Faith Is a Shelter in the Storms of Life

 

                                              (Levi, Josh, and Linda in our back yard)

Have I ever felt afraid? Of course.

After our twin son David was stillborn, and our surviving twin, Josh, was fighting for his life, I had moments of fear. Fear is the emotion a person feels when facing something bad that is happening or is about to happen. Fear is the emotion I feel when my well-being, and that of those I love, is threatened.

To fear is to feel unprotected.

Today a tiny virus is expanding its kingdom of fear with mighty human institutions bowing before its path. What shall we do? Keep following normal precautions, such as sanitizing your hands, often. If you feel sick, stay home, isolated from the public. Follow guidelines like these.

Beyond that, what can I do? Here is where I have found my faith functioning as a shelter in the storms of life.

Consider Jesus’ disciples, in their fishing boat, on the Sea of Galilee. A “furious storm” assaults them. The waves are sweeping over the boat. And Jesus is sleeping.

I think of my trip to India. I’m riding in the back seat of a car, being transported from Hyderabad to Kurnool. A five-hour car ride that brought me a lot of fear. Many times I thought the driver would hit another car, or go off the road. To me, his driving was reckless. I was dead tired from a long flight, but could not sleep. Several times I turned to look at my Indian friend who invited me on this trip. Each time, he was sleeping like a newborn baby. Obviously, he had no fear.

Unable to take the storm any longer, Jesus’ disciples - experienced fishermen - woke Jesus up, begging for help. Jesus wakes, and asks them, “Why are you so afraid?” Had I been in that boat I would have answered, “I’ll tell you why. We are going to drown!”

Jesus responds by getting up and rebuking the wind and waves, as if they were demon-inspired. Upon which the waters calm down. Jesus’ disciples were amazed, and ask, “What kind of man is this?”

When our son Joshua was going under, I prayed and told God, "If You will allow him to live, I shall never have such fear again." Josh lived. And while I have had bouts of fear since then, I remember how Jesus brought Linda and I through this terrible storm. 

What kind of man is this, who is with us in the furious storms of life? His name is Jesus. And we are His followers, people of faith, who love Him, and in whom He works all things together for good.

Getting Acquainted With Grief

I am a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. My son David was stillborn. I held his body in my arms and said goodbye... for now.

This sad event, thirty-nine years ago, sent Linda and I into the light-impoverished place of grief. I was asked to be a pastor for Sparrow Hospital's "HOPING" group to parents who lost children in the Mid-Michigan Neonatal ICU in Lansing, Michigan. Linda and I met with many who suffered these great losses.

Along the way God helped me through some books. They include:

• A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. In the 1970s I was in a bookstore and saw a first edition of this book, written by N.W. Clerk. It was $15. I didn't buy it! Lewis used this pseudonym so as not to freak people out over his frank expression of doubt and struggle at the loss of his wife. God has used this little book, Lewis's journal entries, to comfort many grieving people, including me.
• Lament For a Son, by Nicholas Wolterstorff. Wolterstorff is a Jesus-follower and a professor of philosophy at Yale. He here reflects on the loss of his 25-year-old son to a mountain climbing accident.
• A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken. This is an excruciatingly beautiful and helpful book on the loss of Vanauken's wife
• I'll Hold You in Heaven: Healing and Hope for the Parent Who has Lost a Child through Miscarriage, Stillbirth, Abortion or Early Infant Death, by Jack Hayford. This was the little book that helped Linda and I the most after our son David's death.
• Broken In the Right Place, by Alan Nelson. While this book is not essentially focused on grief, it does relate to sufferings and trials we go through, and God's redemptive activity in their midst. 
• A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss, by Jerry Sittser. My friend Don Follis told me about this book. Linda thought it was excellent. We'll have referred it to many.
• A Grace Revealed: How God Reveals the Story of Your Life, by Sittser. 
• Don't Sing Songs to a Heavy Heart: How to Relate to Those Who Are Suffering, by Kenneth Haugk. Another recommendation from Don Follis. Haugk's Journeying Through Grief also looks good.
• When a Daughter Dies: Walking the Way of Grace In the Midst of Our Grief, by Ben Witherington
• A Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of the Heart, by Martin Marty. Recommended to me by Elmo Familiaran.
• The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society, by Henri Nouwen. The is the classic text on ministering to others out of our own grief; through our stripes, others are healed.

