Vacation

Sunday 5/29/2012 7:52 AM

I am currently on vacation.  My idea of an ideal vacation is one in which I can relax in a quiet place and read a few books.  Since I am a teacher and spend most of my time at work interacting with people I need alone time to unwind.

We are visiting with my daughter and son-in-law and two of my grandchildren, ages 2 years and 9 months.  The 2-year old is full of energy and is constantly on the go and the 9-month old is just beginning to crawl and get into things.  I love playing with them and going for walks but that leaves little quiet time where I can be alone.

As I ran this morning it thought about the word vacation and wondered if the root of the word was the word vacate.   I have certainly vacated my house and my job, which is the usual meaning of vacation, but I want to empty myself like a hermit might if he were on a deserted island, unlikely in my current circumstances.  In the middle of running a number of verses came to mind.  Ephesians 5:18, “Do not be drunk with wine, which leads to debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.”  Colossians 3:9-10, “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.”  John 10:10, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”  It seems that God does not want me to be empty but to be full, full of himself.

John 14:23 records the words of Jesus on his last night with his disciples, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching.  My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”  I need to vacate my heart of the love of things, power and fame if I am to make room for God and the fullness I so much desire.  That would be the best vacation for which I could hope.

Creative God

Sunday 5/27/2012 7:27 AM

Yesterday I went fishing with Ryan.  I only caught one but Ryan caught a quite a few, as usual.  What impressed me was the variety of different fish we caught.  There were large mouth bass, small mouth bass, rock bass, perch, blue gill and pike.  When we got home we went to the park and had a picnic with the kids and grandkids.  There were huge cottonwood trees that were shedding their seeds, so much so that it almost looked as if it were snowing.  There were also various maples, walnuts, oaks and evergreens of different kinds.  This morning I am sitting on the deck and observing different birds, robins, blue jays, gold finches, sparrows, cardinals, ducks and geese.  Flowers are also dotting the landscape, petunias, clematis, lobelia, snapdragons, stock, poppies, iris, peonies and impatiens.  There is a bit of a breeze and I noticed the wing of an insect lying on the table.  I picked it up and noted its shape and structure.  There was a skeletal structure of either small bones or cartilage with a gossamer membrane stretched between them.  It appeared that the structure allowed the tip of the wing to be manipulated separately from the main portion of the wing.  The more I looked at it I wondered if it belonged to an insect or if it was the remnants of a seedpod from the maple tree a short distance away.  I picked up one of the seedpods to examine them side-by-side and discovered that the shapes were very similar.  However, the structure of the seedpod was much more complex and rigid and looked like a branching river nearing its delta.

Psalm 104:24 states, “How many are your works, Lord!  In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.”  I am only in one small corner of God’s creation but his creativity is certainly evident to me this morning.

Routine

Thursday 5/24/2012 6:40 AM

I am a slave to routine.  I wake up early, go for a morning jog and then have my quiet time of reading and meditating while cooling down.  I have a devotional book with assigned readings that direct my thoughts that I use each day.

I am currently enjoying a summer vacation with Ryan and Kate in Michigan.  My regular routine is disrupted.  Yesterday I wore a pair of shorts that I had worn the day before and had gotten quite sweaty.  This resulted in chafing and a painful rash on the inside of my thighs and so this morning I forewent my morning jog.  I am helping to paint the basement at Ryan and Kate’s house and yesterday we moved all the furniture and our suitcases and other materials into a different room.  In the process I seem to have misplaced my devotional book of assigned readings.  So here I sit trying to decide which passages of scripture to read and the topic on which I should focus.  Since my routine is disrupted I feel lost and out of sorts.

My disciplined routine has been a great blessing to me over the years but I wonder if I rely too much on my routine and trust God too little.  I might be a slave to routine but God is not bound to my schedule, he can speak to me through any and all circumstances.  The question is whether or not I can hear his voice when it comes to me in a different vehicle.  Elijah heard God speak through fire and great power when he confronted the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel.  He then prophesied that the drought would end and there was a great storm God displayed his power and presence with wind, lightning and thunder.  But later on Mount Horeb, when fleeing from Ahab, the Lord again spoke to Elijah.  1 Kings 19:11-13 records the event.  “The Lord said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’  Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.  After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.”  God changed the way in which he spoke to Elijah and I’m quite certain he changes the way in which he speaks to modern day Christians too.  The question for me today is if I will have ears to hear his whisper.

Enlarged Heart

Sunday 5/20/2012 6:17 AM

This has been the closing prayer in my devotional materials for the week: “Enlarge my heart, dear Lord, that I may truly love you and live in harmony with all my fellows.”  I prayed the prayer at the end of my devotional time for the past week but this morning I thought about what it means to have an enlarged heart.

