Just Trying To Stay Faithful

Stan and Cindy called on Memorial Day to check up on my recovery.  Stan called from the truck to share a story that had just occured.  They were doing errands and they saw a guy who looked homeless walking along a busy street.  He was loaded down with large bags, and Stan and Cindy stopped to ask if he needed any help or a ride. 

Isn’t that cool!  Seeing a fellow human being in need, they take the time to be inconvenienced. 

Anyway, what was funny was that this guy was rather reflective.  He said that he didn’t need a ride, that he was on his way to Bruster’s to get a Sundae.  He took up his burdens and headed on down the road. 

What I love about this story is that it makes the point that success in loving isn’t defined just by doing something (giving this guy a ride or help), but is first and foremost the act of becoming involved.  Becoming involved in giving hospitality to a stranger almost always requires being inconvenienced. 

Peace

Dan and Cheryl Burton are the most amazing people you will ever meet.  Dan left a successful business to be a church planter in Snellville, GA.  He went through an amazing 15 years of service to see a lot of good, experience a lot of struggles, and, ultimately, to leave and close-down the work.  In this time, Cheryl developed breast-cancer and through God’s grace survived.  This is a story that is not unique.  What is unique is that they walked through all of this without a drop of bitterness staining their souls.  The longer I am in ministry the more I view this with absolute astonishment.  Working with people means bruises, disagreement, disappointment, even betrayal at times.  To come through with a joyful, Christ-focused heart yet without a moronic/vacuous denial of hard times and deep wounds is stunning. 

As we began our transition as a church, Dan and Cheryl talked with us about our vision, our heart.  Much to my surprise and shock, they decided to come along side and help us.  Well, more than help actually.  They came along side, took our hands, and showed us how to do what we longed to do.  Cheryl took us into mobile home parks to do “Good News Clubs” and vacation bible school.  Cheryl anchors our Sunday school in the gospel message, and has an uncanny knack for talking with kids at their level about spiritual things.  She is a dedicated participant in our after-school program who loves and is devoted to the students in her care. 

A few weeks ago I got to see Cheryl do an amazing thing. 

The after-school program is pretty rough-and-tumble.  The kids are not always polite, nice, nor do they abide by the Marquis of Queensberry’s rules.  Cheryl was cleaning up after the program and was reaching for a rubber-band for some flash cards, but it was gone.  There was a young boy standing there who had a rubber-band around his wrist.  This particular third grader is one of the rougher of our crowd.   He’s a good kid, but lives in tough circumstances and doesn’t always have great self-control.  Anyway, Cheryl asked him for her rubber-band.  He told her the one on his wrist was his.  She didn’t believe him and told him so. 

This kid was crushed.  He dropped is head, slumped his shoulders, and walked dejectedly towards his apartment.  Cheryl felt bad, but also knew that you had to loving confront things and not just let kids get by with bad behavior.  Then she found the rubber band. 

She was crushed. 

She called me to go to this kids apartment.  She went by but no one was home.  She tried a second time, but no one was home.  The next after-school day she asked me to go with her to try again.  So we went to the apartment and saw that they were home.  I watched and prayed as Cheryl walked up the stairs and knocked on the door.  She introduced herself to the mom and asked to talk with the young boy.  He came out, and Cheryl got down and told him what she had learned.  She confessed her sin as sin, and humbly, truly asked for his forgiveness by talking about what it must have felt like to be falsely accused.  The boy looked up, nodded.  Smiled.  And gave her a huge hug.  She brought him a candy bar as a peace offering.  He took it, ran inside and brought her something of his.  I don’t remember what.  A soda I think. 

Here is the cool part.  This kid lights up when Cheryl is around.  She has such an influence in his life and his families life.  Cheryl learned that the mother was also a cancer survivor, but is still struggling with the after-effects of her treatment.  So Cheryl has made another friend. 

I was talking with Cheryl two weeks ago, and she saw the mother walking by the ministry center.  Cheryl dropped me like a hot-potato to run out and catch up with her friend. 

All of this because she had the character to walk the way our Lord requires us to walk (live).  Not perfectly or without error, but in forgiveness and honesty and integrity.  Because she admitted her sin and did the right thing, there is a stronger relationship and gospel witness.  This boy and his family knows more about God’s forgiveness and grace because of Cheryl’s example than from any presentation or explanation of the gospel that I could ever preach. 

