And They Call It "Ekklesia" Part III



Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.” But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!” And he said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

Luke 15:25-32

                Enter the stage in my life that I like to call my “Providential Poverty” stage; I was broke, barely scraping by, and developing brilliant ways to spice up the daily meal of Ramen noodles and hot dogs. Due to a concoction of pride and stupidity, I managed to lose a couple of jobs, and finding a new job proved difficult when, for the last couple of years, the only long-term position I held was terminated because of my theft. This was the most shameful and humbling (read: humiliating) time in my life – with one hand I had slapped the world and God in the face and spat out, “I don’t need You!” and then had to extend the other hand and ask for alms.

In the height of my thieving, I was working about five nights a week and taking home around $400 every night, and at that time, I had roughly $300 worth of bills every month (when you split squalor with a few roommates, squalor becomes surprisingly affordable). So, if you do your math, working three nights paid for about four months worth of bills, and working two weeks covered my rent and utilities for a year. The rest was fun money – and I had a lot of “fun” with it. The next year, when the money was gone, as I was developing a taste for dry, crunchy spaghetti as a snack, there was a very sharp familiarity in having no fun money as there was when I walked with a couple dozen Benjamins in my wallet: I was just as lonely, just as dead, just as bitter, and just as broken.

An afternoon in early spring, not many weeks after that February night arguing with God, I was sitting in the cool sunlight outside my little apartment playing my guitar by myself when my neighbor came walking by with her dog. She was an older single woman whose grey hair seemed out of place with the rest of her bright face. She sat on the log bench across from me and asked what I was playing. Confessing that I only knew a handful of songs, each consisting of only four chords, and that they were simple worship songs, I admitted that though I didn’t have much skill, I got great joy from playing them. Pleasantly surprised, she asked to which church I belonged, and though I don’t remember much about that conversation, her last word broadsided me: I had no answer to give her – there was nowhere that I belonged.

Tired of having no place to belong, and even more tired of paying for movie rentals with change from my couch, I received and accepted a job offer to teach 5^th graders for a steady paycheck. Now that I was employed by the State of Texas as an educator, it was “Goodbye, poverty! Hello, slightly-lighter degree of poverty!” Now that I was able to afford the essentials that a young man needs to live, like high-speed internet and Hot Pockets, God began teaching me a lesson that, in retrospect, didn’t take that long for it to “stick”: money, trinkets, toys, and the thrill that they bring are utterly, ultimately void. Whether my pockets were full, empty, or somewhere in between, the person looking back at me in the mirror was exactly the same. When I had money, I threw money around and was entertained and distracted; when I was broke, I was trying to get my hands on more and was busy and distracted. It was always at night by myself, with the sound of the rhythmic ricketing of a ceiling fan filling the room as random headlights flashed on my bedroom wall through the blinds that the emptiness in me was so loud and heavy that I seemed pinned to the bed. It was in the quiet dullness of the mornings that I avoided the mirror every bit that I could. A man deep in debt hates the sight of a checkbook, and when the bill collectors hound him, the sound of the phone ringing brings dread; this is how I felt at the thought of having to look at myself, of having to examine who I had become, because I knew that if I were tried I would be found terribly wanting. This followed me to the small town in which I had accepted a teaching job.

Now, closer to home, my dad began to beckon (though it felt like hounding) me to join my family on Sunday mornings, and I eventually relented. Sitting next to them, I found myself in the place and among the people that I had sworn off two years prior, and they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.

To be continued…again again…

And They Call It "Ekklesia" Part II

               

                After giving sight to my eyes and calling me into adoption under His Fatherhood, God soon began reconstructing everything else I clinged to; we will refer to this adjustment of life to the heart ignited by His Spirit as “hand-new eye coordination.” In a gracious and life-altering error, I was robbed of an athletic credit during my senior year of high school, forcing me to take a semester of P.E. I found myself in a gym daily with eleven girls my age, three of whom were pregnant, and each of us were required to do a very small amount of jogging and a great deal of kickball. Wholly uninterested in this, I asked our coach if, after our prerequisite jogging, I could just walk laps rather than play dodge ball and probably damage a teenager’s fetus. He acquiesced, and I spent a semester walking laps and reading a pocket New Testament every day until nothing but a duct tape cover and wadded pages remained of it. Through the opportunities granted by this unfortunate 5^th Period assignment, God ignited in me the greatest delight of my life: Him, as He has revealed Himself in Scripture. This consumed me all semester, and on New Year’s Eve 2002, in the southeast corner of a conference room in a lodge at Plains Baptist Assembly, I submitted to the call to ministry.

