What if . . .

My eyes snapped open when I heard it. I had been starting to doze off on a bus tour as part of a professional conference. My mind lazily wandered from one foggy, disconnected thought to the next. Looking out the window as the bus chugged down the highway, I caught a glimpse of a sign for an approaching exit, and recognized the name of the town.

A girl I went to college with had grown up in that town. My thoughts drifted back to years ago, and I remembered, recounted and reminisced as my eyes drooped. Then my mind switched to questions: What’s she’s doing? Where is she now? What if things had turned out different …?

Anything can trigger a memory. These reminders conjure up thoughts, feelings and emotions that range from comforting to spine-tingling. A certain song prompts you to remember a specific event. A smell reminds you of Grandma’s kitchen. A unique sound transports you back to the place where you first heard it.

In my case, it was a simple place name that caused my thoughts to meander. But I was a different person back in college, with different priorities, different thoughts, and different motivations.

Where does your mind go when it wanders? Ever catch yourself wondering or dreaming or hoping things could’ve been different or better? There is a danger in letting our thoughts repeatedly return to the past, especially if that past did not include God. If we continually dwell on what was, then we begin to lose focus on where we are right now, and lose sight of where we want to go.

So before my thoughts drifted too far off the road with my “What if …?” question, I heard “Then you wouldn’t know me.” Like sudden, strong gust of wind, the Lord snapped me back to the present tense, and the fog blew away with His answer. I was instantly awake, alert, and looking around to see who on the bus was invading my thoughts.

Once we know the Lord, He will provide corrections to our course as needed. Which is why Isaiah says, “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’” (30:21).

Are you listening?

Broken

When the wineglass shattered, rejoicing ensued. Much rejoicing. (See and hear for yourself here). My daughter and I danced, we slapped high fives, and we squealed and shouted so loudly in the detached garage that my wife heard us from inside the house with all the doors and windows closed tight. That shattering glass was our last ditch effort to get some part of her science experiment to work, and after hours and hours of effort and frustration, a short celebration was very much in order.

The experiment was supposed to be relatively easy: use sound to break wineglasses at their resonant frequency. We pummeled a variety of glasses with sound for hours and hours one afternoon with no success. We tried wineglasses; we tried glasses without stems; we even tried a mug. We tried not to get frustrated as the failures mounted.

After nightfall, we set up one more glass, and with the loudspeaker and amplifier cranked to 11, the glass exploded. After all that time, we broke only one glass, but what joy that one brought.

Consider how often God’s message of love and mercy and redemption and peace gets presented, and then rejected, by one person. I sat in church for years like a stout mug, with that message bouncing off my thick head. Just between 1^st grade and the end of high school alone, I probably sat through about 1,000 sermons and Sunday school-type classes. And who knows how many hundreds of thousands of times God tried to get my attention during the rest of my life when I wasn’t even near a church.

How many times did I stubbornly resist? 

How many times have you?

When His message finally resonated with me, I broke down and humbly admitted I needed Him. Apparently, when that happens, Jesus says “there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:10). 

So if my daughter and I get excited enough to dance and holler when one glass breaks after many hours of trying, imagine what the celebration in Heaven is like after years and years, and thousands upon thousands of attempts to get a person to take that step of repentance? “Rejoicing” might be an understatement. Dancing, high fives, and shouts of joy are probably just the beginning. The celebration might be downright raucous.

Have you given those angels something to celebrate?

The Faucet

www.sweetclipart.com

 

The faucet handle blew off as the water erupted, soaking me and drenching the ceiling. In the next room, my wife and daughter erupted with laughter as I dove under the bathroom sink, frantically grasping for the water shut-off handle to stop the geyser.

By no means am I a plumber. You won’t catch me sweating pipe joints. But replacing a washer to stop a leaking faucet is so simple, even I can do it, and have many times before. So, I do know enough to turn off the water leading to the faucet before attempting to unscrew the faucet handle. Usually.

