In Our Brief Span

A few days ago I was walking on a trail beside the Chattahoochee River and came upon a beautiful granite bench that had been placed as a memorial to someone who had died only a few months ago.

The back of the bench had been engraved “In Loving Memory of Carla Mitchell Roberts”. The lines beneath her name included her dates of birth and death and then this epitaph: “Most Beloved Wife, Mother, Grandmother, Sister, Daughter, Aunt, Mentor, Caregiver, Volunteer, and Friend to All”.

I stood there a moment or two and wondered about who this woman was and how it was that the bench had been placed there. I wondered about how many people contributed to her epitaph. I could not help but think that a group larger than her immediate family had added their thoughts.

I envisioned a conversation where one person spoke about who she was within her family and another chimed in about who she was as a friend, and another volunteered what a great mentor she was and another reminded everyone how much time she volunteered. The bench, I surmised, must have been a community project.

I walked away from the memorial with the thought that  the essence of a life well lived is not to be found in the in the number of projects we get done or the amount of money we make but in the quality of friendships we create during our brief span of time.

This morning my friend, Paul Blowers, noted on Facebook that he was missing his dad, Russ Blowers, who died two years ago today. All day long friends have been commenting under Paul’s status line about what his dad, a pastor,  meant to them.

No one mentioned the numerous projects Russ  completed or the number of church buildings he built or the size of the congregations he served. To the person, those who knew Russ spoke about how he enriched their lives, blessed them, made them feel valuable. One person summarized everyone’s remarks: “He was everybody’s best friend.”

I came away from Paul’s Facebook Wall with the same thought I had down beside the river the other day. The essence of a life well-lived is found in the quality of friendships we create during our brief span of time.

This past week-end Jim Henderson, founder of the Off the Map  Idea Lab, was interviewed by Ira Glass on NPR’s “This American Life”. The theme for the week was “Bait and Switch”, which, for some strange reason, brought evangelistic Christians to the minds of the good folks at “This American Life”. (One of the staffers on that show shared with Ira Glass some of the techniques he employed as a part of Campus Crusade for Christ.)

Ira interviewed Jim because Jim has spent years trying to convince Christians to give up peddling Jesus and  just create and foster friendships with and among people. Jim’s reasoning is that when you become friends with people each person’s interests, values, and convictions just come up. Opportunities to talk about Jesus, and everything else, just emerge between friends. Whatever the outcome of those conversations, the friendship continues.

I have friends who love to hunt. I don’t hunt. They talk about it. I listen. I don’t take up hunting. So what? We continue on as friends. I am blessed by their friendship. I hope they are blessed by mine. How hard can this be?

Friendship is a way of life, an end in itself and not a means to an end. It is through our friendships that we reveal our true nature, that is, that we are created in the image and likeness of the God who is friendship.

A bench by the river, reminiscences of a pastor and friend and the words that ride upon the airwaves remind me: the essence of a life well-lived is in the quality of friendships we create during our brief span of time.

Prayer Walking in the New Ordinary (7)

“You can observe a lot just by watching.” ~ Yogi Berra

We do so many things to keep from seeing what is there to be seen. We pretend. We deny. We project. We let our vision of the future mask the condition of the present. We long for the past and lose ourselves in a cloud of nostalgia. We assert with all the authority we can muster that “things should not be this way” and then go on as if our assertion has erased the obvious. We treat what is in-plain-sight as a mere exception to the rule.

We prefer to live in the old ordinary. We do it all the time. We do it, in part, because to see things differently demands that we do things differently. And to do things differently implies that we have to change. And, once we have settled into the old way, as painful as it may be, we resist change.

I know about the old way of seeing and the old way of doing and the many ways there are to hide from the obvious because I am guilty of it- all of it. I know what it is to long for the good old days, for simpler times. I know what it is to so yearn for a better future that I look right past the present. I know what it is to click my heels and chant “There’s no place like home.” I know what it is to stand in the dark and rage against the night I know what it is to treat all the suffering as a hiccup. I know what it is to “see trees of green, red roses too” and to deny that I also see dead people. I know what it is to “ignore it and hope it goes away.”

The old ordinary is the “reality” of sugar plums where ogres are “out of place”. The new ordinary is where sugar plums sell gift wrap to ogres dressed in Polo shirts and Dockers, where ogres donate to the United Way and sugar plums go shoplifting.