                Scrapping plans for a literary degree at an East Coast university, God beautifully confined me to Wayland Baptist University (much to my early disappointment), where I was to study Religion and English. Before graduation from high school, my mantra had been, “Wait ‘til graduation – I’m gonna leave this town in the dust and go on to bigger and better things.” Then, in college, being transformed by the Gospel, my mantra had only slightly changed: “Wait ‘til this graduation – I’m gonna leave this town in the dust and go on to bigger and better things.” During my undergrad, I continued serving at the small, waning church; here, I was progressively instructed in ministry by a very small, very vocal minority in our little church that, while we wanted young people in the youth program, we wanted their families there more (because families write checks), and we certainly didn’t want the kind of youth we had coming every week.

Ninety percent of our youth were from the wrong side of the tracks with parents only slightly interested in them, let alone attending a small, old, blindingly Caucasian church. These kids were supposedly the wrong color, wore the wrong clothes, had the wrong length of hair, used the wrong kind of English, and emanated the wrong aroma (as teenage boys do when they have no one to wash their clothes or enlighten them about the beauty of God’s grace imparted to us through deodorant – antiperspirant is what theologians call a “common grace”). Though I was criticized for partnering with other small youth groups outside of our denomination (when the big church in our denomination ignored our little church), I was okay with all of the griping, scheming, gossiping, and backbiting – it made me a martyr in my own prideful mind, and let’s be frank: I’m always ok with self-aggrandizement .

                Since I didn’t return a great deal of the Pharisaic fervor to that vocal minority, they turned their sights on my pastor, who had a family to think of, and he succumbed to “preaching for the parsonage,” effectively using me as a bullet shield between him and the Inquisition. Frustrated for having to fight the church to “do church,” I left for slightly-less-yellow pastures. Next, I spent months in a nearby community as an interim youth pastor while the church was searching for a new pastor. To summarize, a gentleman vying for this position left me out to dry as well, since an overly-ambitious college student is an easy scapegoat. Very discouraged, I finally got some great news that my spiritual hero, a man who had discipled me early in my faith and was influential in me accepting the call to ministry, was coming back to the area to lead youth at a large church around here. Stoked beyond belief, I jumped at the chance to be his intern, willingly traveling over 200 miles roundtrip every week just to do that. However, as time passed and I conveyed to him that I was struggling with my calling and my walk with Him, he publicly shamed me in front of dozens of other parents and college students helping with the youth. Hurt, enraged, ashamed, and broken, I threw my hands up; rather than recognizing all of these events as evidence that we all need a Savior to impart to us a new nature, I did what a proud, arrogant, self-righteous young man would do: I folded my arms and told Christ, “If this is Your Church, You can keep Her.” As a perfect bridegroom would, He graciously and sternly answered, “She’s my Bride – if you want Me, you must take Her, as well.” In an ill-advised launch into willing rebellion against God, I responded, “So be it,” and dove face-first into the “dark night of the soul,” the bleakest, coldest two years of my life in which I was crushed between the icy hands of Alone and Empty. I used friends, girls, entertainment, money, and anything and everything else I could find to numb the aching void in me; I betrayed good friends, manipulated good girls, and cut every lifeline I could find. After being fired from a local bar and grill for embezzling a few thousand dollars (this is all after I was saved and served in the ministry for 4 years or so), I left town, thinking I could start anew. The problem with running from brokenness is that the source is me – and there’s nowhere to which I can run from myself. After enduring the same dark night of the soul in another city, I eventually found myself in my small apartment, broke and cold one night in February, asking God why He wouldn’t leave me alone: “I blew it! I left You! Why can’t You do the same?! I screwed up my end of the bargain, so we’re done – just leave me be!”

                That night, as He did in a small lodge in the Colorado Rockies, He whispered to me the same thing He had said years ago: “You have nothing to offer Me, nothing by which to earn My attention or affection – but I have everything to offer you. I have come to adopt you, not to hire you. I have come to make you not My employee, but My son.” It is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance (Rom 2:4), and this was a most kind invitation to come back home – home, where there awaited the family that I had left behind; and they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.

To be continued...again...

And They Call It "Ekklesia" Part I

This post is what I hope to be the first of a series, chronicling the calling, doubts, joys, pains, victories, and heartaches of what God is doing in the hearts and lives of my brothers, sisters, and I who hunger for the glory of God in Plainview, Texas. I feel the urge to record these things at the relative outset of this journey (although God has been orchestrating these things from before the foundations of the earth), in order that transparent honesty be fostered, to portray the yearning hearts who hunger for Christ magnified in our small city, and the quest to find Him worshipped in it and through it. I write these things now so that, at the end of it, I could not look back and claim that I had it figured out, that I had planned or foreseen these things, or give any credit to a blasphemous notion that it was anything of my own devising that led to what, I pray, brings God great glory by lives transformed by the Spirit of God through Jesus Christ, and that these lives, set free by His Gospel, turn in overflow of thankfulness and affection for Christ, and raise their hands to Him and shout, “Worthy!”

