Christianity

Supporting Our Brothers and Sisters in Christ

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A Helping Hand

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. Do not say to your neighbor, “Go, and come again, tomorrow I will give it”—when you have it with you.
—Proverbs 3:27-28 ESV

Once, when my wife and I were in dire straits, a man I only knew through a few posts on a Christian Web site sent me a check for $1,000. I hadn’t solicited that money, but when it showed up in the mail, it brought me to tears. To think that someone I didn’t know would do that for us…well that gift not only met a need, it changed my worldview. One gracious act enlarged my vision of who we are as the Body of Christ.

Thanks, Rick.

On the heels of yesterday’s post, “No ‘I’ in ‘Church’“, I’d like to feature two folks who could benefit from the Body of Christ at large in the Blogosphere.

Milton’s Need

Milton Stanley blogs at the Warnie-Award-winning Transforming Sermons. He also pastors a small church in Virginia. Because his church is just ramping up, Milton’s taken on additional work outside his pastoral role. Recently, he’s taken in his father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. (Milton blogs about his situation here.)

I know how difficult it is to care for a parent who is slowly slipping away mentally. I also know what it’s like to be in ministry needing a little more than what’s coming in. In addition, Milton and I have shared similar career paths, so I’m keenly aware of issues surrounding employment.

I plan on giving monthly to support Milton’s ministry at his church. Though we’ve never met in person, I know enough about his heart for God from his blog to know he’s my kind of guy.

All this is by my prompting, not Milton’s. After hearing about the situation with his dad and work, I contacted him and asked to help.

If you would like to send a tax-deductible gift to help fund Milton Stanley’s ministry, you can earmark it in his name and send it to:

Lexington Church of Christ
P. O. Box 953
Lexington, VA 24450
Julie’s Need

Closer to my own home, one of our dear Christian friends is fighting an exceedingly rare cancer. Julie was in our wedding party and was instrumental in getting my wife and me together. She’s single and is self-employed, so her resources are more limited than some people’s. Just a few days ago, I learned she’s coming up profoundly short on her medical bills because of the way her insurance company is handling her treatment regimen. In addition, like Milton, she’s also caring for elderly parents who have serious medical issues.

I’d like to create (and manage) some sort of non-profit fund to defray Julie’s medical bills. If anyone reading this knows the process for establishing this kind of fund, please e-mail me at the address in the sidebar. I’m terrible at navigating bureaucratic waters, and setting up a fund like this seems daunting to me. I’d be eternally grateful for any assistance I could receive.

Prayers are always needed! Please remember Julie and Milton in your prayers, too.

Thank you for being the Body of Christ.

The Loss of Innocence

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Bratz—JadeI live in an area of the country that suffers from “chronophobia,” the fear of keeping up with the times. LA is about eight years ahead of us, and even our major Midwestern neighbor to the northwest, Chicago, is about five. I can’t point to the chapter and verse, but it’s a foregone conclusion the Rapture for righteous Greater Cincinnatians will occur at least three years after the fact.

When you live in a “backward” area, things that are “forward” startle you. I was jolted this last week by a seven-year-old boy in Kroger yelling to a woman who was clogging up an aisle, “Get out of my way, you fat f***.”

Besides being glad that my son was not with me to hear that, my unconscious response was to run the mental wayback machine to California, 1996. My wife and I were new arrivals, but we understood the vibe well enough to know we were “not in Kansas anymore.” The tape ran and ran, but I don’t remember kids in the Valley launching a tirade like the one I’d just now heard.

Still, it had to come from the coasts. Doesn’t that kind of filth crawl Godzilla-like out of the Atlantic and the Pacific, aiming to meet in the heartland, like some hell-tinged rendition of the driving of the golden spike?

I was in the new Wal-Mart about a half hour from us (tore down the regular “Center” and replaced it with a “Supercenter”) and was fascinated by the 40″+ flat panel displays strategically placed throughout the store playing “The Wal-Mart Channel.” A video by some new teenage singing sensations was looping, young people re-enacting everything they’d seen in Mountain Dew commercials throughout their young lives.