At some point that particular day, between deciding to fix the dripping faucet in the morning and actually attempting to make the fix in the afternoon, I convinced myself that I had, in fact, turned off the water to the faucet. I truly believed the water was off. But, I didn’t bother to verify what position the shut-off handle was in.

When we hear something that seems spiritual or sounds Biblical, how often do we confirm it actually comes from the Bible? When tempting Jesus in the desert, Satan quoted Scripture out of context to help support his lies (Matthew 4:1-11). To fight back, Jesus also quoted Scripture, but correctly. We also need to understand the Bible, so we can distinguish the truth from the quasi-truth or outright falsehood.

Even if they are meant for good intentions, phrases like “God helps those who help themselves,” or “Money is the root of all evil,” or “This too shall pass” sure sound Biblical-ish, but they are not. The website blueletterbible.org has a great collection of sayings not actually found in Scripture. (Small group discussion idea!)

But what other sayings or phrases have we repeated, or believed in, or relied on without confirming they are based on Biblical truth? God may work in mysterious ways (another often-quoted saying not found in the Bible), but He will not contradict Himself. If Satan has the audacity to twist the meaning of Scripture while speaking directly to The Author of Scripture, I don’t think we’re immune to his word twists either. Whether sayings, bits of advice, or words of guidance come from a friend, family, community leaders, or anyone else, we should verify they are based on truth before fully embracing them.

“Test everything,” Paul implores us (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Otherwise, what we believe in could blow up in our face.

Sound of the Psalms

Thanks to Keith Johnson and Life Covenant Church for allowing me to give the sermon back in August.

It's all about communication using descriptions of sound from the Psalms. Trust me, I'm an acoustical engineer.

Litton

The story of Kip Litton is amazing. In the August 6, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, Mark Singer details just how amazing, as this dentist went from overweight to running marathons. Inspired, he set out to finish a marathon in less than three hours in each state. To cover 26.2 miles in under three hours, while not utilizing transportation with wheels, is a difficult and significant accomplishment. To do it repeatedly is astounding.

www.writingaboutrunning.com

Litton started and maintained his own website to chronicle his feats, which initially went unnoticed. However, for about a year when he was 48, he averaged about one marathon per month, and traveled all over the country to race. In many of these races, he finished near the top of his age group. Incredibly, he actually won the West Wyoming Marathon outright.

And people did begin to take notice of Litton’s performances. People like the overall fourth-place finisher at the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Marathon. Litton’s time put him in third place overall. But the fourth place finisher was actually in third place at the halfway point, and he swore he did not get passed during the last half of the race. He would have noticed, too – the last half of the course consisted of a six-foot wide trail.

Other runners, bloggers and race directors failed to find Litton in the myriad of photographs taken during races, except at specific timing checkpoints. People sleuthing the internet eventually figured out Litton fabricated the entire West Wyoming Marathon that he supposedly won, from creating the event website, to inventing the names of the other “participants” and their times.

Litton was exiting each course between timing checkpoints, utilizing transportation with wheels to travel to the next checkpoint, and then re-entering the race. Once he crossed through the checkpoint, he repeated the process. He was cutting the course, which is a running term for “cheating.”

As Singer concludes, “Litton’s story could have been a small but admirable one: an out-of-shape Midwestern dentist who transformed himself into a competitive marathoner. But he had insisted on transforming himself further, inventing a heroic avatar, ‘Kip Litton,’ that couldn’t be sustained.” Singer continues, “But whatever glory he felt was surely short-lived” as people exposed him as a fraud.

What stories are we spinning to impress people, stories based on deception and cheating, which only require more cheating and more deception to maintain? What front or what mask are we putting up for people to see, when the truth is actually very different? Whether stories or facades, they are still lies.

Maybe we’re fooling those people now, but we can’t sustain it. Frauds do ultimately get exposed. As it says in the Message translation of Numbers 32:23, “You can be sure that your sin will track you down.” 

