Category Archives: relationship

Journey to the Air Force

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Forty years ago today, I began my enlistment in the U.S. Air Force. I don’t remember many details of the day I arrived at the Los Angeles MEPS (Military Enlistment Processing Station), but getting there was an interesting and unexpected journey….

As a teen, I had the privilege of living in Bonn, [West] Germany, the postwar capital, where I attended Bonn American High School. My fellow students were the kids of American Embassy staff, military, and, like me, civilian expats; as well as international diplomats and a few local Germans—overall, the upper crust of the international diplomatic community.

I played on the school’s football and soccer teams, wrestled for a year, and was the basketball team’s manager one season. Those teams traveled to countless American and international schools for games—Hahn Air Base, Bremerhaven, three different schools in Brussels, AFCENT in the Netherlands, and more—where I got glimpses of a different life: the enlisted men and women who make up the bulk of the military.

As much as I loved my experience in Bonn, nothing I saw on those bases attracted me. The buildings were boxy and lifeless; the airmen and soldiers no less so. The marching, the olive drab “pickle suits” … nothing called my name and said, “join us.” And nowhere in my family history was I aware of a military heritage. (Only years later would I learn of the Revolutionary War-era Fort Ehl in New York’s Mohawk Valley, or a great uncle(?) who had served in the Army.)

Memories of those bases were in my mind when, during my freshman year of college at Seattle Pacific University, I swore to my roommate that I would never enlist in the military.

But that year at college was hard for me. I loved the experiences and friendships I made on the crew team and I had fun working for the Seattle Repertory Theatre; but I was still lonely and disengaged both academically and spiritually. I had to leave.

After a second summer working at Forest Home, a family camp in the San Bernardino mountains, I decided to stay in Los Angeles to work. I found a job working nights in the photo processing plant of a grocery store chain: I spent eight hours putting stickers over the flaps of self-sealing envelopes with newly-developed photos. Not exactly a career track. (Funny thing, though: when I left after four months, my coworkers gave me a gold Cross pen and pencil set worth probably $50 at the time and over $100 now.)

That fall I rented a room in a house in La Puente. It was in my budget, but that’s about the only good thing about it. The owner’s husband (whom she’d married when she was 15) was a truck driver who’d been in a major accident and was in a rehab facility in Bakersfield. Just to survive, she rented out two of the three bedrooms in the house, forcing her 16-year-old kleptomaniac son to live in the garage. She lived in the master suite … and I mean lived: it was her bedroom, bath, living room, and kitchen. She kept nothing in the kitchen itself, saying that her son had stolen and sold most of the pots and pans for drugs. Her 19-year-old daughter lived elsewhere with her boyfriend.

I think I’d lived and worked there for just a couple months before the loneliness and longing for home got the best of me and I found myself walking into the Air Force recruiter’s office. My experiences during high school had made it easy to choose between the branches, my scores on the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) guaranteed me one of any five career fields I chose, and I would be able to leave for Basic Training not too soon and not too late … forty years ago today. January 27, 1984.

Lessons from Six Decades

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I’ve tried to personalize most of these as ongoing reminders to myself. A few, however, are lessons I wish I had learned earlier.

Be less sure of myself … without losing self-confidence. I don’t have to be right all the time. If I’m always right, I don’t need to learn anything more, and learning is half the fun and half the journey.

Explore … places, people, ideas, myself. In the exploring, look for what brings joy and what doesn’t; what gives life and what sucks it out; what is a fountain and what is a drain. Think deeply; find others who can help me.

Ask a lot of questions. Learn to ask better questions. Be curious about people, places, ideas. Learn without judgment. Keep an open mind.

Look for ways to unite rather than divide. Look for common ground; seek out the similarities between dissimilar things and people.

Be thoughtful and wise about who I listen to … whether news or social media, politicians or pastors. Don’t abdicate my responsibility to think; check out for myself what I hear. Listen to people who think differently; I can learn from their perspective, even if I don’t agree with their conclusions.

