Gospel According To Walgreen's

I pulled up to our neighborhood Walgreen’s recently, shut off the engine of my burly van and sighed deeply. I’m home, I thought. A near-giddiness swelled within me as I made my way toward its doors. My wife wants to know what it is about Walgreen’s that catches my fancy and I tell her they treat me special. The people are friendly, greeting you with a robust “Welcome to Walgreen’s” as soon as they spot your figger coming through the door. It’s new. It’s well-lit and clean. The aisles are wide. The prices? They’re okay, not the best in town, but easily overlooked because of its intangibles. Let me go back to the people there treat me special.

What is it with me?

At Walgreen’s or otherwise, I somehow feel I deserve deferential treatment. I know I’m not the Dolly Llama or anything, but I do want its employees to approach me with, well, flowers in hand and face to the ground and see that I have everything I need. I don’t want to be shadowed (like a used car dealer), mind you, but I want you there when I need you. I shouldn’t have to wait for or track down some help. And Walgreen’s doesn’t make me do that. So I go back. Again and again.

Same goes with restaurant service. If I perchance garner a server with attitude, there goes their twenty percent tip. I’m giving them fifteen percent and not a solitary cent more (I jest, of course, but I do entertain the thought). I frequent the places that are redolent of the “Cheers” atmosphere. Places where my presence means something as soon as I come through the door and where Sam (sans Carla—fifteen percent, remember?) is at the ready to make my experience unforgettable.

Out on the highway it’s no different. I expect people to treat me with dignity and get out of my way when I have somewhere to be. God help them when they don’t. If something happens to upset me, I begin fishing for the needles that came with my mental voodoo doll kit and commence to calling down curses and watching them squirm. Not road rage, mind you. I don’t lay on the horn or wave at them with one finger or chase them down. It’s in my head, I tell you. It’s the thoughts that come to me that I immediately (sometimes much slower than that) have to take to the Cross.

I mean, what is it with me?

Why am I attracted to those who coddle, pamper and encourage me? And why do I work hard to avoid those who ‘have my number’? I guess it’s because I still opt for my own sovereignty far too often. I occasionally like to hear my own national flag flapping in the breezes of self-actualization. I like to control my own environment. To pad it and preen it. I want to feel good. To be happy. I don’t want to be worshipped but I don’t mind being revered either. I still like to hop up on the throne and bid some come forth, others stay away; wave my sceptre, go here, do that, bring me…(didja notice? lotta ‘I’s’ in that paragraph)

If the gospel means anything, it means, as I heard a friend say recently, the “blotting out of my own sovereignty.” Adam (or ‘A-Damn’) wanted his own rule over God’s rule. It wasn’t about eating an apple, by the way, it was about Who Rules?

(Scene One: Adam Talks To Serpent) Yeah, who does God think He is anyway? My way: happiness, wiggle room and choice. His way: narrow, restrictive and grievously uncomfortable. Yeah, you’re right Mr. Weird- slimy- creature- who- gives- me- the- willies- yet- intrigues- me- at- the- same- time, I’m gonna take your counsel ’cause it seems to me that if I’m gonna have dominion on this planet I should make the rules, so Rule #1: My Happiness is All There Is. Rule #2: There is no Rule #2.

(Scene Two: Theater Goes Dark. Adam Screams. Sulfurous smell fills auditorium. CURTAINS!)

Jesus came to this devil-infested earth in the form of a man, but so much less than a man. He came as a Servant-Man. God of all gods humbled Himself as a Jewish servant of poor parentage; a slave, as it were, living under Lex Romana. The scriptures say He “emptied Himself” (Philippians 2:7), or, as the Old King James says, “He made Himself of no reputation.”

He didn’t come as a King who disguised Himself as a pauper for a few days among His constituents to see what life was like on the other side of the tracks. He was a King who laid aside His vestments and birthed himself into a family of slaves and lived as a slave under Roman jurisdiction to show us what life was like out from under any other authority except God’s rule. Satan could not control Him. Herod could not oust Him. Caesar could not corral Him. Peter could not deter Him. Pharisees could not contest Him. The cross could not trump Him and the grave could not swallow Him!

Our Lord was willing to suffer any indignancy man could throw at Him. He loved through cheeks blushed red by the angry slaps of impudent men. He served while His own shirt bore the stains of water from bathed feet sloshed against Him. He cared as He fashioned earth and spit for the oozing eyes of a blind man. He whistled the choruses of Zion as He unguardedly touched the foul, necrotic wound of a leper. He subjected Himself to excommunication from His own Temple so that a chronically menstrual woman could worship freely for the first time in, perhaps, ever.

