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Appetite for Destruction

4/30/2013

When Reese was first moving from babyhood to toddlerhood one of the things that amazed me was how quickly Reese got into destroying things.

I vaguely remember one morning when Reese crawled into the bathroom, grabbed an issue of Time Magazine sitting on a rack by the toilet, and shredded it. She ripped it apart. With, I must add, much glee.

Reese also quickly made a part of her daily ritual ransacking the books on the low shelves in the study and Gatorade bottles on the low shelves in the kitchen. Many evenings a pile of plastic bottles on the kitchen floor awaited my attention after Reese fell asleep.

This is, of course, normal behavior for an infant becoming a toddler, as many of you know from experience. Reese was clearly feeling the growth of her power, the growth of her ability to influence the world according to her will.

In other, biblical words, Reese was (and still is) experiencing the growth of her kingdom (or, in her case, queendom). Of course, nowadays she is more likely to shred a morning to pieces with an argument over what clothes she wants to wear and whether she has to go to school or not.

Both then and now I’ve found it interesting how often Reese uses the power of her queendom to destroy. In days past it was ripping up Time Magazine, biting her mom, and yanking the patient cat. Nowadays Reese still yanks the patient cat with some regularity, but thankfully the biting has subsided.

Reese recognizes the negativity of her destructiveness, at least a little. I can see it in her eyes. By the time she reached three-years-old, sometimes Reese would even police her own destructiveness. Occasionally, after doing something worthy of the guilty verdict and subsequent sentence, Reese would put herself in time out without a parent being involved at all.

But still she does it. And Reese is a great kid. And Reese much more often uses her power to build up and bless. But it’s still disturbing.

It’s not just Reese. My guess it’s all of us on some level.

We all have a kingdom (or a queendom, of course). We all are given a sphere of influence in which our will and action has the power to tear down or build up. We all have a zone in which we have the undeniable ability to bless or to curse by what we say, what we do, and who we are.

The question every morning as we wake up into another day is how do we use our power? What will become of our rule on this day? Will it bring things closer to Heaven or closer to Hell? Closer to life abundant or to death despondent?

It sounds a little odd to put it that way, but I bet you know what I mean.

How do we use our bodies and our words, our time and our sex, our money and our prayers, our energy and our imagination? Do we use it ultimately to build life up or to tear it apart?

For people who follow Jesus, oftentimes such a question brings us to the gospel of John chapter 13. A few short hours before he is arrested and killed, according to John, Jesus says this to his disciples:

“I give you a new commandment: Love each other.

You must love each other as I have loved you.

All people will know that you are my followers

if you love each other.”

Context means everything. John chapter 1 described Jesus as being the powerful Word of God through which the universe was created. In John chapter 13 this same Jesus gets on his hands and knees and scrubs his disciples’ dirty feet. It is also this same chapter 13 where Jesus shares the dark reality that he is being betrayed and abandoned by the very friends he washes clean.

In his potent glory Jesus decides to use his power to serve his friends and build up their lives. In the face of betrayal Jesus uses his power to stand firm in faithfulness to God and to the people God has given him.

And he issues a call to his followers to stay faithful by building up lives through mutual care, instead of tearing lives apart through mutual betrayal. It is this faithfulness in action Jesus declares “love.”

It is this love Jesus requires of his people so that the wider world may see Jesus and know him as he truly is through them.

If you are reading this you are likely a follower of Jesus or at least mildly interested in perhaps becoming one. And so the question is posed to all of us: How do we use our power, our kingdoms (our rule, if you will) as people wanting to have their lives shaped by Jesus?

It can be well argued that this is the fundamental question of Christian discipleship.

So, how do we answer it? Not in vague generalities, but in the specifics of lives lived in real homes, offices, and schools. What is one way you answer the question today? There are, after all, better things to do with life than sitting beside the toilet shredding magazines.

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Putting Her Down

4/23/2013

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Mindy is out of town this week at a training event in Los Angeles, and so I will be putting Reese to bed. Mindy almost always puts Reese to bed under the normal, day-in-day-out flow of our household. I usually stay in the living room doing whatever I do.

Maybe that’s the current status quo because Reese as a walking, talking, arguing school-age kid is more tiring for me than she used to be (for reasons I find both fun and frustrating). So, maybe I’ve punted bedtime to my wife out of a sense of self-preservation. Or maybe it’s because I’ve just gotten lazier.

But, whatever the cause, I’ve found myself looking back wistfully to how Mindy and I used to put Reese to bed together. (I won’t say “put Reese down” because that sounds like what you do for a beloved but irretrievably ill pet).

