they are not the same as your Mommy, Uncle Bill, or me.
            What bothers me right now, Virginia, is the thought that what most of us call “The Christmas Story” might get caught up in your mind with all the other make-believe things you are coming to recognize as only pretend. I would hate for you to push Baby Jesus out of your world along with Elmo and Frosty or the Easter Bunny and Santa. The story of Jesus is very different. It is the true story of how much God loves you.
            We don’t know the exact date of his birth. December 25 was chosen centuries ago when some Christians wanted to turn a festival to the sun into a holy day for Jesus. It’s as good as any other day we might choose, and I find it hard to think Jesus would be upset with anyone for honoring his birth on any day of the year.
            It happened almost 2,000 years ago now. In a little town called Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary heard the first cries of a tiny baby. He was more than “precious” or “special.” He was the Son of God. Angels and shepherds worshiped him that night. Eventually people like Anna, Simeon, and the Wise Men paid their homage too. Millions of us worship him still.
            I want you to understand why Baby Jesus was born, Virginia. He came to show us how much God loves us and that he wants us to live with him forever.
            Jesus grew up and became a man who loved everyone, helped all who would accept his help, and changed people’s lives. He was God among us, and I want you to believe on him and make him the center of your life.
            This isn’t just another make-believe story. It really happened. Yes, Virginia, there really is a Baby Jesus!
                                                                                                                                                Your friend,
                                                                                                                                                            Rubel Shelly

Monday, December 5, 2011

In Defense of “Merry Christmas”

            I hope I’m not being overly sensitive. But I think window designers, greeting card companies, and media have fallen victim to what I hope is the unintentional diminishing of December 25 for people with backgrounds similar to my own.
            Have you noticed that “Happy Holidays” seems to have replaced “Merry Christmas” as the standard greeting for this time of year?
            There are some persons and groups who crusade against anything that carries even the slightest hint of God, religion, or faith. Thus you’ve read about the occasional music teacher who bans “Silent Night” or “Joy to the World” in favor of “Here Comes Suzy Snowflake” or “Walking in a Winter Wonderland.”
            Sometimes it is the decision of a school board to ban all religious music in favor of performances that are exclusively secular. And sometimes it is the real or threatened court action of the American Civil Liberties Union that undergirds the move to ban religious songs and symbols at this season of the year.
             For the most part, however, I suspect the majority of people who celebrate Christmas – and that’s about 96 percent of Americans – have simply embraced the shift in terminology without thinking. And no wonder! Washington now has a “Capitol Holiday Tree” instead of what used to be the “Capitol Christmas Tree.” In our rush to political correctness, we can turn ourselves inside out. In trying to be so open-minded, we can let our brains roll out onto the floor.
            The vast majority of us cultivate a spiritual life. Should Jews be barred from sharing the story, music, and joy of Hanukkah with their non-Jewish neighbors? Should Muslims be silenced about the meaning of Ramadan? So why should Christians be expected to re-brand Christmas as “Winter Fest”?
            And it isn’t only Christmas that gets voided in our culture. Maryland, for example, defended its Thanksgiving curriculum recently by explaining that holiday “from a purely historical perspective” and omitting all references to God and religion. The truth is, of course, that one cannot teach the historical facts about Thanksgiving and omit the Pilgrims’ faith in and gratitude to God.
            I don’t use Christmas to bully or to offend my non-Christian neighbor. And my sense of Christian tolerance tells me to respect his alternate belief or unbelief as his right. But tolerance does not imply abandoning one’s own faith and custom.
            “Happy Holidays” is too bland. It falls flat for me. It misses the point of who I am and what I’m about. All that for the sake of telling you this: Merry Christmas!