The old ordinary is where the wrongful evil rains on the party of the rightful good. The new ordinary is where the good and the evil party together, not knowing whom is who.

The old ordinary is where evil is the exception and good is the rule. The new ordinary is where evil and good are the rule without exception.

“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field but while everyone was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away…when the plants came up and bore grain, the weeds appeared as well.”

I did return to the subdivision on Saturday with four other men. We got there early while most folks slept. We walked the same street I had walked the day before. We stopped and prayed at several spots. We lingered and prayed in front of the house where the drug bust happened. We prayed for the family who lived there. We prayed for the “hardened”.

We walked and we prayed. We prayed for the children who would soon scamper from house to house on Halloween. We prayed for families. We prayed for the addicted, the ones with whom we worship and the ones with whom we live, the ones we may yet prove to be.

We contemplated the invisible network of rich and poor, the corrupt and the corruptible, the supplier, the dealer, the user, the terrible network of violence and harm, the all-too-apparent yet invisible principalities, powers and thrones, the high evil in low places.

 

We talked to long armed people who held us at a much-too-safe distance.

 

We talked about the church and our tendency to hide out in sanctuaries, to cocoon with those of like precious faith, to cuddle with those of like precious lifestyle and like precious taste and like precious opinion.

 

I imagined us, the redeemed of the Lord, peering out of portholes on the good old gospel ship, watching and waiting for someone, anyone, to swim to us and climb aboard. “We have coffee and snacks in the lobby!”

 

This morning I picked up Stanley Hauerwas’ commentary on Matthew and just opened it. My eyes fell on a quote by Dorothy Day” “To reach the man in the street, you must go to the street.”

 

I can think of no better way to get there than to prayer walk in the new ordinary.

Prayer Walking in the New Ordinary (6)

I got back to my car, started it up, and drove out of the subdivision. I thought about how odd it seemed to feel the way I felt, like I had “done something” when, in truth, all I had done was walk through a subdivision similar to my own and prayed in ways I usually pray- when I remember to pray.

I couldn’t figure out what I had done to merit that feeling, except perhaps that I had felt some sort of nudge and actually gotten off my butt and responded. I confess. I felt a little like I feel when I take out the trash without having had to be asked, like I deserved a medal for doing the most ordinary, least-little-thing.

Maybe it was one of those ‘man things’…you know, to feel heroic simply because you’ve remembered to put the toilet lid down? I thought about Jeff Foxworthy saying that he shouted out the door to his wife who was blacktopping the driveway: “Honey! I emptied the ash tray!”

I felt good but guilty that I felt good.

I looked down and noticed that my gas light was on. Linda had warned me three times the night before that I had better get gas because “THE GAS WARNING LIGHT IS ON!” I pulled into a Shell Station. I remembered the place.

It was the station where, once before, I had managed to pull up to the pump, get out of the car without pressing the button to open the gas cover only to realize that I had locked my keys and my cell phone in the car. A double whammy! I couldn’t even pump gas while I waited on a locksmith to charge me a hundred bucks to pop my lock. A quadruple whammy! Heck, I couldn’t even call the locksmith. A quintuple whammy! And all that in a matter of seconds!

When I realized my bind (and that I could not even move my car from the owner’s pump…a sextuple whammy!), I went in to see if I could use the phone and to tell the clerk, an impassive Indian man, my predicament.

I put on my best whine, acknowledged my utter stupidity and my sorrow as I told him what I had managed to do. “This was all I needed today!” I sighed.

He stood there behind his cash register and Binaca bottles and Bic Lighters, there beneath his rack of cigarettes and replied in his thick Indian accent: “Sir, thees locking of the keys and thees blocking of the pump…thees is not an exception to life. Thees is life!”

And to think that I had always believed you needed to climb the Himalayas to meet a guru.

I looked to see if that same guy was working as I pumped my gas. I could not tell but I sort of smiled to myself as I remembered that day. “Thees is not an exception to life, thees is life.”

I watched the numbers whiz by on the gas pump and thought: “How many times have I assumed that the good moments in life are life while the bad moments in life are interruptions or exceptions to life?”