Listen to people younger than me … they have fresher and different perspectives, which will help keep my own thinking fresh. Besides, eventually almost everyone will be younger than me, so I might as well start early!

Invest more in the marriage than you spend on the wedding. Work hard to make it last … because any other option will be even harder.

Control of anything or anyone outside myself is a myth. (Thanks to M., who helped me think this through very practically one day when I was the substitute teacher in high school detention!) Some corollaries:

  • You, and only you, are in control of yourself.
  • If you’re not in control of yourself, you’ve either voluntarily given up some measure of control by, for example, enlisting in the military; or there’s a significant problem:
    • your capacity for self-control is limited by some developmental issue; or,
    • you’re a prisoner … most likely because you didn’t practice self-control; or,
    • you’re a slave.
  • When it comes to other people, circumstances, and even pets, I need to shift my thinking from control to influence.

These are a few lessons that came to mind this week as I reflected back on 60 years of life. There are certainly more but I’ll turn it over to you no matter how long you’ve lived: what have you learned about yourself, about life, about others…?

A Call to Prayer

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Prayer is, in one sense, the simplest thing in the world; it is conversation with God, relationship with the Creator in whose image we are created. Prayer draws us close to a God willing to call us—as he called Abraham—friend.

Yet in another sense, prayer is the most difficult task we can undertake. After all, that same Creator is infinitely greater than us, unimaginably distinct in spite of the image we share; and in prayer, we dare to step into the throne room of the Almighty, in which Isaiah cried, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For … my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty!”

For most people I know, prayer is difficult for other reasons, too. It is like wind blowing across a desolate, cloudless landscape: we feel it, but have no sense of its impact, no movement to suggest that it is doing anything. In the absence of visual evidence, we begin to believe that prayer has no effect; it doesn’t do anything. And seeing nothing, we cease to believe in prayer.

This is one reason we need to pray with others: to increase our faith. The late Henri J.M. Nouwen, Catholic priest and author, writes this:

“We cannot live a spiritual life alone. The life of the Spirit is like a seed that needs fertile ground to grow. … It is very hard to live a life of prayer in [an environment] where no one prays or speaks lovingly about prayer.”

(In “Here and Now”)

Most of don’t live in an environment with people who “pray or speak lovingly about prayer.” We live, rather, in a world that believes prayer to be a superstitious crutch, “the last resort of people who have run out of ideas.”* Between our own wavering belief and the disdain of those around us, prayer becomes a meaningless, fruitless exercise; a religious ritual from a bygone era.

I want to rescue prayer from this meaninglessness. What is truly needed, though, is for prayer to rescue us from our despair.

This is why prayer together is so essential.

When we pray together, we cultivate the soil of our souls, nurturing that seed of the Spirit. Our own prayers are fertilized by the faith of others, and fertilize their faith in turn. Together, we boldly enter that awesome throne room of the Almighty. Together, we bow humbly in his presence, acknowledging both our unworthiness and his invitation, “Come!” Together, we agree that God delights in us, is pleased by our worship, enjoys our presence with him. Together, we press through the distractions that inhibit our own prayers and arrive at the place of communion with God and with each other.

And so, my invitation: Find a few people and pray together each week in November. (At my church, I’m inviting everyone to pray together before our services on Sunday. That would be a good time to pray with your church, too. Your pastor would love it!)

Let’s find out what God will do in us and through us as we pray together.

*So wrote atheist Hemant Mehta in The New York Times, June 27, 2013. (https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/06/27/should-atheists-pray/prayer-is-useless-and-has-a-downside. Accessed online 10/30/18.)

Who Is This Woman?

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I recently started a new sermon series at the church I pastor. The series is called Scars Have Stories* and each week we’ll look at an individual in the Bible whose life is marked by pain, grief, and loss. We’ll also see how God uses that brokenness to bring redemption to that individual and to others.