Monday, November 28, 2011

Lists

            I operate from daily to-do lists. Do you? Making out my list not only helps me remember the things ahead but to prioritize them. Deadlines are their most menacing when you’ve let them get so close that they smother you into inactivity.
            The list I’m working on right now actually covers more than just today. There are some complex and interrelated issues that are going to take several days to unravel – if they can be unraveled. So they are on the list in priority positions.
            I try to keep each list reasonably short. As the number of items on my to-do list grows, the ability to manage my time effectively diminishes. Referring back to the list imposes discipline on my day and holds me to my tasks. “Planning is of no use at all,” says Peter Drucker, “unless it eventually degenerates into work.”
            There are two other lists I keep as well. These aren’t always written down in a notebook. Yet I carry them with me everywhere I go. And the strange thing is that each has the power to cancel out the other. One shrinks as the other grows.
            My worry list tends to be composed of things that are beyond my power to control. So crisis events, others’ demands on me, and things I’d like to bring under my control make this list. These are the things that distract me during the day and keep me awake at night. They seldom generate anything productive, for the idea that I can bring life under my personal control is only a delusion.
            My prayer list is made up of the people, situations, and events I choose to surrender to God. These are the things I know I can’t handle. They are too big and too important for me to try force them to an outcome I can dictate.
            See why they cancel out one another? Anything I’ve given over to God doesn’t have to be fretted over. He’s competent enough to handle it. So long as I am trying to bring things under my personal control, though, I run the risk of fighting not only the defiant realities around me but God’s will for my life. The more praying I do, the less power worry has to interrupt my strength or sleep.
            The Bible presents this challenge: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7 NRSV).
            The more items that get moved off your worry list onto your prayer list, the better off you’ll be. God will graciously replace your anxiety with his peace.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

This, Too, Shall Pass!

            What shall I write for Thanksgiving Day this year? I have been wondering for several days. These are not the best of times. Lots of people are hurting. Political leadership is in short supply. Headlines tend to be negative and discouraging. So is there anything to be grateful for when we gather around the table Thursday?
            Maybe this is worth some thoughtful reflection this year: This, too, shall pass.
            The truth is that nothing in this world is going to last very long. Recession, war, cancer, migraines, an ogre for a boss, a physics class – not one of them is going to last forever. Of course, we are usually thinking about beautiful sunsets, ice cream at picnics, or extended family around the Thanksgiving Day table and lamenting those when we comment about things that are too short-lived.
            But the same is true of life’s setbacks and heartaches as well.
            The longest of human lives are incredibly short – when measured against eternity. David said it 3,000 years ago: “Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered – how fleeting my life is. You have made my life no longer than the width of my hand. My entire lifetime is just a moment to you; at best, each of us is but a breath” (Psalm 39:4-5 NLT).
            Perhaps it would help all of us to keep more things in perspective to realize that the good and the bad, the best days and the worst, or the achievements and the embarrassments are always less than they seem to be at the moment. The person who takes the positives too seriously is in danger of arrogance; the one who thinks a failure or humiliation is forever falls prey to depression and despair.
            For every good thing, give thanks to God. For every transgression, receive his forgiveness. In sickness, loss, and grief, accept his daily grace and strength.
            It isn’t just that I see it in others. This tendency to see too much that is negative and to live with needless stress is too much within my own personality. So one of the items on my list of things for which to be thankful this Thursday will be that life is transient. Successes are only momentary. Failures need not be viewed as permanent either. There is a certain element of relief in knowing that nothing in this human experience is forever.
            When I was just a little boy, I remember an old fellow saying – with a twinkle in his eye – that his favorite part of the Bible was this line: “And it came to pass.” Maybe I’ve had to live nearly as long as he did to get his point.
            Two verses later in the Psalm quoted above comes this: “And so, Lord, where do I put my hope? My only hope is in you.”
            Come Thanksgiving this Thursday, I will remember that – and be grateful.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Your Attitude Makes the Difference


            Attitude isn’t everything, but it’s probably more important than most of the things to which we assign our daily outcomes. The person inclined to whine that others have gotten more breaks or to excuse his failure or poor performance by blaming someone else is likely sabotaging himself with a sorry outlook on things.
            Many things about your life are simply the hand you have been dealt. You can’t change the fact that you were born in that place and with certain givens for your appearance, IQ, or natural skills. Education and training can open some doors for you, but they cannot change your past, make you taller and more athletic, or alter the fact that some people are unfair in the way they treat you.
            The one thing you can do something about is how you choose to respond to your life circumstances. Even Jesus couldn’t control what other people thought and said about him. But he refused to let them dictate his spirit and behavior.
            There is a section in John Baillie’s A Diary of Private Prayer that reads . . .

