A Prayer for a Sunday when the Heat is too Hot and the Music too Slow

Oh Holy Spirit,
You who raised Eutychus from the dead
After he fell asleep during church,
and fell out the window and died;
Grant me the grace to stay awake through church this morning.
And if this is not Your Holy Will,
Grant that I do not snore too loudly,
Or drool on myself,
Or start to nod off and then jerk awake real suddenly.
Whether I make it through this service awake or asleep,
Remind me that the Redemption You are working right now,
At this moment,
Is more creative and far reaching than can be contained
In this room,
At this moment.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Amen.

A Monday Morning Poem

People usually find the incessant
Barking of a dog or two
Inside their fence
A nuisance, noise pollution.

A rap on the window,
"Shut up out there!"

After listening to those dogs bark
At the same string of squirrels,
     Loose dogs roaming the neighborhood,
           The occasional passerby,
                The mail lady six days a week
                      Between noon and two o'clock,

I hear those dogs barking out
A testimony to the sheer persistence
Of created life
As I hop in the shower
     And head to work on Monday morning.

- 3 October 2011

A Poem for Tuesday Morning

Coffee in the morning,
Whiskey at night.
Life is alright

On Losing My Joy

These last two years have been two of the hardest years of my life. I'm not saying this to complain, only to preface my return to blogging. In the last two years I have transitioned from being single to being married; during the same time period, I have also transitioned from being a student to being a full-time pastor. Either one of these transitions by itself is a lot to get used to, but both together are like smoking a joint after drinking a 12 pack of beer, no matter how much you think you can handle it you will find it hard to keep your feet under you.

Now don't hear me wrong, I love my wife very much and I am not writing this to bemoan being married. Marriage certainly has a way of showing a person just how selfish and self-serving he really is, and then grinding down those rough edges, but there's nothing better than knowing that no matter what happens in the course of the day you can look forward to snuggling your sweetie as the two of you fall asleep together at the end of the day.

However, the transition from private Bible college to full-time pastoral ministry in a small town in Southern Illinois has been a hard one. I have recently, within the last month, come to the realization that in attempting to make this transition I have lost my joy.***

One of the ways I have come to this realization is that I have found that I no longer enjoy most of the things that I used to. In the course of these last two years I have quit running entirely for almost a year (something I dearly love), quit riding and sold my motorcycle (something I dearly loved), quit reading theology (something I dearly loved), and just generally lost all hope for anything good to come of life all together. When I'm not working, I'm either escaping into my Xbox (not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself), eating, watching TV, or sleeping.

I have also found that my temper has gotten shorter and shorter. Now, I inherited my temper honest, and for as far back as I can remember I have let it fly when things have pissed me off. Even when I was little I would break toys if they pissed me off. But my temper has always been directed at inanimate objects. I may punch a wall, sling a pair of channel lock pliers across the yard, or cuss a blue streak at the lawn mower, but I've never directed that temper at other people, let alone people I care about. In these last few months I've found myself losing my temper with my sweet wife (not as far as punching her or throwing her across the yard, just being a grouch at her) and this really bothers me.

I've also swelled up like sequined jump-suit Elvis. The clothes that fit when I moved here don't fit anymore. I've always been up and down with my weight, but when I was 20 I topped out at 230 pounds. That was an eye opener so I started doing weight watchers and running and lost almost 60 pounds in the course of a summer. Now I put some of that weight back on, but I hadn't been up over 200 pounds since then. Until moving down here, that is. Back in January I forced myself on to a scale and saw that I was close to 220 pounds. Not good, dude, not good at all.

I know the symptoms I am describing probably line up well with depression, and given the disproportionate amount of time in the last two years I've spent sitting alone in a quiet empty room, sighing deeply and feeling totally empty, that's probably exactly what it is. What I want to do with these next few blog posts is to take a look at how I got here, and how I am going to go forward, in the hopes that maybe some of you out there in blogoworld might benefit from reading what I'm writing.

***Now here's the good news, after realizing that I have lost my joy, I have been taking steps to get it back. I started walking in the morning and listening to one of my favorite series of books on my iPod back in July, and now I have built back up to running a little over 2 miles a day (hoping to get that closer to 5 come spring). I'm gradually losing weight, getting closer to that 200 pound mark and hoping to get back towards 185 by next year. Most importantly, I am realizing that I am not trapped in this place or in this line of work, and that has been liberating. So all in all things are looking up!

