Brainwaves

Beth and I have discovered that senior rates actually get us into the local theater for less than fifteen dollars, less than ten it’s a matinee. While we’ve long thought it just as cheap to wait and own the DVD, there’s no denying the “in-house” experience and, with all the “busy”-ness going on in my home for the past year, taking in a flick now and then makes for a great date. We are usually agreed, beforehand, as to our choice of features. We both bend a little on certain themes. She “leaned over backwards” yesterday, though, and went with me to see Will Smith in “I Am Legend”, afterwards declaring it to be “the stupidest thing she’s ever seen”. In my own opinion, considering that her own niece has been given a possible death sentence (her upper torso is turning into “stone” after taking a prescribed medication for arthritis), imagining humanity either annihilated or transformed into rabid animals via a “cure” for cancer is not all that far of a stretch….

Forget my lack of appreciation, however, for modern “miracle” drugs. Their lengthy list of side effects speaks for itself. My thoughts this time out are on our individual reasoning process, our manner of formulating belief about anything and everything. It seems to me that we often base our like or dislike on no more than personal perspective, what tickles our fancy, strokes our ego. No big deal, of course, if all we’re talking about is the latest offering at the cinema or our preference regarding ice-cream flavors, but when matters affect our future, our way of life, or perhaps even our eternal destiny, shouldn’t we be more assured in what it is we believe and why it is that we believe it? How many of us, do you think, will choose their next automobile merely for its color, their next president based on gender, race, religion, or party affiliation? How many of us, proclaiming to be Christian, stand on no foundation stronger than our own confession?.…

Thank God for the Book; but if that’s all we have, we have no more than several others out there. I’m grateful for the gift of the Holy Ghost; but realize, at the same time, that my heart is deceitful above all things. I rest, then, in He who IS all things, the One who goes with me in the journey, taking me, if ever so briefly, through the veil, assuring me in my soul….

On December 26th, 1996, the body of six-year-old Jon Benet Ramsey was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her family’s home. Same date, 2004, a tsunami created by 9.0 magnitude earthquake sent 500-mph waves across the Indian Ocean killing more than 283,000 people in a dozen countries. On December 28th, 1991, while trying to get into a college football game, nine individuals were crushed in a stampede. On December 29th, 1940, Germany began to drop incendiary bombs on London and on December 30th, 1972, the United States halted its bombing of North Viet Nam. This link provides facts and figures concerning many things besides tragedy. The first cloned human baby was born December 26th, 2002 and the first American test-tube baby on December 28th, 1981. If the Earth appears to be somehow slowed in its orbit around the sun, our personal journey upon it holds true only in its unpredictability. One never knows what their next breath might bring….

Nonetheless, this final week on the calendar has long seemed to me like being in a state of limbo. No matter what one’s relationship with Christ, the celebration of His birth is so cluttered with activity and anticipation that suddenly it is the morning after and the world sits on idle, waiting for that one tick of the clock to officially start the game again. These seven days, of course, will pass much as any other. It will remain “business as usual” and, individually, we will be one with the space, assigning it definition only in terms of what it brings to us. Otherwise, it is: just space. The approaching event, much like our after-thirty birthdays, is viewed much like a milepost denoting another lap completed, but rather than shock us, this holiday tends to suggest opportunity, another chance to get our act together and, this time, do it right. Yet, while we, in the interim, reflect on the past and ponder the future, what “is” continues to happen, usually with no apparent rhyme or reason….

Who determined these two dates anyhow? His entrance into this world may have indeed occurred in a Bethlehem stable, but it’s pretty well a fact that the date we have marked to observe it is in error. For that matter, what we call a new year is just someone’s choice of calculated positions as we circle the solar system like a puppy dog chasing its own tail. It is little more than a self-imposed mental exercise that has us examining our track record, contemplating our next circuit in terms of improvement. If the Book, though, is inspired, I’m inclined to believe God’s finger is also in other aspects of the script. Not in the sense of His having unleashed the elements against us; nor in the multitude of horrendous acts that we tend to commit against each other; but I do wonder if He, Himself, hasn’t set this seven-day segment as an “altar call”, a created moment where, even if nothing else stops, we take pause as He speaks to our heart: “Come. Rest in Me.”….

