For the love of the Waffle House

I love the Waffle House and I love Jim Gaffigan's comedy. Combine the two and you have something truly worth 2 minutes of your time.

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Steadfast

A friend recently turned me on to the Moravian Daily Text. They send a daily email with three scripture readings that take you through the entire Bible in a year. I'm loving it.

Today's reading was from Psalm 117.

Praise the Lord, all you nations!
Extol him, all you peoples!
For great is his steadfast love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord!

And this jumped out at me: God's love is steadfast.
Steadfast=Unmoveable. Unshakeable. Not wavering. Not dependent on what's happening at the moment.

I like that. Mainly because I am often moved, shaken, wavered (is that a word?) and am more often than I'd like dependent on the moment for my feelings.

So I'm changing the way I think based on God's steadfast love.
When I'm down and want to quit, God's love for me is steadfast.
When I fall short of what I hoped to accomplish, God's love for me is steadfast.
When I succeed, God's love for me is steadfast.
When people speak well of me, God's love for me is steadfast.
When I fail, God's love for me is steadfast.
When I am angry, God's love for me is steadfast.
When I am sad, God's love for me is steadfast.

And since I'm made in the image of God, then God's steadfast love is making me steadfast too. Or as CS Lewis put it, he is changing me into the kind of thing that he is.

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Love=Action

See the black car in the background? A (pretty much) empty nest couple is taking the time to teach a recently-made-single mom (through a tragedy of unspeakable dimensions) to drive--in their car--so she can now provide for her kids.

That, my friends, is love.

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What I'm Learning

A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the
public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God
Almighty, that he is and no more.

John Owen

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Where do you find life?

I stopped the other day while going into a building to watch some bees pollinating a plant. I've never really been a bee watcher (more like a bee flee-er), but this was fascinating. With precision, they moved from flower to flower, sucking the nectar and immediately moving on when they'd exhausted the supply of life they'd found. Their receptor cells were keenly tuned in to life.

Fast forward. I'm sitting in the car with my boys waiting for my wife to come out of a store when a bee/fly-like creature lands on the window right next to me. I'd usually roll down the window to shoo him off, but my memory of the bees stopped me. It was like an inside out view of bee pollination 101.

Again, amazing. With precision, his receptor cell felt (smelled? sniffed?) for food on the window. It apparently found some. I watched from inches away as it sucked some sort of nectar (soda? left over candy bar? body sweat?) from the window. He was highly tuned to where there was life and where there wasn't.

Which got me thinking. How tuned in am I to the places where life is and where life isn't? Where have mistaken routine for the places of life?

Jesus said he came to bring life in the fullest possible way. I'd like to be the bee that drinks it in.

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So which one are you?

"Let us speak to one another as plainly as possible."

-John Wesley

Try this without knowing who you are and you'll quickly run into an identity crisis. You'll cave to people's expectations and opinions of you and so avoid speaking your mind and being yourself.

Know who you are and you'll think any other way of talking is a waste of time. If you are in the former category, do it anyway. It's the only way to get to the latter.

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I'm living into this

"If something hurts you, don't avoid it. Face it, get to the bottom of it, root it out and die to it.
Then resurrection will come."
- Rob Bell

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Wow.

For this simply unbelieveable piece of stop motion artistry Olympus:
shot 60,000 pictures,
developed 9,600 pictures,
reshot over 1,800 pictures,
and had no post-production.

"Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings; he will not serve before obscure men." Proverbs 22:29

HT: Ben Arment

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Why we grieve when an icon dies

The media storm over the King of Pop's death is still raging.

Who was responsible?

Was there foul play?

Where is his body?

Just watch the news. A news cycle doesn't pass without him making the news (and boosting record sales).

Some people have taken it hard. They had a personal attachment to Michael and feel a genuine sense of loss. I didn't have that connection--though I'll admit to trying to moonwalk more than once, no dice--but I've known the feeling. I felt palpable grief when Mother Theresa and Princess Diana died in the same short time frame. My connection: Mother Theresa--one my heroes, Princess Di--long before 24 hour TV, I stayed up until 3am as a 7 or 8 year old and watched her wedding.

So why do we feel this way? We don't know these people. We have no one-on-one connection with them, and still we mourn.

Here's my stab at it
When an icon dies, we mourn because that person's art/life created something in us. Their art created beauty for us, and beauty indelibly becomes part of our soul. This is, I think, how God intended it. We live and die by beauty. So when the person who brought us beauty dies, we go through a small identity crisis. Who am I without this person who gave me so much? I'm pretty sure there's a thick layer of sentiment tied to that, but generally speaking, that rings true.

So where is Michael now?

Aside from my own conspiracy theory that this is a ploy to get Michael out of the limelight and boost record sales to generate income, the question remains for many Christians: is Michael Jackson in heaven? To many, Michael is suffering the due recompense for his (according to them) wanton and flagrantly immoral life. He is burning in H-E-double hockey stick.

He was certainly insecure (why else the numerous face changes?).
He was immature--but I also don't know what forces shape the soul when you have a driven father pushing you onto an international stage from your earliest memory.

Michael is responsible for the person he became, to be sure. But God alone knows what a person must overcome to be who they were meant to be. And what's more, the Gospel means that we are all finally judged in light of Jesus, not our accomplishments and/or dysfunction.

As Dallas Willard says it (and I paraphrase):

God will let everyone into his heaven everyone who, in his considered opinion, can stand it.

What do you think?

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Crying Like a Man

Tim Keel had a great post recently on tears that show up unannounced. It's a beautifully written piece with a lasting quote from Frederick Beuchner, whose way with words is unparalleled.

You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it,
or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it...You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.

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