A Missional Life - Takeaways

Just this last week, Christ Community took a bus load of folks to the Global Missions Health Conference in Louisville, KY. We met with thousands of other God-centered, Gospel-driven, Global-minded students, physicians, and mobilizers. It was a great time.

The Christian Medical and Dental Association has always played a leading role in mobilizing students and professionals to take up the call of Christ to go and make disciples of all nations. With years of experience responding to the same questions offered up by willing but weak disciples, the CMDA decided to formulate responses to the most common questions in the form of a short book distributed at this conference - A Missional Life.

In my travels from Louisville to Denver I was able to read through the articles, and had the following takeaways. They are a mixture of questions, suggestions, and remarks:

1. What about now? Are you open to the continual teaching of God's spirit? Is his word still alive to correct, inspire, and train you in righteousness?

2. Living for the glory of God instead of aiming to correct the failures of previous well-intentioned believers allows you to build on the good they did instead of reinventing the wheel.

3. Ministry and leadership are primarily about communicating your value of others. You value people when you need them. This applies to our ministry to the poor.

4. Since pride is the symptom of poverty for those who are materially rich, flippant and cheap praise like "You're so rich!" or "You're so knowledgeable." is the equivalent of Christmas turkeys to the materially poor.

5. Read Let Justice Roll Down by John Perkins.

6. Mentoring is not simply pouring into someone else. Mentoring is pouring yourself out for someone else.

7. "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I might remember. Involve me and I will learn." Benjamin Franklin

8. In mentoring be willing to bring close to the relationship at the right time (both from the disciple and mentor perspective).

9. Rick Donlon's title is that It Start Locally meaning that all missions starts with your focus on what is around you. He's right. However, I would strengthen the phrase and say, "All mission is local". Though you travel land and sea to get to a new place, once there, it is local. It's what's around you. Therefore, we must understand that missions is always here not there.

10. The reason those faithful with little are faithful with much is because once you have more it seems little in light of the much you can now see.

11. With regard to material things and financial frugality, missionaries use things up, wear things out, make things do, or do without.

12. Don't assume what is trending is beneficial. Do your homework and go with what works. Ask your people and listen to them. They are the experts on how they receive our efforts.

How Far is Memphis from Arkansas....in Dominoes?

Two thousand four hundred and twenty. That's right, 2,420 dominoes will get you from the shores of Arkansas to the Bluff of Memphis, TN. Sort of.

The number is 2,420 equals 55 times 44. That means 44 sets of double nine dominoes (55 in each set). Using program written to use image processing and mathematical optimization, we determined the optimal way to use the dark black of the blank tiles and the bright white of the 9's to best portray an image of the Memphis Bridge.

The idea was inspired from the cover a Mathematics Monthly that featured artwork by Robert Bosch whose website is www.dominoartwork.com.

Students from Collegiate School of Memphis, sponsored by Mr. Chris Purdy, helped assemble the image along with one of a cougar for the school. The funds for the project were supplied by an UpLift Grant from Regions Bank.

 

The Memphis Bridge is on display at the Given Garden on the corner of Holmes and Given. Come by and get your picture taken next to the bridge!

Lance Luttrell

It's In the Air

Jesus Te Ama. 我爱你. I love you.

I find it interesting that those of us travelling on short-term missions trips (of which I did several) usually learn an interesting mix of phrases. We start of with, "Hello". Then if we get comfortable we master the necessary, "Thank you", "Where is the bathroom", and "I'm sorry." But those of us feeling very confident in our linguistic mastery and pious for our mission will graduate quickly to "I love you."

God's love is something we should certainly learn to say in any language that someone can understand. It's worth translating. It's worth being shouted from a mountain top. However, it's so interesting that we would want to say something like that so soon. I mean, we're only going to be there for a week. Can we really love someone in that amount of time? 

My point is that I think we misunderstand the depth of love. I think we share it flippantly at times, and find it overused. We say things like "I guess I've got to love him, but man! I just can't stand when he does that." Or better yet, "Yeah, I think I love my neighbors. I mean, I wave at them when I drive by..." Or even, "I love you Lord, and I lift my voice..."

So what does it mean to love? I'm about a month late on this one, but I guess that'll have to do. What does it mean to really love someone or something? Can we grow in our love? Can we stop loving? Is it a feeling or an action?