This last week Cheryl was re-admitted to the hospital with a brain tumor. 

The prognosis is good.  She and Dan are up-beat.  The doctors are too.  We will go and be with them for the surgery on Thursday.  We – the whole fellowship that is Open Table – will stand with the family and clean, pray, feed, as they walk through this trial. 

But what I realized on Sunday when we got word of the tumor was that Cheryl Burton as a person is who we are praying to be as a congregation.  Our lofty expression of covenantal practices are generosity, hospitality, forgiveness, and risk taking.  Cheryl embodies these.  Our commitment to children and community development are the very things she breaths and longs for and lives out.  She does so with a past that carries a lot of baggage, yet she doesn’t lug them around.  Instead she looks for the hand of grace, the miracle for today, the fullness of life as it comes today.  And she prays.  Man oh man, does this woman pray! 

Cheryl isn’t perfect.  Anyone that knows her knows that she can unload on you with a lot of very particular questions and high standards.  She’s loving and gentle and tough. 

Cheryl teaches us many things, and will continue to do so through the years.  But what she teaches me most importantly right now is that what matters most is character.  Plans, visions, ideas…all these are good.  But God uses people of character.  God develops character in people. 

This is the great challenge, the real challenge, of being “missional.”  It isn’t innovative programs, crowd-pleasing results, best selling books, and having others ask you for advice .  It’s walking humbly with our God in obedience to the small things he puts in front of us.  Any other kind of success is his perrogative, but it should never be our primary goal.  It isn’t Cheryl’s goal.  I don’t think it was Christ’s goal.  And we’re imprinting off of them. 

Pray for Cheryl.  She has radiation after the surgery.  She was great when we took our 4 and 5 year old to the hospital yesterday.  Since they will see her with her head shaved and (eventually) without any hair we wanted them to see her and talk with her beforehand to help them with the transition.  She was great with them. 

To get back to my main point on success in mission:  character in loving, humble obedience in the moment.  Knowing God’s heart, which is clearly revealed in his word, and stepping out to the people he takes you to in loving them.  It isn’t safe.  It isn’t easy.  It doesn’t happen because we are perfect and never make any mistakes.  As Cheryl teaches us, it often results from the opposite of being mistake-free.  But Cheryl also teaches us that this life-style of loving in generosity, hospitality, forgiveness, and risk taking is glorious!

Peace

FYI, Mirriam-Webster defines imprinting as:  (noun): a rapid learning process that takes place early in the life of a social animal and establishes a behavior pattern (as recognition of and attraction to its own kind or a substitute).  Go to www.m-w.com if you need more. 

I have been shaped and influenced by motion picture special efffects and speculative fiction.  I have a very fertile imagination when it comes to things spiritual and supernatural.  When I think about things like “spiritual warfare” I have vivid images of confrontations with the hordes of hell, the thundering clash of titanic armies like in “the Return of the King” and “the Lion, the Witch , and the Wardrobe.”  Even lonely prayer vigils become herioic exploits as small groups of the faithful intercede against a great flood of enveloping, stygian darkness.  It’s all quite epic. 

Then things happen to pull me out of my imagination and into the everyday world where good strives to overcome evil. 

 I was waking up from my afternoon coma.  I was listening to the boys play and my wife talking on the phone.  Snatches of my wife’s conversation drifted into my semi-consciousness and pulled me into wakefulness.  Bits and pieces of phrases like “eviction”, “children”, “help”, etc floated into the clearing fog.  When my wife came in to get me up I got the full story of a family whose kids had been visting Open Table that had been evicted from their apartment.  The kids came home from school to find their stuff thrown out of the sidewalk.  Their mother was out of town working. 

Into this nightmare strode a handful of women to take care of the kids, and problem solve what to do with all their worldly possession before folks descended on it to pillage what they wanted.  I was amazed and impressed with the division of labor to look for social services, to get help moving the possessions and storing them at the church. 

What took me to my knees in worship was the unthinking assumptions that we would care for them and that these children would be loved in a hard time.  These women didn’t hesitate to jump into the unknown and face whatever the crisis would bring. 

I stayed home cooking macaroni and cheese for the boys as my wife sped off in the van to jump into the fray.  I prayed and prayed not knowing if we would have extra guests for a while, or if there we enough people to help, or if things would get confrontational.  It was a pecular helplessness. 