Similar to our entrance into the MetaNarrative of God’s story, here in between the “Already” and the “Not Yet,” I begin this story in media res, with God having already done so many mighty things before this writing. As a testimony of nothing more than a man born blind who was given sight by this one they call Jesus, I will obviously be limited to my very finite perspective; ergo, if I assume wrongly of anyone in word or deed, I apologize and ask for grace. I can only avow to the things that I have seen, and can only come claiming to know one thing: Christ, and Him crucified. In that heart, I begin this record with the aim of God’s glory, my humbling and sanctification, and as a witness to the grandeur and fame of the living God, who has done and can do mighty things in Plainview.

                Enter a young man, born into a loving, believing family. As a boy, I lived with a heart of inferiority and a lack of a sense of belonging; for instance, I was born into a family of athletes that, from my perspective, seemed to experience so much joy and connection through such games. Born with severe asthma, I simply couldn’t keep up: I was born with weaknesses not found in my siblings or friends. From this, I always felt less-than and perceived myself to be a disappointment to my parents, though I can point to nothing in my life to ever give me that notion. In response to this, my wicked heart sought out my other giftings, which were not as present in my siblings and friends, and I set my hands to construct them into a temple in which I could worship my greatest idol: me. I began to polish and hone my sharp tongue, wit, humor, and insight to become instruments with which to hack and hew at everyone I knew in a destructive effort to reduce everyone else to the feeling of worthlessness that I felt. Over two decades of life, these gifts in me began to become my identity and god, because without them, I was left with only the weight of the boulder of worthlessness that loomed just overhead. I hurt so many people, was so bitter and spiteful, so proud and so full of gall, and to this day, my inner heart still yearns to erect these idols once more.

                Then one day in a small lodge in the Colorado Rockies, the One I had heard stories of all my life, whispered a message that He has had to daily speak again ever since: “You have nothing to offer Me, nothing by which to earn My attention or affection – but I have everything to offer you. I have come to adopt you, not to hire you. I have come to make you not My employee, but My son.” The boulder of worthlessness fell that day, but fell to become a bedrock and a foundation, fell to become the only platform from which I could rightfully receive that adoption into sonship; because, only founded on the realization that I could not merit His approval and estimation were my hands freed to take hold of His, to be lifted up rather than struggling to clamber up His mountain. This was spit and dirt, a hand on my eyes, and my life since has been one of becoming accustomed to sight.

                In June of 2002, I was welcomed into the King’s family, adopted as one of His sons. In December of 2002, I was welcomed to join His sons and daughters as He sent them out in the ministry of reconciliation, to announce that He is redeeming everything back to Himself and His Kingdom. This took the form of a small, languishing group of people, divided and arguing about how to get more people through the front door. And they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.

To be continued…

A Brief Discourse in Logic: The Hope, Beauty, and Reason of the Gospel

Patty was gone to a conference this past week, leaving Wednesday night and not getting back until late Sunday night. She spent most of those days at “The Groaning Cosmos: Sin, Suffering, and the Gospel,” which was a conference for the Association of Biblical Counselors, hosted at The Village Church in Flowermound, Texas. If you’ve got some free time, google it – buy the audio, I promise it’s worth it; and most of the speakers there (Paul Tripp, Matt Chandler, Jeremy Lelek, Tullian Tchividjian, Bob Kellemen, and Elyse Fitzpatrick) either have free podcasts or are frequent twitterers. But this isn’t a plug.

This past week was a very, very long week with Patty gone. I found myself constantly wanting to call or text, hoping someone would buy me an iPhone so we could have some facetime. I listened to songs that made me think of her and paused from time to time at the home screen on my phone, where my wallpaper is one of her bridal portraits. In the midst of it, I started thinking about my older sister, who lost her husband in an accident a few months ago, how, with red face and running mascara, she would sit and look at his pictures on her phone or camera, occasionally pausing to touch the small digital face smiling back at her. And in the midst of all that we felt in those times, I found myself feeling and thinking one thing more poignantly than all: how I yearned to feel that way for Christ. This is why I feel compelled to write the following:

A Brief Discourse in Logic: The Hope, Beauty, and Reason of the Gospel

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power. After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name He has inherited is more excellent than theirs. – Hebrews 1:1-4

