The Rusted Musket

Two weeks ago I sent the car windows to the bottom, turned the stereo way to loud, and left my most favorite place on planet Earth, Village Creek Bible Camp. I had just wrapped up three profoundly awesome weeks as a cabin counselor and with dust billowing behind my auto like some crazed apocalyptic vision I sped home. It was near Madison, WI, where my car quite incidentally hit the hundred thousand mile mark, that I startled upon some realizations.

I was physically exhausted (Adventure Camp tends to break and then rebuild you) but spiritually alert and alive; honestly, the last three weeks was the first time I felt myself firing on all six in a very very long time. It was as if the sum total of all my being was in play, an exhilarating and terrifying thing. Terrifying because, if transparent, what would this spell for a casual and safe life outline?

Well, the simple answer is change…

When I got home it was Liz who actually broke the ice and it was crazy because I couldn’t distinguish her heart from my own as she spoke life potentials, such were the similarities. She was motioning forward outlandish concepts I had only just been stitching together at camp. Ideas I hadn’t floated by her while Skyping she was floating by me in person! An answer to prayer this was for I had asked God to weave threads of unification. I suppose He had been doing this all along since both Liz and I have had amazing mentors, dearest friends, and prayer warriors speak into our lives; their accumulated message always the same, something youth focused.

All that to say this: We’re finally willing, not ready, but willing, after a decade of meandering around to acknowledge intuitions, coincidence, and the odd burning bush or two. I believe God uniquely couples your personality with His anointing into something Christians refer to as “calling.” It’s this then, the specific thing you can’t help but do because you were built to do it that’s coming together for us.

Mind you, not all the puzzle pieces are in, but the corner pieces, along with most edge, and right center chunk are:)

(Sorry for being vague, there is more to it, the puzzle pieces and all, let us know if you desire details.)

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When you fast you don’t eat, eventually you start thinking about food and every time you think about food you think about God; I’ve been thinking about God a lot lately.

Two days into my fast I wanted to kiss my wife and she said no because my breath was stinky; so I went to the kitchen and ate 3 tic tacs. I then told my wife we could kiss because my breath had been de-stinkified via tic tac. She said “”oh no” because tic tacs have calories and I said “No way!” I checked the package and sure enough, each tic tac contains 1.9 energies.

So I was really down for having inadvertently broken my fast when wifey spilt profundity upon me. She said “You know Ben, fasting isn’t about food, it’s about prayer.” And dear reader, prayer isn’t about prayer, prayer is about God; I had made fasting about not eating food instead of its true purpose, imbibing God. +1 to wifey for the reminder…

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“I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in.” ¹

It’s important to be able to define certain words, “Faith” is just such a word, “Doppelganger” another. That opening quote from CS Lewis is interesting to me because I think it highlights how more than a few people view Faith, as a dumb unreasonable thing. I don’t think Faith is as dumb and unreasonable a thing as some suppose. I think it more probable that people have dumb unreasonable Faith definitions.

Faith for Lewis was interwoven with reason, reason in lock step with belief, kept steadfast by Faith; for it is almost a certainty that once a man “decides that the weight of evidence is for it” he will experience within the next few weeks a personal crises, or his friends will voice their collective displeasure and because of this  “emotions will rise up” and assault his belief. ¹ Faith then, is the ability to maintain core holding’s despite fancies and mood, for without Faith in this respect you can “never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.” Which is interesting to me for this Faith definition rightly implies faith usage, even among “faithless” or the “scientific.”

I would like to end with a simple summation of my Faith definition, it starts out with a little Hebrews 11.1 and ends with a little Lewis:

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. It is the habit of telling moods where they get off.

The thing with zeal, which is another way to say passion, which is another way to say zeal, is that it usually only make sense to the person who has it.

