Ruthless, Part Two

Back in November, when I began this blog, my very first entry talked about Dallas Willard’s advice to John Ortberg to “ruthlessly eliminate hurry from you life.” My invitation was to experience Advent in a new way, without the hurried pace that seems to make the season so unenjoyable and exhausting.

Well, Advent and Christmas are long gone, but, I was wondering how you were doing with battling the demon of the hurried life. As I have continued to focus on being ruthless about living an unhurried life (notice I said I’m focusing on it, not necessarily always being that ruthless about it!), I have discovered some things about myself, and learned some things, also, about what it means to eliminate hurry from my life.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is how much my identity is wrapped up in being a busy person. I am working hard at not including the word “busy” in my answers to those who ask how I’m doing, and I’m discovering it’s hard to do. It’s a sneaky way to say how successful I am, and also to say, “So don’t ask me to do anything that will take up more of my time.” It’s a clever way to put people at a distance.

Another thing I’ve learned about myself is that I like not being hurried. I’ve had more time to spend with Suzette and my family, and that’s great. I’ve spent more time enriching my spirit and my relationship with Jesus, and that’s great, too.

Some other things I’ve learned:
1. Busy and hurried are not always the same thing. Often, being busy is energizing and fun. As long as I learn where the line is between being busy and packing my calendar so full that I’ve eliminated time for the most important things, like rest, prayer and relationships, I can handle being busy and not feel drained or distant from God or others. By the way, I’m still learning where that line is.
2. Ruthlessly eliminating hurry does not necessarily mean that I have permission to stop doing important things. It means I have to take a closer look at what fills my calendar. Eliminating hurry usually ends up meaning that I eliminate the unnecessary and unimportant time-wasters, which, when eliminated, allow plenty of time for the important things.
3. It’s easy to play the victim, to pretend it’s not my fault that my life’s so busy and hurried. And, therefore, it’s not my responsibility to do anything about it. I’m just the innocent victim of a crazy world that demands too much of me. That’s so not true, but learning to take responsibility for my draining, hurried life is still a challenge for me.
4. Related to that, I’ve come to believe that God gives us plenty of time to do all of the things God created us and wants us to do. If we don’t have time to stop and help someone, to spend time in prayer, to read the Bible, to engage in regular acts of service, then we’ve filled God’s time with activities God didn’t have in mind. It’s like money – if we don’t have enough to use it the way God intended, we’re spending too much of it in ways God didn’t intend.
5. But, that doesn’t mean eliminating play from our lives. God does want to us to play, to enjoy the life God has given us.

If Advent was a good time to work on eliminating hurry from our lives, Lent is an even better time. Why not give up hurry for Lent?

Katrina Clean-up Continues

It’s been a year and a half since Hurricane Katrina made landfall just east of New Orleans, right along the Mississippi-Louisiana border. But you’d think it was only a month and a half by the level of devastation and disorientation that continues along that part of the Gulf Coast.

A group of nine folks from our church made the twelve hour drive to Orange Grove, Mississippi, just north of Gulfport, two weeks ago. We went to spend three days helping in some small way to enable people to put their lives back together. We worked on two houses that had suffered water damage when their roofs where blown off and the rain poured in for hours. Ceilings sagged and, in some places, had fallen in; walls were ruined; mold and mildew grew on the wooden studs inside the walls. Drywall on ceilings and walls had to be ripped out and replaced. Kitchen cabinets and countertops were replaced in one house, while repair of a bathroom that had been ruined in another house was completed.

The most heartwarming and rewarding part of the trip is always the appreciation we receive from the families who, with our help, come one step closer to having their homes and their lives back. It was not only heartwarming, but deeply symbolic, as well, when a couple of our team members hung a ceiling fan and light in the living room of one of the homes. When the switch was flipped and the light came on, Mary, the woman who lived there, cried out in delight and said that was the first time she had had light in her living room since Katrina came through eighteen months ago.

There is still a great deal of darkness in the lives of the folks living just a twelve hour drive away from us, and it will continue to be so for another three to five years. Just because you don’t hear about it on the news anymore doesn’t mean the problem has gone away, so let’s not forget this important way we can reach out in love, and help to bring hope out of chaos.