The first person we met isn’t named in the Bible; she calls herself simply, “a Samaritan woman” (see John 4). Today we often refer to her as “the woman at the well,” because that’s where Jesus met her. For those of us who have been around church for most of our lives, this woman is just one of many familiar faces: seen but not known, except by what our pastors have told us. But she may not be who we think she is.

You have heard it said: Jesus goes where shouldn’t be, meets a woman he shouldn’t meet, and talks to her (GASP!). Then he tells her what she already knows: that is, she’s a dirty rotten sinner that no one loves, but he’ll love her, anyway. As a result, her life is radically changed and all the townspeople who know her see the change, come to meet Jesus, and believe in him, too. It’s an incredible story of evangelistic grace. But what if that’s not who she was?

But I tell you: Jesus goes where shouldn’t be, meets a woman he shouldn’t meet, and talks to her (GASP!). [No change yet, right?] But instead of poking away at her as if she’s a dirty rotten sinner, Jesus responds as if she’s an inquisitive spiritual seeker^. He listens to her questions and patiently redirects them until he has the opportunity to reveal himself to her … using that ancient name of God that no one would pronounce but she would undoubtedly know: I AM. Then this seeker runs to her neighbors and asks, “could this possibly be the Messiah?” They come, meet the stranger at the well, invite him to stay a couple days, and end up also believing.

Two women. Two stories. One Savior. Either woman could be who Jesus met. Either story could be true (we’ve seen both in other pages of Scripture). But I think this second woman, the inquisitive spiritual seeker, better fits the aim of John’s gospel, which is all about believing (see John 20:31). It also fits better with the immediate context of that gospel, which includes two other encounters Jesus had with spiritual seekers. In the preceding chapter (John 3), Jesus is approached at night by a religious leader, Nicodemus, who is also asking questions – and,  because of his great learning, is a bit slow to understand the answers Jesus gives.

Earlier still (John 1:43-51), Jesus had met a doubting seeker named Nathanael; Nate had a hard time believing that anything—or anyone—good could come from the backwater town he’d heard Jesus was from … until Jesus told Nate he’d seen what he could not have seen: Nate, sitting in the shade of a fig tree (and probably eating a nice, juicy fig). That divinely-inspired insight convinces Nate that Jesus is the Son of God.

Meanwhile, back in Samaria…. Many people believe that when Jesus reveals to the woman that he knows about her five previous husbands (and the arrangement with her current beau), he’s pointing out her sinful lifestyle. Remembering his encounter with Nathanael, though, I think it’s more likely that Jesus is using that same divinely-inspired insight to convince the woman that he is the Messiah. Just as that was the kicker for Nate, so it is for the Samaritan woman.

So, what’s the big deal? I think we can take three things from this:

  • first, a renewed view of Scripture. It’s easy to look at anecdotes like this encounter between Jesus and a woman and see only what’s on the surface. But when we look deeper (context, author’s purpose, etc.), we see something very different; we get a better look into what God is doing, a better understanding of who he is and how we works.
  • second, a renewed view of women in Scripture. If we’re willing to admit it, we will see that women in Scripture are central to the advancement of God’s kingdom. In a culture (then) that devalued women, Jesus elevated them; we must, too. We are all sinners saved by grace, and this woman is no exception. But that isn’t the central truth of her story; the central truth is that because of her testimony, an entire Samaritan village believed in the Messiah — a radical, counter-cultural transformation.
  • third, a renewed view of our own brokenness and loss. Sin or no sin, you don’t move through five marriages without brokenness and loss. Whether the Samaritan woman had buried five husbands (possible), been divorced five times (possible but not likely), or some combination of the two (probable), she undoubtedly grieved what was or what might have been. But in spite of—perhaps even because of—that loss, Jesus met her and used her to draw an entire community to himself. He can do that with our brokenness, too.

