Category: Enjoying the Process

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Enjoying the Process

#KeepTheFeast

There is a patronizing way to say, “Just read your Bible,” and there is also a pastoral way to say it. As one of the shepherds of the flock, I urge you, hear and keep the words of this Book.

Revelation promises that those who hear and keep the words will be blessed (1:3), but this is only the last inspired Book in which God offers the blessing. The Psalms begin with blessing. “Blessed is the man” not who hangs out with the lawbreakers, but instead, the blessed man has “his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.”

I want this blessing, and so I’ve been reading through the Bible on an annual plan for many years. This summer, along with many of you I added the #SamePageSummer challenge on top of my other plan, and though it was obviously more reading, it was also good. It also seems that my joining along did some good to others as an encouragement for them to read or listen as well.

I just finished reading and posting my summaries of the #SamePageSummer plan, albeit not quite summer anymore, nor on the same page by this point. I was planning to go back and just follow the M’Cheyne schedule, but in talking with Mo last week, I’ve decided to quit (which I’ve never done in September) and start a new plan (which I’ve also never done in September) and follow the Bible reading challenge with #KeepTheFeast.

Should you be reading the #KeepTheFeast plan? I don’t know. Should you be reading (or listening) in order to delight and mediate on His word? You most definitely should if you want God’s blessing.

So if you have no plan, why not accept the invite to #KeepTheFeast? If you’re already doing #KeepTheFeast, encourage one another. If you’re reading according to another schedule, love that. But with the renewed activities of the school year, we need the renewal of our minds by Scripture more and more. Just read your Bible.

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Enjoying the Process

Making a Switch

As of today I decided to switch from the M’Cheyene Bible reading plan to the #keepthefeast plan. Day one was Psalm 119, and this reading by 88 voices was a great way to start.

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Enjoying the Process

A Moldy Spice Girl

No fiction writer could have imagined the following exchange I recently overheard, and I’m thinking about making it my Twitter bio:

“Why do you want to keep a moldy Spice Girl?”

“Because that’s what I do.”

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Enjoying the Process

bahookie

Added to my commonplace book today: 

BAHOOKIE

n. Scottish informal, “a person’s buttocks”

also, “an ass“

Example usage: “try that again I’ll be kicking your fury, brown bahookie” —McSquizzy’s Army Scene, in “Open Season”

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Enjoying the Process

Fellowship: A Mess Worth Making

Our church has another seminar scheduled a few Sundays from now. This will be our fifth seminar, the first two were about parenting and the last two were about marriage. We asked for feedback and ideas after last year’s seminar and one of the suggestions was to talk about fellowship. 

Fellowship is an easily misunderstood and often misused word. For many folks it means food, probably in a basement with a tiled floor (or industrial carpet) with all sorts of casseroles and bitter coffee. Our seminar does include food, and dinner is in a basement, but the food is not potlucked. As for the basement, well, it is actually fellowship hallish, but we do what we can. 

All four of the pastors at our church will speak for one session, then we’ll have a group Q&A as the final session. Our four elders are very different in personality, but united in theology and vision. It should make for a fantastic day together. 

I’m planning to talk about tough cases, how to set expectations and how to behave in order to do our part to reach those expectations. 

If you live in the area and have February 17th free, the seminar is also free, but we’d love to know you’re coming for sake of snacks, childcare, and dinner. Take a look at the Facebook event page, or if you’re a FB hater, leave a comment here and I’ll forward your interest to the appropriate planners.

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Enjoying the Process

On Carrying My Own (Digital) Man-purse

I am not a perfect minimalist, but I am drawn to it in certain contexts like iPad writers are to Starbucks. In my time as a more severe dualist I thought it very sanctimonious to carry the least amount of things with me as possible. My wife can not only bear witness, she has often had to bear my load.

When we would travel together, I would let her bring a bar of soap, and I would borrow. When we would go out to eat, I would let her carry my money-clip in her purse. I mean, she had all that available space doing nothing else, right? I needed to keep my pockets free for my hands. And when she would need to bring superfluous things, like more than one extra diaper for a kid, or her hair-dryer, or whatever it seemed like I might have to carry if she got injured, I often expressed my passive-but-perfervid disgust. Why couldn’t she make do with less, like me?

