Whoa…just watched a fascinating—not to mention disturbing video (see below).  At a HS journalism seminar for public HS students in Seattle, Dan Savage goes off on the Bible.  I’d love to talk with Dan because while he calls the Bible “BS” and claims that the Bible gets it wrong on numerous subjects (homosexuality, slavery, etc) HE GETS IT WRONG!  He totally doesn’t get the apostle Paul on slavery, which may be occasion for another blog (two very different forms of slavery in the first century).  He conveniently neglected to mention that the leaders of the anti-slavery movement — both in England and America— were committed followers of Jesus.  His speech would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.

I’m actually not put off by the fact that he disagrees with the message of the Bible—he’s entitled to his opinion and he’s certainly not alone.  It’s the caricature of what the Bible says and doesn’t say that drives me nuts!  I don’t mean to be unkind but this kind of intellectually lazy, arrogant and adolescent tirade promotes a kind of bigotry against followers of Jesus that Dan himself would portend to oppose.  It takes a level of rigor and study to avoid superficial denunciations and to correctly understand the WHAT behind the WHY of the Bible (i.e. historical and cultural background that gives context to what is taught).  

Having said all that, may we all be reminded that Dan is deeply loved by God and is therefore deserving of love and respect, whether or not he shows it in return.    

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao0k9qDsOvs 

It seems like I’ve got a bit of a dog theme going here with my last couple of posts.  I’m not sure what that means, if anything.   Feel free to indulge in overused metaphors (I’m in the dog house, my life has gone to the dogs, etc).  

In any case we were walking with Bailey (our dog—the smaller one), and Baya, one of our grand dogs—which is just weird and wrong to say.  During the one mile walk Bailey and Baya were obsessed with two things: sniffin’ and peein’.  Me?  I’m walking down the road wondering how the Tigers could have so unceremonially dumped a class guy like Brandon Inge from the team.  I’m thinking about tomorrow’s message—will people will get it and apply it to their (including my) lives?  

But Bailey and Baya were quite content to sniff and pee.  It’s like they were saying, “Wait!  Charlie was here!  I’d recognize that scent anywhere!  Charlie—he’s a bulldog and he thinks he’s all that.  If I can squeeze out just a dribble of pee I’ll show him who’s top whizzer around here!”

Of course, I’m not sure that’s what was running through their doggie brains but it seemed plausible at the time.  But the more I thought about this—that my mind so often wanders while the dogs are so intently  ”in the moment”—it started me thinking about all the things I miss because my head is elsewhere.  God has this amazing world—full of things to see, smell, hear, touch, etc—and so often I miss it.  Bailey and Baya see things.  They smell things.  They touch things.  They are “there”—fully present.  

Me?  Sometimes I’m on another planet.  My body is here but my mind drifted.  And I bet I’m not alone in this.  I bet tons of us struggle with living in and fully appreciating the moment before us.  

So I’m thinking that I should sniff more.  Maybe—quite literally—I need to slow down and smell the coffee…just let the aroma fill my nostrils before the first sip (same goes for a good glass of Cab).   I think I could do better at seeing more too—really noticing people and things.  And I KNOW I can do better at listening.  Sometimes I think about stapling my lips shut, but somehow that seems a bit over the top.   

Maybe the next time we go for a walk I’ll take a cue from the dogs and enjoy the moment with them…see what I can see, hear, smell, and touch.  As for taste?  I’ll wait ‘til I get back home for that. 

NOT AS STRONG AS WE THINK WE ARE

In the shadow of the death of yet another pop icon, Whitney Houston, I couldn’t help but think of the words of the late Rich Mullens:

We are frail 
We are fearfully and wonderfully made 
Forged in the fires of human passion 
Choking on the fumes of selfish rage 
And with these our hells and our heavens 
So few inches apart 
We must be awfully small 
And not as strong as we think we are

Whitney Houston was a rare talent, and her death saddens me immensely.  Like many before her it seems she was taken before her time.  I can’t help but wonder what kind of music would have flowed from her in her older years.  Perhaps the video attached is a hint.  Cece Winans, Whitney Houston and Shirley Caesar on the same stage—they are ridiculous together!  I wish there could have been more.

