Presby-Musings

Sometimes when I am counseling someone who is having a hard time seeing beyond their struggle at the moment, I will ask them to describe what it would look like if they were able to get everything they wanted.   I'll say, "Tell me what it would look like if you got what you wanted out of your relationship."  Or I'll ask them, "Can you describe what your ideal future would look like?"   My only goal is to get them to focus--even for a moment--on a hope-filled tomorrow, and then to reframe where they are now with this new vision.   I want them to begin to see their current circumstances with fresh eyes and to realize that God will meet them right where they are in order to lead them where God wants them to go.   Nine times out of ten the person will get a faraway look in their eyes.  They will first ponder my suggestion and then relate to me what their future could  be if they were able to overcome their challenges...

I was reading today about an interesting aspect of human development that resonated with me on a spiritual level, so I thought I'd share.  When we are very small, we want to have a measure of independence from our parents or guardians. We want to stretch the limits of how far away we will wander from them in a crowd, at a park, or a store, but we don't actually want to be too far  away.   As children, we want what is called object constancy , which is to say that we want to maintain our connection with our parent or guardian even as we wander a bit.  When we can still see them, or know that they are there--we feel safe.  This is why children will often rush back and forth from playing on a playground to the patient parent, who is sitting nearby on a bench.  They just want to be reassured the parent is still there before returning to play.  There is a lesson here for those of us who struggle sometimes to know that God is with us in our s...

Our words are feathers that fly on our breath. Let them go in a holy direction. - Jeanne Lohmann My littlest boy Jacob has basically been an only child for the past week.  Both of his older brothers are gone for the moment--one on a mission trip, and the other attending a wedding out of state.   I've noticed that when his brothers aren't around, Jacob wants to talk more and share more about what he's thinking.  This translates into some fairly diverse conversations about things that happened at his day camp, a new video game he loves to play, Minecraft and much more.  I've also noticed a bit of a pattern with him.  Jacob will chatter away for a while, and then will pause to make sure that I'm listening.  I completely understand why he does it.  He wants to know that I care about what he cares about to some extent, but deeper still he wants to know that I care about him.    We all have the same longings when it comes to our conv...

When I was in my late teens and early twenties I was part of a subculture of mostly young men my own age who were referred to back then as a "metalheads."   We all listened to hard rock or "heavy metal" music almost exclusively.  We all attended the same heavy metal concerts and generally, all wore the same kinds of jeans, shoes and black concert t-shirts when we did.  We all thought we were such unique individuals.   You see, we lived under the illusion that we were special even though we did everything we could to fit into a group with which we longed to be associated.   Most of us live with these kinds of illusions every single day in a culture that is constantly creating them at a feverish pace.   And so, far too many of us become part of a desperate and mad scramble to fit in with our chosen tribes by any means necessary.   We do this, even if it means silencing our questions, blindly accepting the ...

Good is the enemy of great... Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.   - Jim Collins  There is a moment in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus is tempted by the Accuser (the literal translation of the word Satan) to do good things, rather than great things. He's tempted to:  turn stone into bread rule the world perform impressive miracles  The Accuser's temptations are strong.  In one fell swoop, Jesus could solve the problem of hunger in the world, blow everyone away with how powerful he is (which would remove all doubts about him), and then basically take over the world and fix all the political, economic and social ills of the day.   Instead, Jesus refuses to do what seems good in favor of what is great.  He pushes back against the temptation to affect one particular moment in history, in order to fulfill his calling to change  all of history  and to bri...

You can see a lot by looking. - Yogi Berra  Almost all of the conflict in our lives comes to us when we live into the lie that we deserve  to have our own way.  That the difficult people in our lives wouldn't be difficult if they were just able to see the world as we see it.     Along those same lines, our struggle for peace in the middle of trials and tribulations is often grounded in our perceived need for things to work out in our favor... every time.   The late singer/songwriter Rich Mullins captured this struggle in his song, "Hold Me Jesus":  Surrender don't come natural to me.  I'd rather fight you for something  I don't really want Than to take what you give that I need.  This morning I read this convicting and powerful quote from Richard Rohr, who writes:    "It is our resistance to things as they are that causes most of our unhappiness."  Make no mistake, Rohr is...

Cut doors and windows  to make a room. Where the room isn't,  there's room for you.  - Lao Tzu When I read the above passage from Lao Tzu's short poem "The uses of not," it stood out for me in a way that I couldn't quite describe at the moment, and it left me with the feeling that I was supposed to know  something because of it.  To be honest, the last line was what grabbed me at first:  "Where the room isn't/there's room for you."  There was something true and beautiful about that line that spoke to me deeply.  The author seems to be saying, "In the empty spaces... in the margins... there is room for you there."  But it was the first line of that passage that eventually gave me some clarity as to it all resonated with me so strongly:  "Cut doors and windows to make a room."  That powerful line prompted me to ask myself:  "How often do I wall myself off from the world around me... from people who I enc...

