Unity

Psalm 133:1 “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!”

Many years ago, I was a fairly decent canoeist. I could paddle stern and guide the boat or paddle bow and read the river. Both of these positions were important and required experience, trust and teamwork. The boat could only be guided successfully past the many obstacles in a fast moving, winding river, if the man in the stern could use his skill to leverage the entire boat in the proper direction at the right time. The bow man had both to determine the obstacles in the turmoil of rapids or dangers hidden just beneath the surface and to effectively communicate this information to the stern man. In addition, while the man in the bow mapped the way, he had to follow the orders of his teammate in order for the two of them to successfully navigate the craft.

Both canoeists had to be good at reading the situation and reacting to it on an individual basis, skills that came only with study and practice. They also had to be good at working together for a common end, skills that came only with study and practice. I think that as Christians, we are called to study and seek our individual callings and equip ourselves with the skills necessary to succeed in them. I also think we must remember that working together successfully for the glory of God’s kingdom requires seeking a common calling, and that this takes no less study and practice than the individual ones. I suspect we often forget that being in accord requires practice, as well as the presence of the Spirit.

Prayer: God, grant us the patience we need to practice working together in common goals, that we may be successful in your mission for us here on earth. Amen.

http://cityroadchapelumc.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/unity/

Multi-mix Kool Aid : A "Good" Friday Thought

Summer has many traditions and one of them is Vacation Bible School.  Combining boys and girls, recreation, Bible stories and crafts is a formula for a successful event.  Special songs and refreshments add to the adventuresome learning process.

I especially remember when we used to have refreshments on the last day.  The workers would mix together all of the left over Kool Aid packets and make a special punch.  Sometimes the colors would be funky green, or purple or blue.  We thought it was wonderful to go outside the ordinary and be surprised by new colors and tastes.  Could it be that today’s new energy drinks were invented by VBS refreshment committees?  I am not sure.

One thing I am sure of:  Vacation Bible School is an important part of our growth as Christians.  During those experiences and the ones I attend today, the love of Christ is evident.  Caring adults demonstrate their affection for children, their love for the Lord, and their commitment to pass on their faith to another generation.  In singing, in making a craft, in teaching a class, in telling a Bible story, and in making refreshments, Christian wisdom is passed from one generation to the next.  Surely, Vacation Bible School is a key way of continuing our Lord’s counsel to “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”  (Matthew 19:13).

Blessings,

Ron

Ron Lowery is the Senior Pastor of City Road Chapel, UMC, and His Good Friday Thoughts is a weekly feature on this blog.  [Devotionals, blog posts, and commentary by members or friends of City Road Chapel will appear, Lord willing, on this blog on a daily basis. Please visit us here again or subscribe through the RSS feed to be sure you do not miss these devotionals. There are also posts on news and events and opinions and observations. Please comment if led to do so. (We will remove malicious comments, but welcome those that disagree with us if done co without resorting to personal attacks or terminology that is generally considered unacceptable on a church blog.)

Should you wish to come see us, City Road Chapel, UMC is located in Madison, TN, in the northern section of Nashville, within easy distance of Opryland (see map.) Most Sundays we have a small, early church service at 8:00a.m., Sunday School at 8:45, and another, larger worship at 10:00.

We have Sunday bus service to pick up those who cannot make it themselves. (Call 615-868-1673 for inquiries regarding this.)

All are welcome. We will try to post any changes in worship time due to special events here or on the official site.  (Map) If you wish to find out more about us, visit our official Website.]

http://cityroadchapelumc.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/multi-mix-kool-aid-a-good-friday-thought/

What is my Church? (My Meditation for Today)

I read a blog post yesterday at Qideas.org that was quite interesting to me. It was on what we mean by the word “church.” (If interested, you may find it here.) One statement made in the post is “One cannot define ‘church’ by looking at what the church is but must rather look at what the church is called to be.” The author noted that the way we define the institution of the church was very vague in scripture, and it wasn’t until after the times of these writings that the concept of the church as an institution, [and the accompanying arguments about whose version of the church was best] began to solidify. We Methodists stress that the church is the community of believers, but that is still vague. What, not who, is the church? That is my meditation question for the day.