       Teach me, O God, so to use all the circumstances of my life today that they may bring forth in me the fruits of holiness rather than the fruits of sin.
            Let me use disappointment as material for patience;
            Let me use success as material for thankfulness;
            Let me use suspense as material for perseverance;
            Let me use danger as material for courage;
            Let me use reproach as material for longsuffering;
            Let me use praise as material for humility;
            Let me use pleasures as material for temperance;
            Let me use pains as material for endurance.

            What enables everything in one’s life to generate “the fruits of holiness rather than the fruits of sin”? What can turn such negatives as disappointment, anxiety, and criticism into positive outcomes? And what can keep success, praise, and reward from becoming pride? Your attitude makes the difference.
            When a given day begins, countless things are headed your way over which you have no control. It may be bad weather or someone’s bad temper, a deadline that won’t budge or a client equally resistant to a new idea. The one factor you can control through it all is your attitude toward them.
            The difference in today being a good day or a bad one will be your attitude.
           

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

A Sure-Fire Investment


            I am convinced most people want to do some great thing with their lives. But they are under the illusion that the doing of authentically great things is reserved for a chosen few. Heroes. Martyrs. Saints. But not them.
            But what if the greatest thing is not to go out in a blaze of glory but to honor God with a life that consistently seeks to do his will in the little things? Not to climb the highest mountain but to stay on the uneven course that life has marked out for you? Not dying for your faith but staying true to it over a difficult lifetime?
            Think of the 24-hour blocks of your life as bank-fresh bundles of a hundred $1 bills. Your challenge each day is to spend your life. You can’t bank it. You can’t save up until you get 500 or 1000. You get a fresh handful of life currency each morning, and any unspent balance evaporates before tomorrow comes.
            You spend life assets when you mentor a new employee who is struggling, listen to someone who is upset, or volunteer to help someone catch up.
            You are laying down your life when you are generous with hard-earned money to help someone who has lost her job, a family that is being drained by long-term illness, or the ministries of your church.
            You have plunked down a huge chunk of your life in giving birth, praying through your tears for a struggling child, and investing all the time, energy, and passion that go into molding a life for what lies ahead in this challenging world.
            You are spending your life capital by putting your love for a fiancée, mate, or child above career advancement that moves you away from spiritual stability, calls for you to spend far too much time away from people who need you more than money, or calls for you to compromise a central value you have embraced.
            The Bible says: “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16).
            Could it be that there are people who would die in bold, heroic moments (i.e., “cash in” everything) who just don’t grasp that we must spend the smaller increments of our lives in unselfish, other-directed events that honor God by serving the people he has placed on our paths? What a shame that they never developed a concept of serving God by serving men and women in his image!
            You have today’s life capital in hand. Invest it wisely – in small increments of unselfishness here and there. Or lose it completely.
           

Monday, October 31, 2011

It Isn’t (All) About the Money


            Money isn’t evil. It is, in fact, necessary in our world. It is the planet’s medium of exchange. It is how we assign value to objects ranging from cheese to autos to investment instruments. It is the love of money – greed, avarice, selfishness, and acquisitiveness – that both Scripture and common sense vilify.
            There is a group called The Great Place to Work Institute that studies companies and what makes some of them more desirable places of employment. The most recent findings were published just recently. Good wages for one’s work mattered. Other factors such as low turnover, health-care benefits, and the like were also named – as you would expect. So, yes, it is about the money. But it is also about some things money can’t buy.
            All the highest-ranking companies are reported to have three things in common: employees trust the firms’ leaders, take pride in their companies, and have a sense of camaraderie with their fellow workers.
            Trust. All of us have read the headlines about mismanagement, scandal, and betrayal in the workplace. Maybe those stories made companies that are led by decent people to write and enforce strong ethical codes. Perhaps it has caused them to put compliance officers in place. But there are other studies I have seen that suggest having a written code of ethics is not a reliable indicator of a company’s moral culture. Trust is generated when men and women treat others with respect, show personal integrity, and are transparent in communication.
            Pride in the company. This has to do with the belief that one’s work is making a difference. Our product or service matters to people. It contributes to making the world a better place. Because we do what we do, others can do or have things that make their lives better. Who wouldn’t take pride in that?
            Camaraderie. The culture of a workplace can be hostile or friendly. It can make going to work something to dread or to welcome. Even if the task at hand is tough and still has unresolved problems, the fact that we are “in it together” makes a difference. We are friends. We are guarding one another’s backs. We are trying to get something done together – not competing with one another.
            I’d never heard of The Great Place to Work Institute before. Its report makes sense, though, and paints an alternative picture to some families and churches I have seen – not to mention companies.
            These positive traits don’t pop out of nowhere. They emerge because people are intentional about creating a healthy culture. There is something you can do today to promote them where you are. It must begin with who you are.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Someone Named Her “Unwanted”