If you're reading this, I am sure that you (just like me) have heard how love is more than a feeling (thanks, Boston). Many have explained to me how love is more about choosing to give yourself to someone. After all, God so loved the world that He gave His only son. As true as that is, it is still abstract to me. I have found Paul much more helpful as he instructed his young, newly-appointed pastor Timothy.

In 1 Timothy 1, Paul starts out by reminding Timothy that he needs to stay put to straighten out some guys as far as what concerns true doctrine and what is fitting to be used to instruct the people. The purpose of this, he says, is love. What is so profound about this to me, is not that the purpose of correct doctrines, or staying put to correct such doctrines, is love. No. What stands out to me is the map that follows of how we get to love.

⁵ The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith (coloring mine).

Paul is saying here that love comes from three things: a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. Obviously, where something comes from tells a lot about the thing itself. The fact that I'm from Mississippi and Arkansas usually leads people to believe that I speak slowly and have calloused feet from walking around without shoes. Where love comes from hints at some attributes that it might have.

First, love comes from a pure heart. As I imagined the people that I flippantly said I loved, this piece of love struck me the most. A pure heart. If I am to love someone I have to have a pure heart in love toward them. I am sure this means many things, but one of them is this: If you want to love someone (or make your words come true) then you have to actually want to love them. You see, you can have a pure heart toward someone if you are only "loving" them in order to tell someone else about how God is moving in your life or what marvelous things He is doing through you. You can't love someone if you are trying to get something else from them. You have to have a pure heart.

Secondly, love comes from a good conscience. I'm not sure if this what Paul meant, but in my mind a good conscience is a clear one. It could also mean one that works correctly, and directs you toward God, but let me focus on it being clear. In order to love someone, you must have a clear conscience before them. That's exactly what went wrong in the garden. Love for God was dispelled because our consciences weren't clear any more. We were trying to hide something. In order for us to grow in love for someone we now actually want to love, we must confess our sin. We must confess how we were only pretending to love them in order to look neighborly. We must at least confess it to the Lord, and have him absolve us from our sin. Love demands a clear conscience.

Lastly, love comes from a sincere faith. Now, here's where it all comes together. We can love only if we have good intentions (a pure heart), and confess where we've gone wrong (a good conscience), but that's not enough. To have only started along the way, and recognized that you've gotten off track, is not enough to love someone. You must have a sincere faith. But a faith in what? A faith that the other person will receive you? Maybe. Sincerity in expression your mistakes? Possibly.

What I think is hidden here is an allusion to the mystery of godliness that Paul talks about in Chapter 3 - that God was manifested in the flesh. You see, true love requires a sincere faith that there is one who has come with true love to give himself on your behalf. There is one who has come to make up for your good intentions gone awry. There is one who has enabled you to not only intend to love someone, and see that you've gone astray, but He has come and sent his spirit to enable you to actually love them as He has loved you.

So love is more than a feeling. It starts with a feeling and some good intentions (a pure heart). But we quickly see that we don't measure up, and need to confess our shortcomings (a good conscience). And praise the Living God, who came to love us, and now only requires our faith to be accepted.

The Good Work of Healthcare

When the Bible speaks of its own role as preparing the Man of God for every good work, what do you think it means by every? All good work would be included, right? Ok, then. What do you think it means by the word good? Well, after creating each day, God spoke of his own creation as good. And famously, Jesus directed any assessment of being good to God alone. So, it seems "goodness" has something to do with "Godness". Now God is not only in the business of saving people, He is also in the business of creating people. He cultivates gardens just as much as He cultivates the human heart. God is a God of the ordinary as much as the miraculous. In fact, we might contend by sheer percentage of time spent on each that God is actually much more a God of the ordinary than the miraculous.

Nevertheless, my point (admittedly borrowed from Tim Keller in his book Every Good Endeavor) is simply that each one of us has work that has value in as much as it reflects the character of God. Work outside of ministry can be good work. In addition, however, we each face distinct roadblocks and troubles in our own disciplines that need to be addressed. Because I work in healthcare, and am around doctors all the time, I found the following passage to be very relevant. I will be posting more about the thoughts from this book, but this is a potent start.

The Gospel and Medicine
To let the gospel of Jesus shape how we work means to heed the influence of both the psychological idols within our hearts as well as the sociological idols in our culture and profession. For an example of this I will turn to the field of medicine. Some years ago I did an informal survey of several Christians in the medical profession. I asked them, "What are the factors inherent in the practice of medicine today that make it difficult to work as a Christian in this field? What are the main temptations and tests?" I was surprised, instructed, and helped by the answers I received.