After I got back into my car and pulled away I thought about my prayer walk. “This is life…” the thoughts seemed to think themselves…“this methamphetamine in this ordinary subdivision; these thugs hiding in plain view there among these children, these families.; this evil that lives among us; this is not an exception to life; this is life.”

I experienced my “aha”.

Life! That’s where I live! That’s where we all live!

I realized why I felt so good. It was not because I had done something significant or courageous or because I, in my insecure mannishness, felt I deserved a medal; it was because I had actually seen the ordinary.

The old, by God, had become new.

I prayer walked in the new ordinary.

And I felt great!

Prayer Walking in the New Ordinary (5)

As I topped the little rise in the road, I came upon the young woman and the large man who I had seen during my drive through unloading something from the back of a white SUV. The young woman carried a microphone and trotted toward me.

“Sir, do you live in this neighborhood?” she asked. The large man trotted from the other side of the SUV with a large and complicated looking video camera on his shoulder.

“No…no, I don’t,” I said. I felt a little caught off guard. “I’m just walking through the neighborhood and praying for these folks.”

“I’m sorry?” she said. I repeated what I said and she did a real-live-honest-to-goodness double take. “You are? That’s great! Will you talk to us?”

“Uh, no thanks,” I replied. (I would like to be able to say that it was only because I didn’t want to “practice my righteousness” before men. However, the truth was that I imagined some drug lord sitting somewhere in a darkened and smoke-filled room watching the evening news. “Bring me the head of that preacher.” In those moments Bonhoeffer’s words rang a little differently: sometimes it really is better to talk to Christ about a man than to talk to a man about Christ.)

The reporter and her cameraman moved on down the street behind me. As I walked I looked back and saw them scurry from one house to the next, she with her mic and he with his camera.

I came to the  white two story house where the raid occurred. A couple of vehicles sat in the driveway. All of the windows were open. A red poster was plastered on the door. I stood in front of the house for a moment and prayed. I prayed for the subdivision and for the people who had been arrested. I prayed for their families and for their children.

As I looked at the house, I remembered hearing Maya Angelou say that she did not allow anyone who visited in her home to curse or to use racial slurs or any form of hateful speech. I remembered that she said she believed that those kinds of words and the attitudes they represent stuck to the walls and to the furniture and that the spirit of such words seeped into the rugs and lingered in the air.

I wondered about all of the things that stuck to the walls and the furniture and the rugs of the house that stood before me. I wondered whether open windows could do anything to clear out the smell of the demonic.

I turned and continued my walk down the street. I saw a man and his wife load their child into an SUV. I saw a young mother open the door of her mini-van to let her son out. I saw him run into the house. I saw her close the door of the van, turn and follow close behind.

I walked past a house where a large man stood in the doorway of his open garage. He talked on a cell phone and I could hear him tell someone about all the guns they brought out of that house. I heard him say “millions of dollars” and figured that he was talking about the street value of the drugs.

I walked and I prayed until I came to the end of the street. I then turned and headed back in the direction I had come.

I thought about that time when Jesus sent out his disciples on a short term mission trip and told them: “When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him…” I wondered if there was a “man of peace” in this neighborhood and, if there was, whether he had pulled in the welcome mat following the raid.

I walked past a few more houses and saw a woman standing in the open doorway of her garage. I waved and she waved back. I said, “You all have had a rough week haven’t you?” She took a step or two forward and turned her right ear toward me. “I’m sorry?” She said. I repeated what I had said.

“Oh, my gosh!” She said. “You have no idea!” She stayed close to her open garage and I stood at the edge of the street and she told me about what had happened. She told me about how the fire engines and police and SWAT team and DEA agents had come swarming in from every direction at once and how the streets were lined with police cars and fire trucks. She told me about being evacuated from her house because of the explosive possibilities. She told me about how they had brought in a robot and about how the robot entered the house. She told me about the family who lived in the house and how they were carried off and how there was no gun fire and no violence. She told me about how quiet they were and how seldom they ever saw anyone coming and going.

“I guess they were just trying to fit in,” she said. “Just trying to be as ordinary as the rest of us.”

I listened to her for five or ten minutes. She seemed to want to talk it out, if even from a safe distance. I said, “Well, I sort of figured you all had been traumatized so I thought I’d just walk through the neighborhood and pray for you and your children”.