Anyway, Mindy and I have both been Christian pastors since before we were married, but we’ve regularly had trouble finding a regular time each day to pray together as a married couple. That was until Reese came along.

At Reese’s bedtime we’d do essentially the same thing every night, a holy habit, if you will. We would take Reese into her room and all three of us would sit on the floor.

We would read a story from a children’s Bible we like a great deal. It has a pretty good selection of Old and New Testament stories that are told quickly. It’s all in verse, so it’s kind of fun to read aloud.

After the story, we’d read a prayer from A Little Child’s First Prayers, which I found on the clearance rack at Borders. Here’s an example from the prayerbook: Dear Lord, thank you for the rivers and streams, lakes, and ponds. They give us lovely places to visit and water to drink. There are many places in the world where people do not have enough water to drink or to grow their food. Please help us to help them.

Next we would say the Lord’s Prayer and have a few moments of freelance prayer. We’d thank God for the day. We would pray for family members, friends, church members. We’d give thanks for the food we’d eaten that day. We’d pray about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’d give thanks for the cat. Basically, we’d pray about whatever our spirits offered up in the present moment.

(Side note: Reese, at that much younger age, would regularly pray for someone named “Eeiighaaaboo”. We never could figure out who that was.)

Finally we’d sing Reese her night-night song and say goodnight. Here are the lyrics: Good night, (insert your child’s name here). Lay down and take you rest. We’re gonna lay your head upon the Savior’s breast. We love you, but Jesus loves you best. So we bid you good night, good night, gooood niiiight.

I was amazed then and even more amazed now by how much it meant to me to have that regular, habitual time with Mindy and Reese and the Lord. Times change, patterns shift, but that need is still there. As it should be.

But, how to fill it now that things have changed?

Maybe I just need to get my backside off the couch and get back into the night-night family prayer habit. Or, perhaps by now bedtime has become sacred Mother/Daughter time and so a new holy habit needs to emerge?

If Jesus, prayer, and connecting with my family in Christ are all important (and they are), then a new practice to demonstrate that must come into being. If it doesn’t, are those things truly important to me? Think about it: if I say eating is really important for my life, but I never make time and space to eat, am I telling the truth? More than that, will I survive?

How are these kinds of things – prayer habits, connecting with family or friends around Jesus, etc. – working for you? Let me know. I can, after all, set you up with a really sweet, little children’s Bible.

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Don't Pepper Things Up

4/16/2013

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Things can too easily get too complicated for their own good. Often this happens for the best of reasons, at least at first, but it still gets us to lose focus on what matters most.

I remember a trip when Reese was a baby. We were going out of state to visit family. Before the trip, Reese was eating her solid food like crazy. Mashed up carrots, peas, squash, sweet potatoes…it was all good, very good as far as Reese was concerned. It all was going down her hatch with smiles and giggles.

But sometime during the trip Reese decided to change course. She wouldn’t eat her solids. Instead she’d yell like crazy when we put them in front of her and try to spoon them into her. Reese had one good dinner the whole week. She kept up the dinner rage when we returned home.

Not long after we got back, we had the church elders over to the house for a meeting. One of the snacks we put out consisted of these little orange and red peppers you could use, in lieu of chips, to dip in ranch dressing and eat.

We had a lot of peppers left over from the meeting, and Reese decided they looked worthy of a try. After a few tastes Reese concluded that she was unwilling to accept her pureed solid foods from a spoon any longer.

But she would be gladly suck them off a pepper. I don’t remember if the idea to use the pepper instead of the spoon originated with Reese or with us. Probably with Reese, but that’s what happened.

It worked, but ultimately it complicated things unnecessarily.

A friend said shortly after the experiment began, “If dinner isn’t dinner without a pepper, that’s not a big deal until you’re caught without a pepper.” The friend was right. Reese got into the mindset: No Pepper = No Solid Food. We started breaking Reese of the pepper fetish a week or two later, but it was tough going for a while.

The pepper was cute and fun and a great trick that made people laugh when they saw it, but a spoon would have also done the job. The pepper wasn’t ultimately important. What was essential was that Reese getting the good, solid food into her. For a while that reality was obvious to everyone except her.

I think we can “pepper up” our lives of Christian faith pretty easily. We can take all sorts of things that are interesting, helpful, even fun, and pretend they are essential.

For one example, Christians do this all the time with music. Someone says, “It’s just not a worship service unless the music is (fill in your favorite instrument or musical era here).” That can easily become a pepper.

