When Nice Is In Your Mouth Then Open It

“A house divided cannot stand!” 

Jesus

I write a dire warning, we had better stop being unkind and unkind to one another.  Our political leaders of every stripe should learn to be civil in all instances.  Our media had better cease and desist promoting division for profit and fame.  Our educational system better stop promoting ignorance.  Our social media controllers better begin to program their sights to prize goodwill to all.  And we all should take our phones and opinions and go home—and leave them there and then go into the world making friends.  What makes this country great is the rule of law and the number one law that was once a foundation of our country was one set up by the same person that issued the above warning, “Love your neighbor!”  To sit safely on your back porch is one of the greatest freedoms in the world.  Almost all great advances in everything has come from the porch of safety, from hearts free to be kind and minds free to be inquisitive creating souls desiring to help their neighbor. Here is one last thing Jesus said that is very relevant today, “In the end, the love of many will grow cold.”  The greatest tragedy in the cosmos is unraveling in our own country, we are losing love.  Can you imagine the trade-off for this tragedy, you get to believe you’re right but lose love, something you didn’t invent and cannot manufacture.  If demanding our right to be right and the other wrong is the loss of love, then the cost will be the greatest loss ever inflicted upon the human race.  One last quote that we didn’t hear from Jesus but probably from someone who knew him personally, like our mom, “If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything.” 

A Fish In Water A Man In Grace

“as a fish that has got from the shore to the sea

and has all fullness of waters to move in,”

            1600’s Puritan Prayer Book on being filled with God’s Spirit

Sometimes truth is placed in metaphor so well that the truth of the truth is made perfectly clear.  So art has often been for me the way in which God reveals His overwhelming kindness in ways that so opens for me gratefulness to Him that I am “as a fish that has got from shore to the sea and has all fullness of waters to move in.”

We Can't Unkind Our Way To Reconciliation

There is a collective guilt of sin that white America has for its past and present treatment of the black citizenry of our great country.  That sin must be confessed and rectified, a rectification that will take years. The act of being sorry for past grievances is best met with forgiveness and reconciliation, which will result in an ongoing cleansing of guilt and a remaking of right relations and relationships.  There are always two sides to forgiveness, one, the act of being repentant matched by the second, being offered forgiveness.  Its model and clarity are most clear in humans and God in Christ, which I believe was sincerely modeled by Martin Luther King Jr. who was leading a whole nation, black and white, through this Godly process.  We have now allowed media, politicians and radical elements to be put forth as new models of how this process should take place by being unkind and being unkind to one another.  We are no longer brothers and sisters in the struggle together but enemies in a war in which one side must win and the other be destroyed.  In this new climate, it is all the more imperative that the Church takes on its moral and rightful role of leader.  It is the church that should begin to lead in the pulpit and marketplace to model repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation and once again be the place in which this great need of America is addressed and resolved.  The first step is to acknowledge The Truth of Christ in our hearts for reconciliation and the second would be a sincere integration of our sanctuaries.  It is impossible to be unkind while in the act of corporate worship or move into the marketplace unchanged by the act of worshiping together.  We all have a problem and desperately need a model by which we can address and solve it.  There is no better model than The Son of God and humans willing to accept His Lordship over their lives and their problems.

Life Climbing

I was having coffee with a dear friend yesterday and he commented on how great my marriage appeared “at least the one you put on public media.”  I told him I wasn’t going to post images and text from the argument we had had the night before.  Our public image is just that, an image, a well-crafted story of what we want you to think our life is like.  I told him we argue because making up is so much fun and that is in fact true.  A great marriage is just a product of hard work, not like roofing a house but like climbing a very tall mountain—you roof a house because it is required, you climb a mountain because you want that experience, Betty and I want to experience what it means to have a great marriage.

        

Singing Home

A home can be quite loud when it is quiet.  This past weekend ours was filled with the clamor of all our family, dogs, babies and adults, pots and pans, rock and roll and love skipping through us all.  But slowly all the noise began to fade away as family after family set sail, our youngest the last, her little car loaded and pointed east.  We always stand in the driveway signing “I love you” as their cars, winged with arms waving “I love you” glide away toward home and then Betty and I walk into a very quiet home—but it’s not silent.  It is swollen with the rushing sounds of a flood of new love memories, its rooms are quietly folded shut but the chorus of the family that was just there lingers on reverberating in our heart.   The hallway is empty, the rec room shut off, the dining room bare the table leaves removed, our home made for two again and we sat quietly and listen to all the love songs that this home sings—a top ten list for 22 years.