One of the main problems mentioned was a deeply personal one - the great temptation to lose sight of your identity in your profession. The British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones was previously a successful physician in London. In one of his lectures to medical students and doctors, he said candidly, "there are many whom I have had the privilege of meeting whose tombstones might well bear the grim epitaph...'born a man, died a doctor'! The greatest danger which confronts the [medical professional] is that he may become lost in his profession...this is the special temptation of the doctor..." Another British doctor added:


...the temptation [is] for medicine to take over your life and rule your life as an enslaving power. It's a subtle one because...there is a kind of moral ego massage because you are giving so much - hours, responsibility, stress - to do so much good in other people's lives. There's a lot of self-justifying power in that kind of idolatry. It's much easier to feel morally superior as a doctor than as a stockbroker...There is also, in some people, the need to be needed and the power buzz you get from having influence...

Those in the helping professions (and that includes pastoral ministry as well as medicine) are tempted to feel superior because our work is so noble and so draining. And although medical professional pour themselves out in long, stressful hours and literally save lives, they meet plenty of ungrateful, unreasonable, and stubborn people who repay their hard work with venom and lawsuits. This can lead to a correlative spiritual peril. One doctor wrote:
It is easy to become extremely cynical about people and emotionally hardened to life. You see so much of the messy stuff of life and death that you feel your essential defense mechanism is to become emotionally detached and keep a distance in order to maintain your sanity.

Several doctors told me that only the gospel enabled them to see the traits of pride, cynicism, and detachment that were creeping into their characters. One said, "In the early days of a medical career you can work such enormous hours that your prayer life just dries up. That is deadly. Only if Jesus stays real to the heart can you be consistently joyful enough in him to avoid making medicine your whole self-worth, and then becoming hardened when you meet so much ingratitude."


My survey also revealed pressures on doctors that came from the culture. One woman I corresponded with pointed me to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine titled "God at the Bedside." The author was a doctor who often found that patients' spiritual beliefs and practice were very much a factor in their health issues, but "in the modern era, religion and science are understood as sharply divided, the two occupying very different domains." He wrote that he often found that patients' guilt and fears were factors in their illness and also that their faith in God was part of how they healed, but he felt completely unprepared by his training to address any of these realities. "Doctors," he wrote, "understandably are leery of moving outside the strictly clinical and venturing in the spiritual realm."


Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones makes the same point in one of his lectures to medical professionals. Lloyd-Jones was on staff at Saint Bart's in London under the famous chief of staff Lord Horder in the late 1920s. At one point the junior physician was asked by Lord Horder to rearrange and reclassify his case history records. He created a new filing system, arranging the cases not by name, but by diagnosis and treatment. As Lloyd-Jones did this task he was astonished that Horder's diagnostic notes in well over half the cases included comments such as "works far too hard," "drinks too much," "unhappy in home and marriage." At one point he spent the weekend with Lord Horder and took the opportunity to ask him about what he had seen in the case files. Horder responded that the reckoned only about a third of the problems that are brought to a physician are strictly medical - the rest are due to or aggravated by anxiety and stress, poor life choices, and unrealistic goals and beliefs about themselves. Severe cases, of course, could be sent to the psychiatrist, but most of the time that wasn't appropriate. So, Horder concluded, a doctor should basically mind his or her own business. Lloyd-Jones said that after he heard that response:


...we argued for the whole of the weekend! My contention was that we should be treating [the whole of the person's life]. "Ah," said Horder, "that is where you are wrong! If these people like to pay us our fees for more or less doing nothing, then let them do so. We can then concentrate on the 35 percent or so of real medicine." But my contention was that to treat other people [taking into account their whole life] was "real medicine" also. All of them were really sick. They certainly were not well! They have gone to the doctor - perhaps more than one - in quest of help.


Lloyd-Jones was not proposing that physicians were by themselves competent to do this, but rather that together with other counselors and helping professionals they needed to address the whole person. People have a spiritual nature, a moral nature, and a social nature, and if any of these are violated by unwise or wrong beliefs, behaviors, and choices, there can be interlocking physical and emotional breakdown. And even patients whose original illness was caused by strictly physical factors eventually need much more than mere medicine to recuperate and heal.