It’d be interesting to get Christians in a room and see how many “peppers” we could list – peppers about clothing, peppers about carpeting, peppers about how decisions are made, peppers about the right language to express what Jesus has done for us, peppers about what language Christians should never ever use, peppers about the proper roles for particular people.

There can be so many peppers. And, we can get so caught up with the peppers we won’t take the solid food we need without them. We can all go a little Reese like that, I suppose. I'm sure I can.

I remember a story from the Gospel of Luke chapter 4. The scene is Jesus’ first sermon in Nazareth, his hometown.

Luke said that on the Sabbath Jesus went to synagogue, to public worship. It was his habit. In that service, Jesus took a scroll of Scripture, in this case the prophet Isaiah, and he read from it.

He read from it bright words of God’s deliverance of the world – especially the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed. After Jesus had read the passage, he indicated that the words of Isaiah, the promises of God, were being fulfilled that very day through his own ministry.

What we see here as important for Jesus – public worship, an open ear and life to God’s word, and a claiming of the service God has called us to give the world in God’s name – are also the essential dimensions of life for people who consider ourselves his disciples. These are critical parts of Christian life “un-peppered,” if you will.

If we are interested in seeing our lives deepen in God’s love this is what we do. This is what followers of Christ have done consistently down through the centuries.

In Christ, we covenant to be with one another in public worship on the day set aside. This becomes at least as important as being present at work or at school.

(Imagine being in your community’s service of worship every Sunday for a year unless you were out of town or dead. Imagine everyone in that faith community doing the same. How might that change things for you and your community?)

In Christ, we reflect on Scripture with others. We don’t do this simply to learn facts. We do it to better notice and know God’s presence in our life and our world.

(Imagine that each time you read and discuss Scripture you are in a conversation not only with yourself, or perhaps other people, but also with God. Conversation is how we get to know people better. It can work like that with the Lord as well. And this knowledge leads us into prayer, which is yet another part of the conversation.)

In Christ, we give away the specific gifts God has given us to share to make this world more like heaven.

(Imagining asking friends what issues in the world keep them up at night because they yearn to see God make them better. Imagining asking each other what we have been blessed with that others need us to share with them so they can know that God is real. Imagine asking each other where we see Christ at work around us and how we can join in.)

There are all sorts of different specifics as to how each of us live out these dimensions of Christian life. God loves variety. But these dimensions are essential. They aren’t peppers. They are the good, solid food necessary for life.

Let’s help one another focus on them. Let’s keep each other from peppering things up and missing too much of what matters most.

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Cracks Happen

4/9/2013

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In the New Testament letter we call 2nd Corinthians Paul is writing of how the God whose glory is seen in the face of Christ has made the light of his glory shine in us. Paul considers this reality a treasure, and then Paul writes a few lines that have become famous:

"But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed."

Jars of clay are easily cracked. This is a fragile world, and we are fragile creatures – a fact we often deny but cannot ultimately avoid.

I remember a time not long after Reese was born. I was amazed, deeply thankful, and physically relieved when I saw she could support and move her head competently. It made her seem a little less fragile. For my part, I felt a less able to break her accidentally. Both a newborn’s body and a first time father’s psyche are clay jars.

Years have passed since then. And, although Reese is still only a little over three and half feet tall (four feet with hair) and a feather’s weight under forty-five pounds, I now don’t see her as especially fragile, at least physically.

What strikes me as especially fragile are her moods. Reese can go from complimenting my shoes to spitting in my face in less than ten seconds. Or so it seems.

Or this: lately Reese has become very interested in the cartoon My Little Pony. Most of the characters are candy-colored horses of various sorts. Each pony bears on the side of his or her rear-end something called a “cutie mark.” The cutie mark is a symbol that represents that pony’s main characteristic, skill or gift.

One moment Reese can be so confident and almost joyful as she marvels at all the things that could become her cutie mark. The future seems so open and full of possibility.

But flip the switch, and in a moment Reese can become deeply worried because she doesn’t yet know what her cutie mark is. She fears she has no great skill to hold up to the world as valuable, no gift of heart or mind to cling to with pride.

(Sadly, in both cases she assumes she needs one. We’re working on that. We’re also trying to encourage her to give herself a break. She isn’t seven yet, after all.)

But the point is that her confidence and sense of self is a clay jar, easily fractured. To be honest, most adults I know (myself included) often seem that way as well, even when we try to hide it. We are clay jars.

A few years back I read a wonderful little book called A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss by David G. Myers. Myers is a successful professor of psychology who chronicled his experience of becoming hard of hearing.

He describes the fragile process of hearing which depends on minute hair cells in the ear’s cochlea that wave like wheat under the power of sound waves. Damage these fragile cells and we lose our glorious hearing. We are clay jars.