Tis the morning of Christmas Eve and, all through the house, not a creature is stirring ‘cept me and the dogs. Actually, we’re all stretched out rather comfortably in front of a cozy, gas fire. It’s early and there’s not much movement on their part. Yesterday my little group handled the final Youth Detention Center worship service of the year. We have been informed of big changes in the making and the program is being cut down to just one such gathering each Sunday. With nine churches currently participating in the outreach, opportunity to be with these kids will now occur about once every other month. While that hurts, one must remember it is His ministry and the thing to do is, as it always has been to pray for the Spirit to saturate the “sanctuary” no matter who is scheduled. We will continue. The new Assistant Superintendant, in fact, impressed me greatly at the meeting Saturday, speaking of an attempt to “up”-habilitate rather than “re”-habilitate. There were five girls among the present population of thirty-eight inmates. Four were named Brittany. One was a thirteen year-old, prostituted most of her life by a drug-addicted mother in exchange for crack…..

Last night I sat in someone else’s church, invited there to hear my grandchildren sing in their holiday “special”. It is a large congregation with probably at least six hundred or more present on this particular occasion. The balcony was sealed off, I suspect, to protect the television taping of the evening’s presentation. Candles were lit across the front, up and down both aisles, the stage was festively adorned, and we were treated to over an hour of various musical performances as fine as one might hear anywhere. My mood, however, had been dampened by the initial intake of tithes accomplished at the very beginning of the event. Before passing the pouches among the pews, the pastor led the entire assembly in the recital of a credo, a statement of all those things they expected God to do in return for that which they surrendered unto Him. The list went on and on, including, it seemed, everything from His bringing forth inheritance to paying this month’s utility bill. Sometimes I wonder. God forgive me, but I really do. People will always be people, of course; and grace covers that clause; yet surely the Savior must look down at the institution, in general, and shake His head…..

Beth and I had breakfast this morning with another couple who, in their fifties, are obeying what they believe to be a call into missions. Leaving behind children and grandchildren, the two will be departing Monday for San Antonio to enter a year of schooling in Spanish, their ultimate goal being more permanent work with contacts already established in Mexico. I’ve written here previously of my own lack of understanding regarding all that get listed under the label of such outreach. These folk, though, have long been part of an experience shared, members of a Pentecostal community I fellowshipped for more than three decades. We, all, have known the ups and downs, the wounds as well as the worship. We are not strangers to “church” and the reality thereof. This step, I also believe, if not the voice of God, is indeed the cry of their heart and therefore with the blessing of His hand upon them as they go. The journey will confirm itself, their faith well able to meet and survive what each day brings...

The volume of response to a recent post of mine surprised me. I ended it with a request for readers to define their life in one word and learned what can happen when you stop talking long enough for someone else to air their own point of view. My personal choice, a spur-of-the-moment decision, had been “consecutive”, an attempt to express the idea that my years simply passed one day after another, the calendar keeps turning. “Steady”, it seems to me, rather reinforces such slant, suggesting the individual’s ability to “face the flow”, even as “acceptance” indicates faith in the Creator’s being there no matter what may come. Surely we all have been a bit “addle-pated” at times and “cautious”, in my book, just equates to a person’s possession of a little wisdom. “Surprised”? I’ve certainly been there at least more than once; and, if “unfolding” speaks of a hope in what the next bend might bring unto us, then “determined” displays one’s grit in spite of disappointment along the way…

All of the above reflects mileage covered, to some degree, and put behind us. Youth tends to travel with an opinion that “now” is all that matters, the future will always be there. Each lap around the track, however, hopefully teaches us something and somewhere down the road it begins to dawn on us that the moment quickly becomes our past, gives no guarantee of more to come, and is best appreciated when you consume it in such terms. It is a given, of course, that each of us face different circumstances, come through different environments, and are not always equally equipped to do battle with the elements. All the more reason, then, why we need each other and the best connection we can obtain with Higher Intelligence. There’s not a better place to be found at ANY given moment, as far as I’m concerned, than squarely in the center of His will. Trouble is: I find that location always out in front of me, a position aimed at, but never reached with any great certainty. It’s called “walking by faith”…

