Is This For Here, or to Go?

In our house church yesterday (we meet at four), Skip and Carol Tobin shared their vision of a church being less about trying to attract others to come to us, and more about preparing and sending us out to wherever we are needed.

At the close of our service, as we prepared for our usual evening meal together, we shared the bread and cup of the Lord’s Supper as a metaphor for the poured out and broken life of Jesus. Since one of our members has a gluten allergy, we used rice crackers as our bread. It was brittle fare, nothing like the bland texture of leavened bread, a fitting sign of a life broken for others.

As we poured grape juice into cups for everyone around the table, we invited each to share what they needed from God for the week ahead. Blood is a sign of life, we reminded ourselves, not just of death, so we expressed, by turn, our need for renewed life from a God who freely offers life to all.

It was a moment of clarity for me, that in the partaking of an ordinary, life-giving meal, that we not only celebrate our coming together, broken and in need of new life for ourselves, but that in communion we prepare for going out, ready and able to share with others the life we receive in the Eucharist.

In order to live in the world in the imitation of Christ, we need all of the spiritual energy we can get--energizing, life giving bread, life enhancing drink.

As this food gives up its life for us,
may we follow that pattern of
self surrender for each other.
May we be life for one another.

from “Prayers for the Domestic Church” by Edward Hays

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365 Thank Yous

After Superior Court Judge John Kralik’s second marriage ended in divorce in 2007 he spent his next New Year’s Day hiking a trail that led him to the top of Echo Mountain in the Angeles National Forest above Pasadena.

Kralik had planned to do that hike with his wife Grace before she broke up with him, leaving him in a state of shock and feeling terribly depressed. He asked her to go with him anyway, but when she declined, he decided to go alone, hoping it would help him get himself together and determine some direction for his future.

All day he seemed to be hearing an inner voice saying he was a loser and a loner, and that at 52 his life was over. One positive childhood memories that came to him, though, was how his grandfather once gave him a silver dollar and said that if he wrote him a thank you note for his gift, that he would give him an additional one.

This got him to thinking that maybe he needed to refocus, invest more time and energy in expressing gratitude for what he did have rather than just obsessing over the grief he felt for his losses. So he resolved to write a thank you note to a different person each day throughout 2008. The results were compiled in a book that became a bestseller, “365 Thank Yous, The Story of How a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life.”

Beginning with writing thanks for material things, he began to reflect on the many relationships that were priceless to him, everyone from old friends to current employees, and to realize how important, generous, and wonderful these people were, and how often he'd neglected to let them know.

Changing his focus and writing the notes truly changed his life. As a bonus, the book became a bestseller, with the paperback second edition entitled, “A Simple Act of Gratitude.”

This sounds like a great lesson for each of us for the New Year.

New Year's Visualizations

 "...faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not (yet) see."                                                               Hebrews 11:1 (NIV)

One of the key factors in experiencing personal growth and change is to “begin with the end in mind,” to first be able to picture the outcome we want, i.e., the new and whole self that with God’s help we see ourselves becoming.   

A good way to start is write a detailed description of that self, one done in the present tense, as though it were already true.

For example, “I am someone who looks for good qualities in others, and avoids speaking ill of others behind their backs.” Or, “I am able to avoid junk foods, stick to having at least five salad meals a week, and follow a plan of hearty exercise at least every other day," etc.

This is not to imagine ourselves being some super man or woman, or even a saint, but simply a healthy, whole person, the kind of person we would want our own son or daughter to become. Having this kind description in view is a little like when we are putting a jigsaw puzzle together and keeping the picture on the puzzle box in front of us as we work at fitting all the pieces together.

Then the second part of achieving change involves repeated practice, as in engaging in the kinds of  behaviors that are congruent with that picture, that description of our improved self.     

Practice needs to be of two kinds, the first involving a lot of mental rehearsals in which we prayerfully see ourselves responding more positively to challenging situations in our lives. In doing this, we help retrain our brains to successfully live out these new behaviors.

The second kind of practice, of course, is to actually engage in these behaviors in the real life situations we are in every day, realizing that insight alone will not bring about any automatic or lasting changes in old habits. But repeated practice will enable us to replace old habits and patterns with new ones.

Whenever I hear myself or others say they can’t accomplish some desirable goal, I want to suggest substituting that “can’t” statement with something like, “I find this really hard, and I haven’t found a way yet.”

That way, very simple but anything but easy, is to picture a new and more healthy, whole self, then engage in the hard work it takes to practice that new self’s positive behaviors until they become more and more natural to us. 

To accomplish this, it always helps to surround ourselves with lots of  supportive encouragers and allies.

Have a blessed New Year!

Note: You might also be interested in this blog.

Grandblessings Alert!

