And then I plan to jump in with both feet.
Thursday
Learning From the Past
And then I plan to jump in with both feet.
The Miracle Car
May I share a testimony with you?
For years, I’ve had an older Toyota sedan. Recently, through circumstances that aren’t part of this story, the car died, and we replaced it with the same model, but a year or two newer. (What can I say? I like some of the classic Toyotas.) I hadn't had a chance to sell the busted one yet.Then the newer one died. My daughter was driving her sister home in it, and suddenly it seemed that the engine exploded: steam and smoke and scary noises burst from under the hood; the girls jumped from the car, steered it into a parking lot and called me to come rescue them.
I was able to drive it home, but just barely. It was horrible: it chugged and snorted and belched great clouds of white smoke and threatened to die on the half mile trip home. A friend looked at the engine and hung his head: “Cracked head,” he murmured, and shook his head. I was horrified: that wasn’t worth repairing.
Father whispered to me: “You’ve learned to trust me in circumstances where My provision comes before the problem does. Now can you trust me where you see the problem, but you don’t yet see My provision?” Hmm. This might be interesting.
Then we had a brainstorm! We could use the cylinder head from the dead car on the new car! That might work! Let’s look closely, and see if we can figure out how to do that!
So four of us gathered around to examine it. Only two of us had experience working on cars: one on a Honda, the other on a Volkswagen; the third guy & I could maybe change the oil, if we were desperate.
We lifted the hood. There was rust spattered all over the engine like blood, and I was sad all over again. “Well, let’s see where it’s cracked.” and we stuck the garden hose to the empty radiator. The idea was to fill the radiator, start the car, and see where the water leaked out: that was where the crack would be.
But before we could start the engine, we found the leak: a long crack on the top of the radiator! That was a much easier repair.
The four of us ran to the old car and checked: yep! Same size radiator. So over the next several hours, we removed both radiators, tested both radiators, and installed the one from the dead car into the living car, and filled it up. We started the engine: the same chugging and snorting and great clouds of smoke belched from the exhaust. How discouraging.
But then one of the guys pointed at the loose wires on the distributor, and asked, “Would that make a difference?” Two of the cylinders weren’t even firing. We re-attached those spark plug wires, and started the car again: it purred like a happy kitten.
I was floored. We’d gone from a completely dead car to a completely happy car in half a day, without spending a single dime. I’ve never seen that happen before!
Then Father reminded me: “Son, I’ve told you that I am your provision. Do you believe me?”
For the record: No, I don’t get every need met that way. The first car was still dead. And no, I don’t get all of my needs met in the way I want them met (like getting my classic car repaired for no cost at all!). But yes, I’m learning.
Responding to Testimony
“You know, Son, If you keep welcoming the testimonies, you might be in danger of seeing those things show up in your own life.” I could hear the smile in his voice.
I thought for a while about what he was saying: receiving the testimony empowers the testimony in my own life. Yeah, that's Biblical.
Then the other end of the scale crossed my mind.
“I wonder if that means that if I were to reject the testimony, that I would stop that work of God in my life, I would actually be working against God's move in my life?”
I felt Father sadly nodding agreement. There was a tear.
I pondered some more.
I could hear someone's argument in my mind: “Does that mean that I need to believe every unverifiable, every unbelievable fairy tale that anybody dreams up?”
He was silent.
I thought about that for a while.
After several miles, I realized that this isn't a binary situation. This isn't “Either I fully believe the testimony & receive it, or else I completely and utterly reject it.” There are times, no doubt, for each of those extremes, but there are other options, other choices, where I believe a portion of the testimony and respond to other parts skeptically.
I thought some more.
It came back to my attention that Father has been reminding me of my own testimony recently: how he's taught me how I don't actually need to form an opinion all the time. He reminded me of how much freedom that has brought me in recent years, to occasionally say, “I don’t know.” “I don’t have an opinion on that one.”
And that’s the answer in this situation. Or at least an answer.
If I don't have the faith (or the will) to believe the testimony before us, have another option, other than closing off the grace of God in my life in that area: I’m not actually required to form an opinion, a judgment, of every single thing that we hear.
It's easy enough to let unbelief disguise itself as the wisdom of not forming an opinion, but we’re mature enough to avoid that, aren’t we?
Use discernment. Duh. That’s why he gave us that gift; use the gift, then trust the gift that God has given. Engage your trust, or don’t, as you choose.
But if it's a good testimony, believe it, engage your faith with it, and look for the grace of that testimony to manifest in your life.
