Argue All you Want... But Listen to the Music Anyway

There was once a colony of mice who lived all their lives in a large, magnificent grand piano. To them in their piano-world came the marvelous sounds of the beautiful instrument, filling all the dark spaces with rich music and sweet harmony. At first the mice were overwhelmed with awe. They drew comfort and strength from the thought that there was Someone -- though invisible to them -- who made the music, someone close by, yet above and beyond them, someone who transcended their little piano-lives. They loved to think of the Great Unseen Player to whom they attributed the lovely melodies. They honored Him and praised His greatness and magnificent creativity.

Then one day a daring mouse climbed up to another part of the piano. Soon she returned, very thoughtful and a little disturbed. She had discovered how music was really made.
Wires were the secret: tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths and thicknesses which throbbed and trembled and pulsated. They must revise all their old, outdated beliefs: none but the most ignorant simpleton could any longer believe in the Great Unseen Player.

Later, another adventuresome explorer-mouse carried the explanation even farther. Hammers were the true secret -- dozens of felt-covered hammers dancing and leaping on the wires. This was a more complicated theory, but it all went to show that they lived in a purely mechanistic, mathematical world -- let's hear no more about this mythical Great Unseen Player. Any thinking mouse could see that there was nothing to the Player myth. He did not exist!

Untroubled by their unbelief, the Great Unseen Player kept on playing anyway! And the mice still heard the rich music and pleasant harmony! Some insisted there was an intelligence, a design to the music that couldn't come simply by randomness, without a Player creating the wonderful music they so loved. The arguments churned on, and the piano-mice lived in conflict and disagreement.
Still the Great Unseen Player, untroubled by the heated debate, kept right on creating the rich, melodious songs that touched their souls, believer and unbeliever alike.

Paper Cranes... or God's Plan Has a Lot of Steps

People ask, "If God knows everything, why did he keep doing things that he knew would fail, when he could just skip ahead to to big finale?"
God's plan is like origami.
When you do origami, you know what the last step is to get the lovely paper crane, but you can't just go to that last step, make fold # 50 and have a lovely paper crane. There's a process of steps, some of which are annoying (especially when you have big hands and bite your nails like I do), that you have to follow, one after the other, to get to that crane.
God's plan is like that. He knows all the steps to get us where he wants us, and some of them have caused Him a lot of grief, but they all had/have to happen.
I used to think, "Man... that had to really irritate God." when thinking about a particularly bad spot in Christianity's history. I don't think that way anymore. He knew it was coming, and ALSO knew that things would get better once He was past that step. It helps that He never messes a step up and has to refold everything.

That would be a little awkward.

Defending the Faith (when you're armed only with a garden weasel)

I've been cultivating a more forgiving lifestyle. Jesus said "Turn the other cheek," and I try to keep that in the front of my mind when I end up faced with yammering chuckleheads. I have my good days, and my bad days.
This morning was less than stellar.



I was at the mall, doing some long-overdue Christmas shopping, and had stopped for a tasty caffeinated beverage in the food court. I was reading my latest acquisition, How to Study the Word, and really minding my own business.
Now, I don't know if anyone else has encountered this phenomenon, but I find that random people seem to believe that I read because no-one wants to talk to me, and they must save me from a life of solitude (and books).

The lady at the next table leans over and asks, "What are you reading?"
I show her the cover of my book.
"Oh," she says, and after a long pause states proudly, "I'm an athiest!"
I look at her, smile, say, “that's nice,” and go back to my book. (When I'm reading, I like to read... sue me.)

Now I know that as a Christian, I'm supposed to be ready to talk to folks about religion. I'm really new, and really, really ignorant, and so I'm nervous about "getting into it" with the "other side." Obviously, she wasn't.

"What does that mean?" she asks, "Aren't you supposed to try to "save" me or something?" I put save in quotes, because she actually used finger quotes.
I close my book and ask her if she wants to be saved.
"No," she says, "but I thought that's what you people do."
"Actually, no," I reply, starting to feel annoyed she's obviously trying to get my goat, "only Jesus can save you. I'd be happy to talk to you about Him, but I'm just a guy. He's the one with the power."
She makes a face. (I really can't make this stuff up.) Then she says, "How can you believe that nonsense."
Up 'til this point, I was doing pretty well. She was annoying me, but I was doing a pretty good job of keeping the old, snarky me chained up in the basement - but I'm new, and I feel that what I believe is anything but nonsense.
I close my eyes, take a deep calming breath, and this is what comes out of my mouth:

"How can you believe in nothing at all?" I ask her in response. "As far as I can tell, atheists believe in nothing. No God, no Heaven, no Hell, no afterlife at all. What you do here is all there is, right?"
"Yes..." she starts to make her counterpoint, but I continue, "That has to feel completely pointless. How do you even get up in the morning? No consequences. No reward. Nothing at all. Your bad actions are always there in the background, but that's fine - they don't really mean anything, and your good actions mean just as  little. Even at the worst point in my life, I believed in something. I'll be honest, I don't care if you believe in God. You're not ready for Him. But you need to believe in something! I'm just talking baby steps. Believe in an afterlife that you have to earn. Believe in the uncaring Clockmaker version of God. Become a dancing-in-the-woods-naked pagan - their religion has almost no rules at all. At least then, we'd have some common ground to meet on. I could talk about how even physicists agree that something triggered the big bang, the moment of creation - something that existed before the universe. I could talk about the complex machine that is man, and the trillions of little random accidents that would have had to happen for us to form without a Creator, and then we could talk about how evolution and creation are not, in fact, mutually exclusive. There are a lot of things we could talk about, if you believed in something. But with you believing in nothing, and me believing in everything... we got nothin'." I'll admit it, I got a little heated, but I've been dreading the moment when I would have to defend my position, and I pretty much gave her a data dump of everything I'd been thinking about saying when the time came.
She just looked at me. It was like she was trying to figure out how she'd lost that battle, when she was so cool and intellectual, and I was an ignorant Christian.
Finally, she said, "Well, you just don't get it!" grabbed her shopping bags and stormed off.