Whitney came from a family of faith, and in spite of her battles with alcohol and drugs, she returned to her faith in her later years.  Unfortunately, Rich Mullens words proved to be true—we’re not as strong as we think we are.  Sometimes things get their hooks deep in us and we limp—at best—through life.  For Whitney it was alcohol and drugs.  For you and me it may be the same or something different, but there’s something that will get us if we are not careful.

Our vulnerability to fall into all sorts of destructive patterns reminds me of something else.  I’m sometimes intrigued by people who are followers of Jesus declaring their “victory” in certain areas of life—victory over addictions, or greed, or hatred, or laziness, or gluttony, or materialism, etc.  But exactly how victorious are WE?  Declaring that in Jesus we have ultimate victory over sin and death is one thing (and a beautiful thing at that).  But declaring that WE are victorious over things that have hooked us in the past?  Whoa…WE are not as strong as WE think we are.  Without loving, supportive and in some cases “in your face” community those victories can be short-lived.

Because of things in my past I can fall back into the trap of co-dependency—thinking it’s my job to make everybody happy.  Years ago a person asked me, “Who appointed you the f-ing general manager of the universe?” (PS  Don’t jump down my throat on this—just quoting).  She didn’t seem phased one bit that I was a pastor.  She unleashed a stream of f-bombs.  When she was finished I paused and said, “Please don’t hold back—tell me what you REALLY think.”  Then we just looked at each other and starting laughing.   

She was right.  My co-dependency led me to believe I could manage the universe, and if I did it well enough everybody would be happy and everybody would love me.  Insane, I know (not to mention a subtle but real form of idolatry—wanting everybody to love me). But when you are in the midst of insanity it appears perfectly reasonable.  

If I’m not careful, I could return to that life as easily as Whitney returned to drugs and alcohol.  Because, alas, we are not as strong as we think we are.

But God is.  And it is His strength that carries us in our weakness.  It is his mercy that covers over our sin.  It is his loving arms that provide a safe haven, and it is His Son that takes us to heaven.

I can’t wait to hear that heavenly choir…with voices like Cece Winan, Whitney Houston and Shirley Caesar in it.  I wonder, will they let a white dude in that choir?  I can do the sway thing and keep the 2-4 tempo.  I can even sing on pitch…most of the time.  Please?!?!

Today is Feb. 5—Super Bowl Sunday.  Most of planet earth (self included) will be tuning in to watch the Super Bowl in a few hours.  Okay…so many of you will be tuning in to watch the commercials.  Gotta love those Super Bowl commercials.  For $3 million/30 sec. they better be good!

The Super Bowl always falls in the teeth of winter—early February.  It’s brutally cold in February.  But not this year.  What happened to winter?  Yesterday felt like early April—sunny and low 40’s.  This is N. MI…there’s green on the golf course!

I’m calling this “The winter that never was.”  Outside of a few inches here and there it’s been strangely mild.  What’s going on?  Global warming?  Right about the time you go down that road we’ll get hit with sub zero temps and crazy blizzards. For all I know I will wake up tomorrow to gale force winds and drifts so high you can’t safely pull out of your driveway.

But for now I am enjoying the winter that never was…or hasn’t come yet.  I feel bad for people who make their living on snow.  I also feel bad for those who spend lots of money fleeing winter weather—you didn’t flee much.  But all in all I’ve enjoyed this weird, wonderful winter that never was.

I’m thinking of a new Traverse City mantra.  Instead of “A view of the bay is half your pay,” how about this: “In the bay by the middle of May.”  We shall see…

This past weekend I gave a message about fear, namely that we need to stop denying/pretending (or being paralyzed by it), and work through it.

In the course of the message I talked about the fact that the #1 command in the Bible is “Do not be afraid.”  It starts in Genesis (15:1) and goes all the way to Revelation.  Dozens and dozens of times God says, “Do not be afraid” or “Fear not.”  Same thing…

But then we read other statements that talk about fearing God.  Proverbs 9:10 says that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom! 

Hence, “to fear or not to fear?  That is the question!”  Forgive me for taking a bit of Shakespearian liberty.  Below is an email I received from a retired pastor who attends our church.  He is an wonderful man—loving, wise and a great teacher.  I decided (with his permission) to include his email and my response.  I hope it helps a bit.

