Beautiful Things

It’s raining here in Georgia. I’m sitting at my kitchen table, sipping on my coffee, reading my devotional, and looking out my big kitchen window. All I can see is overgrown grass, gray sky, and invisible rain drops splashing into a puddle. My kids are sitting in the living room watching some kind of behind the scenes feature on Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakuel. My wife is at the gym. Overall, the day feels quiet. Contemplative. Serene.

My devotional is Jesus Calling. Today’s entry read in part:

My world is filled with beautiful things; they are meant to be pointers to Me, reminders of My abiding Presence.

Watching the invisible rain crash into the puddle, I think of what Jesus said: He makes the rain fall on the just and unjust alike. Sounds simple (I mean, have you ever seen rain avoid a person?), but it says a lot about God. Depending on how you view rain, it’s either God blessing everyone equally or God allowing hardship equally. You could certainly drill down deeper on the implications, but at face value, the fairness of God in both good and bad is contained within that one, simple act.

It rains on everyone sometime.

Thinking about that, I imagine that in places where it rarely rains, water falling from heaven seems like an enormous blessing, an occasion to sit down and breathe deeply and silently give praise that a need has been met. I would imagine in places like that no one grumbles about the inconvenience, or heaves a sigh at having to rearrange their plans for the day. I would imagine that on a day like today, they just sit back and watch the rain fall with wonder for however long it might last. Each drop seen as precious. Each rain-filled minute a gift.

Meanwhile, I look at the rain and think, “Man – people will be driving like idiots today.”

Perspective. We all need it sometimes. In fact, a lot of us need a lot of the time – the ability to put things into the right context, the right worldview. Usually the problem is fairly simple: our perspective is myopic, limited to the only creature in the universe that we feel matters.

Ourselves.

Today, let’s take a minute and expand that view to at least the people closest to us, whether that’s family or friends or co-workers or the stranger on the street. Let’s make an active choice to see the world not through our narrow lens of self-satisfaction but instead through a lens of wonder and awe and awareness. The rain falls on us all, no one better than the other, so let’s choose to see the blessing in that today. Let’s choose to see benevolence and grace instead of inconvenience and bother. As Garrison Keillor once wrote, in a “News From Lake Woebegon” sketch for Prairie Home Companion, “the Lord offers Himself to us just the same, whether we notice it or not.”

Today, let’s take notice.

In the Passenger’s Seat

Yesterday was a great day for my family. My brother invited us to an Atlanta Braves baseball game as part of my nephew’s birthday celebration (happy 6th birthday, Joey!), and the game started at 1:30. But before that, we were to meet at the world famous Varsity Drive-In for lunch at eleven. As it’s summer and we love my brother and his family, we agreed to both; plus, we were excited to take Ella and Jon to their first baseball game. However, it presented us with a dilemma.

What about church?

Even though I’m no longer working at a church, it doesn’t mean that the church isn’t important to me. It is, and vitally so. Not to sound all judgy on you, but I think that physical community with fellow Christ-followers is one of the key components of spiritual formation. Which means my family must seek it out intentionally now that I’m no longer employed by a church. It has become much more of a priority for us, instead of an assumed thing.

(I realize that sounds bad, but when you’re on staff at a church, you take for granted that you are part of a community. You get too focused on the responsibilities of leading it.)

Anyway, all this to say that Rachel and I sat down and discussed what to do.

“Well, we could go to an early service somewhere,” she said. “I mean, I suppose we don’t have to…”

“No,” I said. “I’m with you. Let’s go somewhere with a nine o’clock service. We can just head straight downtown after that.”

So we sat down and considered the different churches in our area that offered an early service. Actually, we both knew exactly which church we wanted to attend; it took all of nine seconds for us to simultaneously declare it. I won’t tell you the name, but it’s a local church with a reputation for excellence, and one we’ve both wanted to visit for a while.

Now that we can, we were excited for the possibility.

It didn’t disappoint. I won’t go into a church review, in part because it’d be boring to read, but also because I actively worked to NOT see things that way yesterday. When you spend time working behind the scenes in a church, the tendency when you go to another church is to peek behind the curtain; to get an idea of how the other guy does things, and see if there is any inspiration for your congregation. This tendency gets in the way of you actually worshipping, and so it is that some pastors forget what it means to sit back, relax, and focus on God from the pew (or in this case, theater chair). So I went into yesterday morning with my analyzing mode set to Off.