I let her go.

Did I bring her to Jesus? no, oh no. epic fail on that front.
Could I have done? maybe, but I am a novice.
And that's the thing... I'm new to this. I'm still struggling with the fact that I have friends... good people... who aren't going to be in Heaven with me. I still want to believe that there's something good for them, even if I can't find a way to bring them to Christ. But... if they don't believe in anything? There's nothing I can do for them except pray that they let God in before it's too late.

I'm looking back over this, preparing to post, and it looks harsh. I'm not attacking atheists, or followers of the Clockmaker, or even the dancing-in-the-woods-naked pagans. Some of my very good friends are one or another of the above, and I pray for them every night.. I know some of them will say, " I don't need your prayers. I believe in SCIENCE!" but that's like saying you believe in your magnifying glass. Science is just a tool that helps us understand the incredible, unbelievably complex universe... that God made for us.
I'm not really a very good defender of the faith... yet. But I'm studying, and learning, and improving. Right now, I only have a garden weasel for working in the Lord's garden, but soon, I hope to get a shovel.

In conclusion, I'll paraphrase the indomitable Shepard Book, "I don't care what you believe in, but believe in SOMETHING."
At least then we can start to have a conversation.

the Lord, Mammon, and me.

I have a worry.

Every day of our lives, we're pretty much told, "Money makes the world go 'round," and to a large extent that is so. It's hard to live cash-free. Food costs, housing costs, clothing costs, gas... the list goes on and on.


However (and here's where I start to have trouble), we can't, as Christians, allow money to rule us.
I think that too many churches have lost sight of this. I look at 3000 person mega-churches, with paid praise bands, titantrons and 10 services, and I think, "wouldn't we be better served with 10 300-person churches, that didn't require a $10,000,000 facility?" Or, I look at the various denominations and think, "Wouldn't it just be awesome if the greater "church" worried more about sermons and good works, and less about getting butts in the pews so that they can pay an entire level of administrators whose job seems to largely consist of bearing down on the pastors in the trenches about the fact that their church isn't paying their portion?"
It seems like too many members of the clergy (and I'm not calling any particular denomination out, here) are too busy serving Mammon to serve God.

Now, I'm still too new to all of this to be comfortable drawing a line in the sand. Generally, if you do that, and are then forced to cross it, you never get the chance to make another stand. But, I'm pretty certain that when I'm a pastor, the last thing I want to worry about is money. I realize that once I become a full-time pastor, I'll need a salary. It's a calling, yes, but it's also a job of work, and I'm probably not going to learn to live on air and love between now and then. All I want is a roof over my head that I can share with my wife, simple fare, simple furnishings, a suit or (gasp) two for services. In my opinion, you don't become a pastor to make money. I doubt most of the clergy I'm calling out here started that way. But money, while making the world go 'round, is also the root of all evil. It's easy to get caught up in Satan's net, and never even realize you're screwed. I've never really cared about getting wealth, so I hope that I'm safe from that temptation, at least, but you can never know for sure.
I may have to find a little independent church, that doesn't answer to any kind of hierarchy - some place where we worship the Lord, do good works, and don't pay for people to tell us where our money is supposed to go. Shoot, I don't even know if such a thing exists in this day and age. 
All I know is that there are too many churches that seem to need a refresher on Matthew 6:24.

Tears for Heaven

During the dark years I learned to bottle my emotions pretty completely. Now I usually can't cry about normal things. I feel the pain, the grief, the anger... but no tears. Stupid stuff gets me. I cry at movies a lot, and feel ashamed of even that.


Last night, I felt the need to really pray. Don't get me wrong. I pray every night, but last night, I needed to lay it all out there. I've been working on a sermon about prayer, and wanted to start putting some of what I want to talk about into action.

It started out pretty standard. "Heavenly Father, thank you for this beautiful day. You are awesome and mighty Lord..." Prayer 101, you know? But as I spoke, I started to get the feeling that I wasn't controlling the words anymore. They were pouring out of me. When I got to my sins, I shot right past, "Lord, make me a better man tomorrow than I was today," and launched into a full-on confession of my sins. I couldn't stop. Then I got to my prayer list, and names kept falling out of me. Names from the church's prayer list, that I didn't even know I knew. I prayed for the Koreas, for the Middle East, for Africa... and I MEANT it. And I still couldn't stop. I asked Him to find one little child who needed help - hungry, alone, frightened, and help that one child, giving him or her my portion of His Grace, if necessary. Finally, I started winding down, thanking God for all of the gifts He's given me, and praising Him for guiding me out of the desert.

When I finished, I realized I was weeping, and had been for a while, I guess. And I felt clean. I'd been holding back, I think - giving Him the good parts of me, but keeping the bad locked away. I knew He knew about that part of me, but I was still afraid of showing it to Him. Now, it's all out there, at least between God and me.

When I started visiting my daughter's church, I commented on the fact that every time her pastor prayed, he cried. I thought it was odd... cool, but odd.

Now I understand that tears are good. They're the visible sign that you've gotten to the heart of the matter. That you've opened yourself fully to God, and let Him see you at your weakest.

I don't want to be that guy who cries at every little thing, but I hope to become a man who's not afraid to show his weakness, and cry when the situation warrants it.