I think of a watershed, in which the ocean fuels the clouds, rain falls and forms the headwaters, which forms rivers and creeks and flows through valleys, pooling into lakes and trickling down into aquifers, from which I draw water through the tap in my kitchen. Suppose I lived in a land where the ocean were toxic, the rain subsequently so, and where the headwaters were poisoned by that rain: each part in the process would likewise be tainted, including what fills my glass and, truly, all water that leaves my house and returns to the ground. One could see that all we consumed and all we exuded was tainted, and that this slowly kills everything. To combat this, one might install filters and build treatment plants by which to combat the toxin; this sounds reasonable, but if the ocean is poisoned, then the toxin in the rain on these headwaters is equally pervasive, and therefore the poison rains upon the whole country, infiltrating every substance under the sky. So, would the materials tainted by toxic rain be effective in cleansing the water of the toxin of which they themselves are comprised? No: the whole country is poisoned. No effort to use broken things to fix other broken things ever ends in a fix. A broken machine that manufactures broken tools will never be repaired by the broken tools it manufactures.

So we struggle in efforts to construct a better filter and build a better treatment plant. We struggle to clean the waters before we drink them, and then shake our fists when the water that leaves our home is toxic still. In all of human history, we have suggested and strained toward better filtration, but have never succeeded. Though we alter the color by inserting dyes of various hues, or the taste by injecting something to cover the palate, or the odor by mixing in a fragrance, we have never made any advances in removing the toxin. In this land, no man has ever poured for himself a glass of pure water.

What would happen if there were a change in the ocean? Suppose that pure water fell from pure clouds, formed pure headwaters that filled pure rivers. How long before the water I drank became pure? How long before the water I returned to the ground were pure? There would naturally be no poison in my glass or pan or tub or sink, and subsequently no poison flowing from my house back into the ground. There would be no need for filtration and treatment plants, which never achieved what they were built to accomplish. The greatest problem was a source issue, only solved by a change in the source, and all of the subsequent toxicity could be purified by that root change. But how do we wash what is defiled when what we have to wash it with is itself defiled?

So what hope have we? We see that the poison spoils all, fatal from its source. The only hope is for someone or something big enough to change the source. But for such a task, who must this being be, and what must he be like? He must necessarily be entirely untainted by that toxin if there is any hope that he could cleanse it. Therefore, he must be perfect in power to change the source and to remain untainted by it, and perfect in purity, not being from this spoiled ecosystem. However, to have the power to purify and the desire to purify are two different things; therefore, he must have motive, for what would a being perfect in power and purity find for himself in powerfully purifying our land? We may answer, “What if he also be perfect in love?” But if he is perfect in love, he must love perfectly that which is most lovely and perfect, and that would obviously be himself, perfect in power, purity, and love, not us or our poisoned world. If he is perfect in these things, then he has no need, especially from toxic creatures in a toxic world. Therefore, we come, seemingly, to a dead end: even if there be one who can change the source, what reason can there be for him to choose to do so? The who seems the easier answer; the why is more perplexing. Here at this impasse, perhaps, it is revealed that the toxin has so perpetuated itself in our bodies and our country that our vision is blurred.

If this being, perfect in power, purity, and love, who perfectly loves what is perfectly lovely, namely himself, then is it not in the nature of love to display and share what is lovely? When I’ve found a great restaurant or recipe, isn’t my first reaction to share the news of it? If I love a musician’s work, don’t I play it for others to hear? If I love my wife and her beauty, do I not naturally praise her and remark on what I find beautiful in her? By nature, love brings forth admiration, and admiration naturally brings forth praise of the object loved; praise is a public proclamation of the worthiness of that object to be loved, and naturally compels the lover to share it, and we delight to see others love it, as well. Therefore, if there be a perfect being, perfect in love, he must love himself most highly as he is the very thing most highly worthy of love; and in this highest and purest love, would he not naturally seek to share it, and have others delight in it? Though love can be poisoned, twisted to end on the lover rather on the object loved, one who is not tainted by the toxin would not be prone to do so, and indeed would be unable to do so, just as one who is not wounded is unable to bleed. Does it not follow that, if he loves perfectly what is perfectly lovely, namely himself, his greatest delight would be for his loveliness to be seen and delighted in? Wouldn’t his greatness happiness be in displaying his perfection, that others may see it and delight in it? So would not a being, perfect in power, purity, and love, delight to display his perfection by instigating contact with a poisoned world, changing the source of the toxin by providing a pure source that only he could offer, and thus rescue the citizens of that world from the poison, and see them turn to him and say joyfully, “How perfectly lovely you are!” This does not betray a deficiency in the being that needs affirmation and adoration, but a glad being that delights in the gladness that others find in what is perfectly lovely: himself.