We have two more trips planned this year, one from June 10-16 and another in either September or October. If you can take a few days and come help us, please do so – no experience required, we’ll show you what to do! If you can’t go there yourself, prayers, encouragement, and Lowe’s gift cards are greatly needed to make each trip possible.

Let’s keep bringing light into the darkness!

What's Wrong with this Picture?

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” seems to have been the philosophy of a lot of churches this past Super Bowl Sunday. Take Fall Creek Baptist Church in Indianapolis, for example. Right there in the hometown of the now-champion Colts. Instead of trying to compete with the Big Game for people’s attention, Fall Creek planned a big Super Bowl party at the church. For a small fee to cover the cost of snacks, folks could come to church, enjoy some fun and fellowship, and watch their Colts on a big screen projection TV.

Until, that is, NFL officials spotted the announcement for the event on Fall Creek’s website (do they have nothing better to do than browse church websites for copyright violations?). Lawyers for the NFL contacted the church and informed them that it was illegal to charge people coming to the event, it was illegal to use the copyrighted title “Super Bowl” in their publicity, and, it was illegal to show the game on a television screen larger than fifty-five inches wide.

Fall Creek Baptist Church, not wanting to break the law, canceled the party.

Why do they have such laws? Because Nielsen ratings, on which advertising rates are set, do not cover mass viewings of football games in one place. In other words, it hurts the television ratings to have people gathering in large groups and enjoying the game together, and what hurts ratings hurts revenues, and we can’t have that!

But here’s the kicker (pun intended). Sports bars can have all the big screen TV’s they want for as large a crowd as the fire marshal will allow, because they’re exempt from the law that applies to everyone else. So, you can get together with friends at the local watering hole where they can charge you for the food, the barstool, and the alcohol, but you can’t get together with friends in your local fellowship hall, even if the food is free and the environment child-friendly.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Greed is what is wrong with this picture. That’s as clear as a high definition, big screen projection television.

They look like normal kids, kids we might have met on one of our church's mission trips to Peru. Poverty-stricken, wearing hand-me-down American clothes, but they are children of war.

I received the following email from Skip Queen, a member of my church. It is from an Army soldier serving in Iraq named Chauncey Calloway, and, well, I'll let him tell the story.

It is Sunday afternoon here and at first I was upset because i didn't get to go to church because we were on the road but I think I got my blessing anyway. I am going to give you the condensed version because we are at the US Embassy and my time is limited. While in the "green zone" we had to drop our interpreter off at some building and while sitting in the truck waiting four or five kids came running up to the truck. I quickly turned around and inspected them for weapons or bombs but they were completely harmless. I knew I was in the green zone but I still wasn't taking any chances. My buddy SFC King and I were the only ones in the truck. I yelled at him because he had just walked around to the other side of the truck to work on a radio. Some of the kids went up to him while the others yelled at me in the turret behind my .50 cal. "Mister, mister, candy?", they shouted. At first I was hesitant but then I thought about it, they are helpless, hungry, poor children. It was very sad. They were dirty with either no shoes or sandals. Their clothes were ragged and dirty. Everyone knows how easy-going I am. I reached in my pocket and had a couple of starburst and tossed them down to them and they acted like I tossed a hundred dollar bill to them. King scrounged around and gave them some candy and he gave them a pair of gloves. We both had little flashlights on our vest and he asked me if mine worked. I told him yes and he asked for it to give to them. Anything from the Americans was like gold. By this time King and I were rambling around the truck trying to find anything that we really didn't need or could afford to give them. I gave them a soda and hopped down from the turret to take a picture with them. Last night another sergeant gave me a box of vanilla almond cookies that I tossed in the truck just for snacks. After I took a couple or pictures with them I gave them the cookies. The kids will try to get anything from you. They asked for my glasses and my camera. I told them I can't give that to them. It was really touching and I was glad that I had something to give to them. Although they may grow up to hate Americans, I didn't contribute to it. I think that was blessing enough for me. It wasn't church, but I was spiritually uplifted.

God bless Chauncey Calloway and all those men and women like him who find themselves in such a dangerous place that even poor children pose a threat. God bless the children who find themselves the victims, and sometimes even the weapons, in a world they didn't create. And God forgive us all for the wars that have been fought through the centuries, by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, in God's own name.

Shalom.