I agree with the blogger that the church is something called into being. So I ask myself, “What are we being called to do today? My denomination, my congregation. Are we listening to God’s call as it is, not as it was? Are we responding to that call? For my local church the questions would be more like, “If there was a vacant lot on the corner where the church is, and a bunch of people were called today to build a church building to house a new congregation specifically in that spot, what would that congregation look like and what would its mission and activities be?” I would ask the same question regarding my denomination. Of course, the best starting place is myself. I am the one that I can do most with when it comes to fallowing a call. Just thinking.

http://cityroadchapelumc.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/what-is-my-church-my-meditation-for-today/

48: An Explication of De-fixation Vol. 1

If you need some background for this post, friend, read this at the very least. Or if you would like to know all about Ginger, then read these.

Week One: “This sucks but I made the right decision.”

Ever since I ended things with Ginger, I’ve been kind of depressed. I’ve been kind of depressed, but I’m not really letting myself feel it. I find ice cream helps.

Distraction is the name of the game. I start playing some online games. I need something that doesn’t require thought. I find myself spending a ridiculous amount of time clicking as a pixelated frog shoots pretty, shiny marbles out of his mouth, while I simultaneously listen to a sermon or watch a movie. I inundate myself with media in order to subvert and reroute the neurological explosions that reverberate through my skull any time things get too quiet.

Despite everything being generally kind of crappy, I do feel better than I had assumed I would. I feel better because I’m sure I did the right thing. After spending weeks ignoring what I knew I ought to do, I’ve begun truly owning up to it all. Selfishly, I had held onto something just because I wanted it, because I was enjoying it. I had allowed it to continue because it sure felt nice to be wanted like that, and it felt nice to have someone to want. Don’t misunderstand me, I genuinely liked Ginger—a lot—but I also knew, almost from the beginning, that it wasn’t a good idea for us to be together. In the moments when I do allow myself to think, these are the things that I think about.

Week Two: “Oh crap, did I really make the right decision?”

I’m doing pretty well. It seems like things are getting better and I’m thinking about Ginger less. I’m hopeful that things will continue to progress along these lines. But then something happens. Something always happens.

I’m minding my own business, just living life, when my little telephonic friend begins vibrating. I reach for my cell and flip it open; it’s a text. I read it, and as I do, it quickly dawns on me that, no matter how good you are at hiding, reality—via satellite—eventually finds you.

It’s my brother. He tells me August 13^th is off, that I can remove it from my calendar. A couple of weeks before, he had told me to reserve the date, but now he says I shouldn’t worry about it. It was something Ginger was planning; he hadn’t told me that before. It was meant to be a surprise. It doesn’t matter now though.

My heart sinks like a millstone attached to some poor sinner’s throat. I’m instantly flooded with all the hopes I had for our future together, all the things I thought we could, and would, do and share. And in that moment: pangs of regret. In that moment: thoughts of remorse. The second-guessing begins, and a fissure appears in my confidence, a lapse in my surety.

Thankfully, I know enough about relationships to know what inevitably happens when they end: the doubting sets in. You begin to idealize the person and the time you shared, and you forget all the reasons you broke up in the first place. I’ve seen it in movies and I’ve seen with my friends, but it is, as most things are, different to experience it firsthand.

I remind myself what my motivations were for the decisions I made and I cling to those things and to the advice I’d received from my friends. I hold onto them like I’m holding the leash of a greyhound that’s been cooped up all day in a 600 square foot studio apartment finally let out for a walk. All things sane and logical are fleeing their lobe-front homes as my passions start to gather, preparing for some kind of violent revolution.