My wife called later with stories of how the Lord brought folks with large trucks to help move the stuff, provided a place to stay as the family and the Christian’s in their lives tried to solve the real, long-term issues. 

It wasn’t hordes of Orcs and Minotaurs, dueling dragons, or magic swords.  It was compassion and love and determination in the face of despair.  It was ordinary people stepping into crisis.  Heather talked about how amazing Virginia and Sandee are at ministering in this world of finanical insecurity.  Virginia and Sandee are two of the women with Cross-Cultural Ministries who are teaching us how to live and minister in the area where the Lord has taken us.  I don’t appreciate how much courage and love it takes to minister to people who live on the border of the wastelands of despair in a society of plenty until moments like this happen.  God is good to have brought us along side such faithful servants and teachers. 

No special effects.  No sound track.  No million dollar budgets.  But heroes, regular people stepping into real lives when it matters.  They don’t have to, except for the example of Christ and the love of Christ. 

A couple of women from the church went to Java Monkey to spend some time together.  While they were there they were approached by a man and his pregnant wife who were asking for help.  They talked.  Because there were two of them, it was late morning in a very busy part of town, and because they discerned the Lord’s will, the women went with the couple to the hotel they were staying at and paid for a night.  They talked about getting more help than just a single night.  But that’s not the point of story…

A woman (not one of the two mentioned above) came up to me after the service Sunday to find out if the Meth addict she talked to the other day at a service station was the same one I worked with a couple of months ago.  They weren’t.  But that’s not the point of the story…

Last week a guy from church was riding home after work.  The person in front of him got a flat and had to pull over.  Instead of doing what all of us normally do he felt a prompting by the Lord to pull over and help.  While the flat was being changed he noticed that something was wrong.  He got the guy out from under the car seconds before it came crashing down.  It’s amazing how these little acts of obedience mean so much afterwards, and have consequences that we never know at the point of obedience.  But that’s not the point of the story…

The point of the story is that they had their eyes and hearts open, they engaged in conversation with a heart to bless, and they were generous with their time, attention, and finances. 

The Lord is giving us opportunities to put him on display every where we go, all the time.  The vision he gave Open Table is his vision, and he is making it a reality in all of our lives. 

Our core practices are generosity, hospitality, forgiveness, and risk taking.  These are love in action, and I so proud of how many are taking the love given to them and are actively sharing it with others as the Lord directs. 

April 19, 2007

I met a homeless guy on Sunday after church near the restaurant we went to.  His name is Thomas.  Heather and I tried to talk him into coming with us to lunch.  He was self-conscious about his state and his smell (I couldn’t smell anything).  We tried coaxing him, but he asked if we would just get him lunch and bring it out.  I asked him why and he said with a look of shame that he just didn’t feel comfortable.   He was embarrassed.  I told him that I and everyone at our table would love to just share some food in a comfortable place.  We could then find him a place to stay.  You could see the battle wage across his face as his longing to come in warred with his shame.  Shame won.  Literally in tears he asked if he could just stay outside.  I told him “of course.”  I’d bring him lunch and when we were done we would go get him a place to stay.  If I had been thinking clearer I would have invited everyone from church inside the restaurant to move the party outside and share time with him where he felt comfortable.  But it was cold, and I didn’t… 

I’ve been thinking a lot about Thomas and the war that waged behind his eyes.  I thought about the words of a song,

“You can’t fight the tears that ain’t coming,

Or the moment of truth in your lies, 

When everything feels like the movies, you bleed just to know you’re alive. 

And I don’t want the world to see me, cause I don’t think that they’d understand. 

When everything’s made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am.” 

From the song “Iris” on Dizzy Up the Girl by the Goo Goo DollsI thought about a passage from a book I’d just finished reading: 

        “How many of you there still are, girls and boys of various ages, raised by naïve parents in the sixties.  How many of you there are, so unhappy, not knowing how to be happy.  How I long to take pity on you, how I long to help you.  To touch you through the Twilight — gently, with no force at all.  To give you just a little confidence in yourself, just a tiny bit of optimism, a gram of willpower, a crumb of irony.  To help you, so that you could help others. 

        But I can’t.” 

Anton Gorodetsky from The Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko, p.126

The world is choking people.  It is crushing them in debauchery, violence, isolation, and hopelessness.  It is destroying people that the Lord will rescue through us.  We have to be in the game. 