Your Identity is: Peacemaker

(My back yard)

In 2 Corinthians 5 we learn the following. 

• When a person gets saved they become a new creation.
• As a new creation, they no longer live narcissistic lives for themselves, but live for Him.
• As a new creation, they no longer view people "according to the flesh (kata sarka), but according to the Spirit (kata pneuma).
• We see people, all of them, as either reconciled to God, or not reconciled to God.
• New creations are burdened by this. They "implore" ("beg) people to be reconciled to God.
• God gives we new creations a "ministry of reconciliation." In this, we are "ambassadors for Christ."

If you are a Jesus-follower, you have a ministry of reconciliation. You bring people to God, and bring people to one another. You are a reconciler, not a divider. Any fool can divide; blessed and few are the peacemakers. 

The apostle Paul wrote: 

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, 

the new creation has come: 

The old has gone, the new is here!

18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 

19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, 

not counting people’s sins against them. 

And he has committed to us 

the message of reconciliation.

God reconciled you, through Christ, to himself. God did not count your sins against you. God did not look at you and the mess you made of life and say, "Nothing good can ever come from this person." You have the message that God did not treat us this way. You are to share this with others. This is Good News.

Because of this core message of Real Christianity, Linda and I labor to reconcile husbands and wives and friends and families in failing relationships. We have a ministry of reconciliation, just like you. Un-ity, not di-vorce, is the God-thing. 

Tap into God's creative, restorative, reconciling abilities to unite people. God can work, through you, to dissolve disparity between people. 

Abide in Him, and receive His empowering for a peace unlike this world dishes out. Your identity is peacemaker (not peace-lover). 

Do not assist division. Reconcilers refuse to enable dysfunction and sin. Have nothing to do with tearing marriages and families and friends asunder. 

Refuse to entertain words like "This marriage will never make it," or "We could never be friends again," or "Nothing good can ever come out of these people." (Warning: as you refuse to enable sin, the enablee will be outraged because, from their egocentric viewpoint, you are not "helping" them. They may even accuse you of not following Jesus, as if Jesus assists people on the road to destruction. In short, the enablee will likely dishonor you and, in their blindness, view you as trying to control them. How absurd!)

Your core belief is: God is able to reconcile. You know this is true, for He reconciled you, to Him, and to others. The idea is: If two people follow Jesus, and are "in him," they will come together since, in Christ, divisive relationships are nonexistent. View things this way. Think community, not individuality.

If you are a Jesus-follower, you are a gatherer, not a scatterer. 

You assist people on the road to life, rather then enable people on the path of craziness. 

You are someone who brings people to God, and brings people together. 

This is dynamic, far more so than those dark, mediocre voices of relational failure that enumerate sins against people and give up on them. 

***

My books are HERE. 

Adventures With God - Episode 01 - "Desperation"

I'm with Robby Dawkins, Bryan Schwartz, Jamie Galloway, and Darren Wilson in the first episode of Adventures of God. 

***
Three of my books are:

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Encounters with the Holy Spirit (Co-edited with Janice Trigg)

Why I Pray

Downtown Monroe

This morning I received two e-mails from friends who have been desperately praying for answers from God. Today, they received those answers, and were blown away by this. One person wrote, “Why do I not expect this to happen?” Now, for the moment at least, they are motivated to pray more. God’s loving responses to them motivate me to pray more. 