           There are still places in the world where race, caste, or gender puts a person in jeopardy from the moment of birth. The problem is so acute in some parts of India that the district of Satara recently took action.
            In poor, rural areas of India, girls can be considered a family liability. Boys are viewed as potential heirs, family heads, and wage-earners. By contrast, girls are a “liability” because their families will have to provide a dowry in order to arrange a marriage for them. Boys are so greatly preferred over girls that India made the use of ultrasounds to discover an unborn child’s gender illegal.
            Females were being systematically aborted – or murdered after being born. The Lancet medical journal has published a study that suggests as many as half a million females in utero are aborted every year in India.
            In the Marathi language of western Maharashtra state, many of the girls who were allowed to live have been named “Nakusa.” The name means “unwanted.”
            Can you imagine a four-year-old who answers to the name Unwanted? Can you fathom the negative self-image fostered in a child by that age? What about that child as a 10-year-old? Is she subjected to taunts from children with “real” names? Is she marriageable to a “respectable” family with the name Unwanted? Does she want to have a daughter and risk the name being carried forward?
            The Times of India recently carried the story of a 13-year-old named Nakusa Chavin. “Once she asked me why I didn’t kill her when she was born,” said her mother. “Why did we let her live when we didn’t want her?” How many daughters have asked that same question of their parents!
            This heart-rending information has been in news media around the world over the past few days because of a progressive initiative in Satara state to allow girls named Nakusa to change their names. Those who choose a name change will have all official documents and school records changed. Is the harm already done too great? Can the change of name signal the start of a new life – within a culture that insists on remembering the old name? Time will tell.
            If someone has dared to label you worthless or stupid or unloved, hear this word from God to people who had suffered countless indignities: “You shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give. . . . You shall no more be called Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married, for the Lord delights in you. . . . And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:2-4 EST). You are Loved, Precious, and Wanted.
            A new name is a gift that is not to be taken lightly. Wear it with dignity.

Monday, October 17, 2011

The Scattered Church

          A typical Monday-morning question in some circles goes like this: Were you in church yesterday? How was church? Who’d you see at church?
            While there are problems with these uses of the term “church,” they all share the common theme of people who are gathered together. Someone who knows the language of the New Testament could even point out that the word translated “church” has the literal meaning of people called out and called together.
            Ah, but that is the heart of the very serious problem some of us seem to have! Church is a place. A building. A set of Sunday observances. An event performed by a group. Indeed, God’s people are the church whenever they are together for song and prayer, Scripture and communion, hospitality and proclamation. But God’s people are meant to be scattered as well as gathered.
            It is a mistake to think the worship life of the church is principally a Sunday-focused event. It is the whole life of the whole church reaching into the whole world that Paul had in mind writing this: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1 ESV).
            Everything in the life of a Christian should be seamlessly appropriate for putting God’s heart and character on display. Yes, the church is sometimes a gathered community. More often, however, it is what one medieval scholar called “the community of the dispersed.” The arena within which the church functions to put the holiness and justice of God on display is the whole world – for whose sake it is called to be light and salt. If the church is the church only when it is within four walls, who is doing God’s work in your office, plant, or neighborhood?
            Luis Palau makes this point with a metaphor most of us would understand. He says the church is like manure. Spread it around, and it will give life, make things grow, and produce fruit. Keep it all piled up in one place, and it stinks!
            Yes, we need preachers and musicians, greeters and teachers. But what we need even more is for all of us to be Christ-like in chance encounters, on the phone, standing in line, negotiating rush-hour traffic, making customers feel appreciated, and helping frightened patients feel a bit less anxious.
            Kindergarten teachers, bank presidents, computer geeks, maintenance people, teens, senior citizens – all of us can be intentional about bring light into dark places. Giving hope to discouraged souls. Acknowledging the lonely. Being representatives of God’s loving presence in all the places we inhabit or visit.
            “Whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father” (Colossians 3:17 NLT).

