9-11-13

As we make our way through September 11, 2013 I am reminded of the specific context I found myself on September 11, 2001. I was a recent college graduate from Mercer University, the Harvard of the South, as one of my professors use to say. I chose two majors, both within the liberal arts school, which meant that I was largely unemployable without more schooling. After continuing to work at a bookstore I worked at as a student, I was able to get a teaching job at a small private school in the south part of Bibb county. It was a blessing. I was primarily hired to teach Government/Economics part-time, but I was given more courses to justify paying me full-time. I taught students in the 6th, 8th, 11th, and 12th grades. They were all unique with different challenges and joys. I distinctly remember receiving the news of an attack then watching with students as the second plane struck one of the towers. 

The rest of that day shifted from being about accomplishing lesson plans to counseling students about fears, hopes, dreams, and the role of faith in this event. The ones who orchestrated this tragedy were motivated by their own theology, albeit an incorrect theology in my opinion. Perhaps one of the great tragedies that ensued after 9-11 was that Christians produced a plethora of bad theology in response to the attacks. What I found myself doing was providing comfort, hope, and a truer biblical perspective of all that was unfolding in the world in relation to God's word and his work in the world. 

I have sense encountered several of those students I taught, both in person and through social media. I dare say that I would have remembered them regardless of the events of 9-11, but perhaps because of that day they are indelibly pressed into my brain and my heart. Now many of them are married with kids of their own, hopefully making a difference in the world around them. 

"God is a wild old dog"

Patty Griffin has produced one of the finest "gospel" albums of recent days with her homage to her father on American Kid. There are several songs of note on the album as it weaves a story of love, family, failure and redemption. In one of the more captivating songs, she likens God to a "wild old dog, someone left out on the highway".

God is a wild old dog

Someone left out on the highway

I seen him running by me

He don't belong to no one now

He don't belong to no one now

In the lyric she captures a great truth that is often lost on religious types, especially churches and denominations who consider themselves at the front of holding forth the gospel. There is a sense in which people seem to cage God to their own perspective and ideas. They OWN God. They have him all figured out. There are no questions left unanswered, no theological ambiguity, no doctrinal conundrums, no sense of doubt. They approach God the way an animal lover might approach a stray dog and take him in and give him a sense of belonging. Who are we to think that we can ever own God or give God a sense of belonging. If we see anything about God's nature in scripture, it is that he is not given to being dictated by his creation. He is above all of the created order, thus he is free to move as he pleases like a wild old dog running along the highway. 

At times I seem to think I have God figured out. I think I know exactly what he is doing and will do. Then like a wild mutt he surprises me. I don't have a trademark or a copyright on God and neither does anyone else, so why do I try to limit what God can do in my life and the world around me. 

Reflections on Prayer in Wales

My time spent this summer in Caernarfon, Wales was formational in many different ways. First, it reminded me that people are people no matter what country you are in. Second, it reminded me that God is bigger than my southern, American caricature that often drives my understanding of God. Lastly, the impact that the trip had on my prayer life has been incredible, like the first bite of fresh Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich.
The majority of the trip consisted of prayer walking for half our day. We spent time walking through all the different parts of the town and into the outskirts of the town into the sheep infested countryside. I will admit that pray has never come easy for me. It is something I have wrestled with in attempt to hear the voice of God leading me, though at times I suspect that God's voice sounds eerily like my own. My prayer walking experience opened my eyes to the need that I have for God to be present in my life as well as the lives of people I interact with each day. I was humbled by the power of simply confessing that I didn't know the extent of every individual situation and need but that God did and does.

Part of our experience was an exercise in listening prayer. I am staunchly convinced that most Christians spent time uttering prayers to the extent that we become experts at babbling and seldom practice the discipline of shutting up to listen to God. Each day I was challenged in my faith, encouraged to hold on fast to the God of my faith, and to trust in his will for me, the people around me, and the world. That sounds like, "let go and let God"...nothing could be further from the lesson I learned. It was this deep sense of trust even when I doubted the one in whom I trust. It was something akin to jumping off the trapeze platform with no net and not enough a bar. I am finding that jumping is part of what God is looking for from me.

Chesterton on Life and Faith

I have long wanted to read G. K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy. This summer I finally marked it off my list. One can easily see his influence on another great thinker, C. S. Lewis. Here are few nuggets I found in my reading of the book.

"We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it. We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to."

"Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul."

"Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once."

"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason."

"For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God."

"Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas; but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas."

"But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

Wales Pictures

 Prayer walking

 Croeso

 cool cross in a cemetary

 dipping my toes in the Atlantic

 A cool church in an area we prayer walked on the last morning

 5 Americans in a phone booth

 Prayer walking

 church service

Castle Ruins from the 12th or 13th century

Wales Mission Trip 2013

 Our home for the week.

 Getting training from IMB missionary John Robinson

 Group shot on the sea wall

 View of the ancient medieval wall

 Overlooking the town of Caernarfon

 Group debriefing

Beautiful sunset over the harbor

2 Corinthians 10:5

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.