And then the story won’t be so amazing.

Sour Cream



www.bonappetit.com

The sour cream never had a chance. Never knew what hit it. Innocently it waited in my refrigerator for the next potato- or nacho-based meal, which as a bachelor happened frequently.


This particular day, I staggered into my apartment after running 22 miles while training for my first marathon. Drenched with sweat, vision blurred and legs wobbling, I lurched toward the kitchen, ravenous after burning so much energy. Flinging open the door to the fridge, several tumbleweeds blew out, exposing the unsuspecting tub of protein and fat. Hesitating briefly, a small voice of reason pleaded to not make meal out of a condiment. I shrugged, and attacked the sour cream with primal gusto anyway.

Even though I had changed my physical regimen over several months to prepare for running 26.2 miles, I hadn’t changed my eating habits – burgers, fries, fried chicken, and now apparently, a foray into the fattier condiments. No wonder my body always felt so broken down, and I was zombified by the need for sleep.

Call me crazy, but a food-ish product that contains 10% of my suggested daily allowance of saturated fat in a mere 2 tablespoons couldn’t possibly replace all the carbohydrates, potassium, sodium, vitamins and minerals I burned off in mass quantities. And it certainly could not provide me energy for the next training run. So I lost weight and remained sluggish throughout my training. I bonked during the actual race. My legs turned to mush, and I slogged through the last 2 miles like I was shuffling through waist-deep wet cement.

In the second half of 1 Corinthians 10, Paul writes about bad food. Bad because it was sacrificed to idols, not bad because of its fat content. These days, we do not have to worry about whether our food participated in pagan temple rituals. But we should be concerned about what food we put into our bodies, and how it affects our moods, our energy levels, and our focus because it relates to how well and how actively we can serve God.

When speaking of food, Paul said, “Everything is permissible – but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible – but not everything is constructive” (1 Corinthians 10:23). The items on my bachelor menu were all readily acceptable to eat, but they were not helpful for me. I hope you do not have a sour-cream-as-a-meal habit, but what other food-ish item(s) are on your regular menu that may not be beneficial for you in the long run?

Silence

Microsoft clip art

Remember a serious crush you had when you were in high school? Michelle and I were in typing class together (Flashback: The class taught kids how to use a typewriter correctly. You know, those clackety things people used before computers to create documents?). From what I could tell we hit it off pretty well. Joking and laughing and occasionally stealing glances when the teacher wasn’t looking – needless to say, I was a little distracted during class. Maybe it’s because of those interactions that still, to this day, I don’t know how to keyboard correctly.


Yet, even though I spoke with her, I remained silent about The One Thing That Mattered: how I felt about her. And so, I remained trapped in my own, self-constructed solitary confinement of unspoken hopes and dreams.

I drowned in that same silence when I found out she had started dating some guy. Some other guy. Some guy in our typing class, no less, who probably used his superior typing skills to woo her, unlike me who continued to hunt and peck. Some guy who apparently had no problem talking to her on a deeper level, unlike me who kept silent about such things.

So while they started joking and laughing and stealing glances, I ached inside, left to repeatedly wonder “What if I had said . . . ” Every word I failed to speak when I had the chance pressed down like stacked weights on my chest. Her same actions that used to thrill me, now tore me apart. I resembled David’s remarks in Psalm 39, “When I was silent and still, not even saying anything good, my anguish increased” (Psalm 39:2).

By not saying anything of importance or meaningful to her, in effect, I abandoned her ears to let them roam and find something of substance to listen to; something our fellow typist verbalized.

What is The One Thing That Matters to you that is being left unspoken, and to whom? How could your relationship with God, your friends and your family improve if you said something – anything - about how you honestly feel and what you think? During this time of resolutions to start the new year, make it yours to start tearing down the walls of silence.