He showed us what it looks like, under the reign of the Almighty, how not to honk or gesture in an unkind way to a selfish commuter (and, of course, so much MORE). He taught us by a Life empowered by grace how, when snubbed by an impertinent cashier, to smile and bless her and to bear the offense gladly for the glory of God. He lived as the Second Man and died as the last Adam to supplant our need for our own sovereignty, which is sure emptiness and death, and to take His sovereignty which is eternal Life and Peace. No reputation here, yes, but well known in His Kingdom!

In lieu of all this I’ve come to a decision. I will forego my next trek to Walgreen’s and head down the street to Eckerds where I’m a nobody. That’s where Jesus would go.

It’s closer anyway.

Walking In Peace (When Your Life Is In Pieces)

“I am like a broken vessel.”
Psalm 31:12

“But as for me, I trust in You…”
v14

Hold fast
Help is on the way
Hold fast
He’s come to save the day
What I’ve learned in my life
One thing stronger than my strife
Is His grasp
So hold fast
–Mercy Me, Hold Fast

Someone I know is falling apart at the seams. I have been watching them make all the wrong choices for some time and now I see them paying all the retail prices on their purchases. On a recent day my heart hurt watching them get pummeled by life. In a ten hour span of time, this poor soul could barely come through one crisis without getting sideswiped by another and their already “very bad day” culminated with the most dreaded phone call they had ever had to answer. I wince for them even now as I recall watching the emotional bloodbath they were dragged through. It was pathetically painful to watch. R-rated, even.

I desperately want to reach in and rescue them but that is a pipe dream. Could they have come through the worst of it? Possibly. Maybe. Ummmm, no. Not by a long shot. There is still a Valdez-sized clean-up ahead. A gargantuan slick on the ocean. And pieces and shards of life scattered everywhere, much like flotsam after a wreckage at sea.

(God, show them a hope. Gather up the pieces of the mess they have made and put them together again. God, get the glory. Take them to the place of Grace where peace rules and heaven is graspable.)

I wish they could have been with me tonight as I prayed with a man whose body is covered–every inch of it–with an auto-immune disease only one in a half million suffer with. There is no treatment. No cure. It must run its course, sometimes taking as long as four years. It is painful. It burns. It is horrific. I went to pray for this giant of a man of God but, marvel of marvels, he prayed for me! Tears ran down his face and swollen arms were lifted to the heavens as he thanked God for his valley! “I know Your purpose in this,” he cried out to the Lord in triumph. “You reign in me! I am Yours!” he shouted to the ceiling tiles. The man laughed in joyful surrender. Laughed!

He is a man who is walking in peace.

I wish my loved one could stand in the same faith of a woman I know who is in the hospital tonight. She and her husband were recently faced with the most difficult decision of their lives: should he stay home and be by her bedside or return to the mission field? What would you do? As in everything in their lives, they took it to the Lord. With reckless abandon, her husband is en route to their field in a hostile country where countless millions need Jesus. Did they choose ministry over marriage? Heavens no! They chose God over ALL things…

I have no doubt that her hospital room is a sanctuary of heavenly peace tonight. I just betcha that that plane ride her husband is taking, though filled with second-guessing and painful separation, is met with a grace worth the risk.

I wish, oh how I wish, this soul could have listened in on a phone conversation I had with a lady just yesterday. It was her sad misfortune to send her son away to a home for troubled sons for a full year. Next month she and her husband will be able to visit him for the first time in six months. She told me that it has only been recently that she can say his name in her home without breaking down. Now she is carried by a grace that sweeps her to peace-filled places and she smiles knowing God is shaping her son and he is finding out for the first time who he is in Christ. His letters home are a diary of the power of God to transform. Predictably, even in the Body of Christ, some have questioned her move, even gone so far as to be angry and think she has thrown the poor child away. She listened for awhile and even agreed somewhat. Until, that is, the glassy calm seas of peace surrounded her and told her to have faith. He is the One who rules the storm. You haven’t thrown him away, My Child. You have given him to Me.

There is no safer Place.

Speaking of “Place,” David gave the secret of his oft-tormented existence. In the Hebrew Hymn Book, chapter 31 and verse 12, he says of himself that he is a “broken” man. The word he uses is also used of Adam in the book of Genesis when he is told to “tend” the garden. It means to break up the soil for planting. God’s minstrel is saying that the hoes and rakes and plows of life had ripped him to clods and bits and uncovered his earthiness.

What a sad predicament, and one to which we can all relate.

