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?

Boston 2013

(Boston Local 103 IBEW)

My heart got ripped out during the 2013 Boston Marathon. Although we have all anguished over the dead and injured many times after similar, senselessly tragic events, I always had a sense of detachment. They happened somewhere else. I didn’t know anyone directly involved. I’ve never been there.

But having grown up in the Boston area and run The Marathon just last year, the bombings this year became personal. I had been in the crowds and experienced the joyous electricity among the spectators as a kid, and I was finally able to fulfill a lifelong goal of being the focus of that excitement as a competitor in 2012. I can say the commitment and multiple years of training and preparation it takes to get to the starting line as a runner is matched only by the years of commitment and encouragement provided by a runner’s friends and families. Friends and families that were ripped apart for simply offering encouragement – 26.2 miles of beautifully loud and raucous encouragement - where it is needed most.

I keenly understood many aspects surrounding this event, and when I first heard of the bombings, my response was intensely furious. I’ve got to do something! Instinctively, I wanted the perpetrators brought to justice. If I were being honest, I wanted an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, severed limb for severed limb. But, honestly, what could I do?

In 2 Chronicles 20:1-30, the king of Judah, Jehoshaphat, is faced with disaster thanks to an impending invasion by overwhelming army, and he’s wondering what to do. “Alarmed, Jehoshaphat resolved to inquire of the Lord” (v3), and he prayed intensely before concluding with this appeal to God: “For we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you” (v12). 

The Lord answered “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Go out and face them tomorrow, and the Lord will be with you” (v17). The next day, as the people of Judah “began to sing and praise, the Lord set ambushes” against the invaders (v22), and the armies completely annihilated each other (v23). There is no mention of Judah’s people lifting a finger during the battle, only their voices. 

Whether it’s an invading army, mad bombers, natural disasters, a cancer diagnosis, bullies, or a host of other things that make hearts quake with fear, what can you do? We cannot control what might happen to us. As Jehoshaphat said, we don’t have any power over those things, and we should acknowledge as much by praying to the One who does.

The only control we have is how we respond to the situation. And if you are searching for victory, that response should include prayer, praise and perseverance, as the Lord does His work.

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.

Power Aware

What if we could see the how much energy gets sucked up by our electric-powered machines, simply by plugging them in? That was the idea behind the Power-Aware Cord, one of Time Magazine’s Top 50 Inventions of 2010. Lights wrapped into the cord glow as electricity flows through it. The more power a machine draws, the brighter the cord glows, so a person could actually see the highest contributors to their electricity bill. According to Time, researchers discovered that making the electricity “visible” alerted people to the items that used the most power, so they could adjust their habits and uses accordingly.

What’s the biggest energy drain on your life? For me, the all-too-easy, but honest, answer in the past several months is “Work has swamped me,” and made me too busy to focus on much else. I’ve felt impatient, cranky and snippy. I probably glowed as I burned all that energy, a beautiful hue of angry, frustrated red. Ironically, the more energy I expended at work to try and beat back the mounting aggravation, the more frustrated I felt, which irritated me even more.

But I should have known better. For years, I carved out some time during lunch to read the Bible. During this recent stretch, guess what I continually skipped doing? When I take back some measure of control over my schedule and force myself to read Scripture despite everything trying to squeeze it out, the turbulence of the day smoothes out.

Just this week, I was supposed to participate in a conference call that would have sucked up another hour I did not have to spare. After stealing a few quick minutes with the Word just before the call, I joined in. However, several key participants mysteriously did not call in. So the call was canceled after about 10 minutes. And I felt brighter, lighter and energized.

Every time we read the Bible, we are “growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so (we) might have great endurance and patience” (Colossians 1:10-11). As we grow in that knowledge, God also uses His Word to teach, rebuke, correct and train us (2 Timothy 3:16), which brings to light those areas where we have allowed ourselves to drift away from Him and grown dim, so we can adjust accordingly.

The more we read, the more we grow. And the more we grow, the more we glow, because we get plugged into the ultimate, inexhaustible power source. What are you plugged into?

1/4 Mile

To race for one-quarter of a mile is one of the toughest running events a member of a track team can be asked to do. Just a little too far to be a sprint so you can run as hard as you can for the entire distance. Just a little too short to be a distance race so you can conserve some energy and pace yourself.

In high school, the coach had us distance runners do many ¼-miles for practice, and after those practices, we all would collapse in near exhaustion. Before one particular practice started, I found a pair of football shoulder pads in the equipment shed, and slipped them on for a laugh. Then I found out practice for that day would be ¼-mile, ¼-mile, ½-mile, ¼-mile, ¼-mile, ½ mile. Ouch. Then the questions started: “Hey, Sean, you gonna keep those on or what?” “Are you wimping out?” “Taking off the pads?” Having a stubborn streak, the pads stayed on as we started.

I made it through the first ½-mile, but was obviously dragging. The workout would have been hard enough without the extra weight, but with it, my legs burned, my lungs heaved, and my heart pounded so hard I thought my ribs would crack from the inside out. So finally, I decided to get rid of the extra weight, and tossed the pads aside. The next ¼-mile run, I was amazed at how much quicker and lighter I felt. I guess you could say that I felt somewhat rejuvenated, even though I was racing for ¼-mile.

If it feels like you’re dragging, like you’ve got a weight on your shoulders or your heart, you might be carrying around some extra burden that you need to toss aside. It’s time to rejuvenate yourself because, as Psalm 12:25 says, “An anxious heart weighs a man down.” “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:6). Confessing our sins is liberating, like being freed of shoulder pads. The race we’ve all got to run is hard enough without the extra weight that sin uses to drag us down.

M&Ms

You don’t need to convince me about original sin – I survived potty training our daughter. When we started to get serious about the whole potty training thing, my wife and I agreed that our daughter would get one M&M for just sitting on the toilet as a method of encouragement. When she agreed to sit, we gave her an M&M. However, we limited the chocolate reward to one try within a reasonable amount of time. No bouncing on and off the potty just to get more M&Ms.

After coming home one night during this same period, a frazzled babysitter and a chocolate-crazed 2-year old blazed past us at the door. Although we discussed the M&M/potty training plan with the babysitter, we forgot to tell her about the “one try” limit. Even at two years old, our daughter instinctually knew enough to swindle the clueless babysitter nine times in just two hours to keep getting more chocolate.

If we could have gotten her to focus through her sugar rush and ask her why she kept lying to the babysitter, I’m sure her very eloquent response would have been, “It is no longer I myself who did it, but it is sin living in me” (Romans 7:17). We were stunned by the deceit she demonstrated so easily. But maybe we shouldn’t have been, for as David said, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5). The sin and the inclination to do wrong were already in our daughter, and it lurks in all of us.

To be properly prepared for Easter, Lent should be a time to repent and purify ourselves to properly present ourselves before God. Yet, with all those sins that we are aware of and unaware of since conception, repentance can seem like a very daunting task. However, repentance is as simple as sincerely asking God to, please, “forgive my hidden faults,” and “keep your servant also from willful sins” (Psalm 19:12-13). Jesus paid for each and every sin we have committed by being crucified. His blood “purifies us from all sin” (1 John 1:7), whether that sin was deliberate or unconsciously involved M&M’s from when we were seemingly innocent 2-year olds