Winning does not tempt that man.  This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,  by greater and greater beings.  - Rainer Maria Rilke A friend recently shared with me that she couldn't wait until a certain day in September to arrive because she had marked that day as the beginning of many of the trials and tribulations she and her family had faced over the last year.   To reach that date, she believed, would mean that a year of hard things had come to an end, and she could begin looking forward to a new year with new possibilities.  That made perfect sense to me.  I have my own milestone date in mind as well.   I was listening to a song by singer/songwriter Ryan O'Neal the other day, and these lyrics touched me deeply:   God, it has been quite a year- I've lived a little bit and I've died a little more. I know that I've asked it before, But please let the scale tip here in my favor. I always feel a bit guil...

"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?"   - Matthew 7:3 Nearly twenty years ago, as part of a spiritual retreat, I met a man named Dale, who was one of the most loving people I've ever known.   Dale was one of the leaders of the retreat, and he was instrumental in my coming to terms with my own spiritual and religious baggage.  And I had a lot of baggage.   I learned a phrase from Dale that has stuck with me all through the years:  "What I see in you, I see in me." Dale would quietly insert this phrase every time we would start to rail about the difficult people in our lives.   Me: "She is so frustrating...  she never listens to me, and then always wants to give me advice."  Dale: "What I see in you, I see in me."   Me: "That guy drives me crazy, he's so full of himself."  Dale: "What I see in you, I see in me."...

I read this quote the other day about "being ready" from Tim Fargo, a writer, and blogger. He wrote, "Opportunity doesn't make appointments, you have to be ready when it arrives."  The fact of the matter is, most of us don't live our lives poised to take advantage of opportunities.  We don't live our lives ready to step boldly into the future.  If we are being honest, most of us live our lives pretty much the same way every single day--the same patterns, the same roads, the same activities...   And we do this because it feels comfortable.  There's typically not enough going on to bust us out of the inertia that we create out of a need for safety and security.   But on occasion, we experience what storytellers call an "inciting incident"--something that shocks us, moves us, jars us loose.  Maybe it's a good thing like a promotion or a new love interest, or perhaps it's something not so good like a bad diagnosis or a tragedy...

Among the many keepsakes of mine that my mom held on to for years was my very first driver's license.  It now resides in a drawer near my desk at home, and occasionally I'll catch a glimpse of it.   I barely resemble the kid in that 33-year-old photo.  He had a defined chin and a nice thin neck.  He had a full head of hair, to boot.   Honestly, I can't even remember what I was thinking when that photo was taken.  I do remember the feeling of freedom I felt when I took my parent's car out for my first solo drive later that day, though.   Many years ago, I read this John Updike short story entitled "The Happiest I've Been."  At the end of the story, the young narrator finds himself driving away from his rural Pennsylvania home to the big city of Pittsburgh, where he's attending college.  The young man is filled with a sense of joy as he approaches the tunnels leading into the city.   As he drives, the young ma...

"There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign forever and ever."  - Revelation 22:5 "No one looks for stars when the sun's out..."   - Rumi  I have these moments where I long for the presence of God in my life so deeply that it's hard to breathe.  I know that sounds kind of odd, but it's true.  I want to know more, to feel more, to understand more of God more and more all of the time.   I catch myself wishing that there was a rift between whatever dimension we happen to be living in at the moment and the one where God exists in God's fullness.  I just want a glimpse, just a glimpse of what it must be like there.   Heaven, at least in my humble opinion, isn't somewhere up there.  Heaven is just on the other side of here.  God is all around us, in us and through us, but we struggle to experience God because ...

This week, while we are in Florida, we reunited my youngest son with some of his buddies that he's known since he was two.  They all grew up together in an unorthodox preschool that was on an honest-to-goodness farm.   The lady that ran the school no longer keeps kids, but this week she agreed to a week-long summer camp reunion.  To say that my boy has been excited about this is a gross understatement.   As I was driving him there yesterday, I drove past the road that led to where my parents lived before they moved with us to Texas.  I had to fight off the urge to make the turn... to drive the familiar streets... to pull into that driveway... and to find my mom still there.   Grief never really goes away completely, I'm learning.  It just finds a place in your heart where it lives quietly until those moments when you remember that there's an empty space in the world where the one you loved used to be.   And then it no...

Yesterday I met with a group from Florida that will be traveling with our group from Texas on the next pilgrimage to the Holy Land I'm leading in October.  My friend shared some of his photos from the two trips we've taken there together.   We came to a series in the presentation that was taken in the Judean wilderness between Jericho and Jerusalem--including the traditional site where Jesus was "tempted" in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights after being baptized by John the Baptist.    One of the ladies in the group remarked, "It really is a desert, isn't it?"   My initial reaction was to chuckle a bit, and say to myself "Well, of course , it is!"  But I realized that for most of us there is a disconnection from the reality  of the stories we read in the Bible and the way we imagine them.   But we don't have to wonder about the realities of the wilderness in our own lives.  We know what it feels like ...