I felt very privileged the other day to sit down with an old acquaintance, he’s cool and zealous, a total stud. He’s been doing mission work in some part of Romania for the last 14 months. Those of us in the missions business (I speak as if I am) refer to 14 month mission assignments as “long term” missions, opposed to “short term” missions, which usually last about two weeks. I truly respect walking around another culture long enough to actually need to do laundry; I think it’s very sincere.

My friend was very passionate about what was going on in Romania, his life. He told me how he guest spoke at his old youth group last week and how he went all “Pauline Spirit Hammer” on them. In the re-telling of this particular story his zeal meter rose along with his volume. Before I knew it zeal and volume were landing all over me, and the coffee (which tasted better afterwords), and the neighbors; man, his hand was even shaking!

Then I shushed him.

Yes I did. He was getting to loud and passionate for my comfort.

He said he was sorry.

I tried to appear as if I wasn’t dry bones, telling him never to be sorry about passion.

Questions I’ve been pondering since: A) As a believer, when was the last time you hung out with someone who was so passionate about Jesus they made you squeamish? B) When do you suppose was the last time you were passionate enough about the concerns of Christ to such a degree that it flavored someone else’s coffee beans?

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I’ve given up talking online about certain things for Lent, basically most politics, especially Wisconsin politics. Reason being, well, has anyone witnessed such schism betwix Wisconsin Christians the last two months ever?! Probably not since the Reformation have Wisconsin Christians been so quick to remove fellow brothers and sisters from their newsfeeds.

You know how lint gets on your clothes and you can kinda obsess about it. You can even buy this sticky roller, it’s wonderful. But my point is that lint obsession can ruin your joy, you could be wearing the most amazing thing ever and all you’d be caring about is how there’s some lint on it.

Occasionally, for brothers and sisters, I believe politics is like lint in this regard; attention sucking, joy draining.

And yes, I do feel better having given up the “lint roller” of political diatribing the last few days…

I have a dear friend that consistently gets their feelings hurt when we talk the blood and guts of life; the message I  bring isn’t out of whack, sadly, the messenger is. Dietrick Bonhoeffer, a German born Lutheran pastor and WW2 martyr has some insightful words on the matter of message and messenger:

“Therefore, supposing we could speak of the greatest and most sacred things in such a way that we forget everything else because we get carried away by our enthusiasm. Suppose we were given the unique gift of being able to say, to put into words what we feel and what others have to carry around silently inside themselves. Suppose we did this with one another in all sincerity and devotion. “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” These words strike like a paralyzing and destructive bolt of lightning. We had not bargained for the possibility that even our most sacred words can become unsacred and godless and rotten when they have no heart, when they are without love.” ¹

I have a personality in my life I refer to as General Lee, he’s pretty crazy for Jesus. I’ve found that General Lee can basically say anything to me and I’ll receive it, I don’t always agree, but I still receive. I think this is because his words are rolled up like Swiss Cake Rolls of love and fall out his mouth like Green Bay Superbowl 45 announcements. I’m beginning to think it’s possible that the reason he’s in my life is to teach me how to communicate in agape love.

Each of us are given daily opportunities to come across lovingly or priggishly. Conversations with my dear friend remind me that I’m not the bastion of love I perceive myself being. So God help us move forward, one love filled encounter after another. Let us sound less like gongs and more like xylophones, which of course, is the instrument I think agape would play…

Who is your Atticus?

My cousin is a minister, he ministers young adults, basically he’s a youth pastor. I think he’s a more profound youth pastor than he gives himself credit, which is probably good because if he did he would be insufferably proud. Anyways, this last weekend I went on a winter retreat with my cousin, his beautiful wife, and fifteen of their youth group kiddies. The weekend started at my cousins church with four goofy teenage boys piling into my ride with all their awkwardness and headphones and then ended forty eight hours later back at church with the same lads falling out of my ride with drained Ipods and half eaten bags of ranch popcorn.