This is the Gospel, that a perfect God, out of an overflow of His perfection, created all things and created within all things a longing to delight in what is most lovely. We introduced a toxin in Sin, which is by its very nature a rebellion against the perfect God by whom and for whom all things were created. Our poison has pervaded and infiltrated every corner of the country we inhabit, from the cosmic to the atomic, visible and invisible, and we are poisoned people in a poisoned world playing with poisoned things in an effort to fill a hole meant for an untainted Perfection. This is the necessity for the Gospel. The hope of the Gospel is for a perfect God who is perfect in power and purity that He may be able to rescue us. The joy of the Gospel is that through His Son Jesus Christ, He has rescued us! Christ was and is the antidote, plunged into the very heart of the poison, to absorb all of the poison, to become Himself the poison, and to be justly and rightly expunged from the land. In triumph, perfect in power, purity, and love, He conquered the venomous Sin and the end of Sin, Death; He conquered it fully and perfectly, being raised again untainted and alive, sounding the death knell of Sin and Death, and sitting at the right hand of the perfect God, making purification for the poison that plagued the land. Now, those whom He has purified, out of their delight in His loveliness and perfection, run back into the countryside to announce to all that hope has come, that there is a new ocean, a new rain, a new headwater from which flows living water. They sing unending songs for the Unending Beauty and gave all things for the Greatest Pleasure, which is the One who has come, to rescue and to be delighted in.

“It is the chief end of man to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.”

-John Piper

Deep Calls Unto Deep...

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+42&version=ESV

Above is a link to Psalm 42. Though not expressly written, most scholars agree that this is a song written by David, and many place it during the time that he is in exile, running from Saul, and cut off from the Temple.

There’ve been some fairly popular modern songs written around the first couple of verses in this song; I remember singing one of them from the hymnal. The songs in themselves may or may not sing of something true and right, but I think they’ve missed the point of this song wholesale: if we read on, David is talking about extreme anguish.

He has been cut off from connection with the worship of God and the fellowship of worshippers, and though he has not been totally “put out” from God (and gives no evidence of believing that to be true, contrarily still directing his cries and prayers toward God and His dwelling place), he is disconnected by force from the personal and communal worship in the Temple. He has dined on his tears (v. 3) day and night, so grieved that he foregoes food and water. But then, as we read on, we see one of the reasons why David was such an awesome man of faith, why he was called “a man after God’s own heart.” David shows himself, spiritually, to be a bad mammajamma, or if you’re Matt Chandler, you would say “this is why he’s varsity:” David begins speaking the Gospel to his own heart!

Look at who David is addressing in verse five: his soul. If we follow his logic here, he’s moved from expression of deep anguish to remembrance of connection with God, and immediately turns on his downcast soul: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” He starts doubting his doubt! That’s evidence of “varsity” league, my friend: rather than wallowing in the despair, he puts his own trouble and dismay on trial. And look at what he combats it with: remembrance. Remembrance, not only of “good times” in the past, because there is no guarantee that he will have “good times” in the future, but remembrance of the One who never fails: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.” This is David’s chorus.

Faith is less an object of the heart, and more of the mind, and less an object of the mind, and more of experience. When we can’t explain the reason we have been commanded or in questions of God’s nature, we so often cop out by shrugging out the phrase “we just have to have faith.” But we grossly misinterpret what Christ means by having “the faith of a child” (Luke 18:17). I’ve watched my nephew jump into his mother’s arms from the trampoline a hundred times; the kid doesn’t hesitate. Why, then, does he confidently jump into her arms without a moment’s thought? Because she has caught him every single time: he has faith that she will catch him. Not once in Scripture are we ever commanded to have blind faith; on the contrary, just as in Psalm 42, we are called to remember who God is and what He has done, and to take faith in Him. We have a firm foundation for our faith in Him because He’s got a few thousand years worth of a perfect track record of being faithful that we can look to and say, “He has never failed – He will not fail here.” God keeps His word, period, and thus our faith is founded in Him; ergo, faith is not a “feeling” or even a choice only, but is vouchsafe obedience in the One who never fails – it is the culmination and natural result of knowing Him. Inversely, lack of faith is a libel on His name and character, and betrays a lack of knowing Him.

Patty and I are wrestling with this now: we’ve heard the calling for us to uproot and move to Dallas so that I can be equipped at seminary and she can be plugged in and flourish and blossom in her calling as a counselor. This means leaving behind family and friends we love dearly, in a place we have grown to love by God’s hand shaping our hearts. Even though this may only be for a season, the cost is the same as if it were for the rest of our lives: everything we hold on to in this world. However, as great as the cost is, and as sharply bent we are to fix our gaze on the “price tag” of obeying, David has words for us: “remember.” Remember, O my soul, how much sweeter He is than all the things that He has made. Remember, O my soul, that the path in which He leads me is pointed back to Him, so that following Him gets me more of Him. Remember, O my soul, that He disciplines me like a child, and that at times, “no” is better for my soul than “yes.” Remember, O my soul, that I have died to myself and the life I live is no longer mine, but His who lives in me. Remember, O my soul, that He is good. “Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.”