Monday, October 10, 2011

A Healthier Image of God

            From Eden forward, Satan has been telling two vicious lies about God.
            First, he spreads the awful falsehood that God sets boundaries because he doesn’t really love us. Wants to take the fun out of our lives. Wants to keep things from us that would be good for us. Remember the strategy? He convinced the original pair that they would be better off with something God had forbidden.
            Second, he has had great success in telling the even more insidious lie that anyone who crosses one of those boundaries had better be afraid of God. Run from him and hide. Get away or get wiped out. This is even worse than the first!
            Yes, the Bible speaks of a reverent fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom. But that is very different from the dread and terrible sense of foreboding from an intolerant, ill-tempered God who is more likely to strike you down than pick you up when you have failed. Crossed the line. Really messed up.
            Do you remember what happened on that fateful day when God came for an evening stroll with his beloved Adam and Eve in their garden home? They were nowhere to be found. So he called for them, and there was no answer. Then he went looking for them and found them cowering and trying to get out of sight. “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid,” said Adam, “because I was naked.”
            Adam had been naked every other evening God had come to visit. He hadn’t been afraid to meet with him on those days. Neither had Eve. So what had happened between the last visit and this one?
            “They had sinned!” you say. Yes, but something more had happened. They had been set up for that sin by Satan’s first lie and hurt even more by the second. The second one made it more likely they wouldn’t react well afterward. Satan had convinced them that God is mean, hard, and vengeful.
            Afraid of God, the original pair started looking for a place to hide. And the human race has been fleeing God ever since – convinced by Satan that the last thing we should do is run straight to God when we’ve broken faith and failed.
            One of the things I have had to learn in my own life is to challenge that lie. Would that all of us had a healthier image of the God who created, loved, and redeemed us. Would that we had never fallen for the devil’s lie. What Satan says is the wrong thing to do when you sin is, in fact, precisely what you should do: Don’t run from God in your failures; run to him instead.
            “Let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most” (Hebrews 4:16 NLT).

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Mortality: Trying It on for Size


            I read a Reuters news report about people taking a “test run for death.” It got my attention. A trial run at dying? Trying death on for size? Here is the story.
            Suicide is the leading cause of death for people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s in South Korea. So some entrepreneurial or altruistic persons – the article says there are conflicting ideas as to which they really are – have come up with a seminar being offered to the public about what they call “well-dying.”
            One of the instructors says the experience has proved to be meaningful to people across a wide spectrum of age. His claim: It makes people appreciate life more to think about their mortality. The course motto: “Don’t take life for granted.”
            Does it sound just too morbid to you? Not to me. I think our technological and sanitized approach to sickness, human infirmity, and death is a way we have created to distance ourselves from reality. So we don’t let children see the dead goldfish or go to their grandmother’s funeral. Teenagers think they are invincible to speed – whether as highway recklessness or an illegal drug. And adults are so self-absorbed that we forget that our actions can hurt others.
            We used to live in rural settings and see plants and animals die. There once was a time that people died in their own homes. Folks sat up with families and the corpse until time for the funeral. And funerals both talked about death realistically and urged the living to take stock in light of their own mortality.
            In the South Korean version, people don a traditional hemp robe and lie down inside of a casket. Somber attendants in dark suits place a lid on the coffin. One lady who has terminal disease for which she had stopped treatment went through the experience recently. As she rose from the casket, she said, “I will discard my greed in order to relate to my husband and love my daughters more.” Say you may know some people who might benefit from the experience? What about you? Me? Some couples I know? Some kids and their parents?
            Socrates used to quote the words inscribed on a temple at Delphi: Know yourself. He added: The unexamined life is not worth living. The biblical prophet Jeremiah speaks for Yahweh: The human heart is devious and should be opened to God’s true and just scrutiny.
            “How grateful I was that this was a fake funeral,” said one participant in the seminar. With a sigh of relief, he hinted he would look at some things differently.
            Trust me. You don’t have to try death on for size. It fits us all. And it only makes life the more precious to know that – and to think about it deeply.
            Scripture says: “Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties. After all, everyone dies – so the living should take this to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2 NLT).