I’ve done the same thing to friends at conferences or other trips. They wanted to bring their backpack with them, so surely they wouldn’t mind carrying around my booklet or free books either. I’m sure that I always asked nicely, and said thank you, too.

Hopefully you can see that I’m trying to poke fun at my selfish self here. It’s not to say that we must always carry our own burden, but , actually, there is a verse about it (Galatians 6:5).

My main point, however, is about why I joined, and still have an account with, the Facebook. I resisted for a long time, not because I dislike technology or the Internet or social networks per se. I resisted because most everyone else was doing it. I resisted because the most that anyone can waste my time on Twitter is 140 characters (it’s now twice that, and yuck, but they didn’t ask me). I resisted because I already know enough ways to waste my time. I resisted because I had seen MySpace pages. I resisted because I had Googled some articles about how Facebook uses your data to target you for ads….

That’s all high-road sounding, and I fancifully suppose people in L’Abri communities would say similar things. But, and this is big, I mostly got away with my resistance because my wife had Facebook. That meant she could tell me about all the banality. She could tell me about who was pregnant. She could pass on prayer requests that others posted, or even prayer requests from our family. She could keep in contact with my sister’s friends when my sister was dying of cancer and was stuck in hospital beds and nursing home beds two-thousand miles away. She could carry my digital social media purse.

I realized that my precious digital minimalism was just no good. I still don’t like Facebook. BLECGH! I don’t have the app on a pocketable device, but I do open it up once or twice a day on my computer. After clicking through the notifications (so I don’t have to keep looking at the red circle of how many things I’m behind on), I scrim (that’s scroll-skim) through the timeline. About that time I question the meaning/vanity of life. But a bunch of people I care about communicate, even seem to hang out, there. Lots of people at our church use it to announce opportunities, ask for prayer, and/or encourage others to persevere. Lots of parents at our school use it for the same reasons, and also to share what’s happening with their friends, which spreads the word about how God is blessing. And amen!

If Facebook went away in an hour due to a meteor, or a Federal lawsuit, or other, I might sing and dance, and not in lamentation. But for now, though lots of people seem to be abandoning the service, for understandable reasons even, I will keep carrying my own purse.

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Enjoying the Process

NoDiscontentDecember Postmortem

It’s been a couple weeks since the official end of our family’s finishing hashtag of 2018. I posted about it a few times, and here is an autopsy report.

  • The focus, agreed upon by every member of the family, was fitting and helpful. December was “richly scheduled,” as Anese Cavenaugh likes to say, and it was good to take fussiness off the table as an acceptable response. That’s not to say no one was ever fussy, but it was nice to have the zero tolerance policy clearly in place.
  • Just like praying for patience, you don’t want to do it. Ha. Not only was December busy, there were some days and discussions which seemed extra providentially selected for testing the contentment commitment. By God’s grace I think my own capacity to see contentment as an appropriate response was increased, as well as my actual choice in the moment.
  • Encouraging the use of Grinch lyrics in the Open Season of confrontation added some laughter (at least for the persons whose souls were not greasy black peels), and encouraged us to remember that obedience, which itself is not a laughing matter, can be pursued with joy not just under burden.
  • If I remember next December, then we will do this again.

Since you’re certainly wondering, our new family hashtag for this month is #jerkJanuary. I’m joking. We haven’t chosen one, and I don’t think we will. Also, of course, contentment is required by God all the time, so we don’t get to return to grumpy-pants grumbling because we survived the gauntlet. Paul said that contentment should be learned for every circumstance; our pursuit of contentment isn’t dead, but we’ll pause our use of the pound sign.

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Enjoying the Process

Ante Lux, Tenebras

Auditing Omnibus for the last six years has done more to shape my worldview than almost all of the formal education I’ve received. If I could only choose between having gone through seminary or Omnibus, that would be a tough call. For realZ. What I’m saying is, Omnibus–the readings and discussions–is really good stuff.

For the first six years of the school a small group of adults audited Omnibus I through VI. Jonathan (who taught the class) provided the reading assignments, and then we auditors would join the class every Thursday morning during the school year. The reading was often tough to complete, but always beneficial, and the discussions were invaluable. It has been crucial for continuing to shape my world-and-life view. Jonathan would say the same thing, as would all the other auditors, along with the students who have taken it (though most of them haven’t known anything different).