These feelings are taking over, but the confusing thing is that I don’t altogether know why. I don’t know how much of it is just that I miss the chemical rush of being with her, the happy excitation of neurotransmitters mingled with sentimentality. I don’t even know how legitimate my feelings of loss are. Am I missing her, or just selfishly missing the way she made me feel?

Right now, solitude isn’t the refuge for me that it usually is. It’s not uncommon for me to feel the most at peace when I am alone. Right now though, my thoughts are too scattered and my heart is too raw. Right now I find solace in prayer and in the company of others, but not so much in the vast caverns of imagination, not so much in contemplation and rumination. No, right now I’d still just rather not think at all.

http://iwaveddatinghello.com/2011/07/12/48-an-explication-of-de-fixation-vol-1/

With Thanksgiving is Sometimes a Tall Order

Philippians 4:6 – “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

This was one of my devotional verses for the morning. Coincidentally, the past few days have found my e-mail, Facebook, personal conversations, and Twitter (okay, I only follow prayer related Twitter so what should I expect,) filled with prayer requests. I add my own. I looked at the verse and thought of some of the people’s needs and wondered where the thanksgiving part came in. When someone dies or is very ill, when they have lost hope due to the illness of depression, where are we thankful.

The “head-answer,” meaning understanding with our minds, is easy. We have Christ’s salvation so, in the long run we’re okay. Also, God has promised to be with us through our trials, so we need not fear or feel alone. The “heart-answer,” meaning how I feel about it, is a bit tougher.  Even when my heart accepts that I am not alone and God will take care of me, I yearn for the pain to go away. Knowing it will get better doesn’t always seem to be enough. The only answer I have come up with is the knowledge, both head and heart, that God will make me a better person and use my trials to my benefit. They will also better equip me to be part of his plan to comfort others in need. Still. Thanksgiving is a tough one.

Prayer: God, give understanding and strength to enter all my conversations with you in a spirit of thanksgiving. Amen

http://cityroadchapelumc.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/with-thanksgiving-is-sometimes-a-tall-order/

Use it or Lose it: How to Exercise Your Faith

“Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. ‘You of little faith,’ he

http://joanq.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/exercisefaith/

47½ : Another Apology

Friend, I have something important to say, but I will try to keep it brief.

In my last post, I recklessly made an artistic decision rather than a relational one. I chose to draw a parallel between the ending of a human life and the ending of a relationship. In abstract terms, which unfortunately is usually the way my mind operates, this is probably excusable. But in this instance it related to real events, which means I almost certainly overstepped my bounds.

My intentions are probably irrelevant at this point, given the hurt that I have apparently incurred, and I certainly cannot apologize for that enough. There is obviously no comparison in terms of the magnitude of sorrow between the two events, and given the recency of said events, it was especially ignorant of me to make any such connection and specifically in such a public forum.

To those who are close to this situation—friends and family—I humbly ask for your forgiveness. I did not consider the implications of what I wrote, as I should have, and thus acted both immaturely and insensitively. For in any way trivializing your grief, I am deeply sorry. I do not claim to deserve it, but I hope you can show me grace in this matter.

Thank you.

Joel

http://iwaveddatinghello.com/2011/07/07/47%C2%BD-another-apology/

47: Stillborn Dreams

If you’re new around here, then you probably want to read these entries in order to catch up on the story of me and “Ginger Grande.”

It’s a Monday morning. I meet the guys for some coffee and prayer. Afterwards, inexplicably, I get the sudden urge to shave my head. It’s something I do often when I feel stressed out or lacking control; it’s a way for me to assert some kind of volition and decision in the face of an otherwise ambiguous or helpless situation. Also, it’s summer in Texas and there’s no better time to put the ol’ trusty clippers to the scalp.

Following this follicular freedom, I sit in my room thinking and generally enjoying the fact that I don’t have to worry about school for a couple weeks—my classes having ended the Thursday previous. My phone sits on the bed next to me, silent and seemingly forgotten. Suddenly, the old girl awakes and starts buzzing. I look over and, much to my surprise, see that it’s Ginger. I clumsily snatch up the phone, wondering why she’s calling me during our “silent period.”