Monday, September 26, 2011

I Love That Kid!


            I don’t know Josh Ripley, but I love that kid! Let me tell you why.
            Sixteen-year-old Josh is a junior at Andover (Minn.) High School. He was running a 5K race on Sept. 16 in a field of 261 competitors. With the race less than half done, the 6-foot-5-inch runner heard a scream and saw a runner he didn’t know crumpled against a fence – holding a profusely bleeding ankle.
            The injured athlete was 5-foot-5-inch Mark Paulauskas, a freshman at Lakeville South High. Here is Mark’s account: “He just picked me up without saying anything and started carrying me and trying to calm me down. He said, ‘It’s going to be OK. I’m going to get you to your coaches.’ … I think it’s amazing.”
            Sure enough, with his own coach trying to figure out why Josh hadn’t passed the halfway mark, he spotted him. “I was wondering what was going on, why was he so far back,” said Scott Clark. “Then I see Josh. He’s got the kid in his arms.”
            Josh Ripley carried Mark about a quarter mile! He handed him off to his coaches and family and then – dead last in the field of runners now – sped off to resume his race. He passed 50 kids to finish 211th out of 261 runners. No excuses. No disappointment. No explanation. He just finished what he had started – only to be asked by one teammate why he had fallen so far behind.
            “He just humbly says, ‘Oh, I picked up a kid,’ ” said sophomore Simeon Toronto. “And I’m like, ‘Dude, you just picked up a kid and carried him?’ That’s incredible!” Then added Toronto: “It was just so typical Josh.”
            I love that kid! And while most of the news reports I tracked down cited this as a supreme example of sportsmanship and compassion among athletes, I think they missed the real force at work in Josh’s action. The details make it pretty clear that it was the unfolding of a very practical faith that Josh embraces.
            He does volunteer work at Living Word Christian Center and – by both Mark and Josh’s account – prayed over Mark as he ran with him in his arms. He prayed for Mark’s pain to stop and for him to be all right. He even asked Mark’s permission before he started the prayer! And Josh seemed honestly bemused by all the attention being paid to him later. He insists he did “nothing special” – but said he was just thankful God let him be there for someone who needed help.
            Mark’s ankle needed 20 stitches to close the gash some runner’s spikes accidentally created. Blessedly, there were no damaged ligaments or tendons. He should recover fully, after he gets out of a walking boot and off his crutches.
            Josh has reminded me again that there are wonderful people out there who are always doing kind and good things with no expectation of being noticed or rewarded. Great kids who aren’t threatening teachers or doing drugs. People whose faith is not a banner or excuse but a daily lived reality.
            I just love that kid! Don’t you? And I want to be more like him.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Commitments & Complications