I feel jet lagged…

A great many wonderful and profound things were said during those forty eight hours, but what I liked best was this, who is your Atticus? I don’t even really know what the question means, but this is what I think it means. Basically, who is the giant in your life, the person you want to be like when you grow up, the one who you observe and imitate? That person is your Atticus.

My cousin is an Atticus to some of those kids in his youth group, I think that’s incredible, almost incredulous. It makes me marvel at how the Lord uses willing hands, not perfect ones, and yes, this brings immense comfort to me. Also, it gets me thinking about how I use my time on earth and if it could be used in a worthier manner than getting my gamerscore over 40k by years end.

This last weekends winter retreat reminded me that Atticus type people aren’t lazy in life, that I should try to be more consistent when outside the spotlight, that I should chase the genuine by following Christ’s example as the ultimate Atticus, perhaps read To Kill a Mockingbird, and also say “thank you” to the parents of those teenage boys for raising them clean because my car’s not even that messy…

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I just got done reading Dr. Chauncey Crandall’s utterly fascinating book, Raising the Dead. Dr. Crandall is a charismatic Christian who believes in healing, even raising people from the dead. As a side note, I also believe in Christ’s power to heal and raise the dead, even though I don’t necessarily subscribe to charismatic patterns of belief.

The book starts off with a bang, basically on September 20, 2006, Dr. Crandall feels the Spirit prompting him to ask God to bring back to life 53-year-old Jeff Marken who had died on his operating table forty minutes ago. Mr. Marken was so dead even his fingers had turned black. After praying, Dr. Crandall zapped Marken with the defibrillators and, wait for it, Marken came back to life! Incredible, right?! The nurse in the room didn’t think so, she screamed and then yelled at Crandall asking him what he’d done, she thought for sure the guy would be a vegetable. Miraculously, Mr. Marken didn’t have any brain damage at all; a miracle no matter which way you spin it. Of course I found this to be incredibly powerful stuff, but the reason I wrote this piece was for another reason, a bunny trail of sorts, concerning the spirit of our age.

After reading the book I went to Amazon to see what some of the reviews had to say (I have a bad habit of doing this) and there was one in particular that I thought really captured the modern mind. The reviewer in question gave the book a two star rating because there were only two instances of dead raising. Think about that! The God of the universe can’t even impress us moderns with raising the dead, not even twice! Matter of fact, raising the dead twice only gets you a two star rating…

I’ve been ruminating on forgiveness this week because some people need to forgive me and I need to forgive some people, especially the girl at UW Waukesha who walked up to the back of my Highlander today and purposely put a scratch through the Jesus sticker. Bad news for her could have been the fact that I was sitting in the car when she did it. This incident though brought about an important needle of thread and thought for I wondered how I could so easily settle into a madness that refused to forgive this preppy chic for a shenanigan that caused no actual damage to either Jesus, Jesus sticker, or car. Especially since I frequently walk up to God’s allegorical car to not only scratch His “I Am” sticker completely off but then break His windows as well…

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I thanked God for nothing as intense shoulder pain throttled my better judgment on the way home from evening class. The night before I had somehow torqued my arm while sleeping and could barely move it, even a day later. There are no coincidences though and sometimes my books prove this better than anything else. I was in the middle of reading about Christianities desert saints who believed serving God “was not intended to spare them from suffering but to inspire them to choose suffering because through the incarnation suffering has become redemptive.” ¹ Or, as John Chryssavgis put it, “The more profound our personal misery, the more abundant God’s eternal mercy.”

I was seeing nothing profound in my pain, or was I? It was like slamming the door shut with one’s foot in the way, something you feel you should reconsider. For instance, a conversation I had engaged in a few months back swirled about my head. It centered on the French author Simone Weil’s difference between affliction, (the crap of the world) and suffering (participation in Christ’s suffering). One is chance, like a fire leading to ashes and smoke, the other is choice, like a purifying fire leading to redemption. I had missed the opportunity, seen it to late, the choice of transforming my affliction into something more…

Image Credit: Michelle Stone