That conversation took place in 1927, but two trends have only exacerbated the situation that Horder and Lloyd-Jones were addressing. First, there has been an enormous increase in specialization, so that no single helping professional ever seems to have the luxury of looking at the whole person. Just as important is the growth in influence of a view that has been called "evolutionary social constructivism," which believes that "all aspects of every level of reality [have] a single evolutionary explanation." In effect the very concept of the whole person is vanishing. Our consciousness and emotion, our choices and desires, our goals and joys are increasingly seen to be the results of our genetic hardwiring. The old idea of a person consisting of body, mind, and spirit is gone - now there is only a body that has mental, emotional, and spiritual neurology. In addition to this reductionistic understanding of human nature, the increasing economic and legal pressures on doctors and hospitals are likely to push medical professionals more cautiously to "mind their own business" when it comes to treating the whole person.


Because they understating the effects of both creation and fall on the human person, Christians in the medical profession can resist the narrowing implications of this view. The Christian view of human nature is rich and multifaceted. God created and will resurrect our bodies - and so they are important! If God himself is to redeem our bodies (Romans 8:23) then he is the Great Physician, and the medical vocation could not be loftier. Bot God does not care only about bodies; he created and redeems our souls as well. SO Christian physicians will always bear the totality of the human person in mind. Their faith gives them the resources to muster the humility and the ingenuity necessary to see patients as more than just bodies.

Becoming A Perfect Man - Easier Said Than Done

James talks a lot about talking. The Proverbs also talk a lot about talking and even about talking a lot.

This last week, a friend of mine and I were memorizing James 3:2 - We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault at what he says, he is a perfect man able to keep his whole body in check.

Like most people, my first thought was, "I know! If I could just keep a reign on what I said, I would be much better off!" We know the truth that controlling what we say is a very difficult task to master. Even when we think we are doing well, just wait ten minutes until the crowd changes and you say exactly what you were vowing you wouldn't say. We all do it.

But after a while, I got to thinking about this verse some more, and I started weaseling my way through it. I began to think, well, if all you have to do is never be at fault at what you say, then I guess my thought life is of no regard. Of course, I reasoned, if you think about good things, good things are bound to come out. But the self-justification wasn't aimed at how to improve, it was aimed at how to get by. I was thinking to myself, well if I think these terrible things, but then always say the right thing, then maybe I'm a perfect man. Maybe it's as easy as just saying it, and you don't have to do anything about it.

But then the words of Jesus come ringing in. In Matthew 12:34, Jesus reminds us that from the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. You see the words that come out of my mouth are truly a reflection of what is really inside my heart. And the truly sobering fact is that though I'm thinking I'm saying the right things, the truth of the matter is that my words sound just as self-justifying as they truly are in my heart. Love does not hide, nor does it cover over insincerity.

There is hope, however. There is one who though he was curse, he held his tongue. He only spoke what he heard the Father say. His words are truth and life. Jesus the Word of God has come to dwell in us to not only make us innocent before the law, but perfect - men and women able to keep our whole body in check.

Afraid to Worship

A friend of mine and I have been regularly listening to sermons from Fellowship Memphis via the extremely convenient app.

[A quick side note: I was listening to one of these sermons while building my back fence in the snow this weekend. I think the sermon was downloading and stopped for a while when I was too far from the wifi connection of my house. Several minutes went by with nothing, and I forgot I even had the earbuds in. Then, as I was putting up one of the last slats, somebody started talking to me. Startled, I looked around, through the fence, behind me. I ducked and look up, there was no one! Oh yeah, it's Brian Loritz. He is talking to me on the sermon. Right.]

This week I was challenged to think about Courageous Discipleship. One of the main points here is the relationship between fear and worship. I know that I have often been told that there is connection between fear and worship. Pastors will say that when the Bible says "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" they tell me it means something like reverence or respect. The same way you fear your Father.

I'm sure that's true, but I heard it in a little bit different way this time around. What I heard was, "You worship what you fear." It struck me, because I can see how it's true. I can see how our respect is given to those things which we consider powerful. I suggest this revision, though, "Your fears reveal what you worship."

Take the fear of the dark. The fear of the dark happens because you are unsure of what will happen to you. It reveals that you value, that you worship, your own life. You are afraid to die or to be injured. It's a perfectly natural fear - but Jesus has even conquered this idol for us. He has conquered death.

Or take a concern or worry about what others think of you. It may be that you worship them, or at least their opinion of you. Your fears about what they may say indicate that you respect their opinion. You worship their words over the words that proceed from the very mouth of God.