With my house currently occupied by four adults and three children, I’m not sure how I managed, yesterday afternoon, to escape Nickelodean, all current sport presentations, and Texas Ranger re-runs, enjoying, instead, a bit of the History Channel. The program took us back to the early annals of men seeking astronomical truth and then slowly moved forward to modern analysis. Via a spectacular video presentation, I was treated to a front row seat of our sun, five billion years from now, exhausting the hydrogen gas that gives it existence. Initially enlarging itself in a final death act, the solar furnace will simply swallow Mercury and Venus, transform Earth into a pool of molten lava, reduce everything else to nothing more than charred chunks, and, eventually, just before it “bites the bullet”, vaporize the whole scenario, flooding infinity with microscopic, possibly life-producing particles of all that we were. One scientist, reflecting on such knowledge, thought it “cool” that the facts made us “genetically connected to each other, chemically connected to the planet, and atomically connected to the universe in all its entirety”. Personally, however, learning my creation stems from interstellar cosmic dust, without the hope of eternity inserted, just leaves me empty……

Probing Outer Space may have greatly advanced us in many areas of technology and given us the ability to now seemingly define much of all that’s out there, but it yet remains, it seems to me, that we have no answers for “the big picture”. Where do the heavens start? Where do they end? Is such magnitude actually no more than a drop of pond water beneath the microscope of higher intelligence? Are we, ourselves, no more than mere metaphysical figments of our own imagination? Can a man ignore the questions simply on the basis of a book being declared as “inspired by God”? Or can he demand that, if there indeed be a living God, what really needs His breath is the man, himself? Once the gulf has been spanned and encounter actually takes place, all the interrogatives can, in faith, be laid to rest in an assurance established within all that he is. His ego won’t have to be stroked by modern evangelism. His mind won’t be taken down some doctrinal path just because everybody else happens to be going that way. It is the Shepherd who has his heart and his next step. Scientifically explain me in any terms you wish. Where it takes me is back to the One who has confirmed Himself unto me. Break it all down to molecular simplicity; and where you are is a Voice speaking it into reality……

The expressway, this close to Cincinnati, puts one’s existence in jeopardy on almost a daily basis; but, in escaping that rat race, what you encounter here in northern Kentucky are a lot of narrow, winding roads that could break a snake’s back. Wednesday evening, the daughter and her husband had their car demolished when a young girl simply pulled out in front of them. Thursday morning, my wife was rear-ended, given no choice other than coming to a complete stop on the wrong side of a bad curve, was then rear-ended by a lady going much too fast on wet pavement in her SUV. The one grandson is being checked for whiplash. Everyone survived. Things happen……

The incidents, though, do reflect where my mind has been lately. Indeed, today, in my heritage journal, the question was put to me “What word best describes your life?” and, at a loss for what else to write, I penned “consecutive”. That wasn’t meant to suggest a belief in reincarnation, merely that the past sixty-six years have mostly been just doing my best with what came at me, then getting up tomorrow and doing it again. Boredom. Excitement. Disappointment. Different days bring different moods. What counts is the mental attitude developed while walking through it; and that, it seems, is individual to each of us. All the more reason we need each other as we go……

Have you achieved some form of success? Have you over-came circumstances and environment, leaving your past behind you? I salute you. Looking back, though, I see myself as possibly the servant who buried the talent given him, yet can’t grasp where I might have been able to alter the course, no point in time when some certain decision sealed my future, sending me down an irretraceable path. What I can comprehend as being the best thing that ever happened to me is a connection established with Him more than three decades ago bringing focus and a bit of purpose in the way. Indeed, however unprofitable I may be, in such grace, I rest and am blessed……

Quick! What linguistic term would you assign yourself on such subject?