            Making and keeping promises is one of the things that distinguishes humans from animals. It is also what separates good people from bad ones.
            Yes, I can imagine some promises that should be broken. What if I am a junior-high kid who promises his buddy to help get even with somebody who hurt his friend’s feelings by trashing his bike or computer? Then I realize that I’ve promised to do something wrong. Break the promise! You had no right to make it. Adults sometimes get in those situations as well. Think first. Then speak.
            Yes, I can imagine some good promises made in good faith that may be broken. Suppose a woman accepts a proposal to marry – only to discover over the few months prior to the wedding date that the relationship is a big mistake. Better to be honest and suffer embarrassment or break his heart now than create the long-term heartache and eventual failure of a formalized commitment.
            But the general rule about keeping promises cannot be formed by exploring the exceptional cases. And the principle that holds a society together is that we must keep the promises we make to one another. Employment contracts, land sales, bank notes, installment loans – these formalized contracts about “things” require documentation and signatures. We enforce them in courts.
            Then there are the adult promises we make to one another. They should be regarded as even more important to our integrity as human beings than the contracts we sign about mere things such as cars or money. Are they?
            A Christian leader made negative headlines last week with his televised comment about keeping promises. A caller asked what advice to give a friend who had begun a romantic involvement with another woman after his wife began suffering the dreadful effects of Alzheimer’s disease. “I know it sounds cruel,” he said, “but if he’s going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over again, but make sure she has custodial care and somebody looking after her.”
            The speaker’s on-air partner asked about the traditional – and biblical – vow to love and remain together “in sickness and in health” until death parts them.
            “If you respect that vow, you say ‘til death do us part,’ ” he continued. Then he added: “[Alzheimer’s] is a kind of death.”
            Lots of things are “a kind of death” – ranging from bankruptcy to paralysis from an auto accident to disfiguring cancers to Alzheimer’s disease. That’s why we make promises. That’s why we take uncertainties out of the lives of the people we love. That’s how we preserve integrity in complex and painful times.
            This is what the Bible says about making promises: “It is better to say nothing than to make a promise and not keep it” (Ecclesiastes 5:5 NLT). Amen.

Monday, September 12, 2011

If Only for a Moment

              Like most of you, I remember where I was on that terrible Tuesday morning an eternal decade ago. I heard that something terrible had happened in New York City via car radio. I was driving to campus to teach logic when what turned out to be the most illogical and outrageous event in recent history took place.
            That first report had more ambiguity than clarity. Maybe it was only a tragic, freakish accident. Maybe it was just a “crazy” in a cockpit. At that point, we were thinking of all sorts of possibilities – and hoping for the best of the worst of them.
            We got through class. I moved as quickly as I could to pick up student papers, get back to my car, and head for a television set. With the radio on as I drove, the less-sinister options had all but left the conversation. My country was under attack – by some person or cult or country or what?
            In the 10 years since, the source of the attack has been identified. Military responses have been planned, executed, and protested. London, Mumbai, and cities other than our own have come under attack. In addition to the nearly 3,000 who died in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, twice that number have died in the U.S. military. Two of them were young men I knew.
            In the 10 years since, we have had time to blame and excoriate. Politicians have mastered the techniques of party polarization and personal ineffectiveness. (Is there a statesman anywhere to be found?) The terrorists have succeeded in frustrating us when we travel, helping to throw our economy into chaos, and infecting all of us with a sense of apprehension about what could happen next.
            But I do remember at least one good thing that happened in the aftermath of that awful day. America sensed – if only briefly – that we are one nation. Black and white, Latino and Asian, Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Democrat, we found ourselves standing together in unity. We showed intentional acts of kindness to one another. We smiled at each other as if to reassure one another. We met together to pray across the lines of our different faiths.
            Our pain, confusion, and fear gave us a sense of being “one nation.” We even said the pledge again that affirms we are “one nation under God.” But that ever-so-brief period soon gave way to the old divisions and has seen new ones added. Negative motivations do not generate positive outcomes that will endure.
            That awful day is deposited in a painful place in our memory banks forever. Living in denial would not reverse history. So it is better to allow the memory of a dark day that produced heroic first-responders, unselfish Ground Zero volunteers, and patriotic service by so many to call us back to a strong sense of unity grounded in our positive commitment to the common good, the Golden Rule, and love that imitates that of One who gave himself for all.
            If only for a moment, we had a glimpse of a better way forward. 