But maybe if it isn’t a testimony you find you can engage your faith with, I don’t need to utterly reject and shut down that move of God in my life.
Discipleship Before Conversion: A Testimony
Testimony: Date Nights
Saturday
Testimony: The Covid “Vaccine”
A Little background:
• The Covid 19 virus is a real virus.
People are dying from it.
• But the virus is being blown way
the heck out of proportion, and most of the deaths attributed to
Covid are actually people who had the virus dying from something
else. (CDC has acknowledged it..)
• A fair number of people are scared
silly of the virus. (This is not a time for judging.)
• There are a few vaccines for the
virus. Except that they’re not vaccines, they’re “experimental
therapies.”
• A fair number of people are scared
silly of the vaccines/experimental therapies. (This is not a time for
judging.)
• The federal government and a good
number of state and local governments are working overtime to
convince us that we need to get the vaccines/experimental therapies.
(Ironically, as I’m writing this, I’m getting text and email
notifications working to persuade me to get the treatment.)
• The attempts to manipulate/convince
the public are primarily based on either bribes or threats; they are
mostly not based on logic, research, or science.
• It’s pretty well documented that
the medical community has opportunity to make a lot of money from the
government for promoting the Covid “vaccine,” for treating Covid
symptoms, for reporting Covid deaths. (NB: It’s my policy to place
a lower value on the opinions of people who are being well paid to
have and to convince me those opinions.)
• A fair number of people are scared
silly of the government’s intentions. (This is not a time for
judging.)
• The Bible is pretty clear: we don’t
actually have reason to be afraid, and in fact we are commanded to
not fear.
• A fair number of people are afraid
to trust God when our health, our life or our government is on the
line. (This is not a time for judging.)
OK. That’s the background. (Note that
I’m not interested in arguing about these points. If you feel that
urge to fuss about these, go somewhere else to do it.)
TESTIMONY. This is my own story; fair
warning: it might be long and rambling.
I’m a fairly strong, fairly healthy
adult male with a solid immune system. I’m not actually afraid of
the virus. I’ve walked with Jesus long enough to know that he’s
serious about his ability to take care of me, and I know that it’s true that
“whether I live or I die, I am the Lord’s.”
I’ve heard first hand reports from
medical professionals, from people who have taken the vaccine; I’ve
read the manufacturers’ statements about them (and their
disclaimers of any liability for their product).
Based on what I’ve read (and I’ve read the original CDC & other reports, not just the news reports about them), I don’t see any reason why I personally need to take the vaccine/experimental therapy that they’re so aggressively promoting. I don’t judge those who take it, but I am comfortable concluding that it’s not for me.
But there are people around me who are scared of the virus, some more than others, of course. Many of these are MY people, people I would die for, people who would die for me: people I love.
These people are scared for me, and they believe they have reason. They consider me higher risk for more than one reason, and the reports agree with them. Some of these people trust the vaccine/experimental therapy, and they want me to “protect myself” and take it. Some of them want me to take it as protection for themselves. (This is not a time for judging.)
So this put me in a tough place. I was confident that I didn’t need the vaccine/experimental therapy, and that in fact, I would be wise to avoid it.
But people who love me were paying a price for my choice. That wasn’t comfortable for me. There were people, people I love and whom I love to be around, that weren’t comfortable being around me. That’s not comfortable for me.
That’s been a hard place. And when I find myself in hard places like that, I try to remember to take these to my Father, so I brought this awkward, confusing, emotionally-charged mess that was in my heart to him. He listened quietly for a while (or at least I assumed he was listening, but he sure was quiet). I poured out my concerns and confusions to him. I wasn’t OK with this divided heart thing going on.
We spent a while here, days, maybe weeks, not minutes or hours. But eventually, his peace did what it does, and it settled my thoughts and emotions and drew my attention back to my Father’s goodness where it belongs.
And in that process, he drew my attention to Mark’s version of the Great Commission, and to one clause in particular: “If they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them.” He wasn’t giving me a direction in the midst of the options, he was just reminding me: “This is the way I am with you, Son.”
As I kept praying (I cannot tell you how many times I’ve stopped listening too early!), I felt his affirmation that I could trust him, I could trust this promise, whichever way I chose to go, but this was my choice to make; he wasn’t going to make my choices for me here.
I still believe that this virus isn’t a threat for me personally, and I still believe that I don’t need the experimental therapy that’s being promoted.