Vegas

“So, we’re planning on taking Todd’s RV to St. George for some golf on a long weekend down where it’s warm. It’s going to be like a mini retreat. Some fellowship, some study, some reflection, Steve’s bringing his guitar. Just some good Godly time on the road with the group.” My men’s small group had decided to make a road trip for a little getaway. Seven guys, one RV, 780 miles and one God. Those numbers sounded pretty good to me.

During the trip, however, it didn’t take long for God to be pushed aside. The RV became more like a traveling locker room, in language, attitude and smell. After 10 hours on the road and an entire day on the golf course, the supposed focus of our trip – God – had barely been mentioned. That evening, someone hatched an idea to head south to Las Vegas instead of staying in St. George for another golf day. Vegas was so close, so easy to get to, so tempting. But if we hadn’t made the Lord the focus of the trip up to this point, we sure weren’t going to now.

Until, of course, He stepped in.

While making a 50-point turn at a gas station, Todd caught the back corner of his RV on a concrete post, partially tearing the rear wall away from the rest of the vehicle. Daylight shined clearly through three of the four sides along the perimeter, meaning we were stranded until it got fixed. Tempers flared, and frustration boiled over.

God forced us to stop and reconsider why we were supposed to be on this trip. Before the Lord leads us beside quiet waters and restores our soul, He makes us lie down in green pastures (Psalm 23:2-3, my emphasis). Oh, He made us lay down all right, so that we had nowhere to go, no way to get anywhere, and nothing to do, until we asked Him to join us. Our quiet waters and green pastures were outside of an RV repair shop in the middle of the desert. While waiting for the rear end to be re-attached, we finally got together, apologized to each other and to Him, and invited Jesus along for the trip home.

On the way back, we had some fellowship, some reflection, some study, and sang some songs while Steve played guitar, like a mini retreat. Just the way God wanted the trip to be in the first place.

Tear jerker

The tears caught me off guard, especially since they were mine, and I was trying to speak. As part of the LIFE 401 Sunday School class at Life Covenant Church, we were supposed to be describing how our relationship with Jesus started, and what it’s meant to each of us. I had told different pieces of my story many times . . .

Raised by a single mother who made me go to church as a kid, but I didn’t want to. In my late 20’s, my future wife gave me a Bible. Not to seem ungrateful, I started reading it cover-to-cover, slogging through in over two years. During that time, I got married and started my own business, as an over-analytical bundle of nerves and doubts.

The very same week I finished the last verse of Revelation, I attended a spiritual retreat, and suddenly, everything in the Bible made sense. Jesus spoke to me directly, accepted me and loved me. From that moment on, I desperately needed Him. I still have my doubts and fears, but thanks to my faith in Him, they are short-lived. Even though I’m still learning about Him years later, I can tell Jesus is watching over me because I put my trust in Him. I have no other explanation as to why things have worked out the way they have, and it’s been just outstanding.

A tear-jerking story? May not seem like it, but I have brought myself to tears every time I have been invited to speak to groups of people about what Jesus means to me.

Pop quiz: What do the movies Finding Nemo, Up and even Despicable Me all have in common? Not only are they animated movies, but they all opened my tear duct spigots. Bonus points if you realized another common thread includes a father or a father-figure trying to protect and connect with lost or rejected kids.

I never got to experience that, because my parents separated before I started pre-school, thanks to Dad’s unfaithfulness. After my cloudburst in LIFE 401, I realized my testimony actually begins there – the reason why a single mother was raising me by herself.

And that’s why I cry tears of thanks whenever I talk about Jesus.

Where my biological father offered rejection, God accepted me. When I got left out, He chose me. When I got abandoned, He invited me into His family. “God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure” (Ephesians 1:5, NLT). Those words are so sweet to someone who never had a father. The more I know Jesus and the more I understand what He did for me, the more grateful and thankful I become.

*Sniff*

. . . can someone pass the tissues?