But (oh, don’t you just love the Biblical “buts”?), two verses later he lets us in on a little secret. He says that when he is in such a bind, he “trusts” in God. The word translated “trust” is an active verb and it pictures a place where David runs to when he is broken to bits, scattered hither and yon, like jetsam from a dashed sea vessel. He finds a tide that will carry him to a Harbor of Refuge where he can safely winter out the storm. Or in the field of battle when the bombs are bursting in air, he is stolen away into a citadel of protection. He tells us God is a Person who shows him a Place everytime and in any situation.

The couch where my friend suffers from the horrific skin disease has become David’s threshingfloor where God shows mercy and healing (2 Samuel 24:18). The porch where my sister in Christ waits for her son’s return is her Baal-perazim (1 Chronicles 14:11) where God “breaks through” against the enemy. And that courageous wife in the hospital tonight? She’s really in Ziklag where David “encouraged himself (literally, ‘latched onto’) in the Lord” (1 Samuel 30:6) despite great loss and popular opinion.

Take a page from David’s hymnbook. Run, don’t walk, to the Place God has prepared for you in your calamity. He is there. He is able. He will come through for you.

Sad to say, my friend right now is not ready to take the way of restoration. “I’ve gotten this far without God,” they glibly stated. “I can get myself out of this too.” That’s just their pain talking. I know them well and I know that in time they too will run to Jesus. And when they do, I can predict the outcome: He will gather them up, love on them, put them aright and set them free.

I know. I have a story too.

The View From A 'Tamed' Church

Something’s wrong.

One of the leading researchers of modern cultural behaviors is George Barna and Mr. Barna said at the close of 2006 if the present behaviors and attitudes of church-going people were to be measured against the biblical standards of faith and practice, then the church in America is, at best, lukewarm. “Very limited effort is devoted to spiritual growth,” he says. “Most Americans experience ‘accidental spiritual growth’ since there is generally no plan or process other than showing up at a church and absorbing a few ideas here and there. Even then, few people have a defined understanding of what they are hoping to become, as followers of Christ.”

Didn’t Jesus say something about a “lukewarm” church?

Oh yeah…

Barna went on to say that pastors by and large are overly optimistic about the devotion of their congregations, saying that 70% of the adults attending consider their personal faith walk to be the highest priority in their life. Actually that number is waaaay out of kilter as Mr. Barna’s research has uncovered the sad, sad truth: only 15% of church-going adults make their relationship to God the most important aspect of their lives.

Come back to earth, pastors.

A long-held assumption came further into the light of evidence in his 2006 survey: the church is being ingested by modern culture and willingly going down its throat. Barna says only one in five of churched adults consider themselves holy although large numbers of those polled have no idea what ‘holiness’ means. Only one in three (35%) think that God expects them to be holy. “The notion of personal holiness has slipped out of the consciousness of the vast majority of Christians,” he reports.

Mr. Barna has uncovered a trend within the church community which he calls “bifurcation.” Simply put, he sees an emerging (counter) culture within the church breaking away from those who are typically labeled “born again.” He calls these the “Christian Revolutionaries” and characterizes them as having “demonstrated substantially higher levels of community service, financial contributions, daily Bible study, personal quiet times each day, family Bible studies, daily worship experiences, engagement in spiritual mentoring, and evangelistic efforts. They also had a series of beliefs that were much more likely than those of typical born again adults to coincide with biblical teachings.”

In his end of the year report, Barna further states, “(P)eople do not have an accurate view of themselves when it comes to spirituality. American Christians are not as devoted to their faith as they like to believe. They have positive feelings about the importance of faith, but their faith is rarely the focal point of their life or a critical factor in their decision-making. The fact that few people take the time to evaluate their spiritual journey, or to develop benchmarks or indicators of their spiritual health, facilitates a distorted view of the prominence and purity of faith in their life.”

It seems to me that the church in these ’self-enlightened’ times has become one of the many housepets of our culture. No, she’s not one of the chosen indoor ones at the master’s knee but rather kept outside, thrown a bone every now and then, and held behind a fence. Rather than looking to the sky or fence for redemption, she sits at the back door, nose pressed against the glass, longingly staring into the master’s darkened living quarters, wishing for the warm fire and favorable place at the master’s knee.

She forgets that her true Master is a Lion and she His lioness. She forgets when culture was shaped by her, when her roar could be heard ’round the world, when the gates of hell could not prevent her from advancing. So here she sits, behind all her stained-glass bravado, tamed, neutered and spayed, foraging for crumbs in the lawns of social Darwinism, satisfied to be in the menagerie.