In his book The Jesus Centered Life , author Rick Lawrence was writing about some of the popular misconceptions that so many people have about Jesus and what Jesus desires from his followers.  One of them struck me pretty hard:  "Jesus told us not to focus our energies on fighting sin but instead to do everything we can to encourage good growth.  He is less interested in what we are against, and more interested in what we are for."  I got to thinking about what Lawrence wrote, and decided to do a bit of research on my own on the power of positive vs. negative reinforcement.   Every psychological journal that I found on the topic all came back to the same notion:  Positive reinforcement is much more effective in changing behavior than negative reinforcement.  And by much more, I mean so much more it's not even funny.   When I was serving as a youth director in Chicago, we took our junior high students on a mission trip to urban ...

When I was in seventh grade there was this kid named Tim, who annoyed me.  Truth be told, Tim annoyed everyone.   One day Tim and I got into a fight in class.  It wasn't much of a fight, honestly.  Tim said something insulting to me for like the fourth time that day, and I jumped out of my desk and tackled him.  By the time the teacher pulled me off of him, I had been pounding on Tim's head pretty good.   We both got sent the principals office and we both got paddled, which still happened back in those days.   I had to shake Tim's hand and act all buddy-buddy afterward, but when we were walking down the hall back to class I told him, "You keep mouthing off to me like that, and I'm going to kick your butt all over again." Tim looked at me blankly and said, "If I get paddled at school, I get way worse when I get home. Way worse."  At that moment, for the first time since the beginning of the fracas, Tim began to cry.  ...

A little over fourteen years ago from today, I was face down on the floor of a small Pentecostal church in Nashville, Tenessee having a crisis of faith.   I was leading a youth mission trip that summer.  I had nearly completed my seminary degree and was about to begin the process of becoming an ordained minister, but I had come to believe I'd made a mistake.   I just knew  I wasn't cut out to be a pastor.  I wasn't good enough.  I had doubts about significant chunks of the Bible.  I struggled to love people.  I really didn't like church all that much.  And I had baggage--lots and lots of baggage.   As I lay there on the floor, inhaling the musty smell of old carpet and dust, a story from the Bible came into my thoughts--a story from the book of Genesis where the patriarch Jacob wrestled with an angel in the middle of the night.   Jacob had a lot of baggage, too.  He'd betrayed his family, broken c...

Yesterday evening I attended the sweet wedding of two beautiful and awesome people, who I've come to know and care for very much.  After the ceremony, we all gathered for the reception while we waited for the wedding party to finish with their post-ceremony photos.  Joy permeated the room.  Laughter was on everyone's lips.  Food tasted better.  The drinks were ambrosia.  The lights twinkled like stars.  All of it was imbued with meaning.  No matter what was happening outside of that room, for the moment all we felt was joy and hope at the prospect of new beginnings.  For a few precious hours, we all stepped into eternity and simply reveled in it.  I think most of us long to feel that eternal joy in every moment.  We long to know the kind of peace that comes from a hope that is secured through our trust in God's love and mercy.  But we relegate most of our moments to "ordinary" status and resign ourselves to day...

The Truth must dazzle gradually,  Or every man be blind--           - Emily Dickinson  I experienced an odd feeling today--one that I've had before, but have never really reflected on all that much at the time.  Today was different.    I was sitting with my oldest and youngest son in a cafe while we were waiting for our lunch to arrive, and I had the strangest sense of the passing of time and the importance of the moment.   My oldest boy is getting married in September, and presumably moving on to launch a new life with his new bride.  I wondered how many moments like that I would have--sitting at a table with my boys at this age, in this season of life.   I decided that those moments could be counted on one hand.  I felt a strange sense of the importance of that realization.  It felt like the kind of wisdom that only comes when we are open and vulnerable and knowing that life is short, pre...

"Beauty will save the world." - Dostoevsky -  Today is my middle son's fourteenth birthday.   A little over fifteen years ago, my wife and I shakingly made our way out of an OB/GYN office in downtown Chicago stunned with the news that the barely three-month-old baby inside her would live.  A week earlier they'd told us the baby's heart rate indicated the pregnancy was unsustainable.    We were at the office that day because they fully expected to do a procedure following the miscarriage.   Instead, we discovered that not only was he alive, but his heart was strong and vibrant. I can still remember the way the cold and mist hit my face on that gloomy, cold December morning.  I could smell woodsmoke in the air from somewhere.  I found myself full of wonder at how the city lights provided a vibrant contrast to the grey sky.   It was beautiful.  All of it was beautiful.   The ancient Greek phil...