“Oh, my gosh! Thank you!” she said. She went on to tell me that she and a woman down the street were prayer walkers and how they had circled the whole area many times praying for families and for children and for the elementary school down the street. She pointed to a house down the street and said, “The woman who lives down there is a part of a women’s ministry. She’s a real prayer person too!”

She asked me what church I was from and I told her. I added, “I am not really here to promote my church. I am just here because it seemed like what I was supposed to do.”

I went on to tell her that I had decided to invite the men’s group at our church, a group we call BOB, to return to the neighborhood on Saturday morning to prayer walk. I assured her that we would do so quietly and discretely.

“Oh listen!” she said. “You and your men’s group can come over here and pray for us any time you want to! We are just an ordinary subdivision but we need your prayers.”

We said our farewells and I continued on my way.

I had met a “man of peace”. He happened to be a woman.

Prayer Walking in the New Ordinary (4)

As I walked I looked ahead down the street I had just driven. A slight rise in the road prevented me from seeing all the way to the end of the street. It was so quiet. Although I had seen a few people during my little drive through, I could see no one at the beginning of my walk.

I thought about a conversation I had with a former colleague of mine who lives surrounded by the beautiful mountains and pastures of East Tennessee. We were talking about the little church I serve in the suburbs of Atlanta. He asked me about the church and how well we were doing at serving our community. We had been talking about missional theology and the little missional self-assessment: “If your church disappeared from your community tomorrow, would it be missed?”

I remembered saying to him, “Our church building is located next to a few subdivisions, and some of them are gated. On top of that, few people are ever home.” I explained to my friend that I was not sure that there is a “local community” in the suburbs of Atlanta.

“I am not even sure that the home is the center of life in the suburbs of Atlanta,” I said. “I think perhaps the street, or, better- the expressway- is the center of life in the suburbs of Atlanta. People live in their cars; they just shower, sleep, and watch TV at home.”

My friend sort of snorted. “Want to know my theory of suburbia?” I asked. He nodded as if to say, “If I must”. That’s all it took.

We were sitting at a table so I grabbed a napkin and drew a straight line. “This as a continuum”, I said. On one end, I wrote the word “membership” and on the other end I wrote the word “subdivision”. To the right of the word “subdivision” I wrote the word “neighborhood”. To the left of the word “membership” I wrote the word “community”.

Subdivision—Neighborhood—Community—Membership.

I pointed my pen at the word “membership”.

“Have you ever heard of Wendell Berry?” I asked my friend. He said that he had, that he knew he was a Kentucky poet, essayist, and fiction writer. He went on to say that he had never read him.

“Well,” I said, “One of the key ideas in Wendell Berry’s writing is the idea of ‘membership.’ I went on to describe Berry’s vision of this small town in Kentucky where people knew each other so well that the rhythms of one person’s life fit with the rhythms of another person’s life. Each knew the other’s needs before the needs were expressed. Each knew when to come and when to stay away.

I went on to say that part of what made membership possible in Berry’s little fictional community was that people were tied to land and to farming and to seasons, to the “fullness of time” rather than to “tick-tock time” and to a deep sense of kinship, which entailed not only blood relations but also deep understanding.

I said that in Berry’s understanding membership emerges over time and as a result of being rooted to a place. I recounted the ways in which Berry critiques the transitory nature of modern life. I paraphrased him: “Everybody wants to be someone other than who they are and somewhere other than where they are.” I said that such desire flies in the face of membership.

“We not only don’t have membership in our ‘community’ in the suburbs of Atlanta,” I said. “I’m not sure we have membership in our churches. We are commuter churches by gated subdivisions where no one’s home”

I pointed to the word “community”. “There are about a gazillion definitions of community,” I said. “We use the word all the time but really don’t have an agreed upon way to define what it is.” I went on to say that in most of our ways of describing community we include shared values, shared history, and some degree of social cohesion.

I then claimed that, for all our missional talk about being “the presence of Christ in the local community”, we probably knew more about being the presence of Christ than we did about “local community”.

“I stand on the porch of my own house and look around,” I said. “I look to my right and see locked houses. The folks who live in those houses are from Mexico, Eastern Europe, Korea, and Texas. I look across the street and see the rental house where some folks from Germany just moved in. Straight ahead I see the house where, every so often, I see a tall skinny guy carrying a big medieval sword rush out to his car. I look to my left and see folks from the West Indies, Viet Nam, Liberia, and North Carolina.”