My, how times have changed…

Finding Voice At Starbuck's

Finding Voice At Starbuck’s

January 2nd, 2007

What will you do with the time that’s left?
Will you live it all with no regret?
Will they say that you loved till your final breath?
What will you do with the time that’s left?
–Mark Schultz, Time That Is Left

“Go, stand and speak to the people in the temple the whole message of this Life.”
(Acts 5:20)

“I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me.”
(Jesus, John 8:28)

It is well past dusk at the neighborhood Starbuck’s and I am sitting in a café of more empty tables than customers. A couple sits over the top of my laptop screen talking in quiet tones, oblivious to the gentleman who spilled his coffee just now. They seem to be enjoying each other’s company immensely. A gray-haired gent is pounding a younger upstart at a game of chess to my right and two Hispanic fellows are pouring over their medical books and glossary terms immediately next to me, quizzing each other and studying mind-numbing graphs. I steal a look to my left and a woman who doesn’t need to order a large cheese-covered pretzel is ordering one nonetheless. It is the thrum of life amid the cloying smells of danish and java.

In a little over twenty-four hours a new year will begin. The iconical old man is heading down the long hallway to his appointment with the ossuary of the past. He is passing the naked baby who awaits its grand entrance, shoulders slumping with each retreating step, a milky grayness replacing the sparkle his eyes boasted just months earlier. Time rudely ignores him and wishes him to pass without incident.

Here today, gone tomorrow…

It is in this coffee-scented milieu I think about standing, er, speaking up to the sparse gathering and telling them about the Life. I picture myself saying, “Men and women, may I have your attention?” I see them turning to the sound of my voice, some curious, some frightened, others downright disturbed by the intrusion. Can you see the old geezer with hand on dark knight looking over his bifocals at me, berating me with wizened eyes? The woman reading her Bible across the way would smile as she has at almost everyone who has passed near her, and wait for the forthcoming oracle, yet tinged with some cautious reservation.

I think about having Heaven smile down on me as I put myself on the line for the Kingdom and saying, “what are you all living for?”

Tomorrow? Riches? The next paycheck? To feel loved? For another chance?

I think about a mantle of apostolic authority gracing my shoulders, with attesting signs and wonders following, bridging the long gap between the first century and now. I imagine an angelic sheen on my face as I relate the good news, the breathtakingly glorious news: Jesus Christ has made a way out of the darkness by His death and resurrection and waits to escort you to your divine destiny if you will call upon His Name.

I fantasize a stunned silence. Then an outcry. Likely, even my presumed sister in Christ with the Bible might even lower her eyebrows and wonder if I were some loony fanatic who just gave people like her a bad name when all they wanted to do was to live the life and let that speak for itself (then again, maybe not, who am I to say?). One of the girls behind the counter would pick up the phone and call for a manager and for security. I would be told to knock it off or leave the premises and if I persisted, they would have no other choice but to call for the police. I would go down in all my glory, cuffed and pleading for the souls of men. Taken to my Mamartine. My Patmos.

Just now my ipod blasts Tomlin’s “How Great Is Our God” and I find myself wanting to put external speakers to it and letting this anthem drown the din of men’s spiritual apathy here in the Starbuck’s. Let that speak for it’s self. I could just play it and watch the sinners fall one by one.

*bathroom break*

I pass by a girl reading from the New Age section, too pretty and innocent to fall into the trappings of the likes of MacLaine or Cruise or any of our “psychic friends” out there in la-la land. An inkling of an idea comes over me to go over to her and tell her to put it down, that’s not good for you, that will lead you into deeper darkness. Then I quickly set any such notion aside with a “Nah, she’ll just think I’m hitting on her.” So I pass wordlessly behind her and back to my table, back to my quiet, safe and dignified life.

There is the thought that niggles: of course I am not to stand, er, speak up on my own initiative but to wait for the Lord’s direction if and when to do so. Jesus operated out of this and I must as well. But the niggling becomes a pricking: what if God does speak and directs me to raise my voice above the din and share the glad tidings?

Would I?

What if the ‘idols of Athens’ so aggravated me and the ‘perversions of Sodom’ so vexed me that I could not hold my voice? That the fire in me (is there a fire?) so ravages all that makes my fear of man and longing for self-preservation be burnt to a crisp so that the pain and pleadings of the Almighty could not be held back? What if I suddenly found my voice and the fire of heaven fell at the corner Starbuck’s?

It’s near closing time now, and I am putting away the tools of my trade. My fingers are hitting all the right keys to go into hibernation mode. I check the watch again and put a rush on things. I need to get back to the house. I’ve already missed the whole first quarter of the Chick-Fil-A Bowl. Zipping up the satchel, I turn to the lady behind the counter. She smiles and I return a smile. And then I unceremoniously remove my presence, not missing the irony that I make my living as a communicator, but spent the whole evening pecking keys on a keyboard.