So I signed up to get the experimental therapy, confident that it will by no means hurt me. That was long enough ago that I had to work really hard to get it; it was really awkward, really uncomfortable, really irritating to jump through all the hoops. (The notifications I’m getting now announce that some places have it available for walk-ins.)
After several weeks, I made it to the front of the line and it was my turn. They had me sign a raft of papers (and were really confused when I insisted on reading what I was signing), and the nurse who gave me the injection confessed that he didn’t believe we needed “a ‘vaccine’ that is 95% effective against a disease with a 99+% survival rate.” We laughed about it together.
When it came time for the second injection, people crawled out of the woodwork to tell me their horror stories of how bad the second one was, and how dangerous it was, and how that’s where people got sick from the second one. Thanks folks!
So I reminded myself pretty aggressively of Father’s promise. “If they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them.” My version went this way: “If I am injected with anything deadly, it will by no means hurt me.” It was kind of hard work to agree with him instead of all the fear-driven testimonies.
The next morning, I woke up feeling “off,” and the doubts whispered into my ear: “See! I told you you’d get sick! Now it’s happened to you!”
So I had a conversation with my soul. “If I am injected with anything deadly, it will by no means hurt me.” I kind of had a shouting match inside my soul for a while, but eventually my soul gave in, the symptoms vanished, and I had a great day. That was a month or two ago, and I haven’t been sick for a day since.
I still shake my head (sometimes when my soul gets out of line) at how much this changes the hearts and the choices of some of the people I love, but then I remember, “I did this for you, because I love you.” I can’t generally tell them that, of course, because they think I was convinced of their opinions when I saw the error of my ways because of their insightful presentation of the media’s hysteria.
And I feel my Father’s comfortable pleasure with my choices here. It was my choice, your choice might be completely different. But this is how I dealt with it.
I hope my story is helpful to you.
Thursday
The Chef's Knee
Maintaining the Garden
Transformed Thinking about Scripture
Opinions About Pornography
Friday
The Deception of the Finished Lesson
It’s a deception, an illusion, and it’s perpetrated, many times, in God’s name, and often with the best of intentions.
It’s the deception of the finished lesson.
I became aware of it while I was studying something-or-other for teaching. I felt like I was wrestling a greased pig. I cut my way through bunny trails and wild goose chases and fought off premature and inaccurate conclusions.
It was a long and arduous process.
And when I was done, I presented my results to the folks I was teaching, all tidy, all logical, all wrapped up with a nice little bow on it.
It was good teaching. And my conclusions were both accurate and relevant.
But I was uncomfortable with how tidy it was. This was not a tidy topic, and I felt that I’d done folks a disservice by hiding the blood, sweat, toil and tears that went into the process.
In actual fact, the blood, sweat, toil and tears are a legitimate part of the topic, of the conversation. Let’s be honest: outside of TV shows, there aren’t a lot of thorny questions that tidily wrap themselves up in 30 minutes, are there?
It seems to me that the need to make things tidy and clean and neat is not actually a benefit to American culture.
Let’s be specific. If we think that the abortion issue has a clean and simple answer, we’re not paying attention. If we think that the topic of social justice can be solved easily, we’re smoking something interesting. If we think the fear of God, or the grace of God, or the rapture, or the solution to immigration, or balancing a household budget have tidy answers, we’re not seeing the whole of the subject.
Christian platitudes are an abysmal failure. But Christian blogs and Christian books (and not-so-Christian books) that have clear-cut answers are equally deceptive.
We’ll see how I respond to this, how I deal with this in the future. As much as anyone else, I like having clear answers readily available, and I like not looking like a dork as I stumble for an answer that actually means something on a complex topic.
But we might find that not every post has a confident conclusion. I don’t know. We’ll see how this turns out.
Thursday
Reflections on Some Influencers
I knew a man who studied God, and God’s ways, for decades. He could put all kinds of letters after his name, including DMin, and PhD. He understood the Bible better than anybody else I knew at the time.
When I listened to him, I thought, “What a learned man. What a great foundation! I need a foundation like that.”
I knew another man who didn’t have a degree, but had spent a couple of under-funded decades among a people who didn’t even know who God was: teaching some, discipling a few, and desperately depending on God every day, for his meals, for his ministry, for his family’s lives.
When I listened to him, my heart melted. I prayed earnestly, “Father, I want to know you like this man knows you!”
I knew another man who came from the streets, and even that was just recently. He had not the slightest shred of education, and it showed. But he spent hours, many hours, just sitting in God’s presence, listening to his heartbeat, talking with him about what was on his heart.