Coming soon...The first step towards losing one's joy: jamming a square peg in a round hole.

N.T. Wright; Gnosticism; Lukewarm Church

So yesterday I discovered iTunes U. iTunes U is a place where all sorts of universities from around the world post lectures and such on all sorts of topics and you can browse and download them as you like. I'm an avid podcast listener and have been for some years now, so this is really exciting! Upon discovering this I promptly downloaded everything I could find by the illustrious Nicholas Tom Wright.

This morning while running and then while at the gym lifting weights, I listened to a lecture given by Dr. Wright at Duke Divinity School titled "Revelation and Christian Hope: Political Implications of the Revelation to John." I would like to share one thing he said in this lecture:

"Again and again, Revelation draws on the great themes and insights from the Old Testament prophets...because Revelation, like the whole New Testament, sees the Old Testament as a great, complex, multi-faceted narrative which came to its climax in Jesus and is now generated a new narrative which is demonstratively the fulfillment of that ancient story but also in a significantly new mode. Revelation is...the climax of prophecy...The book of Revelation tells the same story the gospels tell, which though we may not normally read the Gospels like this, goes like this...it is the story of how Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, conquered the power of evil through His death, and became the Lord of the world. The New Testament is not about how Jesus, on the one hand revealed that He was divine and then died so that we can go to heaven. That's half-way to gnosticism if you aren't careful. They are about how Jesus acted as the embodiment of Israel's God to overthrow the usurping forces of evil and to establish through His death, resurrection, and ascension, God's Kingdom on earth as in heaven."

Amen and Amen.

Now here's my question. I am acutely aware of the fact that the church culture in which I have grown up regularly sees the vast majority of young people who grow up in church promptly leave that church at the age of 18 when they go off to college and then maybe they will come back when they turn 35 and have kids (mostly just to instill some good old morals in their young ones...remember when the gospel used to be good news?). Anyway, building on Wright's statement that the gospel is about Christ embodying Israel's God, and defeating the usurping forces of evil to establish God's Kingdom and that the gospel of Christ coming to "prove" He was God and then die "for our sins" so that we can "go to heaven" when we die is dangerously close to gnosticism, I wonder if the majority of churches, at least in rural middle america, aren't more gnostic than Christian? And if that's the case, is it any wonder so many close their doors each week? Maybe gnosticism was a hot thing 50 years ago when most of the people in church now were growing up, but somewhere along the way it has lost steam. Maybe a big part of the work we need to do as Kingdom citizens in the immediate future is converting "christians" from gnosticism to the gospel of Jesus Christ?

An Ode to Beans and Rice

I eat beans and rice almost every day of the year. Some days I eat beans and rice twice a day. I have even been known to eat beans and rice for breakfast. Beans (1 part pinto, 1 part black) and rice (brown, never white) is delicious. You can dress it up with cheese, barbeque sauce, jalepenos, onions, you can wrap it in a tortilla and toast it on the cast iron skillet, you can eat it on a bed of fritos or tortilla chips. I got a 10 pound sack of black beans for Christmas and it was gone by february. My dad orders 50 pound sacks of pinto beans and we split them up amongst the family. That's how I roll.

So in honor of how much I love beans and rice (fresh pepper season is coming! I've got 4 dozen little starts sitting next to a window in the sun right now), I wrote this poem:

I love beans and rice,
I love them very much.
I love beans and rice,
I could eat them for dinner and lunch.

Thank you, thank you very much

A Well Protected Garden

One of the most important aspects of growing a garden is garden protection. In these turbulent times, one cannot be too careful when it comes to keeping thieves out of the garden. In this area, two of the most persistent garden pests are rabbits and gypsies.

These two garden thieves have a lot in common. Both are covered in hair, both will eat sugar snap peas before they get very far out of the ground, and neither have souls.

In order to protect against rabbits and gypsies, I've used 2 foot tall chicken wire and 5 foot tee-posts. My neighbor must have been having a problem with persistent gypsies because he ran electric fence around his. I hope I do not have to resort to this!