It was amazing. I didn’t stress about a single thing. We got the kids checked into the church’s registration system, sent Ella off the elementary age kids area and took Jon to the preschool area. I was worried about this part because Jon has attachment issues to me, and those issues flared up every Sunday just before he went to his Sunday school class and I went to mine. So I expected tears. I expected screaming. Instead, I watched my son stroll into a completely foreign environment, pick up a truck, and immediately start playing.

He never even looked back.

I figured if he could do it, then so could I. I walked back out to the lobby area, grabbed a free cup of coffee, found Rachel, and together we strolled into an entirely different world. And for an hour, I forgot I was a pastor. I forgot what it felt like to worry over the service.

I remembered what it was like to simply let go of myself, and enter into the presence of the holy, righteous, and awesome God of All.

Now I’m not saying you don’t worship as a pastor. You do. It’s just different. You’re so involved with the mechanics of the service that you’re a bit more aware of what’s going on than most people. You know what needs to go on in the Audio/Visual booth; you know when the men need to take up the offering; you’re subconsciously listening to the ticking of the clock in your head; reading the body language of the people; judging the ambient temperature in the room, watching the faces during singing, worrying about the lighting, revisiting your sermons notes in your head, thinking about how you might want to change an illustration or the close. In many modern churches, you’re the one responsible for making sure that the people have done their part to make the service worshipful.

And I worried about that more than I should have. I did theater in high school and happent to be a bit of a nerd, so the ins and outs of production not only fascinate me, they present an area for excellence to be achieved. Which means that I spent more time worrying about that stuff than necessary, which meant that I allowed my worship to sometimes be more of a battle than it needed to be.

Which made sitting in the passenger seat yesterday all the more restful.

It was also instructive for my spiritual life. I cannot always be in control. I cannot always be worried about making sure that every I is dotted and every T is crossed. To be that consumed with attaining perfection is to deny what Christ’s death and resurrection proclaims as true: that I am broken, and cannot fix myself, even after He’s put me back together again. I must rest in Him and let Him transform me.

To be sure, we can’t, as Dallas Willard famously wrote, be Vampire Christians – “I’ll just take your blood, Jesus, and go on with my life, thank you very much.” But neither can we go to the opposite extreme, where we don’t even need the blood of Jesus because we’ve figured out the magic formula. There’s a reason Jesus spent so much time chiding the Pharisees; when we feel like we have God mastered, then we’ve missed the point because we’ve missed the Person.

Writing all of this is taboo in some people’s minds because I’m admitting to something that some Christians want to deny: that I’m still being conformed to Christ. As a pastor, I often felt the sadness in people when they would ask me for an answer and the only one I could give them was “I don’t know.” Others were liberated by my honesty, but there were some who seemed defeated by the truth. Looking back on it, I think it was because they felt if I didn’t have all my stuff together, how could they possibly hope to?

Here’s how: by surrendering to Christ. Reading His word, not as a rule book, but as a conversation. Considering His Spirit in us not as a power to be mastered, but as a gift to be enjoyed. Putting ourselves into His hands and trusting that He will shape and grow us in the ways that matter, the ways we need, and that He’ll do the same for others.

Yesterday, I was reminded of that. It was powerful. It was awesome. And it awakened a hunger for more.

It was a good day.

Beyond The Walls

Yesterday afternoon I found myself balancing on two rocks, trying desperately not to fall into the Chattahoochee River. I was also trying hard not to drop the young man in my arms.

Before you freak out, let me explain: I was baptizing him.

See, once upon a time, the young man came to my youth group. He was a small kid, loved baseball, very energetic (from what I can remember). Now, he’s a buffed out Naval weapons instructor who’s on leave for a few days. He came to Christ while serving in Kuwait, and when he decided he wanted to be baptized like Jesus, he had only two conditions: 1- it should be in a river, and 2- he wanted me to do the dunking.