In a few minutes I will walk to the back of our property, by the river, where there is an old table, and my praying chair. I’ll bring my journal, Bible, and a cup of coffee… to meet with God for a while, and pray. I will pray for others, and I will listen to God speak to me. At this point in my life, I rarely leave these prayer times without feeling encouraged and strengthened. 

Why do I do this? Why do I pray? The basic reason is: because Jesus did. Here’s my reasoning. 

1. Jesus is my Great Shepherd. 
2. My Great Shepherd spent much time praying. 
3. Therefore, I spend much time praying. 

How do we know Jesus spent much time praying? Because “Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him.” (Luke 22:29) What Jesus did there was: 

1) instruct his disciples to watch and pray. 
2) pray, himself. 

“As usual,” Jesus went to the Mount of Olives, and prayed. “As was his custom.” Praying was Jesus’ customary way of doing life. If Jesus habitually did this, who am I, one of his followers, not to? 

I read of a sign, supposedly on the Alaskan Highway, where the road turned from pavement to dirt. It read: “Choose your rut carefully. You’ll be in it for the next hundred miles.” Choose praying. Over time, it will become the habitual rut in which you live your life.

- From John Piippo, Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God (Kindle Locations 3636-3652). 

My Summer Reading

 

My parents were readers. I remember my mother taking my brother Mike and I to the library to get books.

My parents bought us books to read. As a kid I read through the entire Hardy Boys series.

I used to read books while driving. (I am not recommending this.) Even underlining while driving. (I don't recommend this, either.)

I have not only not stopped reading, I think my reading has increased.

Note, please: To better understand it is important read things from other viewpoints. For example, as a philosophy major, I learned I needed to read atheistic texts that challenged my theistic worldview. Everyone who is excellent in apologetics understands this.

Here's my current summer reading projects.

The Prophets, by Abraham Heschel

The Crucifixion of Ministry: Surrendering Our Ambitions to the Service of Christ, by Andrew Purves

Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things that Matter Most, by Jerry Walls

Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation, Uri Maoz and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, eds.

The New Crusades: Islamophobia and and the Global War on Muslims, by Khaled Beydoun

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Johnathan Haidt

Covenant: God's Purpose, God's Plan, by John Walton

Ecclesiastes, by John Goldingay

Dr. Seuss and Philosophy, by Jacob Held, Ed.

Higher! Higher!, by Leslie Patricelli

(Because I have grandchildren.)

The Allure of Toxic Pastors

(Cancun - 3/1/19)

A e years ago Linda and I read The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus' Path of Power in a Church that Has Abandoned It, by Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel. It's excellent! The interviews with Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and others are inspiring and instructive.

Chapter 8 is on the allure of toxic pastors and leaders. A toxic leader is:

• "someone who maintains power and significance by manipulating followers through their own fundamental drive to be powerful and significant."
•  someone who dominates and controls others.
• someone who wields their personality to cement their power.
• someone who relegates others to positions of dependence on them, rather than on Christ.
• someone who subverts systems designed to hold themselves accountable.
• someone who quickly establishes scapegoats when they fail.
• someone who does not develop other leaders, because they pose a threat to their own power.
• someone who creates "an unhealthy symbiosis between themselves and the organizations they lead, such that their absence would equal the collapse of the organization."
• someone who has ceased living "according to the way of Jesus - the way of love,  humanization, and truth, giving himself (or herself) to the way of manipulation, dehumanization, and deception."

Why do churches with toxic leaders do nothing about this? Because, say Goggin and Strobel, this is what we want. "These are precisely the people we believe possess the "it factor." This is what we are looking for." 

"The reason we desire toxic leaders, according to Jean Lipman-Blumen, is because toxic leaders promise to “keep us safe, anoint us as special, and offer us a seat at the community table.” We want a sense of safety, significance, and belonging, and they are offering it in exchange for loyalty." (P. 148)

A Worship Song from the Prophet Amos

I took my song "Reveal Yourself" from the book of Amos.