In order to make this doable for more people, we decided to offer a three year-long, two evenings a month, class for adults. Jonathan, Leila (the other Omnibus instructor at the school), and I selected the best of Omnibus I and IV (Ancient history), then II and V (Medieval history), and then III and VI (Modern history).

And we start tonight!

Year one is called Omnibus Tenebras (Latin for “darkness”). As I mentioned above, it’s history from creation until the coming of Christ, and it’s full of reading about men who long for a savior but had only selfish and petty and pars-potent (partially powerful) gods to try to appease. We’ll be working through the Gilgamesh epic, the Hammurabi code, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the history of Herodotus, Virgil’s Aneid, and a few more. We’ll also read through all the Chronicles of Narnia, you know, for fun.

Next year will be Omnibus Lux (Latin for “light”), because God came in the flesh and the news of Jesus’ death and resurrection spread and overturned so many kingdoms of men, Caesars included. The third year, the modern period, will be Omnibus Modius, the Latin word for “basket” (in Matthew 5:15), since the apparent project of many men since the Reformation has been to cover up the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.

At the moment we’ve got over forty adults on the roster, and it’s going to be another fabulous ride.

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Enjoying the Process

Twenty

“A silent lover is one who doesn’t know his job.”

—Robert Capon, The Supper of the Lamb

Today is our twentieth wedding anniversary! Praise the Lord, and amen!

I love my wife, though I have not always been good at knowing what love is or what love does. By grace, she has been patient and I am on the learning/loving path.

From the beginning I knew that she would not be satisfied with the status quo in our Christian walks, in our relationship at spouses, in our work as parents, or in our service to Christ’s Body; her high expectations were part of what attracted me to her. In order to be helpfully provocative (rather than a nag, or as the boss) she had to be a committed disciple of Jesus, a lover of the Bible and theology, and a student of people. She has been that since I met her, and has only matured more than I could have imagined in all of those things over the last two decades.

There is no one that I’ve sinned against more than her, and there is no one that has shown me what forgiveness looks like in the flesh as much as her.

She is a model of endurance through chronic and sometimes debilitating pain.

She cares about our kids, seeing them for who they are and encouraging each one in their particular interested and giftedness.

She is the financial nerd (in Dave Ramsey terminology), but how necessary that has been to keep us from never-ending debt of the free-spender.

She loves loud music, the kind that shakes the outer panels of our minivan and causes the back seat to bounce with the subwoofer underneath.

She consumes and processes more conversations in a month (personal and via podcasts) than I can imagine doing ever.

She is always curious, always learning, quick to say she was wrong, laughing (the good ways) the whole time.

She respects me far more than I deserve, to my face, to our kids, and to others in our church.

And I still love to watch her gait, even though it’s changed a lot under the burdens of pain and responsibilities.

I love you, Mo! Happy anniversary!

This isn’t a wedding photo, but it’s at least closer to when we tied the knot!

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Enjoying the Process

It’s Good to Be Dad

Dad’s don’t get a lot of respect in pop culture. They get a national holiday like mothers, but most of the advertised gifts suggest that it’s better to placate dad’s playful side than to honor his sacrificial side. That could be because a lot of men with children don’t actually work for their family, but at least they sometimes play (barbecue, boat, throw the ball, etc.) in a way that lets the kids come along.

Our culture has daddy issues, father hunger, vengeance toward the patriarchy. I’m less interested (today, at least) in chastising those errors and more interested in publicly stating my thanks to God for getting to be a dad.

I had only superficial ideas about fatherhood when I was growing up. Getting married and having kids and needing to do something with those kids seemed like the natural progression of life. What I came to realize later, well into parental practice, is that fatherhood is the glory of a man’s fruitfulness. I didn’t know that dad’s had such a divine purpose or how enjoyable the fruit would be.

We have four kids, going on 16, 13, 10, and 8 later this year. We have three girls and one boy. They are all different, they are all great. I love watching them sing, swim, shoot hoops, write papers, draw, dance, perform, plan, and read. Their mother knows them well and helps me to know them better as well. Being their father is exhausting and exhilarating. But even when one of the kids is second-level fussy or in full-on disobedience, I’m glad to be their dad.

The Ministry of Fatherhood is a gracious and great calling. It’s worth celebrating as a father, not just waiting to be appreciated as one.