At about 11 a.m. this morning, while I was meeting with some friends to help plan a memorial service, my wife called me at my office with the news that our youngest and only daughter's twins had arrived. Needless to say, we were ecstatic, along with their father and our grandson, age 6, all joyfully welcoming 7 lb., 8 oz. baby boy, and 7 lb., 6 oz. baby girl into our grand-family. They join their little Yoder cousins ages 6, 4 and almost two.

What a juxtaposition of events, I thought. One life, that of a 51-year-old former student of mine, remembered for all of the good gifts she brought to her family and many friends, and now new life was breaking out 400 miles away, a sign of hope and promise of more grand things to come.

Such is life, the bitter and the sweet mingling together, beginnings and endings overlapping each other. We are continually blessed by how precious each life is, and then mourn because all, like the wild flowers and grass of the field, wither and fade away. But life goes on and love gets passed on, one generation to the next, a part of a continued story. The best is always yet to be.

Our daughter was the youngest grandchild of both my parents and Alma Jean's, the last of dozens of cousins in her generation on each side of the family. It looks like her latest births may actually mark the last of the next generation of cousins in both clans as well. We've been told, at least, that our own number of grandchildren will likely remain at six, a fine number indeed.

One never knows for sure, of course. Thirty-five years ago we were quite certain we would have no more than two children, our sons. Then miracle daughter came along, without a doubt the very best mistake we ever made :-) !

Without her, we wouldn't be celebrating this grand event, and with twins, we feel doubly blessed.

Thanks be to God.

Want To Be Really Happy?

Someone gave me this little piece on how to be happy recently, written by Harrisonburg resident Daniel Anderson, who gave me permission to share it with others. He is scheduled to undergo major brain surgery for a seizure condition in June.

If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap.
If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing.
If you want to be happy for a week, take a vacation.
If you want to be happy for a month, get married. **
If you want to be happy for a year, win the lottery.
If you want to be happy for a lifetime, devote yourself to making other people happy. 

** Associating marriage with a mere month of happiness is the writer's attempt at humor, though he thinks it's all too often true!

All of this got me to thinking that if one were to add the line "If you want be truly happy forever," I would suggest heeding the words of Jesus,  who said:

How happy are the humble, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
How happy are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
How happy are those who work for justice and righteousness, for they will be completely satisfied.
How happy are the kind and merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
How happy are those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God.
How happy are those who strive for peace, for they will be called the children of God.
And supremely happy are those who are persecuted for doing right, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

New Life in Death Valley

"Dead man walking" is a slang term prison guards use, I’m told, when escorting a death row inmate to the execution chamber. It is also the name of a book (and later a movie) about the story of Sister Helen Prejean, and the close relationship she establishes with both Matthew Poncelet, a condemned murderer on death row in Louisiana, and with the families and loved ones of his two victims.

According to this Sunday’s lectionary texts (it was my turn to lead the study at our house church congregation today) we are all like dead men and women walking. Since our mortality rate is exactly 100%, we are each well on our way to becoming an obituary statistic. Death is inescapable. A pastor friend of mine recently reported that he’s had to conduct nine funerals so far this year alone in his aging congregation.

But there are other forms of death to which we are also subject, according to today’s scriptures. In the Ezekiel 37 reading the prophet is lamenting the death of his people as a nation. They have experienced a humiliating defeat and a forced “trail of tears” in which he and thousands of his people were forcibly escorted on an estimated 800-mile march to far off Babylon.

Likewise, Psalm 130 is about the death of hope (“Out of the depths I cry to you...”). The gospel reading in John 11 is about the mourned death (and resurrection) of a dearly loved friend and brother. The reading from Romans 8 is about deliverance from the devastation resulting from our addiction to sin, and follows the lament in the preceding chapter “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

In each of these cases, there is nevertheless hope for new life, even in Ezekiel’s grim vision of a valley strewn with the dried up bones of his conquered people. It appears there were simply too few battle survivors to bury their dead. But in each scripture it is also clear that just as God is the original author and creator of all life, so God’s Spirit (the Hebrew “ruach” is translated as spirit, wind or breath in the Ezekiel story) can breathe new life into all that lies in our dark valleys of death.

I think about that especially at this time of the year as we are finally emerging from what we refer to as “the dead of winter.” A lot of plants literally die in the fall. If it weren’t for their seeds, they would become extinct. Other plants and trees go through a form of hibernation in which their leaves drop off and they go dormant.

But there is an amazing resurrection that occurs each spring. Buds and leaves reappear in lavish abundance, representing a whole new start. Life not only reappears, it does so in miraculous multiplication. As someone has observed, we may be able to count the number of seeds in a single apple, but only God knows how many potential apples there are in each seed and in each bud that appears on the fruit trees in our back yard. Countless!

Of course we are powerless to make this kind of miracle happen. We can prepare soil and carefully plant our seeds and plants in it, we can prune and pull weeds and water the soil, but only the original creator can actually produce life or restore life out of death.

So can dried up bones ever live again?

When the Spirit of God enters Death Valley, anything can happen.