Nick

hi nick,    an interesting series—and really valuable (to me , anyway). you hit on a few of the potholes that upset my own growth, and create difficulty with others. looking forward to the rest( i think).  yesterday, you anticipated one of the truths that our Mt. study will come to on 10/20 - “do not be afraid” (Mt.10:26,28,31). thanks for the advance help. you mentioned that that command to not be afraid runs all thru the Bible , and the command to be afraid is also present, “fear the Lord”. i wish you had explained the difference, even tho the verb, and its cognates are the same. (phobeomai, phobos) my take on it is that the word has multiple meanings, depending on the object of the “fear”. fear/dread of things/people/task, but worship/respect of the Lord/spouse (Eph.5:33)      in any event, i truly respect you and honor you as God’s rep. here.      grace and joy,  ned amstutz
 Reply Reply to all Forwardntwomey is not available to chatYour message has been sent.Reply Nick Twomey to ntwomeyshow details 2:45 PM (0 minutes ago) Thanks Ned.
Yes, I wish I had more time to talk about the difference between fearing God and not being afraid.  I probably should not even mention a point that doesn’t have time to be explained!  
The issue of “fear God” is an interesting one theologically.  Many believe it simply means “holy reverence/deep respect.”  And it includes that for sure.  But if you stop and think about it, we “fear” (i.e. are a bit phobic) about most things we don’t know or understand.  It’s why we’re phobic about the dark (among other things).
So to come into the presence of a Being that is both holy and “wholly other” is a terrifying thing.  We have no frame of reference.  We are—to put it plainly—freaked out!  Isaiah 6 is a good example.  When God pulls back the curtain and Isaiah sees God enthroned in heaven, he drops to his knees and declares that he is “undone.”  The language in Hebrew conveys the sense of moving from integration to disintegration.  
All that to say that “fearing God” conveys not just a deep respect but a jaw-dropping, knee-knocking, heart-pounding “dis-integration.”  It clearly is not fear as in being afraid that God will pounce on us, take advantage of us, do us harm, etc.  It’s more of a sensory overload where we are in the presence of a power so far beyond us that we short-circuit (for a lack of a better phrase).  What we learn in the person of Jesus is that this holy God is also full of love, grace, mercy, compassion and forgiveness.  Talk about Good News!
I’m sure I don’t have this all figured out so I’ll let you take over from here :)
With love and great respect,
Nick

This week I am in the northern part of S. Africa (Mafikeng—near the Batswana border) on a personal vacation/missions trip.  I am walking alongside an incredible couple by the name of Mike and Michelle Tessendorf.  They are pastors and founders of an organization called Orchard: Africa (www.orchardafrica.org).  It is movement of sustainable compassion amidst suffering and hardship that for many of us is inconceivable.

I wish I had pictures to post but those will come later.  For now imagine looking over row after row after row of fresh graves—children and young adults from one day old to thirty years old. The AIDS pandemic has brought great misery and suffering in Africa, but in the midst of it all is a kind of hope that defies logic.  I’ve been learning so much from Mike and Michelle about causes and solutions and the more I learn the more I realize how little I know.  The issues are as complex as we human beings.  To say I am humbled is an understatement.

I met several courageous, beautiful people today—all HIV+, some with full blown AIDS. To offer them the gift of encouraging words, human touch, and compassion was all I had to offer.  I hope it was enough.

Through Mike and Michelle’s wise leadership they are creating a network of leaders who are addressing systemic problems (overwhelming in many ways) with grace, compassion, foresight and enormous wisdom.  Michelle has written simply amazing curriculum on AIDS for students and has also developed equally effective curriculum to assist children in grieving the loss of parents to AIDS (death, as I have learned, is simply not spoken of in this culture—therefore children are living with enormous trauma by the loss of parents who seemingly just disappear).

I am with friends Herb and Chris Fluharty, a couple in their late 60’s who in recent years decided to step out of their personal comfort zone and get involved in a deeply personal way.  Rather than sitting comfortably on the substantial resources God has entrusted to them, Herb and Chris are giving and serving in ways that both inspire me and humble me.  They are living examples of what I talked about in the series we conclude this weekend (Oct. 2, 2011)—MOVE.  

But what impresses me most is the wisdom of God at work to bring long-term, sustainable solutions to deep, systemic problems.  Coming on a trip like this and getting all emotionally entangled in a way that results in “shoot from the hip” solutions won’t work.  In spite of my best efforts I keep spouting off ideas like, “What if we…” as if a thousand people before me haven’t thought of that!  Sometimes I want to smack myself.

