Weird Family Members and World Peace

 The media has given us an alternative name for the upcoming holiday by inventing “Friendsgiving”. More and more you see people forgoing family time to have their own private holiday excursions. Holidays have become uncomfortable because we are forced to hang out and have conversations with folks from differing opinions. I believe this is a symptom of becoming a selfish society. We want our favorite food and our favorite opinions blaring from our favorite source of news. It is all about what we want. We have our rabbit hole and we don’t want to go into someone else’s. So we have become escape artists for family get-togethers.

Spending time with family members that we don’t enjoy doesn’t sound like an appealing way to spend precious vacation time. But if we don’t start building bridges now, our children will suffer the consequences. We must put aside our entitlement, learn to love the unloveable and show our children how this is done by example.

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“But Uncle Fred is an intolerable bigot,” you say? Maybe we need to take the first step with Uncle Fred by letting him rant without our input. Maybe we shouldn’t try to fix Uncle Fred’s opinions and give him time to speak his mind in a safe environment. Oh, and did I mention that we need to look Uncle Fred in the eye and not stare at our phone or the TV? We need to engage with him. We need to pull some stories from his life and maybe we will discover a gold mine under his bravado. Or maybe we won’t.

Maybe we will only find our own personal gold mine of kindness. Maybe it is time to man-up and calmly sit and listen in a non-judgmental way to those with opposing values. Maybe this is where unity begins. If families can’t even sit down to a meal together in peace, how can we expect world leaders to fix this mess?

There, But for the Grace of God

 Have you ever had a moment of clarity where you see what your life might have been like had you not found a relationship with Christ and for a split second you realized that you owe it all to the grace of God? I had this experience last week and it was frightening and eye opening. It is an experience much like that tour of Bob Cratchit’s future, past and present with the ghosts of Christmas. It filled me with gratitude for how God has held me. It was an incredible gift.

I found a trusting relationship with God at the extremely young age of seven and I have followed him closely as a child, then loosely as a teen and young adult, then closely again as a “seasoned” adult. And although my path has been anything but ideal or even boring, I have clearly been held. Held in my decisions, thoughts and actions by a Father that loves me dearly.

It is hard for those of us who have followed Jesus our whole life to imagine our lives without him. And unlike those who came to Christ after hitting rock bottom, we don’t realize the depths from which we have been delivered. But last week in the glimpse of my life without God’s love, it was quite terrifying. I saw, in another person, my own weaknesses magnified to become my demise. I saw how things might have turned out for me and my family if I had to depend on my own easily fatigued struggling to make it through the tough times. And I saw how it would have been for me in the times where I felt unlovable. It would have destroyed me without that over-riding love from my Father.

Lauren Daigle’s song, Thank God I Do, expresses this perfectly.

You're my safe place
My hideaway
You're my anchor
My saving grace
You're my constant
My steadiness
You're my shelter
My oxygen
I don't know who I'd be if I didn't know You
Thank God, I do

I cannot imagine how anyone can live a life without the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Life is a roller coaster and He has carried me though so many crazy twists and turns. My hope is to someday have the faith to let go of the bar and fling my hands in the air knowing He holds me.

If you are reading this and you are tired of a life of striving on your own power; know that God hears your humble prayer and will fill you with a new life of placing your eyes on him. You don’t have to earn this. It is free for all who ask. Then you can place your eyes on Him and let go of that load. This song expresses it beautifully.

The Chemistry Teacher Next Door

 Life is so unpredictable. In a time when I lost what I thought was the love of my life, I found so many friends and they pointed me to my true love.

It was my first teaching gig. I was hired by a small school district in a town 30 minutes drive from mine. I was married, had a kindergarten daughter and was pregnant. The guy who hired me didn’t notice the baby bump. I quickly found that I loved my students and teaching. But not only that, I found a friend next door to my biology classroom. Deryl was a quiet, kind, non-judgmental soul. He introduced me to his wife, Linda who was not so quiet but every bit as kind, and they took me under their wing after my daughter was born and my husband left me. I particularly remember two of their acts of kindness.

When my six year old daughter was sick and I had run out of sick days to stay home with her, Deryl offered to let her stay on the couch in his office connected to our classrooms. He was so thoughtful and would stick his head in and check on her periodically during the day. About a year later, he and Linda invited me to dinner as they so often did but this time they had someone for me to meet. He is now the love of my life and we have been married for 37 years.

Through the grapevine I heard that Deryl had pancreatic cancer and passed last Saturday. I lost track of Deryl and Linda except through that grapevine but I will always remember how their kindness changed my life.

Splagchnizomai: From the Gut Compassion

 Three years fly by in a heartbeat. If you have children, you know. Years that seemed so long and boring as a child, are gone in a flash in adult time. This is why it is so interesting to me to study the way Jesus used his three short years of ministry. He had a monumental job to accomplish in such a short time-frame! Yet many, if not most of the accounts in the Bible are of personal one-on-one interactions. Jesus never hurried and surprisingly, Jesus didn’t choose the most popular and powerful people to build his ministry.

Jesus spent his limited time with lost, lonely people who society rejected. He interacted with each of those people as if they were the most important person on earth. He had a massive job to spread the Gospel to an entire world for all eternity, had three years to do it, and yet he chose to spend his time one-on-one with lepers, widows, women with questionable pasts, liars, cheats and all around insignificant ordinary folks. Why did Jesus use this approach?

This leads me to the Greek title of this blog, Splagchnizomai. I know. This sounds like a word Mary Poppins invented. But according to my source, Lisa Harper, it means “from the gut compassion”. As I understand it, it was used in Mark 1:40-41 to explain why Jesus stopped to heal the leper. Jesus was driven with compassion for the leper who was a forgotten outcast of society. In Jesus’ personal encounters in the Bible, he gave his full attention to each individual as if they were the only person around. He didn’t stop to look at the clock counting down the moments he had left on earth then rush on to the next big preaching event. He took his time with people. And this is one of the many upside-down, counterintuitive ways that Jesus worked.

So what if we applied this same approach to our short life’s story? What if we valued our one-on-one time with people and spent less time trying to scratch and claw our way to a place with more influence? What if we quit worrying about how big, how powerful, or how orderly our life is and start each day with caring for each individual in which we come into contact, whether we deem them worthy or not? What if we made time for others and valued every encounter as holy and ordained by God?

My biggest block to this approach is that I don’t have it in me to love like Jesus with that kind of compassion. Nope, I just don’t have that. Anything I did would be contrived. So first, I must realize deep within my soul that Jesus loves me even though I’m not the prettiest, smartest or most popular person in the room. He doesn’t measure with the same stick that we humans use. He measures with splagchnizomai. He measures with his compassion and not my worthiness. It is so hard to imagine that Jesus would stop what he is doing to tend to me, yet he has never in my life of 64 years ever let me go. He has held me through my darkest night. It is his love and not mine that does the trick. Nothing depends on me.

So all I need to do is to keep my eyes on Him and let go of my earthly ideas of ministry. God did not create me to be another Billy Graham. I will not cure cancer. I will not solve the homeless crisis. He created me and placed me with those he chose for me to love. I must trust his plan. My role is to let Him love through my attention and presence, one person at a time.