I’m being told this is a problem..

I’m prepping for a short sermon on the prophet Amos at my home church this Sunday.  The prophet’s central theme  During my prep, I came across this

One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific

and technological power. It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, “That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.” That’s the question facing America today.”

That was March 31, 1968 during a lecture Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered entitled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”  I’m not sure the revolution ever quite took off.  If you type “1 billion” into the BBC news search, you’ll pick up a story reading that  “English Premier League clubs are wrestling with over 5 billion dollars of debt between them” while “figures also show that EPL wages have passed the 1 billion dollar mark for the first time.”   You’ll also find an article revealing the over 1 billion text messages sent every day, globally.  A few pages back, you’ll eventually come across a short article noting the jump in the number of people living in extreme poverty, which has now exceeded 1 billion people, by even the most conservative estimates.

King, like Amos (who wrote during one of the most prosperous periods in his peoples’ history), was keenly aware that God was never impressed by human progress and achievement; mainly because it usually means that the poor are left somewhere on the side of the road while we hurry on our way to whereverthehell we we’re urgently getting to.  How much more is this true now?  How much greater our power and how much more vast our influence than in Kings time? How far down the road towards ’success’ we are… and how great the number of those we’ve forgotten on the way?

My temptation is to list the many things “we” could do rather than the many things we choose to do with our power and influence.  But instead, I’ll tell this story:

I met Richmond at the Jubilee conference in Pittsburgh.  He was there to ask college students to consider making Compassion sponsorship part of their lives.  He himself had been a sponsored child.  Growing up in Uganda, he’d seen his father shot and killed before him and lived for a time wandering the streets with his mother and sisters.  Mercifully, they settled in a village where Compassion had begun a project in partnership with a local church.  After only a few weeks, Richmond received notice that a woman in America had chosen to sponsor him, giving$32 each month to support the program.  She wrote to him often and often told him that she loved him.  Inspired by the knowledge that he was loved, Richmond applied himself and excelled in school.  Graduating at the top of his class, he applied for and received a scholarship through Compassion’s LDP program to attend a University in Uganda where, once again.. he excelled.

Richmond applied for and received yet another scholarship with which he is now studying at Moody Bible College in Chicago. But the story doesn’t end there.  Upon arrival at Moody, Richmond was given a living stipend.  He took a long look at the money he would need to live on and decided that he could make a few sacrifices in order to clear some room in his monthly budget…

$32 a month…

..so that he could sponsor a child through Compassion.

And so one day Richmond will stand before the God of history and he will talk in terms of things he has done. Yes, he will be able to say he went to college. Yes he even went to graduate school in the wealthiest nation in human history.  And it seems that I can hear the God of history saying, “That was well done!  But what is more,.. I was hungry, and you fed me. I was naked, and ye clothed me. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided shelter for me. And consequently, you may enter the kingdom of greatness. You have done it unto the least of these, my son, you have done it unto me.

Sponsor a child with Compassion International.

As a bunch of y’all know, I’m on vacation until June 1, at which point I will no longer be on vacation and will be back to more regularly posting. But until then, I wanted to share this brief vacation thought.

I’m embracing the need for “vacation” to be an exercise in making my life to look exactly the way I want it when I’m not on vacation. That, rather than “letting myself go” or deviating from myself to such a degree that I need time to recover from my vacation, I am purposefully shaping my days to be more conducive to mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health; up a bit earlier, time to exercise, honest/serious conversation, great books, good food…

The thing I am finding holds all this together is stillness. It’s the one thing that I have implemented that I have had to seriously discipline myself for. But it’s been the discipline of silence/stillness that given meaning and life to the rest, the same way Sabbath gives meaning and shape to all other days of the week.

Of course it is far easier to find stillness and silence while on vacation, but as I alluded to earlier, I hope the shape my days are taking now gives me such a taste in my mouth for living well that I’d fight for such things once I’m “back at it.”

On the plane home from Indiana, I was reading one fo Frederick Buechner’s memoirs, entitled “Telling Secrets.”  (Not to be confused with his collection of sermons, entitled “Secrets in the Dark” or the animated classic “The Secret of NIMH” which has no correlation with Buechner at all)

In the introduction of the book, Buechner writes:

“After forty years of writing books, I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.”

This is a more concise way of getting at the heart of my reflection from Warsaw.  He goes on to write…

“..what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we fear more than anything else.”

As my previous post attests to, I am learning that one of oddest things about being “fully human” is that it includes a sense of division within myself; not being fully who I think I am or want to be.  The trick becomes not waiting until we are “whole” or “fixed,”  but embracing our complexity and incompleteness as is.  Like covering our nakedness with leaves, it seems unnaturally natural to hide behind competence and health (I actually sat staring at my screen for a bit before posting the Warsaw, IN blog because somewhere in my guts, I was afraid that I would lose standing with the millions of people who have grown up respecting me… then I realized I had confused myself with Michael Jackson, which happens all the time.)  But in the long run, keeping up appearances not only keeps us from the opportunity to be loved as we are, but furthers the social game which traps others in a fear of their own humanity.

Fred (can I call you Fred?) later writes this:

“The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which, for better or worse, we are being most human, most ourselves…”

This has always been part of why I write (songs, blogs, etc… ).. to unearth myself in hopes that I can/will be loved and inspireothers to do the same.  Buechner’s work does that for me, I’m just passing along the goodness.

I’ve been posting pieces over at Soul-Audio.com. This time ’round, I’ve revamped an old thought about the T-Shirt I made in ‘99 which reads “They Will Know We Are Christians By Our T-Shirts.”

Go to Soul-Audio.com to read it.

Begin with fresh carrots. Peel and wash the carrots.  Then put the carrots back into the plastic baggie you brought home from grocery store.  Place the carrots (still in the bag) into the refrigerator.  While you are in the fridge, you should find Trader Joe’s Carrot Ginger Soup in a carton.  Remove this carton from the refrigerator and pour the contents (should be soup) into a pot. Place said pot on the stove.

Now go back to the refrigerator, remove the carrots you peeled and washed along with some ranch dressing.  Eat a few of these carrots with ranch dressing on them.  How the dressing gets on the carrot is up to you.  After a while, you will wonder how long it takes to make this stupid soup.  You will then realize that you had not turned the stove on.

Coconut milk should appear out of nowhere.  Also, no measuring should be necessary since the immaculate coconut milk (ICM) will show up in the quantity needed. Pour the ICM into the pot with the TJCGS until someone says “Dude, what is that? What are you doing?!” Look wryly back at your friend and say something along the lines of “I know what I’m doing.” Nevermind the fact that this is not true.  TJCGS will now be transformed into TJCG&CS. Well done.

Stir the coconut milk into the soup until you are pretty sure it looks like you know what you are doing.  Then return to the couch to have a couple more carotts.  After another few minutes you will once again remember that the stove is not on.  WIthout panicking, get off the couch, move to the kitchen and turn on the stove.  Be sure the burner you turn on is the one directly beneath the pot containing the TJCG&CS.  Now that you are there, stir the soup with a knowing look on your face.  You can also add to this same effect by saying something like “yeah.. that’s gonna work” quietly to yourself but loud enough for others to hear.

The soup should heat up in about the time it takes you to forget that you are making soup because you are explaining to your friend how therapeutic cooking is. The soup will burn. At this point that won’t matter since you will have filled up on carrots and ranch, which was the genius of your plan all along.

Yum-o.