My Dad can beat you up...

There’s nothing like the promise of raw materials; it’s a magical thing as an uncut board lies warm in your hands, or a blank canvas sprawls before your pencil. Then, when you screw up cuts or blemish the surface, it’s like the magician farted on stage. I’ve started a new project for Patty: a modern-looking, three-shelved…shelf, and I’ve made so many blunders on it, you can almost see the multi-colored handkerchiefs proceeding from said magician’s butt, filling my shop.

I started with four-foot boards of padouk (the red wood in the pictures) and bird’s eye maple, which I got at Acacia Hardwoods in Lubbock off 130^th and Slide. It’s a cool little place, and I almost convinced them to let me stay the night nestled at the foot of some of their beautiful exotic lumber (if Acacia ever reads this, please make endorsement checks payable to “Cash”). I was finish sanding the padouk board, which I had tapered and beveled on the table saw (more pics forthcoming) as my mind started to wander, and for the following paragraphs, I make this appeal to the International League of Masculinity: please don’t revoke my Man License, but I’m about to make a reference to “Army Wives.”

I began thinking about “Old Mother Kirk,” an allegorical character in Lewis’ “Pilgrim’s Regress” who represents the universal Church (not universal in the sense of a universalism doctrine but as the Church as she has existed throughout history and the world, my militant theologians). She is represented as an old woman, and History says of her that she is always crumbling, but is never quite crumbled. Cyprian said that a man cannot have God as his Father who does not also have the Church for his Mother; I began to flesh this out, I admit woefully, in conjunction with a scene from an episode of Army Wives my wife watched a couple of weeks ago. In this episode, there’s a woman whose husband is stationed in Afghanistan or something, and she has two boys at home, and the oldest is acting up and rebelling and yada yada. Then, out of the blue, one of the boy’s biological father shows up all rugged and handsome and Alabama-y, and she “innocently” hangs out with him, has a few drinks, and when he has too many, she lets him crash on the couch. If you’re a man, riddle me this: if you were the husband stationed overseas and you heard about this, would you not steal a jet, jump out mid-flight and parachute down to your house, and beat that guy so mercilessly that the EMT guys who arrive later begin to weep?! I would, and that’s why I’m starting online flight lessons and shopping for parachutes, homes. In the morning, the oldest “troubled” son finds the not-his-dad guy asleep on the couch, and yells at him to get out of their house, and of course the line-blurring mother scolds him for his “disrespect.” I’m resisting the urge to snap my fingers, roll my neck, and shout “No she ditt-ent!”

So, to bring back a smack of testosterone, I started thinking about my Mother, the Church, and the suitors who try to woo her while her husband is away. Throughout history, there have been many-a caller knock on the Church’s door: the serpent, Baal (who made my Mother’s front porch a regular haunt for many generations), Arminianism, the prosperity gospel, all Lifetime movies, etc. There have been instances where the Church has remained faithful to her husband and sent the callers away, but there have been a great many whom she has entertained. Each has had some things in common: they only wanted my Mother in order to draw her away from her true Groom, they robbed from her house, they abused her children, and there have always been a few of her sons and daughters who have found one on the couch and shouted, “You are not my father! Get out!” Some suitors have made it clear that they are not Her Groom, and that they are a better replacement (i.e. mammon), and some have posed as Her husband who has come home (i.e. the social gospel), but they are never Him. So to extend this metaphor, here are a few thoughts from me, another of Her sons:

·        I know that these men are not my Mother’s Groom because I know Him, and can distinguish who they are not only because I know who He is.

·        You and I, like sons left to watch the house, have been tasked with “being the man of the house” in His absence, and must love my Mother enough to rush to her defense when an enemy comes to call, whether my Mother sees him as such or not. A scolding from my Mother, who has forgotten her Groom for a time, is a worthy price for preserving Her for Her true Husband.

·        There has always been a remnant: there has always been a pocket of brothers and sisters who remember their Father, even if seemingly from afar. Even when the Church has been romanced away from Him, there have been children who remember and long for their Father, who rush after their Mother, portrait of Him in hand, recalling sweet memories and whispering beautiful visions of the day He comes back.

·        Not even a groomsman is the Groom, nor is a bridesmaid His Bride. No one but Christ may stand at the altar: not the Word, not faith, not service, not gifts, not morality, nor growth are the Groom, though they all have their place in the wedding party. No agenda, no organization, no school of thought or niche or movement is the Bride – the Church is the only one who fits in that dress.