I spent time this week with a group of kamikaze Christians working apartment ministries around the city.  It started with our prayer time for Standardized testing on Monday where I met Barb Newman.  On Wednesday I ran across someone from seminary I hadn’t seen in a while who was in this ministry.  On Thursday I attended a presentation about separation of church and state in local schools (more about this later).  At this meeting I met up Tim Cummins and a couple of others working with him.  They were all more than a little baffled and angry about why people were beating their heads against the restrictions of sharing Jesus in the public schools when there are wide-open opportunities with the same kids in Apartment complexes. These people love Jesus with their lives and their words.  For these guys the gospel is not a concept, but a face.  The battles and persecutions and sacrifices you read about in your Bible are not ideas from antiquity, but daily decisions.  I felt like a 10 year old sitting around with the “big kids” feeling important merely by association.

I thought a lot about my commitment to the gospel… 

All of this thinking brought me to the conclusion that our calling to the lost can not be “disembodied.”  In my public health days we had a saying, “Statistics are people with the tears removed.”  Without the tears the gospel becomes (for me) one of several competing options.  If it’s inconvenient then I can make another valid choice.  But with the tears it becomes a consuming obsession.  I am no longer fighting for an idea, but for Thomas, Alex, Jonathan, Carlos, Jennifer, Karla, Henry… 

If you are like me, and you are struggling to “get back in the game” after years of being only around believers, then I want to encourage you that the way out is found in the real lives of real people.  It’s scary.  But I guess that’s why our Lord says – more than any other command in scripture - “Do not be afraid.” 

I want to encourage you, if you haven’t already, to get involved in the various opportunities that are opening up for us in the after-school program, ESL, VBS, Theology Café, and other ministries – ministries that will let you see the tears on the faces again.  Faces which will call you to lay down your life, take up your cross, and follow him. 

February 8, 2007

Last October-November we had folks cleaning out the garden of a woman at Pearl Lane named Ry Kim.  Ry had cancer.  The chemotherapy was taking its toll and she couldn’t keep it up.  It had gotten out of control, and so some folks had graciously gone to winterize it.  My wife and young sons were part of that crew.   In December, our youngest (3 at the time) told his mom as she was driving down the road on some errand, “Ms. Ry Kim needs a vacuum cleaner.”  She didn’t pay much attention until he said it again the next day.  ‘Mommy, Ms. Ry Kim really needs a vacuum for Christmas.”  Mom called me and I called the pastor working with Ry.  Virginia said that Ry Kim needed several things, but that she probably could use a microwave more than a vacuum.  However, when she asked her what she wanted for Christmas, Ry said, “A vacuum cleaner.”   

So we went to the store to find a light weight vacuum for Fisher to give to Ry Kim.  It was a funny visit on a rainy day when he gave it to her.  Ry kept calling Fisher “Boy!” and Fisher tried to be attentive all the while not liking the smell of the house.   

Ry died a couple of months later.   What was most amazing was what Virginia shared about that time.  You see Ry Kim knew that the big questions about life and eternity had been answered by Jesus.  She didn’t fear death.  But in her suffering and loneliness she felt forgotten.  She wanted to know if he cared.  She asked for a vacuum cleaner.   And so the Lord spoke to a 3 year old to do his will.  Ry knew that she wasn’t forgotten.  For the rest of my life I will treasure the fact that my son hears the voice of God.   This is what being “on mission” is about. 

Mission is about being where the Lord is, working with him to make him known, to live and extend grace, to be his hands and feet.   Ry Kim’s funeral last Sunday was a real blessing.  It reminded me how the Lord wraps blessings and grace in the most humble of packages.  Her life was an amazing journey with many opportunities to be bitter over real evil and overwhelming loss (her family was slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge).  But the Lord saved her and made her a living witness of grace and forgiveness.  You would never have known that looking at her home or her humble circumstances.    The testimony of others about her life made me so curious and excited to discover the other as-yet-undiscovered gifts of grace in Pearl Lane (the area we serve with the after-school program and ESL).  I have found several in the after-school program that make the journey of faith truly alive and less theoretical.  What is so important about this perspective is that it keeps us watchful and expectant for the presence of our Lord at Pearl Lane.  It helps protect us from those pesky, dangerous, toxic ideas like “those people” need us, or that we are “the great Suburban/Middle Class hope,” or letting a “good works” mentality creep into lives defined by grace.