Here it is, recorded by our worship leader Holly. Linda sings backup. I'm singing backup and doing the guitar work.

In his book The Prophets, Jewish biblical scholar Abraham Heschel write:

"What is the nature of Him whose word overwhelmed the herdsman Amos? Is His grandeur like a towering mountain? Is His majesty comparable to an inscrutable constellation? Is He sublime as the morning and mysterious as darkness? All comparisons fade to insignificance when confronted with what a person such as Amos asserted:

For lo; He who forms the mountains, and creates the wind, 

And declares to man what is his thought; 

Who makes the morning darkness, 

And treads on the heights of the earth— 

The Lord, the God of hosts, is His name. . . . 

He who made the Pleiades and Orion, 

And turns deep darkness into the morning, 

And darkens the day into night, 

Who calls for the waters of the sea, 

And pours them out upon the surface of the earth, T

he Lord is His name, 

Who makes destruction flash forth against the strong, 

So that destruction comes upon the fortress."

 

Amos 4:13; 5:8–9

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Prophets (p. 35). 

T

Guard Your Mouth, Preserve Relationships

(Monroe County sunset)

I'm reading from Proverbs, searching for wisdom.

Proverbs 13:3 says,

Those who guard their lips preserve their lives, 

but those who speak rashly will come to ruin.

I know a man who spoke everything that came into his mind. He had no filter. He thought he was funny. He embarrassed his wife and children.

I have opened my mouth and ruined a relationship. I was twenty-one. I occasionally played golf with our family's insurance agent. His name was Don.

I remember driving home after a round of golf. Don was in the car with me. We started talking about cats. I told Don about our family's Maine coon cat. He was huge!

"What's his name?" Don asked.

"I named it "El Gato." That's Spanish for "The Cat.""

Then I added, "I didn't want to give him some ordinary name, like "Mittens.""

"Don, do you have a cat?"

"Yes," he said.

"What's its name?"

"Mittens."

That was the last time Don and I ever played golf.

A fool’s mouth lashes out with pride, 

but the lips of the wise protect them.

Proverbs 14:3

(If your cat is Mittens, forgive me...)

Trying to Be Relevant Has Left the American Church Irrelevant

(New York City)

Neither the Old Testament prophets, nor Jesus, were trying to be relevant.

The Church's great distinctive is not We are way cooler than you and your tribe are.

Can a church have culturally relevant things? I believe so. But these things, as awesome as the lights and fog machines might be (we are so easily entertained) , are not manifestations of our great distinctive.  

See, e.g., this: 

15 Then Moses said to him, 

“If your Presence does not go with us, 

do not send us up from here. 

16 How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people 

unless you go with us? 

What else will distinguish me and your people 

from all the other people on the face of the earth?”

Exodus 33

The Gospel is relevant, as the antidote to, our miserable condition. But a presence-driven church is not trying to be culturally relevant. 

Os Guinness writes: 

“Rarely has the church seen so many of its leaders solemnly presenting the faith in public in so many weak, trite, foolish, disastrous, and even disloyal ways as today… This monumental and destructive carelessness has coincided exactly with a mania for relevance and reinvention that has gripped the church. So a disconcerting question arises: How on earth have we Christians become so irrelevant when we have tried so hard to be relevant? And by what law or logic is it possible to steer determinedly in one direction but end up in completely the opposite direction?… We are confronted by an embarrassing fact: Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant.”

It’s not evil for a church to have a fair-trade coffee bar. I probably like coffee more than you do. Coffee-drinking was so much a part of my Finnish heritage that my grandmother literally had tears in her eyes when she learned I started to drink it. To her, I finally joined the Finnish Faith Community. But something has gone wrong when God communicates to us one thing (“better is one day in my presence”), and it gets misinterpreted as another thing (“better is one day with my barista").

- See my book Leading the Presence-Driven Church.