·        Her Groom is not to be trifled with – He’s the biggest, baddest mamma-jamma in all creation, and His arm around Her waist does not budge. He will defend Her until the day He comes back for Her. Hell may have no fury like the diary of a mad black woman, but there is no hand swifter, no wrath hotter, and no strike heavier than the sovereign Creator God holding on to the Bride He has preserved from the foundations of the earth. The message He’s repeated to all posers who’ve strutted to Her doorstep: “You don’t mess with My Lady.”

Woe to the wolves who sidle up next to Her and offer to buy Her a drink; shame on my Mother when she heads to the club when Her Husband is gone! Go home, wash your face, straighten your hair, and put on your engagement ring, daggumit! Your true love is coming!

There must be three things present in you, if you are to be a son entrusted as the “man of the house” while He is away: 1. you must be a part of the Family, 2. you must have a true love and knowledge of the Groom, and 3. you must have a true love and knowledge of His Bride. Just as no one else can be His Bride, and no one else Her Groom, there can be no one else in the Home but their Children. Merely theological thought for the week: does this house have any pets?

As all good things flow out from God, may they return to Him as worship and adoration,

Kasey

Bringing It Up to Code

The wifey and I are in the throes of becoming licensed as foster parents, and we have a safety inspection of our house in a couple of days. In an attempt to be proactive, we started making a list of the things that we needed to make the house kid-proof, or at least kid-retardant. So, today, I tackled some electrical work before the wifey got back from softball practice, and I had a healthy dose of buyer's remorse: our house has been very poorly wired (if you’re the house inspector and you’re reading this, I’m uhhh, just joking). While I'm pretty certain that the concept of grounding electricity existed the last time this house was inspected (like, two years ago when we bought it), I also know that the previous owners were trying to get cleared to hurry up and move out. Ergo, everything that was found lacking in the inspection was rushed and inadequately patched - today's blog brought to you by the word "gilded" and the letter "they did a crappy job."

Practically, I would never do any electrical work if I didn't know what I was doing, even on household 110V. I had an uncle who was routinely working on 110 at work, and when some things were mis-labeled and mis-wired, he was electrocuted and died. Therefore - there is NO work in your house and for your employer that is worth life or limb. Whenever in doubt, hire someone (insert plug for my buddy Jeremy and S&S Electric in Plainview). If you are equipped to do it yourself, always cut power at the source, and use a few different methods to ensure that the power is dead (there's no replacement for a voltometer).

Theologically, I've realized something about sanctification. One might as well get used to me mentioning C.S. Lewis' name - the dude was a master of allegory. This is yet another instance. In "Mere Christianity," Lewis says that we can imagine ourselves as a shack – when we come to Christ, we are relieved when we see Him cleaning stuff out, fixing broken things, straightening hinges, repairing the sink, and so on. But we soon come to find that, once He fixes our little shack, He grabs a hammer and starts tearing out walls, knocking holes in the roof, doing all sorts of Holmes on Homes shtuff (yeah…I watch a little HGTV with m’lady). We are shocked to find that He doesn’t leave us as a little shack. We were content with a nice cottage – He is building a palace. This is sanctification: one thing, by the hand of God, becoming another, the Spirit enabling and enacting transformation into the likeness of Christ, as Christ leads us to the Father.

In the same way that our house didn’t just show up fixed, but was deliberately labored in and upon to become a better home, no one just wakes up sanctified. There has never been a case in history where someone just realized one day that they were suddenly Christ-like. In Matthew 5:29, Jesus says, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” Now, in a culture of such soft ears and sharp tongues, this passage is instantly branded as “extremist,” even within most of our churches. You hear an instant cacophony of “Well, what Jesus really meant was, you know, not to love your eyes, or whatever,” or “Jesus isn’t speaking literally, He just means, like, to not be bad.” What our reaction to this passage reveals is that we see things upside down: we crave the immediate created over the eternal Creator, and would rather have comfort in our short 20-80 years here than the fullness of life from here to eternity. This is like not running a ground wire because it's expensive and troublesome and being ok that you run the risk of becoming the ground and being electrocuted.
Speaking on Matthew 5:29, John Piper tweets, “How intentional do you have to be to pluck out your own eye? Completely.” The process of sanctification, the process of the Spirit making one thing into another thing, a dead rebel into a living son, costs us, in the same way it costs to make a broken shack into a palace. There is grinding (the Hebrew word for “contrite,” i.e. Psalm 51:17, shares the same root as “grinding”), there is sanding, chiseling, patching, cutting, scraping, blood, sweat, and tears. But hear me here, if the end is worthy, then at the point of completion, everything else pales in comparison. The shack, made into a mansion, is worth every nail, plank, sheet, and brick that comprised it. Nearness to Christ, even at the cost of all things, is worth anything, because He is everything. Sanctification is not a shellac-ing over the old man; it’s the death of the old man and the birth of the new man, and the subsequent Christian life is the process of learning to see with the new eyes, walk with the new legs, work with the new hands, and think with the new mind.