Earlier this week marked the forty-third anniversary of my dad’s death.  He died at the age of forty-two after suffering with emphysema for a number of years.  They performed an autopsy after his death and discovered that he had an enlarged heart.  An enlarged heart can be caused by certain kinds of medication but in his specific case the doctors surmised that his heart had to work harder to pump more blood throughout his body.  His emphysema precluded the proper oxygenation of his blood so the heart had to increase the flow of blood to ensure his cells had the proper amount of oxygen.  My dad’s enlarged heart was the result of his suffering with emphysema.

My reading today includes 1 Peter 5:10-11, “And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.”  It would seem that God also uses the suffering in my life to make me stronger and more steadfast and firm in my faith.  I see the adversity in my life as something to avoid at all costs.  I want a nice leisurely stroll through life but God knows what will make me stronger and what will enlarge my heart.  When I suffer and when I enter into the suffering of others their burden is lifted, my heart is enlarged, and my faith is strengthened.  Praise the God of all grace.

Us Vs. Them

Friday 5/18/2012 5:06 AM

“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!”  This opening verse of Psalm 133 was the first thing I read this morning.  I’ve been reading it every day this week but today it reminds me of an email I got yesterday at school from the retiring president of the union.  In the email he thanked those people who had worked with him over the last couple of years and asked for unity and for support for the new, incoming union officers.  A few minutes later a faculty member responded by describing the outgoing president’s job as “to get a bunch of capitalists, who like to hold onto their money, to act like Marxists, who like to share their money.”  That kind of rhetoric and attitude is one of the things that has turned me off to the union over the years.  From the first days when the union was trying to organize the faculty it has been cast as a struggle of the poor, overworked and underpaid faculty against an oppressive, overbearing school administration.

In the four years before the union was voted in the faculty got cost of living raises every year and one year we got an addition raise besides.  There was a collegial relationship between the school administration and the faculty as a whole.  When the union came in they didn’t agree on any part of the contract for over three years.  Any proposal made by the district was viewed with suspicion, gone over with a fine-toothed comb and ultimately rejected by the union.  During those years there was a total of twelve percent cost of living increase and when the union finally settled on the salary part of the contract it was for a ten percent raise, two percent below the cost of living.  When they announced the results of their negotiation it was hailed as a great coup.  I saw it as a loss of two percent.  To this day, ten years later, we still do not have a contract that covers the entire employment package.  The union, of course, blames a stubborn, bullying, recalcitrant district and school administration.

In his book, Imaging God, Douglas John Hall suggests that forgiveness in our relationships with others will transform the church and the broader community.  He writes, “The face of forgiveness, acceptance, and love that has been shown using the compassionate countenance of the God of Golgotha can be reflected in the faces that we show to one another.  We can also begin there to live out of a trust that overcomes the ancient addiction to suspicion that infects our race.  We can begin there to seek and find intimations of the communality that is our de facto status as creatures, though we resist it strenuously and take refuge in the illusion of self-sufficiency.  We can begin there to defy the barriers to peace and justice that arise when human beings are conditioned to regard other human beings as ‘the enemy,’ or to think them less than fully human.”

The suspicion expressed by the union and the propensity to view others as the enemy enters into all areas of life, politics, health care, environmentalism, race relations and even the church, to name just a few.  Perhaps if we in the church practiced more forgiveness, acceptance and love, exhibiting the compassion of God to each other, it might leak out of the church and overflow into the world at large.

Gutter Gopher

Monday 5/14/2012 5:01 AM

My regular running route takes me past a prison that was shut down last December.  The lawn along the street is overgrown, with gopher holes dotting the landscape.  Yesterday when I ran I saw a cat crouching by a gopher hole, waiting for his morning meal to emerge.  This morning as I ran past that section of the road I saw a gopher running in the gutter trying to hop up the curb back into the grass but it was too small to reach that high so it was frantically running back and forth.  Evidently it had come out of his hole and then fallen off the curb into the gutter and was now looking for a way back to his hole.  His plight was desperate and he was extremely vulnerable to a prowling cat.

After I passed the distraught gopher I thought about people who are in the same sort of desperate circumstances.  Perhaps they are addicted to drugs or alcohol and recognize that they are in serious difficulty but, no matter how hard they try, they can’t seem to escape from the addiction.  Others may be in abusive or dysfunctional relationships and long for love and acceptance but can’t find it.  Shortly after I had those thoughts Tim McGraw’s song How Bad Do You Want It? came on my iPod.  The chorus of the song contains these lift-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps kind of words: “How bad do you want it?  How bad do you need it?  Are you eatin’, sleepin’, dreamin’ with that one thing on your mind?  How bad do you want it?  How bad do you need it?  ’Cause if you want it all you’ve got to lay it all out on the line.”  Unfortunately, no matter how badly someone may want it, laying it all out on the line and having a singular focus to fix things often has the same result as the gopher trying to jump from the gutter to the curb.

1 Peter 1:13 gives good advice to me today.  “Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming.”  I need to take a realistic look at my circumstances and my plight and then set my hope on the grace of God.  He is the only one who can deliver me from my desperate circumstances.