“I have at least waved at all of them,” I continued, “but I do not know any of them. We have no common story and few common convictions. We do seem to agree to enough rules to cohere in some sense but those rules are pretty basic: ‘Pick up the newspaper that is thrown uninvited into your driveway. Cut your grass. Pick up the trash that settles in your yard. Take in your garbage can and recycling bin at the end of trash day.’”

I pointed to the word “neighborhood” on my napkin continuum. I told him I had only recently learned what the word ‘hood’ meant. “The word ‘hood” means ‘the condition of’”, I said. “So, a neighborhood is a place in which the condition of neighborliness pertains.”

I looked at my friend, “ I know the guys next door to me on either side well enough to borrow a wrench, offer to pick up their mail when they are out of town and offer to ‘watch their place’ when they are gone. That’s it. And I know them that well because they are southern boys like me from North Carolina and Texas and because we live next to each other.”

I talked about how our houses are arranged to face the street, which, again, is where the action is. I talked about how folks drive into their garages at night and out of their garages in the morning and about how, if you wanted to visit the guy next door, you had to go out to the street, walk down it, and then down their driveway and up their sidewalk so as not to tread on their grass. I suggested that we humans don’t like to take paths with that much resistance.

I then pointed to the word “subdivision”. “This is where I live, where we live, “I said. “We don’t live in neighborhoods or communities or memberships. We live in places defined by what was done to the land more than the condition that exists among people.”

“A sub-division describes a place that was probably once a farm or a woodland and that was divided and sold and then subdivided and sold in ‘parcels’, which is the same word we use to describe “packages.” Think ‘commodities. We live on commodities that were shaped by a creature called a “developer,’” I said. “A developer is a guy who buries his construction garbage in your yard and then high tails it out of there to the next project. He makes a fortune and several years later you get a sink hole. Where I live is defined not in terms of people but in terms of what happened to the land.”

Last Friday I walked my prayerful steps into a subdivision, a place marked not by neighborliness or community or membership but by artificial boundaries and invisible barriers. I walked between the concrete curbs and prayed as I passed locked doors, suspicious blinds, and fenced yards.

I took an ordinary walk and prayed ordinary prayers in an ordinary subdivision.

I felt right at home. Sadly…

Prayer Walking in the New Ordinary (3)

Friday morning I told someone else about the big drug bust and all that had happened in that subdivision that was located in our county just the  day before. I told him about  the guns, the drugs, and the cash. I wondered out loud what that must have been like for those ordinary families in that ordinary subdivision to see extra-ordinary swarms of law-enforcement come wheeling onto their streets from every direction at once.

“I’m going over and take a prayer walk through that subdivision today,” I said.  My friend was not keen on the idea.  I assured him that I would be very unassuming, as close to invisible as a sizable fellow could be. “Besides,” I added, “Could there be a safer subdivision in our county the day after one hundred or so law enforcement types swarm in on a house in the subdivision?”

I thought about that comment of Jesus about the house being swept clean of the demon only to have seven more move back in. It seemed to me that the lag time between when the first demon was swept out and the next legion moved in would be the appropriate time to make my move.

My friend shook his head and repeated that he wished I wouldn’t do that. I said something like, “sometimes a feller’s gotta do what a feller’s gotta do.” (Lest you think that I was being bold, you should know that I did not see any more danger in taking my little stroll than when I take a walk and cut through any other sub-division closer to my house.)

So, Friday afternoon I drove over to the subdivision, which is located within walking distance of an elementary school. The entrance to the subdivision looked like every other entrance to every other subdivision. An ordinary sign identified it as ‘just another” subdivision.

I decided to drive through to get a feel for the size of the place. As I drove I noticed ordinary split level homes with ordinary cars and trucks parked in the driveways. I saw a sign identifying one house as the home of senior football player in a high school close by. The yards were well-trimmed. A couple of houses looked empty. One or two were for sale. Here and there I spotted a swing set, a couple of bikes lying on their sides by a driveway. I estimated there to be about 60 houses in the subdivision.

