Month: July 2004

Building Castles with Air

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In talking with folks all over, I have been struck by one inescapable reality: We Christians in America have become a prayerless people ignorant of the Bible.

Reasons for this I have outlined in previous entries. We are filling our time with everything but prayer and study. True, our lives are hectic—far too hectic—but if we think we are going to build the Kingdom of God and see ourselves transformed into men and women who would die for Jesus, we cannot do it on ten minutes of prayer dashed off daily as we hustle from place to place. We cannot do it with a lone verse taped to a dashboard. We cannot do it with empty souls.

I do not know why we fail to understand this. But even more, I do not understand why we don’t feel the impoverishment in every part of our lives. It is one thing to be a child of God, but quite another to be filled with the Spirit in such a way that everything we do has a holy sheen to it that others notice instinctively. That we know that this is where we should be, but still we do not care to get there, is a kind of sickness. We have become so used to the illness itself that we have learned to live in this sickly state and to make excuses for feeling rotten.

But this is not what the Lord desires. He wants all of us, not a tossed off token prayer, not a hope that one day we’ll get around to studying and knowing the Scriptures.

We can only get there if we want it. If we are sick and tired of being sick and tired in our souls, then maybe we can work to find ways to make it possible for us to spend the time before the Lord that we need to reach that place where He can truly use us to change the world.

But we have to want it. Do you?

The Anti-Church

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This last weekend I was talking with folks concerning some of the issues I’ve raised in my posts on the Church and work when someone mentioned an issue that had come up in his former church, a good-sized, Midwest congregation.

It seems two families got hit particularly hard by downsizing, putting their incomes in such dire straits that they were threatened with the loss of their homes. When they approached the church for help, they were told nothing could be done. The kicker was the church was in the process of buying an $80,000 sound system. The kicker for those families was that they eventually did lose their homes.

Yet, nothing could be done.

Let me say this: When you love a 64-track digital mixing board more than your brothers and sisters in Christ, you are not the Church. When folks in the congregation spend more time debating whether or not they’ll sign up for the ten channel package of satellite HDTV rather than the twenty channels of programming when all the while your sister in Christ is going to lose her home, you are not the Church.

I am absolutely sick of hearing these kinds of stories. There is never any reason for them to exist. I don’t want to hear about our concern for the lost if we have no concern for them once they are no longer lost. The Church does not stop being the Church once a person gets baptized. We talk and talk and talk about community and love and all sorts of warm fuzzy concepts, but if I see my brother in need and do not do what I can to help, then I am no longer the Church, but a rugged individualist who believes that God helps those who help themselves and can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. If you can point to the chapter and verse that supports that kind of thinking, then I’ll recant, but you simply won’t because it is not the Gospel.

How many of you are sick and tired of playing “church”? Frankly, I’ve had it. Meanwhile, the thief who comes to steal and destroy robs one family after another, families who thought they were surrounded by love, but were in fact only surrounded by theories and nice ideas.

This is only going to get worse, folks. If you are like me, I would challenge the leadership of your church on these kinds of issues. And while we can think globally and worry about someone on the other side of the planet, if we can’t deliver on helping the people we meet together with every Sunday, how can we ever hope to make a difference to the world? We can’t let the Church become some glib, but pale, imitation of itself or else we have become the Anti-Church.

God forgive us for letting it get this far!

Honoring Our Parents As They Move Toward Death

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Today would have been my mother’s 71st birthday, but she only made it to 67 before brain cancer shortened her life. We never know how fast or how slow our parents will die. When my mom was diagnosed, we knew her condition would deteriorate just long enough to give us time, but slow enough to cause great grief as a vital woman was reduced to a shell of herself. Nor did we predict that my father would drop dead unexpectedly, less than four months before my mom did.

I say this to ask all you who have both their parents alive now to make a decision today to never put your parents into a home.

It may mean that you have to accommodate them as they die. You may have to move one parent in with you if the other is unable to care for them for whatever reason. It may mean you have to go part-time at work to take care of them, or even quit your job altogether in order to take care of them in the last stages of their lives, but do it. Don’t even question how it will work out. It will be messy and will undoubtedly hurt to be that close in such a precious time, but God will honor you for that decision to give your parents that last bit of your love and care.

Also, it is never too early to discuss estate details with them. Make certain they have all their funeral and estate plans in order, a lawyer (and a backup lawyer) selected, and make sure an executor is appointed ahead of time. If they appoint you, you will have a lot of work to do. A trust can make this easier and your folks should consider putting their estate in a trust, rather then letting it go through messy probate issues. And absolutely get a statement of the value of their assets before they die. It can always be revised later, but trying to organize it all under the emotional pressure of their passing is avoidable if done in advance.

All the legal stuff aside, the last gift you can give a dying parent is to be there for them in their hour of death. Don’t let anything take that away. Again, God will honor you for loving your parents that way. You only get two chances; let them both be blessed.