Here, in Kentucky, it serves no purpose getting excited this early about any particular Presidential candidate. By the time we actually go to the polls on the matter, the subject has long been reduced to throwing a switch for whomsoever the rest of the country has already determined to be the party’s representative in the final showdown. Nonetheless, even though I’m registered (to my mother’s chagrin) as a Republican, my curiosity has twice, now, taken me across such lines into the enemy’s camp, investigating a voice in the midst of all else out there, chasing my heart’s wish for something better than simply “politics as usual”; and, on this occasion, it wasn’t the main speaker who had drawn me to You-Tube, but someone so convinced she had encountered a breath of fresh air that she, herself, needed to serve notice……..

Oprah Winfrey. No doubt there are those who would insist her endorsement of Barak Obama is no more than “common color”, racial brotherhood. Personally, I find nothing wrong if such accusation were proved to be true. We’re all guilty of showing partiality in our individual choices and, as I listened to her address the state of Iowa and, indeed, the entire nation, thanks to today’s media potential, that issue bothered me not at all. To tell the truth, her words too closely mirrored my own feelings about this country for me to ponder her ethnic loyalty. I, too, find myself tired of all the rhetoric within the halls of Congress and believe there to be no greater moral mark the government can possess than its integrity; but it remains to be seen whether or not this fellow she supports can accomplish such major change and restore unto us, once again, national dignity……..

The Church, in my opinion, also sits in such sad state of affairs, having lost her witness via an abandoning of that which testifies for itself. When all we become is but a bunch of programs with no soul for that which birthed us in the first place, all the life dries up and that which yet exists is nothing more than man trying to hold it all together. Hope is eternal, of course. Beneath the sand there yet flows water able to make the desert bloom like a rose; but we appear to lack thirst enough, humility enough, to dig for it. It’s easier to continue using duct tape and band-aids in our present attempt to build Babel. What the United States needs is revival, and in more ways than one. Surely we’ve never been the saint, never been more than stumbling in the wilderness, but blessed in the journey. Maybe we just need to remember, and give thanks……..

“Yet they meet as well as diverge, our stories and His, and even when they diverge, it is His they diverge from, so that by His absence as well as His presence in our lives, we know Who He is and who we are and who we are not”…..Frederick Buechner

Our pastor, this morning, brought forth the final message of an eight-part series entitled “Nothing’s Too Hard For God”, such conclusion concerning itself with the subject of addiction. Two testimonies accompanied the sermon, one dealing with an escape from alcoholism, another with delivery from drugs; but, from the beginning, it was quite clear that the list of things unto which men might fall into bondage did not end with the above. Some are just easier to hide than others and all are relative to “being human”. I liked it, therefore, when a portion of the antidote he presented was asking God to give us our “daily bread” and his last bit of advice was “to stay anchored in Christ”. To each their own theology, of course, but I long ago learned being set “free” doesn’t always equate to an immediate eradication of everything that holds us hostage……

I sat in that same service, this morning, and listened to a worship team fill the sanctuary with a well-rehearsed music program that had all the earmarks of being what it ought to be. It just wasn’t accomplishing what it ought to accomplish. Good voices. Great words. Yet something lacked in its ability to connect the congregation with the focus of their offering. A machine pumping out lyrics to which, here and there, some attempted to span the gap for themselves, but failing to merge all things into One. “Victory” was left for the individual to find. The Body was too occupied with business as usual. And if that sounds judgmental, it is only meant to suggest that the church, any church, is but a representation of that which Christianity, as a faith proclaims: Emmanuel-“God with(in) us”, the suffix of that last preposition a matter to be confirmed as we go…….

The last few days in northern Kentucky has seen winter, as we know it in this neck of the woods, finally descend upon us. A little late this year and nothing to the extent that life, as we know it, is hindered for more than a few hours while morning traffic slugs it out on the expressway. School was cancelled Wednesday; Thursday we went, in spite of bitter cold temperatures (our Special-Ed unit remaining faithful to their scheduled Community outing at the local mall); today, the powers that be have but allowed us a reasonable delay (we clock in at ten-fifteen). Relaxing, then, before a warm, cozy fire with a hot cup of coffee and Frederick Buechner’s “Secrets in the Dark”, I find myself deep in thought. This is my second perusal of these particular sermons and the journey is just as pleasant as the initial occasion, the present passage concerning itself with the concept of walking on holy ground. Is that, I wonder, in any way akin to the disciple’s attempt to walk on water?.....