There’s something in her tone of voice as she asks me, “Can you talk?” that instantly lets me know something is wrong. After being assured that I can, Ginger starts speaking. In a broken voice, she tells me about something that happened a couple of days before. It amounted to a breech of trust on her part, and she feels pretty bad about the whole thing.

[Reader, I must interject here briefly to explain a couple of things. Firstly, out of respect for Ginger, I am not going to delve into the nitty-gritty of the matter. However, I must also add that it is important that you know the event in question was certainly not as sensationally sinful as what some of you may be speculating. So please don’t allow your jaded judgments to take hold of your imagination. She's a nice girl and worthy of your respect.]

In the moment, I don’t really know how to respond. It’s obvious she’s contrite about the whole thing and feels pretty guilty, and I truly don’t doubt her sincerity. I tell her I forgive her. I pray for her. And then I sort of calm her down and guide the conversation into the realm of normalcy. We talk for a couple of hours.

As soon as I hang up the phone, it all starts to hit me—all of it. My mind starts processing what happened and tries desperately to make sense of the frantic machinations of thought swirling inside me. There’s a heaviness to the moment, a gravity that I can’t shake. In a flash, I have a Keyser Söze moment; all the pieces start coming together. All the things I had been worrying about were somehow made evident in the conversation I just had: the lack of rapport, the fact that she is five years my junior, and the strong sense that who she expects me to be, and perhaps thinks I already am, is very different from the person I actually am. I have this flood of thoughts, images, emotions, and memories. I have them, and I don’t know what to do with any of them.

I grab my journal and put pen to paper. I’m trying to clear my head and make some kind of sense of what I’m feeling. I decide to write a letter I have no intention of sending, in order to figure out what I might want to say to Ginger. Over the course of the day, I talk to a couple of friends and try to get some input and some perspective. And finally, I go to bed knowing I really need to have another conversation with this girl.

The next morning, I wake up early and do some more writing and praying. After a while, I take a shower and get ready to head for church; it’s Tuesday, which means I have a staff meeting I need to be at and some other things to work on. I grab my stuff and head out the door.

Upon arrival, I spend some time talking things through with a woman who works in the church office, a close friend of mine. Pretty soon it’s time for the meeting. In addition to covering some mundane administrative issues and the like, we discuss one of the families in the congregation that is going through a particularly rough time. This couple had recently lost their grandson. The mother was almost full-term. There had been no sign of complications. But something happened and the baby was stillborn. I hadn’t heard about it yet, and as I listen to the story, my heart breaks.

The meeting ends and it’s lunchtime. Apparently life goes on even in the face of confusion and sadness and death; apparently a person still has to eat. I drive to Smoothie King™ and, as an act of pitiful self-indulgence and distraction, I purchase the heftiest item on the menu, a smoothie designed for people who lead a much more active lifestyle than I do, a smoothie with enough calories to satisfy the needs of a small African village for at least a week—the Hulk™.

I’m emotionally on edge and crazy anxious, but I know what I need to do: set up a meeting with Ginger as soon as possible. After a while, I muster up the courage and I send her a text. [How bold of me.] I ask her if she’ll have any time that afternoon to talk. She says she’s free. I suggest a time and she heartily accepts. Her excited tone, punctuated by friendly emoticons, disturbs me more than a little bit.

I head out of the office and to my car. I get in and sit down. I take a deep breath. I glance over at the small, green, plastic lizard hanging from my mirror. I soberly reach up, clutch it lightly in my fingers and give it a gentle tug. It detaches easily, and I set it softly in a cup holder. I turn the ignition, put my car in gear, and start driving.

I’ve already thought about everything I’m going to say. I even wrote it down a couple of times. I listed out the things I need to discuss in itemized form so that I could memorize them and leave nothing unsaid. I rehearse all of this in my mind as I drive north on the interstate.