I could not stop watching that loop. This time my son was with me, pulling my arm with both hands, near-screaming, “Daddy, let’s go!”

There, in the eyes of those kids.

If you’ve ever seen the open eyes of someone freshly deceased, then you’ve seen that look. There’s nothing there in those eyes. Emptiness defines them. Even a child knows that something is missing when he or she sees the eyes of a corpse.

Those two dozen teens in that music video loop channeled that same deadness. Behind the eye liner and mascara was a vast nothingness.

After my son was practically biting my thigh trying to get me to stop watching corpses dance to the music, I could not stop staring at the under-20 crowd that filed past me everywhere we went the rest of that day. How had I—for so long—missed the ungrateful dead?

It’s miserable spotting a worn fifteen-year-old suburban girl you know could teach a fin de siècle Parisian hooker a thing or two. Madonna may have been a tramp in my era, but this girl is something altogether different. She may not even be human, at least as we define it. I’ve seen mannequins with more expressive faces. If there was a soul in that kid once, it vacated a while ago.

But more than anything else, I want to apologize to that zombie of a girl for my generation. We let her generation down. Our harebrained youth ministry experiments, our obsession with our careers, our self-centeredness—we allowed the Enemy to gut them while we slept on our watch.

Or maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe we did care, but we got stuck fighting so many endless battles against wickedness that we had to compromise somewhere. The low-rider jeans were too trivial to fight. It could be something worse; she could be doing crystal meth.

I just can’t get over the vacant stares.

What’s the entry point for death in our children? One day our sons are playing in the sandbox with their Tonka trucks and our daughters are having tea time with their stuffed animals, then the next they’re passing around rubber wristbands that signify what sex acts they’ve successfully completed, or strangling each other to the point of passing out—for the “fun” of it.

Sunrise, sunset, swiftly fly the years.

Sure, we’ll get some PhD pedagogue regaling us with tales of the Dark Ages and the need for kids to grow up fast back then, but childhood today seems to be measured in seconds anymore. When girls in the first grade consider Barbie a toy for preschoolers, and boys have abandoned G.I. Joe as young as six, maybe picoseconds would be a better measure of the length of childhood.

It gives me the willies to think of my own son encountering one of these kids who’s a fifty-year-old in a ten-year-old’s body. I used to think they only minted those out on the coasts, but when I hear a seven-year-old neighborhood boy calling an adult woman a “fat f***,” I’ve got to wonder if someone’s firing up a local franchise.

The soap hasn’t wound up in anyone’s mouth around here, yet. I’m not looking forward to that day. My son got out some Blue’s Clues tapes the other day and watched them almost nostalgically, eyes wide and still sparkling. I watched with him for a few minutes. Though I knew he wouldn’t want to stop watching, I let him go, even if knew he’d ultimately sit there for two hours. Why? Because the precious gift that God has bestowed on him is indeed that.

And once you’ve lost it…

Watching the Wicked Prosper

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Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled,
my steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pangs until death;
their bodies are fat and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are;
they are not stricken like the rest of mankind.
Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them as a garment.
Their eyes swell out through fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against the heavens,
and their tongue struts through the earth.
Therefore his people turn back to them,
and find no fault in them.
And they say, ‘How can God know?
Is there knowledge in the Most High?’
Behold, these are the wicked;
always at ease, they increase in riches.
All in vain have I kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence.
For all the day long I have been stricken
and rebuked every morning.
—Psalm 73:1-14 ESV

Last week was good. I commented to my wife that for the first time in an exceedingly long time, life felt normal. She smiled and the sky grew bluer. Today it was 73 degrees outside. The crocuses were shouting.

But a late afternoon bluster blew in gloom, and our souls were disquieted by more bad news. We’d had our week, however fleeting. Time for more tears.

Will it be another season of loss? One wet finger in the wind cannot tell me.