The author speaks of that “scrubby patch of upland wilderness mucked up by the sheep”, that “patch of no-man’s-land to which Moses had fled for no motive holier than to save his own skin” as being holy for no other reason than it was, at the moment, aflame with the presence of God. Then, because the whole earth is likewise so sanctified by no more than the Creator’s manifested reality, he goes on to suggest that the church, any church, achieves similar classification only via our coming into it much as the prophet, himself, approached the burning bush so long ago. “Footsore and travel-stained with the dust of our lives upon us, naked in our hypocrisies, our failures, and our deceits”-It is in seeing Him and in seeing our need of Him that we establish connection. Indeed, it is only such time as we are in Him, “in the fire” and yet not consumed by Him, that there can be said of us as having known anything remotely close to being “holy”; and anything apart from that encounter is merely “religion”…..

Does that last statement seem to infer that, without “contact” we are hopelessly lost? To be truthful, such is my personal belief; but not so much in terms of our being condemned unto eternal punishment. For all of our creativity with words, too often, I think, we do not consider that perhaps the image others gain by our verbiage is the one we intended. Then, again, give us a Book, accept it as being inspired by God, and some of us have little or no problem demanding all fall down before their individual totem erected out of chapter and verse. A recent venture into Luke’s Gospel, however, hinted to me of a day when, before Him, our theological correctness may not be the most determining factor, but rather upon what was our heart set in our pursuit of life. Was He, alone, always and ever, not just the oasis unto which we returned in desperation, but the joy set before us and the hope alive within us, the strength for the road as it met us day by day?.....

This, for me, is Christianity. Holy ground or pacing off the deep. School calls. Got to go!

Friday evening Beth and I went down to Bob Evans just to enjoy a few moments of relaxation over a cup of hot chocolate. Business at that hour was beginning to wane, allowing the waitress and the manager, both, to join us in conversation and so we sat there, as friends, sharing laughter and life. It was a bit of peace, found amidst all the chaotic stress that tends to build, on occasion; and as we walked, afterwards, back to our car, I spoke of a repressed desire to simply forget the calendar and commitments, climb into the vehicle, and head south toward Pensacola. The sound of a distant train whistle, the whoosh of the nearby expressway traffic called to something deep within me and it would have been easy to follow the flow, become one with the rhythm, and disappear into the darkness…….

Saturday afternoon, the two of us went to the cinema to see the movie “August Rush”. It contained no vulgarity, no nudity, nor erotic display of gender encounter. We could have taken the grandkids with us and in no way have violated their innocence. A young boy, separated from mom and dad at birth, is somehow able to experience music being constantly generated by everything around him; and, believing it to be a connection he has with his parents, he follows his heart, hoping it will one day lead to a reunion. The story finds him, at one point, sheltered with a group of street urchins and he asks their conniving mentor if perhaps they, alone, are the only ones who can hear such wonder. Wizard, chasing his own dream, simply answers: “It’s more like we’re just the only ones who are listening”.……

Sounds. Inner connections. Voices that call to us as we go. Learning, not just to hear, but also to distinguish truth from that which is no more than self. It’s just too easy to get lost in the cacophony of everyday living, swimming in the noise, but with no real knowledge of its existence. We march along, not to “the beat of a different drummer”, but to the sound of some galley slave’s incessant pounding. One day we discover the chains are around our feet. It is we who row with no understanding of just where we are going. Coming to Christ is like suddenly catching the melodic lilt of chimes and having it attach itself to your soul. Here and there, as you journey, the melody grows faint and you need to check your position, strain to locate the tune. Then, once more, the wind blows, bringing reassurance in the next step…….