Who is this woman? We only know what the Bible tells us. But we can be sure of this: God’s promise remains:

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13)

CREDITS:

*Thanks to Dr. Dan Allender for that phrase, “scars have stories.”

^Thanks to Dr. Lynn Cohick, Dean/Provost of Denver Seminary, for introducing me to this different view of the Samaritan woman … and for generously sharing her research and writings.

Are You A Peacemaker?

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“Make every effort to live in peace with everyone….” (Hebrews 12:14, NIV)

UN troops are often called “peacekeepers” but there is an irony in that name: they don’t keep peace at all. Rather, they go into troubled areas and stand in the middle of conflict between two factions so diplomats have time to negotiate for peace between the two sides. But since there’s no peace to begin with, there’s no peace to keep.

Followers of Jesus are not called to be peacekeepers, but peacemakers.
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Mike Murphy writes this in his blog, “Rumblings“:

“Blessed are the peacemakers” someone famous once said. What if those who say they believe actually acted on those words of Jesus? Peacemaking is a dangerous, radical activity in these days of unfiltered bombast and underdeveloped impulse control. The peacemaker always pushes against the prevailing winds. Such is the way of the kingdom of God.

If we’re to be peacemakers, though, we need to figure out what a peacemaker does. Let me offer a few thoughts toward that end. First, let’s not define peace as just the absence of open conflict. The Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions calls that “negative peace,” but there is something more: “positive peace” is the absence of the causes of war. That’s the kind of peace we want.

But there’s a challenge in our striving for peace: it won’t always work. Paul put it this way in one of his letters in the Bible: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Romans 12:18, NIV). Two important truths are in those words: first, it’s not possible to live at peace with everyone. We live in a broken world filled with broken people, some of whom just aren’t peaceable; others are even downright dangerous. Second, it doesn’t all depend on you. Try as you might, you’ll never be able to find peace with some people, let alone make it. Do your best, but ultimately we will all live with the tension between wanting peace but not experiencing it.

In an excellent book called, The Peacemaker, Ken Sande offers these hopeful words:

All conflict should be seen “as an opportunity to demonstrate the presence and power of God.”
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A peacemaker, then, aims to demonstrate God’s presence and power in the midst of conflict. Let me suggest four ways to do that:

First, a peacemaker keeps his or her focus on becoming like Christ, the Prince of Peace. We were created in God’s image, but that image was scarred and marred by sin. God’s plan from eternity past has been to restore that image in his creation (Romans 8:29); his work today in the lives of his followers is focused on making us like Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18); and one day that work will be done and we will be like Christ (1 John 3:2).

Second, a peacemaker seeks peace with God. That comes first through faith in the saving work of Jesus Christ, his death on the cross, and his resurrection. But since we all continue to sin (rebel against God’s good design), we need to keep short accounts with God through ongoing confession and repentance. Finally, we need to accept his forgiveness (1 John 1:9), which has been freely offered through Jesus’ sacrifice.

Third, a peacemaker seeks peace with him- or herself, which grows out of faith in God, trust in his guidance, and living as God desires.

Finally, a peacemaker seeks peace with others. Too often we try to have peace with others, yet are not at peace with God or ourselves; it is a futile and frustrating aim, and we end up being more like UN peacekeepers than true peacemakers.

“Peace with God, peace with each other, and peace with ourselves come in the same package.” (Tim Hansel; quoted in Sande)

Let me leave you with a couple questions to help answer:

Are you easy to be at peace with? Or are you disagreeable, argumentative, combative?

Do you need to give up your need to be right? If you have a strong need to be right, then finding peace with others will always be a struggle. Practice saying (and meaning!) these four words: I may be wrong. Use them even—perhaps especially—when you know you’re right! Which is more important, the person you’re with, or being right? Most of the time, the answer should be the person you’re with.

So, are you a peacemaker? Will you become one?

 

NOTE: This blog is the core of the message I offered at The Journey Church, Sonora, on Sunday, June 10, 2018.