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Knowledge vs. Wisdom


            These are strange times. The store of human knowledge is increasing rapidly and exponentially; the evidence of human wisdom seems sparse and infrequent.
            I value and affirm the place of science, for example, but know that pushing its boundaries has not always produced good outcomes. Germany boasted the most advanced scientific community of the early twentieth century; yet its then-celebrated but now-debunked “science” of eugenics was a major justification offered for the Holocaust. The knowledge intelligent people have does not seem to make it more likely they will believe what is true or do what is right.
            A full century later, we may not have come all that far. Politicians still seem to vote the interests of their richest and largest-donor supporters. Courts can still be guilty of rendering verdicts tinged with favoritism toward the wealthy and well-connected. A 2005 study of psychiatric drug trials hit upon the unsettling fact that academic researchers whose work was funded by a drug company were almost five times as likely to report the treatment was effective.
            All of us are limited, thus always fallible. Furthermore, we are often tinged by bias and too frequently swayed to seek selfish advantage.
            So you must pardon me for being skeptical of the Ivy League professor who reports that casual sexual experimentation is a healthy rite of passage for adolescents. You must forgive my naïveté when a government economist explains that debt accumulation is normal. You must overlook my sheer stupidity in not rolling over to the latest published diatribe against faith in a personal God.
            What I have found in professional and personal interactions with such persons is that they are often parroting what they were told by some “authority.” At other times, they are using their academic skills to justify or defend something they have already embraced for personal reasons. Then, in the halls of academe, there is always the temptation merely to tear down what was once in place.
            Don’t take the word of any human as final and beyond challenge. Whether Christopher Hitchens or Billy Graham, Stephen Hawking or Pope Benedict, what anyone says is subject to challenge. Hear others respectfully, but hear them with a sense of obligation to examine contrary views – and to think for yourself.
            If thinking seriously about the most important issues of human experience is thought too great a burden, one has already fallen for a popularized fallacy – and has a way to go to get back on her feet to think rather than to follow blindly.
            That we live in a time of so many facts so easily accessed may or may not be helpful. It depends on our being wise enough to use them with mature judgment.
            “Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes of wisdom” (James 3:13 NIV).

Monday, August 29, 2011

The Unheralded Virtue

            Name a virtue that you admire in others and want to cultivate in yourself.
            So what word came to mind? Courage would have been a good answer, for so many people these days seem to lack the ability to confront their personal fears or to face life’s uncertainties with confidence. Another good answer would be justice; it is concern for the public good that demands we look outside our selfishness to meet others’ needs and to protect their persons and rights.
            Self-control or the ability to practice moderation and restraint might be your immediate concern; if you are battling weight or smoking or temper, it probably ranks high on your list of desired virtues. I dare to say prudence didn’t come to mind – though you might have used a contemporary term such as good judgment or discretion; it is the counter to thoughtless and reckless behaviors.
            Those four qualities – temperance, prudence, courage, and justice – are often termed the cardinal virtues to Western civilization. As far back as Plato and Aristotle, they receive praise. Add such names as Seneca, Thomas Aquinas, and Ben Franklin to the list, if you wish. These are praiseworthy traits. And all are consistent with the great ethical teachings of Judaism and Christianity.
            A virtue that gets little attention and practically no praise in modern settings is humility. Perhaps it is because our culture tends less and less to consult or quote biblical materials in its discussions of character. Perhaps, too, it is because we seem to have equated a healthy sense of self-esteem with personal arrogance.
            In athletics, we call it “swagger.” In the halls of the academy, it is “pomp and circumstance.” In business and high finance, it is “perks.” On the streets, it can be called anything from “attitude” to “posturing” to “respect.” And while none of these terms is evil or inappropriate, our shallow culture has come to define them in terms of a feigned superiority that lets one person or group step on another.
            So the football player dances in the end zone or over the opponent he tackles, and the pitcher in baseball pretends to be a gunslinger when he strikes out the other team’s cleanup hitter. In the university or company, the person who gets the promotion gloats over the one who didn’t. On the streets, she dresses like a whore and wants the reputation of being “a mean girl” or he works hard at the glare and manner of a thug. The result is not healthy self-esteem on display but boorish, uncivil, and cruel behavior – behavior of the sort that creates fights and vendettas when two persons or groups of the same mindset meet.
            Humility means acknowledging we all stand on others’ shoulders. We all know too little to put others down. We all owe it to the other person to hear her point and to try to understand his perspective. C.S. Lewis made this important point: “Humility is not thinking less of oneself but thinking of oneself less.”
            “Pride leads to disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom” (Proverbs 11:2).