I passed a white SUV parked by the side of the street. I saw a young woman and a large man unloading something out of the back. I passed the house where the bust occurred. Even though a mini-van and a car sat in the driveway, the house was empty. All of the windows were open. A red sign had been plastered on the front door. Swept clean.

I drove the length of the subdivision, turned around, and drove back through. I saw a couple of ordinary folks either getting out of their SUVs or getting into their mini-vans.

That old Monkees song passed through my mind: “Another Pleasant Valley Sunday…” Of course, it was Friday but who was counting?

I parked my car at one of the street, got out, and started walking.

Prayer Walking in the New Ordinary (2)

Later in the morning, I told a friend of mine that I was going to go take a prayer walk through the neighborhood of the big drug bust. He cocked his head and asked, “And what will that accomplish?”

What will that accomplish? I turned his question over in my mind. What will that accomplish?

Something about his question reminded me of something my friend Phil Kenneson wrote in his book Life on the Vine. In that book, Phil, in addressing the ways  the convictions of American culture seem to work against those particular virtues we call the ‘fruit of the Spirit’, writes about our deep commitment to being  “productive”.

As I recalled in my little flash of memory, Phil had argued that our convictions about productivity, which is the amount of some supposed good that is produced by a certain investment of time and resources, works against the development of certain other convictions.

For example, a culture that values productivity will not hold “Sabbath-keeping” in high esteem unless such Sabbath-keeping can be seen as servicing our productivity. It is okay to “keep Sabbath” if doing so will prepare us for the upcoming six days of “productivity”. Rest as an end in itself is suspect in a culture that values ‘product’.

Likewise, a culture that values productivity will only value prayer to the extent that “it works”. The ‘productivity culture” might value prayer if it can somehow be demonstrated as a kind of technology (or magic) that “produces” some desired end. To simply pass one’s time in prayer, without regard to whether anything is produced, is seen to be the ultimate folly in a culture given to “productivity”- even when that culture claims to believe in God!

Heck, a culture that values productivity will only value “walking” to the extent that it produces some desired outcome like weight loss or personal health or arrival to some destination. To walk for the sake of walking, or, to walk simply because you can, seems like so much foolishness in a culture that values the productive use of time and energy.

In a culture that values productivity, walking for the sake of walking while praying for the sake of praying is worthlessness squared. And, to do that in a culture that is, for all practical purposes, indifferent to God (unless he can be somehow roped into being yet one more “technology” to help us achieve our self-selected ends) crosses the border into Whackytown.

“I have no idea what it might accomplish,” I replied to my friend. “It just feels like something I’m supposed to do.”

Later I thought some more about my friend’s question: What will that accomplish? And I thought about the great god Productivity. The more I thought about it the more I realized that Productivity is at least part of the reason why we do not value art or poetry in this culture.

I thought about how those folks who appear on the Antique Road Show are not sure they “have something” until one of those antique dealers puts a dollar figure on it.

“This vase has been in my family for 300 years.”

“And, it’s worth $25,000 dollars!”

Cue the swoon!

The real value of the thing is the dollar value of the thing- grandma be damned!

How do we value our possessions? How do we value our time? How do we decide when anything is a worthwhile pursuit? What deep, and hidden convictions, shape our hearts to embrace one kind of action as worthwhile and another as not?

What will that accomplish?

I thought about my reply to my friend.

I wished I had said, “Oh, it’s not about accomplishing anything; it’s just my art.”

Prayer Walking in the New Ordinary

Last week I received a phone call from someone who lives in another state. “What is going on down there?” she asked.  I didn’t know what she meant until she went on to say that the news where she lives reported on a big drug bust in our county that allegedly  involved a ruthless drug cartel. As it turns out, our little neck of the woods was a center piece in the crack down that included arrests in 17 states last week.

The next day I waited for the morning paper to arrive so I could read about the local happenings. I was sitting on the couch reading Neil Cole’s newest book Organic Leadership when the paper arrived. I went out, picked it up, walked back into the house, sat down on the couch, and read the article.

The article detailed the way law enforcement swarmed a house in an ordinary neighborhood a few miles from where our church meets. The article detailed the amount of methamphetamine, the number of automatic weapons, and the huge sums of cash taken from that home-based methamphetamine lab situated in the middle of this ordinary sub-division.