I don’t know why some prosper and some don’t. That person over there mints money with every breath, but that broken fellow propped up against a crumbling brownstone…wasn’t he there last year, too? His crime? He was a decent person who only tried to do what was right, but someone took advantage of his kindness. We comfort ourselves with the knowledge that at least he doesn’t have dogs licking his sores.

We in America love the rags to riches story. American Idol taps into this nation’s consciousness like an epidural. Celebrity is its own reward. We simply adore our celebrities. Look at how many were troubled by Brad and Jen’s split last year: All those homes! How will they ever divvy them up fairly?

On the other hand, the people who stay in rags or who find themselves moving in that direction, well, we don’t reserve as much affection for them. Houses on BoardwalkNone of them make it to the cover of the highest-circulating magazine in the country, People. Didn’t Jesus Himself say we would always have folks like that? They’re a dime a dozen, aren’t they?

A friend who was a missionary told of being dropped off in the middle of Africa, but his scheduled ride never materialized. After a day left stranded out in the bush, he started walking, only to eventually come to a village. In that village, he was welcomed by a Christian family. They put all the food they had in front of him, and even that wasn’t much. Just some goat intestines—not fully emptied. Those folks were destitute, but they welcomed this fellow believer with glad hearts. My friend said he was so blessed by that family that he would never forget them.

Here in America, though, we have a sense of entitlement that never quite goes away. We deserve to keep up with our neighbors, even if it’s killing us to do so. And when someone eventually tanks, when a family has their breadwinner taken out, we too often look the other way. It’s as if we’re watching a real-life monster movie. We’re at the head of the pack, but the crippled girl who prays for everyone nightly can’t keep up with the rest of the group. When a grue swallows her in the darkness, we dispel our own guilt with a simple “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It makes me wonder sometimes if we’re the wicked of Psalm 73. We don’t think about that enough here in this country. We don’t like to be distracted from the goal of a five bedroom home, a Hummer in the driveway, and a kid at Harvard.

Our not wanting the distraction doesn’t make the indigent go away, though.

When I hear Christians in this country talk about how easy it would be if they lost everything, I can’t help but wonder if they truly mean it. I’ve known godly friendships that have dissolved because one person was on the way up while the other was headed down. The tendency in a few churches is to assign blame to the downwardly mobile; those poor had their past sins come home to roost. Heads get shaken and words muttered—and then the room clears.

Misfortune seems to haunt some people. I’ve seen cases of families that kept on getting hit with one misery after another. One day they’re no longer in church. Perhaps their rusted-out hulk of a car didn’t fit in with the new SUVs in the church parking lot. Maybe one of the teens in the youth group made a disparaging remark one too many times about the out-of-fashion threads worn by the kids. Or a husband didn’t fit in with the men’s group consisting of CEOs, what with him being the night clerk at a convenience store and all. Not that any of those CEOs would offer him a job anyway.

So they slink away. Some drop out of church altogether. Others find a church parking lot filled with rusted-out cars just like theirs, and they’re happy—for a while.

We talk about being destitute for the Lord, but I don’t think we truly want to be. We hear some megachurch pastor give a sermon about how Mother Theresa died with only a pair of shoes and a couple habits to her name, and we may even get a tear or two welling in the old eyes, but we dab it away. Then we pack the family into our late model Toyota Sequoia and head out for an all-you-can-eat dinner and a movie—or two. We may aspire to be destitute, but only if we can look good and have fun doing it. Blessed are the poor in spirit. It’s the spirit of the thing, isn’t it?

Are we the wicked? All of us? Some of us?

I confess that I really don’t want to continue to be downwardly mobile. It’s more stressful than people imagine. I wonder why some people live a life of ease and luxury, while others work so hard and yet get so little for all their hard work. Doesn’t square with the American mantra, does it?

Yet here we are in America complaining. Downwardly mobile here beats a life of eating goat intestines, right?. Try to convince the rich of that, though. Actually, try to convince anyone here of that.

How can I say I know the Lord when I am so ungrateful?