He talked it over with his mother, and she decided that was acceptable – as long as she could be baptized with him. They called a mutual friend, who contacted me because, as we determined yesterday, I was “the only preacher crazy enough to do this.”

Naturally, I agreed.

So after some searching, we found Abbotts Bridge Park, which isn’t as much of a park as it is a boat ramp with a gravel parking lot and a bathroom. Turns out they load in tubers by the busload at the park, so we had to wait until about 35 bathing suited rednecks lashed their beer coolers and their tubes together and launched a massive flotilla of whooping shenanigans down the river. Once they were safely out of range, we tiptoed down the ramp, through the mud and into the frigid water.

Which is where we began: me, balancing on two rocks, holding the young man while I said, “Because of your faith in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, it is my privilege to baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

And with that, I dunked him. I also lost my balance for a split second and had to fight to keep him from falling. Once he came out of the water, he was all smiles, and he hugged me.

“Thank you,” he said.

His mother was next, and when she stepped into the water she let out a small yelp. I’m telling you – it was cold. But she went under with the same pronouncement, and when she came up, she shouted. Then she hugged me. And then her joy in the moment just bubbled over and infected our audience on the shore: her husband, her son, his wife, our mutual friend and her husband, and my wife Rachel and our two kids, Ella and Jon. Someone started singing “He Is Lord.”

It was cool.

Afterward, as we stood on the boat ramp chatting, I overheard Rachel tell the mother, “Well, he left the church because he knew God had something more. He still loves the church – but he wants to take it beyond the walls.” I thought about that for a second; it made me think of something that a friend told me a few weeks ago, a friend who doesn’t like church because of negative associations but likes getting together with me to talk about God: “Don’t give up what you’re doing – there aren’t enough people like you willing to talk to people like me.”

I don’t know how much things like that shape direction and purpose, but I’ll say this much: I love taking the church into unexpected places. I love the fact that when some men wanted to pull their boat from the river they got to see the mother’s baptism. One even asked, “Aren’t you supposed to do that in a church?”

“Anywhere is the church,” someone else said.

I like that. “Anywhere is the church” as long as the people who are Christ’s body will make it so. A coffee shop, a riverside, a baseball field – we can find moments of the holy wherever and whenever we’re willing to seek them.

We just have to be willing.

Play With Me, Daddy

“Play with me, daddy.”

I must hear that a couple hundred times a day. Sometimes, I’m ready to play, and it’s tickle fights, wrestling matches, Avengers figures, cars and trucks until we can’t stand it any longer. Other times, I’m not so ready to play, and I try to beg off. If you’re a parent, I’m sure you can relate.

But lately, I’ve noticed something. When Jon says “Play with me”, he’s using the word play in an entire different way. In fact, it may be an entirely different word.

I hear play and I think interaction, me and him using our imaginations to create scenarios and worlds where the toys we use and the time we share transport us together into another place. But it’s a separate togetherness: we each act independently within the game, each one doing what we imagine our characters should do. I think play, and it’s really all about collective yet distinct imaginative effort. Me and him as two.

When Jon says play, it’s less about imagination or collaborative effort. It’s more about him doing what he wants to do while I sit in the same room with him. Sometimes he’ll hand me a truck and tell me where to drive it. Other times he forgets I’m even there. The only thing he really needs is for me to remain physically present; my mind can be a thousand miles away as long as he can still use my arms as bridges and my belly as a mountain. I am another toy for him to use.

It’s ugly, but sometimes I get frustrated by this kind of play. My son has some cool toys, and the idea of just running the same four trucks over my stomach for an hour and a half makes me feel a little…I dunno, bored maybe? I want to line up action figures and trucks and Lego castles and create our own fantastic battles and worlds. I understand on a deeper level what play can really be, and I want to explore that deeper level.

My son, who’s only four, doesn’t get that yet. So he’s content to play at his level, happy to have a few small toys and a daddy who will simply sit with him for as long as he needs. He doesn’t know what he’s missing because he hasn’t learned there’s anything to miss. Developmentally, he’s right on schedule and I have to stop and remind myself that, as his father, I have to work with him where he’s at and gently expand his world a little bit at a time.