I wondered what that must have been like for the ordinary folks who lived in that ordinary neighborhood to learn that the quiet couple with the baby down the street was allegedly a front for a violent drug cartel, that their home was an arsenal and the site of a highly volatile methamphetamine conversion lab. I wondered if they hugged their kids a little tighter the night after the raid. I wondered about single moms in the neighborhood and whether they felt even more insecure about their surroundings.

I wondered about my own neighborhood, which has endured its share of burglaries and even one home invasion.

I finished reading the newspaper article, picked up Cole’s book, and started reading where I left off. The next paragraph I read said this:

“Once you have been crucified, you are a different person. Old things have ‘passed away’ new things have come. (2. Cor. 5:17) A dead leader is a dangerous leader. Such a person has nothing left to lose. No personal glory is at stake. Ambition is dead. There is no agenda, only what Jesus asks. Reward is not an issue because the leader is already dead. A dead person has no possessions to protect. You can’t even really tempt a dead person; corpses feel no pain and have no lust. Once we pass through death, what else is there to fear?”  (Neil Cole; Organic Leadership: Leading Naturally Right Where You Are, Baker Books, p. 275)

My next thought was, “Jim, you need to take a prayer walk through that neighborhood.”

And my next thought after that was: “Uh….Patience, Lord, I don’t think I’m dead yet.”

For some reason (could it have been all the thought of death and drug cartels and methamphetamine and fear and death and death?), my mind switched to thoughts of resurrection. “Ah, yes…resurrection.” April. Easter. Bunnies. The empty tomb.

But then I remembered something New Testament scholar N.T. Wright had written in his book Surprising Hope, something about how dangerous people of the resurrection can be because, seeing that death is not the final victor, they are freed from the terror of terrors- death in all of its manifestations. (Resurrection, according to Wright, takes the power from the powers because they lose their capacity for threat. Caesar for all his Easter attire does not really care for resurrection, which is the ‘ace” that trumps his “king”.)

“Man, this business of Jesus following gets you going and coming”, I thought.

I got up from the couch, walked to my bookshelf and pulled off Wright’s book. I was looking for the exact reference that I had remembered when I came across this:

“…a proper grasp of the (surprising) future held out to us in Jesus Christ leads directly to a vision of the present hope that is the basis of all Christian mission. To hope for a better future in this world- for the poor, the sick, the lonely and depressed, for the slaves, the refugees, the hungry and homeless, for the abused, the paranoid, the downtrodden and despairing, and in fact for the whole wide, wonderful and wounded world- is not something else, something extra, something tacked on to the gospel as an afterthought…to work for that intermediate hope, the surprising hope that comes forward from God’s ultimate future into the urgent present, is not a distraction from the task of mission and evangelism in the present. It is a central, essential, and life-giving part of it. Mostly, Jesus himself got a hearing from his contemporaries because of what he was doing.” (Wright, Surprising Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church, HarperOne, p. 192)

Right there, standing in my sleep duds, between the early morning headlines, Neil Cole and N.T. Wright I thought, “Looks like I’m taking a prayer walk into the new ordinary.”

Blessing / Not-Blessing

View the following video and then answer the questions following each.

*What is it about this video that can help us better understand the nature of blessing?

*Consider the various kinds of action, the kinds and quality of relationships, and the suggested (implicit) aims of the action that might lead one to call what you are seeing a form of blessing. List them.

*We aren’t just born knowing ‘blessing’ when we see it. We are schooled to name certain things ‘blessing’. How does this video accord with what you believe about blessing? How did you come to think what you think about blessing?

Now consider this video…(Ironically, it fades into a vodka commercial…)

*What is going on in this video that might lead you to think “whatever blessing is, this is not it”? How does it accord or not with your understanding of ‘blessing’?

*Consider the various kinds of action, the kinds and quality of relationships, and the suggested (implicit) aims of the action that might lead one to call what you are seeing a form of not-blessing. List them.

*We aren’t just born knowing ‘not-blessing’ when we see it. We are schooled to name certain things ‘not-blessing’. How does this video accord with what you believe about not-blessing? How did you come to think what you think about not-blessing?

Bonus Questions:

What do these videos suggest, if anything, about context and the emergence of blessing?