Or take my fear. My fear that I will not succeed in the roles in which I operate. This betrays that I value success. I value winning. I also value and worship my own abilities and am afraid to let God come in, use His strength and show Himself off to be great.

May we be afraid of the Lord. May we fear the Lord, and allow that to lead us to worship Him. What will He think? What will He do if I do this? What will He say of me?

Awaken the Poor

I have often thought myself to be a disciplined man. I grew up under a strongly self-disciplined father who could and would lose weight on command, lower his blood pressure when needed, and reign in his diet like it was his job. Speaking of jobs, he is the hardest worker I know and is diligent with every moment.

So, when I came to passages in Proverbs about sluggards, I usually kept reading until I found something about the wise man or working man or disciplined man. But not today. The Lord had a different message in store.

Psalm 24:30 – 34

I went past the field of a sluggard,

    past the vineyard of someone who has no sense;

thorns had come up everywhere,

    the ground was covered with weeds,

    and the stone wall was in ruins.

I applied my heart to what I observed

    and learned a lesson from what I saw:

A little sleep, a little slumber,

    a little folding of the hands to rest—

and poverty will come on you like a thief

and scarcity like an armed man.

Immediately when I started reading this, houses in my neighborhood started flashing through my mind as if I were driving past them. I could see the thorns that have grown up around the house. I can see the ground covered with weeds. One house in four in my neighborhood are overcome with weeds, thorns, and are boarded up. I’ve seen brick walls torn down, windows shattered, and trees lying on roofs unattended.

But what follows, is maybe not what you expected. I don’t look at those things and then condemn the owners for their negligence and sluggishness. Instead, it struck me for the first time that poverty is a tool of the enemy that is waiting to strike. Those that slumber for a moment, who fail in their vigilance for a second will fall to poverty in a moment.

The answer, at least from this passage, seems to be a wake-up call. A literal call to wake up the poor. Awake! Awake! Arise my neighbors! Arise and sleep no more. No longer let the silent weeds grow up around us. Don’t ignore the broken windows. Awaken us, O God. Awaken us to see the devastation that has taken place, and put us in the vigilant place of prayer and action. Come and awaken our sleepy eyes. Let us see the Dawn of Your Justice rise in our neighborhood.

3 Tough Messages

The proverbs are rich with turns of phrase and rhyming of ideas. Often I look for threads of a theme between the proverbs in the same chapter, but often find that it is limited to only a few verses in a small neighborhood of one another.

There are a few themes, however, that run the course of Proverbs, and are worth taking to heart. The clearest theme, probably, is the idea that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The respectful reverence of the one who created us puts us in our place and its only in that place that we can begin to grasp wisdom. The next might be to get wisdom because it is of great value. We hear lady wisdom calling out to us, and are admonished over and over again to get wisdom and not sell it.

In addition to the clear themes about wisdom, there is one that is as pervasive, but less obvious. It is the theme of faith. Faith is what is required, I think, to demonstrate true wisdom. Or maybe, it's that true wisdom really is an expression of faith. After all, wisdom is an application of knowledge, and often times it's simply an expression of confidence that the same thing that happened in the past will happen again. That's faith. Certainly our faith can carry us to things that we haven't seen before, but so does wisdom. Wisdom tells you that if your dad was right about 90% of what you have experienced, you can probably trust him for another 10% of things, or at least 5%.

In Proverbs 19, there are three people whom we are told to respond to in different ways. Each of these requires faith. We are met with a poor man, our son, and a hot-tempered man.

In verse 17 we are told, "He who is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will reward him for what he has done." We meet the poor man. The thing about poor men is that they are needy. They need something from us. Usually money, or food, or a job. But the interesting thing here, is that if we give to the poor, we can trust that we are lending to the LORD. In other words, we are believing that the LORD will repay us for what we gave, and that with interest! It requires faith to be kind to the poor.

In verse 18, we find our son. Here we are admonished, "Discipline your son, for in that there is hope; do not be a willing party to his death." We have someone for whom we are responsible for training, not doing what they are supposed to. A difficult conversation is coming. Possibly even punishment. We are smart creatures, and we know that if we have to administer discipline we probably won't be liked very much. Nevertheless, this verse says that if we don't discipline we are letting him carry on toward his death. We didn't warn him that his disobedience will lead to his destruction. So, by adding faith to this verse, we convince ourselves that having tough conversations early, and being willing to enforce discipline will bring hope to our sons.

