No Matter What You've Done

When I was a kid, my family would travel a few hours away from my home in Detroit to my grandparent's farm in the middle of Michigan. Remus, Michigan to be exact. You can find it on google earth at 4403 Ten Mile Road, Remus, Michigan. There on the farm, we were able to do stuff that you couldn't do in the sprawling concrete jungle of metro Detroit: shoot bb guns, ride minibikes, jump out of haylofts, pet cows, drive old pickup trucks in great big fields. It seems that out there, parents kind of let you roam a little further - further into the woods, further into silence, further into maturity.

I remember one summer I was walking around with a bb gun. It was a bad summer for me and the bb gun. I shot a blackbird that I was just trying to scare, and I shot out the window of my grandpa's 57 green chevy pickup. Both were bad choices. Both were discovered soon after by my elders. Both left me (and them) with this sinking feeling of "uh-oh; why on earth did I do that?" The bird later died. The glass was never repaired. The world was changed by my poor judgement. Sound familiar? These are the cute-"everybody's got to learn"-coming of age stories. Unfortunately, we homo-sapiens don't learn very well. As I've shared with select people over the years, there are many more sordid tales of damage to property and hearts, caused by my hands, my words, my 'momentary lapses in judgement'.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one out there who has experienced this. Where do you go when you've let them down? Where do you go when your actions wound? In the ancient story of a king who used murder to conceal a sordid affair, the king laments to God, "Against you and you alone have I sinned, Lord God." But I don't think the sin against God hurts near as much as consequences of harm done to one another, which throws mankind collectively and individually into what some have termed the 'dark night of the soul.'

What I want to know is: when and how, under what circumstances, does dawn break onto such a dark night, no matter what you've done? Some would say that time heals all wounds. I hope there is a more powerful potion than the passing of time.

More to come . . .don't lose hope.

No Matter What You Believe

I want to talk to you, no matter what you believe.
I am a pastor, a Christian pastor, even a United Methodist pastor; mainline denomination, on the northern edge of the Bible belt, and I want to talk to you, no matter what you believe.

I won't condemn you, I can't possibly convert you, I probably haven't thought about some of the things that you've thought about in as much depth as you have. But I want to talk to you.

If you're like most, you'll be able to ask me something I can't answer. You'll compare me to others in the same category as me (whatever that might be) and find I'm different, or the same, but I still want to talk to you.

I want to hear about you, and what you think, and what you believe, and what pops you out of bed in the morning, and what keeps you up at night. I believe you've got a lot to offer the world. If you're anything like me, you're probably good at a couple of things, not good at a lot, and wish you were better at some. No matter what you believe.

I won't use your story as an illustration to make my point. I won't go looking to exploit the conversation. It might take me a few moments to fully tune in to what you're saying. You might catch me at just the right time and place, or we might need to set a time. But I want to talk to you.

No matter what you believe, I believe something too. My beliefs compel me to want to find out about you, to listen so carefully that something in you helps me understand the world, our place in it, and where we might be headed in this life or the next. I hope that what I believe is worth sharing, but that's not why I want to talk to you. If you want to know something about what I believe, you'll ask.

And that's good enough for me, no matter what you believe.

No Matter What It Takes . . . Part 2

To all of you who came out to Another Level Sunday night at Oliver Twist, I say thank you. To those of you who couldn't make it, I say we missed you! We did indeed talk about the mistakes we make in life, and how they drive us apart. The night's conversation ranged from the not-very-personal celebrity-caliber mistakes (like those by the golfer who shares his name with a feline), to the slightly more personal mistakes made by companies and service providers and churches that annoy the ((&&*(^ out of you, to the oft-painful 'deal-breaker' mistakes. We talked about how sometimes those mistakes really change your life, and how sometimes you carry around their long-lasting-legacies as baggage and haunting thoughts.

I've met a lot of people who share with me a propensity for learning about life the hard way, often one mistake at a time. I've also met a lot of people who have an ability to move on. As a friend of mine named Kurt once said, "it's not whether you fall that matters in life, it's how well you bounce." I agree; but bouncing ain't easy, and in a very real sense, it can't ultimately be done alone. Often times, the more we try to bounce, the less we succeed.

Take the case of most anyone struggling with addiction. The addict consumes their drug (or porn or whatever) of choice. It gives a high or some other form of positive feedback. The high leaves. The rational thought appears, condemning the behavior and illiciting shame. The shame leads to a resolution: Never again. The resolution leads to an obsession on avoiding the 'drug'. The obsession with avoidance quickly allows the obsession with the drug to return. The vow of abstinence is sabatoged by the power of the thoughts and the drug itself, especially if there is a physiological addiction/withdrawl. So the addict consumes again. And again, and again.

The power of the mistake over life that must be broken, through humility, accountability, repentance, honesty, vulnerability. Ultimately, a price must be paid. The good news is that God has made a way out. There is a higher power. For the Christian, there is the forgiveness and justification that comes with a commitment to Christ and connection to a Christian community. For the agnostic or otherwise religious, there's at least a 12 step program.

Ultimately, we are freed from our obsessions, freed from the destructive power of our mistakes, by a redeeming God who pursues us, no matter what it takes, and a community that embraces us in love. But it's not easy. Nobody said life would be easy, but it's worth it, no matter what it takes.

No Matter What It Takes

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Oops. Well, he's not the only one to ever make a mistake . . .


Mistake makers, you're in good company!

When I first moved to Atlanta, I moved in next to a girl that I heard was single. That raised my eyebrow. I remember the first time I actually saw her, she was taking some trash to the curb. I ran out the door and introduced myself as the new guy that was now on the other side of her duplex. "Great timing," she said, "I was just taking out the trash!" Oops.

The next night, my friends from work wanted me to go out with them; "Nope," I said, "I think I'm going to just happen to be playing my guitar on the front steps tonight when a certain someone gets home." Well, I was there when that certain someone got home, and that guitar playing turned into a long evening conversation. I'm happy to say that it's about 15 years later, and that first awkward and modest pursuit of the girl next door has resulted in some 12 years of wedded bliss.

Of course, anyone who's experienced the 'wedded' part knows that it's not all 'bliss.' There are plenty of screw-ups and stumbles along the way. And don't get me started on all of the mistakes that get made on the journey through single-hood. The faintest memory of them still makes me cringe! From moments of indiscretion, like talking it up a bit too much with a girl who's not your date,

to absent-minded ignorance, like buying candy for someone who's diabetic,

to failures to communicate, like not telling your loved one you'll be working late, there are plenty of opportunities for simple mistakes to boil over into major ordeals!

One day I was looking through the pages of the Bible, and I got to thinking about the great mistakes that it contained. Adam and Eve eating the apple, Moses killing an Egyptian in revenge, a king name David scandalizing his reign with an affair and a murder, Jesus rising to influence and then being killed for stirring up the religious authorities . . . who knew that a book so sacred would contain the record of so many mistakes?

I wonder what we can learn from that