Myers tells of a woman, a Christian, who got progressively more and more enraged because her preacher repeatedly asked the congregation during worship, “How many of you have sex?”Eventually her husband told the woman the pastor’s question has been, “How many of you write checks?” We are clay jars.

We are not made of steel, and we waste too much energy trying to convince the world otherwise. Jesus got tired and hungry. He felt alone and even sensed the icy void of death.

But we are even more deeply made of God’s grace. It was this grace that fed the hungry multitudes from Christ’s hands. It was this grace that raised Jesus bodily from the tomb. As Jesus’ people may we show this new-creation-making grace not only through our supposed strength, but also through the vulnerability of the fragile clay we share with the one we call Savior and Lord.

In all ways, strong and weak alike, may the good, life-restoring news of Jesus spread through us.

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Being a Burden

4/4/2013

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“I don’t want to be a burden.”

I’ve heard a lot of people say that, and I’ve said it too. I hate to have my noise, my mess, and my problems poke into other people’s lives. It’s often embarrassing and certainly not the kind of image I want to project to the world, to you, to anyone.

I remember years ago when I was studying for a brief time at Notre Dame. Each student had his or her own breadbox-sized cubicle room in the library. It was a nice, miniscule, closed-off study room. One night I was in mine studying. I had headphones on and was singing along to some song as a way of trying to stay awake.

After a while I took the headphones off and left my room to fetch a book. There was an attractive girl sitting at a table across from my door. She said to me, “You’ve got a nice voice (which is not true), but would you mind not singing. I’m studying.”

I had become a burden and for some odd reason I still feel my cheeks go a little red when I think about it years later. I don’t want to be a burden. I just hate my stuff imposing on other people. You probably do to.

I remember one of my first airline flights with Reese. Baby Reese had just started talking in her own language. All the time. Loudly. I guess Reese still talks loudly and without end, but she uses English, at least more often than not, so it’s different.

Anyway, we’re on the plane. Reese is talking and crying and snoring and smiling and wiggling, and I’m mortified. My baby is all in other people’s business – for hours with nowhere to flee. And I hate to be a burden.

But instead of nervous indigestion I received a blessing.

Now, to be honest, I must say that as we were boarding the plane I heard a woman say to her husband, “This’ll be a long one.”

But, for the most part people were wonderful.

On one leg of the flight our seatmate was, in some obvious coming attraction of Hell, caught between two babies. This woman was kind to us even after I spilled onto her the water I was trying to keep from Reese. On another leg a woman was handled us with joy even when Reese started to, shall we say, cough from the bottom end.

I still don’t want to be an undue burden on others even if my burden to impose is this wonderful creature I call my daughter. However, the fact of the matter is that we are burdens to each other. All of us are. Without exception. Every day.

None of us came into the world on our own, and we can’t live without depending on others no matter our age and skills. We live in a web of interdependence that includes the world itself. And our planet is situated in an inter-impacting, almost fathomless universe God shaped mysteriously into being and called “good.”

In Matthew Jesus talks of us coming to him with our burdens and receiving rest and a share in his burden, which he promises is light. The Apostle Paul speaks of us being interconnected in a great body with Christ as the head. Paul says that when one suffers all suffer, and when one is caught up into joy, all the others bask in it as well.

Indeed, in Christian thought the identity of the one, true God is an interdependent community – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit leaning into each other totally. This is love, and the God who spun the galaxies is love, says the first letter of John.

We need each other, and we need to be kind to one another when one person’s burdens butt into another person’s life. Often we try to deny this is the reality of the situation until we get into such a mess that we can’t fake complete independence any more.

How liberating it would be if we saw sharing our burdens as a calling from God that we didn’t need to elude or hide from behind a pile of money. How sweet it would be if instead of hiding our burdens we trained one another in how to give them over to the Lord together? It would be beautiful and raw and real.

And it would be the kind of witness the world is crying out for. In a way, it is the kind of witness I received on the plane years ago with Baby Reese in tow, and I remember it still.

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Robert here.

This is something called a Reese Piece. Reese is a nickname for Karyssa, my daughter.

Each Reese Piece is a brief exploration of some way I sense God has spoken to me through her.

God reaches us through the experiences and relationships of daily life. This seems obvious, but I find it’s something which is still easy for me to forget.

It is my prayer that “Reese Pieces” will encourage you to look for the ways the Lord is trying to reach you through the life you live each day and the people who populate it.

Appetite for Destruction

Putting Her Down

Don't Pepper Things Up

Cracks Happen

Being a Burden

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