As all good things flow out from God, may they return to Him as worship and adoration,
Kasey

Scratching at the Surface

*see the board in action by clicking the square above*

The other night, I watched a movie with my wife and afterward, as she got ready for bed, I began to feel restless. I ventured out into the shop without any definitive goals, just to clear my mind by busying my hands. A wise man said that a man who works with his hands, Sabbaths with his mind; I find the reverse to be true, as well: a man who works with his mind, Sabbaths with his hands.

Walking through the cold, moonless serenity of my backyard to the inviting door of my shop, my eyes happened upon a large board that I had laid out. It was a culled, throw-away 2"x12"x8' pine board, so knotty and pitted and rotted out that I've only used it to prop up a wall for the 5 weeks I've had it. With no particular aim in mind, I grabbed my plane and got to work on it.

In the 3.5 hour process of removing bark and rotted edges, digging out bug-eaten pits, and laboriously sanding over some knots bigger than your fist, God proceeded to whisper a bit - I love it when He does that.

Waist-deep in shavings, I had in my hands a degenerated piece of raw material; the lumber yard practically gave it away. It was discounted because it was currently unusable - it was poorly milled, didn't have a straight section to be found, and was rougher than Charlie Sheen's latest headshots. Plus, it was chemically treated, so a guy wouldn't even want to burn it to keep himself warm. Yet, the deeper I cut, the more this piece began to yield. I started with the underside, where pits ate into the board three to four inches, planing away the splinter-infested gouges into smooth, curvy lines. I moved to the top, covered in stamps and spray paint, and began to cut out the blemishes. The more I worked, the more the flaws transformed into character; the more I pulled back the scars, the more beauty I began to find underneath. By about 1:30am, my plane, sander, and a bit of my flesh and blood had uncovered a highly-figured, beautiful board, strong and deep and warm. Where the most ginger touch would have riddled a hand with splinters, there was now such a skin-soft surface that was not only gentle to the hand and eye, it also proved particularly strong, especially for a soft pine. With some cheesecloth, some natural stain, and probably some goofy smiles on my part, the thirsty wood drank up the color and BLAM! I suddenly had a conversation piece! This board is one of a kind, with organic, flowing lines and soft edges, patterned and knotted in swirls, and a hand-worn look that gives me the feeling of "home" - unremarkable, but uniquely "mine."

And it was just here that Christ whispered, "I'm doing this to you." How beautiful a thought! That the Craftsman that spoke light into existence, who scattered the stars and told the waves of the ocean "You may come this far, and no further," is pouring Himself into me! That He's scraping away the slag and splinters, softening what has hardened, filling where I'm vacuous, and forming me into a beautiful gift to present to His Father when I come home. That's sanctification, homey: Christ making beauty from ashes, dancing from mourning, a work of art from a culled scrap. In fact, the word for "workmanship" that Paul uses in Ephesians 2:10 is the word for "poetry": thus, the beauty of His universal Church, the collection of all who are in Christ throughout time and space - a living showcase of the goodness, glory, and splendor of the Creator.

However, we were not created to be simple objects of art, but to be made into redeemed tools with which the Craftsman accomplishes beautiful things. This is the "ministry of reconciliation" of 2 Corinthians 5:8, the process by which Christ brings the broken, rebellious creation back into peace with God, into which we have been graciously invited to take part. Hopefully in that same vein, I thought that it would be unfitting to leave that board as a mantle piece and made it, instead, into a "man-tool" piece, for which this blog is named. I jigsawed out holes for the drill and saw, and routed slots for the jigsaw, router, and nailgun, then braced it on studs. Now, though its aesthetic appeal is unassuming (only one edge is visible from eye-level), it is still as beautiful as it was, and now also performs an important function: keeping my tools close at hand.

Then a second echo of the first whisper came: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone," Psalm 118:22, reiterated by Jesus in the Gospels. There is coming a day when what the world has rejected as foolishness will be gloriously displayed as the ultimate sum of all things: the Great King returning, not meek and mild as in the Incarnation, but resplendent and undeniable, rapturous and unending. C.S. Lewis said that this day will not be a day of choosing, but a day of revealing what we have already chosen - it is no good saying, "I choose to kneel" when we have lost the ability to stand. This is unspeakable terror for those who do not know Him, but immeasurable joy for those who call Him "Father" and "Lord."

May our cry be: "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessng!" -Revelation 5:12

As all good things flow out from God, may they return to Him as worship and adoraton,
Kasey