I bring all this up because it’s sort of where I’m at with God right now. For a long time, I’ve been content to play at my level, which is to do what I want to do while having the security of His presence. But God’s been gently expanding my world; He’s calling me out into places of much deeper meaning and discovery, not because I’m special, but because He has something He wants to show me. I still want to play with a couple of trucks.

He wants to help me build worlds.

Like my son, I’ve been content to just do my thing. But also like my son, I’ve learned to put my hand into my daddy’s and let Him lead me into something else. It requires trust and faith that He won’t lead me into situations where I’ll be hurt; it requires me loving Him enough to surrender to something that stretches me, pushes the envelope of what I think I can do. And when I find I’m at my limit, He lovingly picks me up into His arms and lets me rest, reassuring me that we’ve done enough for the day.

Sometimes, I worry about what other people might think of what He’s teaching me. But He doesn’t. And I trust Him.

Because He loves me.

Graduation Day – Final Sermon

* This is the manuscript for my final sermon as Youth Pastor at Chestnut Grove Baptist Church. After much prayer and thought, my family has stepped away from full-time pastoral work so I can pursue a career as a writer and speaker. I’ll have another job too (it’s almost a necessity) but my main focus is on expanding my writing and speaking opportunities.

To all of you who have supported or helped me in the ministry over the past fifteen years, please know that I am grateful for each of you. Your contributions, far more than my own, were the reason that God was able to transform so many students. Thank you for being such a blessed part of my service as a pastor.

*****

“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” – Romans 8:29

There’s a book that’s been sitting on my nightstand now for almost a month. It’s less than a hundred pages thick, and the stark white cover almost mocks me every time I walk by.

“Risk is Right” it tells me. John Piper says so.

I’m not a very risky person. Never have been. When I was a kid, my idea of taking a risk was dunking an Oreo into milk after I’d taken a bite, thus allowing for the potential of tiny black cookie crumbs to contaminate the pure white milk. It was my brother who jumped off the house with only a shopping bag for a parachute. It was my friends who snuck out of the house at night to sit on their front porches and feel the rush of the cool night air combined with the knowledge that they’d broken a rule. It was the heroes in my comic books that dared to do things that common sense and insurance agents said was, to put it bluntly, stupid.

But not me. I was the good kid. The (semi) obedient one. I set the example. I toed the mark. Always have.

Sure, there were times when I did things that were risky. Once, when I was about 15, my friends convinced me that it would be fun to camp out in my neighbor’s yard as a cover for sneaking down to a store that was rumored to sell cigarettes to under-age kids. I didn’t smoke, had no interest in smoking, but I was the straight-arrow, so they figured I could just walk in, be my normal polite self and procure a couple of packs of smokes for the heathens. The plan, they said, was flawless.

Except for the fact that I froze up. I couldn’t go inside the store. I had visions of the police being called, of my arrest and incarceration, of my parents sobbing as the judge threw the book at me and derailed my chance for college, which would derail my chance for a good job, which meant that I was inevitably headed towards a future of riding the rails like the hobos in Hardy Boy novels, destined to either help Frank and Joe solve a mystery or be a shadowy figure who foretold their doom.

So my friends took my learner’s permit and went inside to try and by smokes anyway. The clerk kicked them out, laughing. I was relieved until, as we crossed the street, I got hit in the knee by a car that didn’t have its lights on. I was knocked head over heels into a drainage ditch, convinced that my leg had been severed as punishment for being so stupid. I just knew I was going to die in that ditch, becoming a cautionary tale to other kids and a source of embarrassment to my family.

“Poor Jason,” my grandparents would say as they sat on the carport shelling peas. “He seemed like such a good boy.”

Obviously, my leg was fine. My knee did swell to the size of a mini-basketball, but I hid it from my parents by wearing baggy pants for two weeks and pretending my limp was just some new kind of strut. It is entirely possible that I was responsible for starting the gangsta lean. I should’ve thought to trademark it.

But that’s just not who I was.

I could tell you more stories, stories about how I didn’t take the right kind of risks, stories about how the risks I did take were either coldly calculated to the point that there was no risk at all, or wildly impulsive, resulting in a day-after sense of shame and regret that made me burrow deeper into myself. Bottom line is that I’ve never taken the right kind of risks. Never figured out that there are healthy and productive ones to be taken.

