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.

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.