Lastly, in verse 19, we meet the hot-tempered man. The sage tells us, "A hot-tempered man must pay the penalty; if you rescue him, you will have to do it again." I don't exactly remember this story, but it's written in the footnotes of my Bible. When we were on our honeymoon, we saw this drunk at the airport. He was throwing trash on the ground, and shoving items around that were bumping into people. He of course had no idea what a scene he was making. You could feel everyone around him was annoyed and bothered by his actions. His friend with him, though, was kindly apologizing for each incident. Then when it was time to fill out the customs forms and get everything prepared the friend was filling it out for him. But one thing was certain, this wasn't the first time, and it wasn't going to be the last. Faith here, requires that we believe that in rescuing a hot-tempered man does him no good. Sometimes we really have to discern that some need to feel the consequences of their actions that they may change. Cecil, a co-worker of mine, put it like this, "Hunger pains are some of the world's strongest motivators. Feeding people can be the worst thing you can do for some people."

Cecil's point is that if you continue to provide relief to people that can change and work, then you are keeping them from developing the skills they need to be independent. Paul the Apostle said practically the same thing. The tough part here is between these three verses. We must be discerning for verses 18 and 19, and yet kind in verse 17. May God grant us the faith to discern the correct course of action, and yet be kind to all along the way.

Losing Myself

Humility. The art of losing one's self (thanks, Hillsong).

C.S. Lewis (I'm told by John Piper and Brian Loritz) says that humility is not a beautiful woman saying she's ugly or a smart man saying he's dumb. Humility is a person who is more concerned about others than either his shortcomings or his strengths.

The most challenging part of this word for me is the fact that humility leads to confrontation in love. We often avoid confrontation either out of indifference or out of self-preservation - we still want them to like us. Humility says that I value this person more than I value my reputation. Therefore, I must be willing to confront them on this issue.

May the prayers of the Litany of Humility draw us into the heart of the one who thought only of the Father's will and the joy set before him.

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.

From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being loved, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being extolled, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being honored, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being praised, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being preferred to others, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being consulted, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being approved, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the fear of being humiliated, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the fear of being despised, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the fear of suffering rebukes, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the fear of being calumniated, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the fear of being forgotten, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the fear of being ridiculed, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the fear of being wronged, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the fear of being suspected, Deliver me, Jesus.

That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be esteemed more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be chosen and I set aside, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be praised and I unnoticed, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be preferred to me in everything, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

To a Friend Who's Closer Than a Brother

This was a poem I wrote for David Montague a few years ago. I consider it still to be true, and the depths of what it means to create friendship:

To a Friend Who's Closer Than a Brother

In this world there seems to be
A closer friend than family.
Somehow they earn our deepest trust
Which never fades and never rusts.

But o how few are faithful friends
Who stick with us until the end
For seldom will a person die
Or for a good man give his life

So now I ask, "what is a friend?"
"And how do deep friendships begin?"
For me, I think, it goes like this:
Those men with words and works amiss
Are quickly stricken from that list.
But those whose tears and clinched fists
Fight with prayer against injustice
In my heart as a friend persist

But something dearer strikes the bond
Such simple things make us grow fond.
God's glue (it's called) takes many forms
From Gatorades to cleaning dorms.

It binds our hearts as we bind signs
To big gorillas for all to pine
"'Marry me, Anna.' What does it mean?"
As we, through love, let God's love beam.

Again I ask, "What is a friend?"
"And how do deep friendships begin?"
For now I know what there must be:
It isn't just proximity
In place or age or family.
But we must have ONE Bethany
Who calls our hearts that we may speed
Together toward our God and King.

The Precious Gifts of Marriage and Singleness

Christian parents are often heard at the Rehearsal Dinner of their children's wedding saying something to the effect of, "We have been praying for this moment for a long time." Most of us in this American society appreciate and recognize the gift of marriage. After all, a prudent wife is from the Lord.

But what about the gift of singleness? Do we really believe that God gives singleness as a gift (1 Cor. 7:7, Mt. 19:11)? If we do, are we believing and adding faith to this facts, and trusting that the singleness he gives us is a good gift? Are we honoring singleness as truly better than marriage?

These were the topics of today's sermon at Christ Community Church. If you want the notes for the outline of the sermon, let me know in the comments, and I will be glad to send you a copy.