I pull up to Ginger’s house. I take a deep breath, and I step out into the hot summer air. I walk haltingly to the door and pause for a moment on the front porch before knocking. After a very brief moment, I raise my clenched fist and allow it to fall forcefully against the wooden surface. In a few moments, she comes to the door, cute and smiling. It’s obvious she doesn’t know what’s coming, which is probably for the best, but it makes this a hell of a lot harder. She asks if we should go for a walk, and I reluctantly accept. And then I start talking.

We’re not far into our walk before she stops smiling, and by the time we’re halfway to the gazebo we aren’t moving at all. I can see tears trying to form in her eyes, despite her best efforts to fight them. Eventually she manages to stammer softly, “Can we start walking back now?”

On the way back I tell her I want her to be able to say whatever she wants to say, to feel like she has a chance to respond. She doesn’t say a lot, but she does say she doesn’t really agree with me. She says she doesn’t want to question my ability to hear from God or something—though I had tried to be very intentional about not saying, “God told me”—but she says she can’t help but think that I’m just afraid, that I am overanalyzing and overthinking and just unable to take a risk. She says all of this in a polite way, her efforts to conceal the tears becoming progressively less successful.

We arrive at the house and we’re just standing by the mailbox. Suddenly her roommate appears and begins engaging us in conversation. Neither of us knows what to do, so we pretend like everything is normal. She gets the mail and then leaves the two of us to talk.

Ginger says she feels like she has things she wants to say, but can’t put words to any of it. At this point, she’s on the verge of losing it. “I’m going to go now,” she hastily and shakily utters.  I solemnly nod and watch as she turns around, walks swiftly to the door, opens it, and disappears.

I get in my car and drive off. I park a couple of blocks away though, in an empty parking lot. I sit for a while, tearing up a bit as I think of what’s been lost. I start mourning it, mourning this thing that had been growing inside each of us, this thing that was suddenly cut short before it really even had a chance to live, to breathe, to be known.

I pick up the toy lizard in my hand and run my thumb across its rough skin as I stare out across the desolate concrete and lonely white lines all around me. The sun beats down on my car and I wish my AC would go higher or the sun would go lower or that everything would just go away for just a little while. I guess I wish an awful lot of things. An awful lot.

http://iwaveddatinghello.com/2011/07/06/47-stillborn-dreams/

Faith and the Twilight Zone

One of my favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone is one where an old professor is forcibly retired to allow for a new breed of teacher to step up. I have often found that episodes of shows like this one are designed to make one think, even if they tend to be a bit weird. That is the case with this episode. It is called “The Changing of the Guard,” and stars Donald Pleasence as the teacher who, looking back on his career, is in despair, thinking his life has been wasted in teaching things that no longer matter to modern (at the time of the show’s filming) youth. The episode then presents the teacher with a confrontation with the ghosts of past pupils who had taken things he had taught them to heart and who explained how he had helped build their character. The professor then decides his life was not wasted but that he had, indeed, had a positive impact on the lives of many young folk. He also acknowledges that it is time for him to retire and allow a “changing of the guard.”

I think about the little things that I picked up here and there from my teachers in the past. Not just formal teachers but role models and mentors. I wonder if they knew how much the little things they taught added together to make a big difference in the my life and the lives of others? I wonder if I have had a positive influence on the lives of others in my time? And will I know when it is time to step aside and let others take up the banner and lead for their turn?

Jesus taught by example. His followers did as well, in their time. Each passed on what they learned and eventually let the next generation step up. They left a legacy that has been carried by generations, often through only a small action, a kind word, or a sympathetic ear. What little thing would He have me do today that he can use for His glory? I think I’ll ask Him.

http://cityroadchapelumc.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/faith-and-the-twilight-zone/

The Ex Factor: Introduction

A year ago today, on July 5th of 2010, I called up my Ex and asked her to come over.  I very briefly

http://speakfaithfully.wordpress.com/?p=832

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