How might pairing these videos in this way contribute to our choices as to those we might choose to bless and those we might choose to avoid blessing? How do you feel about that?

These Little Losses, These Little Loves

I took my 15 year old cat, Kitte’, to the vet last Thursday, took him back to the “little room”, and stroked his head with my thumb while the vet ended his gentle life. He left me on a sigh. I could not contain the tears.

As I drove home, I thought about the time, when I was about five or six years old, when I talked my parents into taking me to Burson Feed and Seed, just off the square in Carrollton, Georgia to buy an Easter Chick. I remember walking with my dad, passing the checkerboard painted storefront, wandering through the front door and down a dark corridor between stacks of feed, seed and garden implements to these little cages that were packed with blue and green and lavender chicks.

I picked out a blue one and took him home. I put him in a box and watched him stand around and cheep. I fell in love with my little blue chick. I watched him all afternoon, cautioned again and again by my mother that picking him up would not be good for him. So, I watched him from afar. (I wonder now if he could feel my warm breath as I watched him from afar.)

As the day progressed, I noticed that my little blue chick changed. His cheeped less and less. He sort of wobbled on his feet. After supper, he cheeped no more. He died.

I cried like the baby I was. My mother, who was a wise and infinitely practical woman, petted me and said: “James, just remember these little losses help prepare you for the bigger ones that are coming.” (I smile as I write that because it sounds so matter-of-fact in its cold and truthful comfort, which, in its own way, was so “my mother’. I have since learned it was a truth for the future, not so much for that horrid present.)

These little losses…

The traffic light changed to red at the intersection of Langford and Peachtree Industrial. Doing my best to conceal my tears from the skinhead whose jeep idled next to me, I sat there, these 53 years down the road, and thought about my mother, who, with my dad and that whole tier of aunts and uncles, including grandparents, comprises my big losses. As matter-of-fact as she was, she was right. The little losses help prepare us for the big ones.

As the light changed and the skinhead jumped the line, I crossed the intersection and thought about a corollary to my mother’s statement: these little loves prepare us for the big loves that follow too.

As I continued my sniffling drive, I thought about the artful truth of the creation story. God created the man and the woman, male and female, and created them in his own image. I have been thinking about that “them” and about how it suggests that the “image and likeness” of God does not lie only within us but between us. I thought about how our capacity for friendship reflects the eternal friendship that lies within the Godhead and between the members thereof- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I thought about how our capacity for friendship with the Godhead and with one another extended to other living creatures. The little critters, birds and fish and squirrels and deer, who gave God such delight that God infused them with blessing “life for life.” “Be be fruitful and multiply! I love them so much I want more, more, more!”

I wondered about the meaning of our stewardship, the oversight over creation that God has given us and how that might be shaped by our remembrance of the delight of God, the infusion of blessing and our capacity for friendship with other living souls. I thought about how that might help account for the giant ache I felt for this little loss, this little love.

When I got back home I dug around for my copy of a prayer by Stanley Hauerwas. The prayer was contained in his book Prayers Plainly Spoken, which is a collection of prayers  he uttered before his classes in the School of Theology at Duke University. I remembered being struck by its tenderness.

This is the prayer he delivered after the death of his cat, Tuck, who died at the age of 20.

“Passionate Lord, by becoming one of us, you revealed your unrelenting desire to have us love you. As we were created for such love, you have made us to love your creation, and through such love, such desire, learn to love you. We believe every love we have you have given us.

Tuck’s love of us and our love of him is a beacon, a participation in your love of all your creation. We thank you; we sing your praise, for the wonderful life of this cat. His calm, his dignity, his courage; his humor, his needs, his patience, his always ‘being there’ made us better, made our love for one another better, made us better love you.

We will miss him.

Help us not fear remembering him, confident that the sadness such memory brings is bounded by the joy that Tuck existed and with us is part of your glorious creation, a harbinger of your peaceable kingdom.”

I sat in my chair and contemplated that prayer. I glanced across the room and saw yet another ball of cat hair, the stuff that has been choking my vacuum cleaner for fifteen years.

“Amen and amen”, I sighed. “Good bye, little boy’.

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Thankfully, the practice of dying Easter chicks is a thing of the past. What a stupid and brutal practice! It reminds me that Genesis 1 is followed by Genesis 3.