But Mike and Michelle have made a long-term commitment, and with that comes experience.  And with experience comes wisdom.  And with Godly wisdom comes Godly solutions.

Though I am here on personal vacation and orchard: africa is not a Bay Pointe partner, I am honored to meet, know, respect and love leaders like Pastor Jephthe Lucien in Pignon, Haiti, Pastor Benjamin Francis and Pastor Robert Tamang in Kolkata and Siliguary, India, and now Pastors Mike and Michelle Tessendorf in Mafikeng, S. Africa.  

Amazing people doing amazing work in the name of Jesus.  What an honor to be a small part of it all. 

  I became a follower of Jesus when I was fifteen.  Sometime after that I became a huge fan of Bob Dylan too.  Not that Bob and Jesus are on the same level—although they are both Jewish (for whatever that’s worth).  It’s just that I kept picking up key insights about God, life, death, faith, doubt, hope and host of other things through Dylan’s music. 

So I’ve decided to blog about some of this.  I’m not sure why—literary therapy perhaps. If any of this resonates with you that’s cool.  If not, that’s okay too.

Why did Bob’s music move me so?  Why does it still?  In asking the question I feel a bit afraid, as if reflecting on this does Dylan an injustice unless I write something so profound (which often means no one really gets it) that my words carry a mystical quality about them.

Screw that.  I don’t care about being mystical…or witty…or clever.  I am, however, interested in the uncanny parallel between my earliest days as a believer in Jesus and how much of the gospel I gleaned from Dylan’s songs.  As I devoured the gospels (and the rest of the Bible), some of the profound truths I was learning from scripture kept finding expression in Dylan’s songs.  

Take, for example, “Every Grain of Sand.”    It’s a song about trying to find meaning and hope during the seasons of life that make no sense, or when we screw up.  The Bible has much to say about pain, suffering and screwing up.  But it also talks about God’s presence in the midst of it all…that God sees and knows and loves.  Jesus talked about God caring so much about us that not a hair will fall from our head without God’s knowledge and awareness.  

Every Grain of Sand…one of many songs that stirs my soul and connects me again to the gospel that changed my life.  Thanks Bob.

By the way, I posted a link below to some girl from the UK doing a very slow, soulful version of Every Grain of Sand.  But being technically challenged, I have no idea if it will actually appear.  I hope so because I dig this girl’s simple, slow, soulful rendition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY0jpPf8sXg&feature=related

I recently attended a Transformation Intensive designed to help churches bring about authentic, deep spiritual transformation in people’s lives.  I am also taking an online course called “The Leader’s Soul.”  One of the major themes of both the conference and the online course is the place of spiritual disciplines/activities that are catalytic for ongoing spiritual growth (growth being defined in terms of increased love for God and increased love for others—see Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 22:37-39)

Today’s assignment had to do with prayer, but it was a particular kind of prayer: a prayer of surrender.  The idea is to surrender your life to God at the beginning of every day.  It’s the old “one day at a time” idea from recovery.  And since today is really all we have, it’s a pretty good place to start.

One person’s practice for daily surrender was to hit the floor every day “knees first.” This was a daily reminder to surrender the day to God—to invite God to live His life through this person.  Kneeling was symbolic of surrender (it’s kind of hard to be cocky and self-absorbed on your knees).

In the coming days I will be experimenting with various ways to do a daily prayer of surrender first thing in the morning.  In the meantime I wrote my own prayer of surrender as a starting point:

Jesus, I am your servant, humbly available to you.  As best I can I surrender this day to you.  Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is not here.  So I give you NOW— today.  Please use my life for the glory of Your name and Your kingdom.  Add anything, take anything away…at any cost.  I am Yours.  Use me.

May I not be remembered for physical appearance, professional accomplishments, people I know or crowds I address.  Rather, may I be known for loving You by the way I love and serve others.  

I yield this day to the power and the promptings of the Holy Spirit.  May everything accomplished through my simple life bring honor and glory to You, Lord Jesus.  Take my human flaws and failures and use them to remind those who know me that only You are God and I will never be any more than Nick.  Amen. 

I can’t help but wonder about the cumulative effect of a daily prayer of surrender on our lives. I hope you will join me in doing this—simply opening your life to God at the beginning of each day and saying, “May Your kingdom come and Your will be done on earth—today, in my life—as it is in heaven.”  

Here’s to the transforming journey of daily surrender…