When I listened to him, I realized that he had some ideas that were pretty messed up, and the first guy could help him with that. And I saw that he had some serious insecurity issues, identity issues, and the second guy could really help him with that.
But when he talked, he blew my mind. He healed the sick regularly, got words of knowledge effortlessly, and unbelievers listened carefully when he talked about his Jesus.
When I listened to him, I thought, “Father, is this really possible? Can your children walk in this kind of revelation, this kind of power, in this day and age?”
I learned some things in this reflection.
• I really do love meditating on the things God has done in my world, in my life. The angel in Revelation 19 was right: the testimony of Jesus, who he is, what he's done, really is the spirit of prophecy. Mmm mmm. So good.
• Different people have imparted different strengths into my life. If I only listened to people like me, I would certainly not be who I am today. Since both my wife and I like who I am today, this would be a bad thing.
• Even people that make me uncomfortable can have a great impact on my life, provided I’m willing to learn. It's that "willing" part that I wrestle with sometimes.
• It’s not enough to know ABOUT God. I must know God. And there’s more to know than I have any idea, even now. What a big heart!
• It’s not enough to know God. I must also know ABOUT God if I aspire to trust him, to be like him. And again, there’s more to know about him than I even believe is possible.
• When God invests himself into a person, he doesn’t necessarily make that person tidy, neat, clean, respectable. My ideas for what a “Good Christian” is were woefully inadequate, which means they are probably still woefully inadequate today. (Yet again I am reminded: He is NOT a tame lion.)
God Teaches a Teetotaler About Beer.
I grew up and learned religion. So of course, my home was a dry household. And then I worked for a pastor who never taught that alcohol was evil, but he surely acted as if it were, and expected his staff to as well. It started me thinking.
Eventually, we had children in our alcohol free home, and it was good, of course. Until God intervened.
On one of my regular retreats, on a solo camping trip, God woke me up in the middle of the night and warned me that I was failing my children. OK. he had my attention.
I crawled out of the back of the pickup where I was sleeping so I wouldn’t fall asleep in the middle of our conversation. Sure enough, the little voice, the impression in the back of my head continued:
“In a few years, your children will be entering junior high school. They won’t be out of your influence, but there will be many other influences there. Some of them, and you know what this is like, will invite them to discover beer, to discover drunkenness.”
And then he dropped the big one. “And you’ve done nothing to prepare them for that temptation.”
My heart sank. I knew he was right. But he didn’t let me sink there. After a moment or two, my mind began to fill up with perspectives and ideas and insights.
One of them caught me seriously off guard. He reminded me that I loved barbecue, but I was frustrated: a great steak was NOT complimented by a glass of milk, or by a CocaCola.
Oh my. Seriously?
But then I had visions (pictures) of what could happen. I saw better barbecues which led to better fellowship. I saw my children - my family - separating themselves from the religious spirit that accompanies many alcohol-free homes. And then I saw my son, in junior high school, being approached to step behind a barn and share a Budweiser with him, and my son responded with, “Beer? That’s not beer. That's cat piss! Let me tell you about real beer!”
Oh my. I remind you that this is in the middle of the night, in the middle of the woods. I remind you that while I had tasted beer before (and not liked it), I had never had a glass of beer. I remind you that I was really comfortable in my no-alcohol religion.
And here’s God, telling me not just to drink beer, but to become educated about beer. And God was telling me to (gasp!) give beer to my school-age children, and to (gasp!) listen to their opinions about the stuff!
That was fifteen or twenty years ago, and it has been a glorious success (as if it’s surprising that God’s plans work!). I became a far better father than I had been before! And the beer? I had no idea of the variety. I still don’t love all kinds, but there are some that are pretty good, and there are some that make a good barbecued steak into a great barbecued steak. Who knew!
Oh, and that vision about my son telling his tempter, “Beer? That's not beer!” Yeah, that happened, though it looked different than the way I imagined it. And now he brings both life and excellence into a world I'd never reach, to people for whom alcohol is pretty important.
I’m not trying to say, “You need to drink beer!” Oh heck no! Don’t do that (unless God speaks to you the way he spoke to me). My obedience included learning about beer, but others' obedience involves not drinking beer.
I’m trying to say, “It’s a really good idea to do what God says, even if it’s really weird!”
Oh, and let me add: God the Father has some really good insights about how to be an excellent parent. I encourage you to learn from his wisdom on that topic!
A Personal History with Unchurched Believers
Unfortunately, when I returned home, I discovered I had left my jacket, with my wallet, behind, and I didn’t recognize it until I returned home, an hour’s drive away.