Which is why I picked up that book, “Risk is Right”, in the first place. I needed to know how to do what God was telling me to do.

I needed to know how to leave this church, step out in faith, and see where God would take me.

It’s funny that this is all coming together on Graduation Sunday. A lot of people are here to celebrate and acknowledge the preschoolers and high schoolers and college folks who’ve put in their time, completed a major season of their lives, and are moving on to other things. New things. Scary things. I look at Austin and Madison and Cody and Brandon and Jon and Haley and Victoria and I remember what it felt like to walk in their shoes. After high school, the choice was simple: college. After college, the choice wasn’t so simple, especially for me.

There’s not a lot of people banging down the door to hire English majors. Though there are a lot of English majors banging down doors to deliver you a fresh, tasty pizza in 30 minutes or less.

It’s funny that this annual ritual comes around and we stand in front of these kids and extol the virtues of risk, of stepping out, of change. We tell them to chase dreams and find their passions, and we slip them a couple bucks and we wait for the inevitable: for them to do what so many of us did, and settle down, find a job, start a family, and leave risk behind.

Change, for some of us, is best left to the younger. Or to the marketers behind clever political ads.

And yet change is at the very heart of what it means to be human. From conception onward, we are constantly in flux. Life is steady progression from one stage to the next, only we stop acknowledging it at some point when we feel safe. Maybe it comes when we make “enough money”. Maybe it comes when we get that dream house. Maybe it comes when we find a church we like that has people like us and we feel at home. I can’t say what it is for you, but for some of us out there, you know what I’m talking about.

You find that comfortable spot and you set up camp and you say, “This is where I’m supposed to be. I ain’t moving.”

Which would be great if life worked that way. But it doesn’t. We’re not meant to become static. We’re meant to be ever-changing. Just look at what Paul is saying in Romans 8:29 – we are meant to be conformed into the image of Christ.

Conformed. It’s a verb. It means continually shaped. Molded. Remolded. Occasionally taken back to the drawing board and started over again. It’s the truth about our lives and character: we are constantly being remade by the One who made us, the One who doesn’t have to be remade.

Have you ever thought about that? That God doesn’t have to be remade? I grew up hearing that “God doesn’t change” and while that’s true, it’s misleading. It makes God sound stale. It makes God sound like the old man who lived in my former neighborhood and threatened us with a shotgun for walking on the neighbor’s side of the property line.

“You’re almost on my grass! Do it again and I’ll shoot! Whippersnappers!”

The reason that God doesn’t change isn’t because He’s crusty, it’s because He is infinite. He is all things in all times to all people. That’s why He’s just as accessible to people today as He was in the time of Moses. That’s why His word still has wisdom and power in our modern world just as it did when the majority of people thought that sailing too far would make you fall off the edge of the planet. Because God is infinite, which means that He is always sufficient, it means that He never has to grow or change or learn. He simply is and that’s always enough.

So when we, who must change, decide that we’re not going to anymore, we establish ourselves as equal with God. The Bible says that’s blasphemy.

Our comfortable, familiar lives are blasphemous.

Now that’s a powerful thought. It’s no wonder we resonate so strongly whenever we hear speeches that implore us to strive for more. We are built for that kind of thing, and when we become too entrenched in a blasphemous lifestyle of complacency or apathy or fear, we sense deep within our hearts that God not only means for us to do more than just sit there, He is grieved by our self-satisfaction because it means we no longer listen to Him.

I was in that spot. I didn’t want to risk being obedient to God, which sounds pretty dumb for a pastor to say. But obedience to God meant walking away from a sure thing; it meant leaving behind friends and family and security and hope for a future. It meant stepping away from students that I’ve come to love very, very much. It meant defying conventional wisdom that life is better when we mitigate risk, settle in for something comfortable and dependable, and only consider stepping outside that zone if we’re sure that there’s something better waiting on the other side.

In fifteen years of preaching about having faith in God and obeying Him no matter what, this is the first time I’ve followed His leading without knowing where I’m going to land. It’s the first time I’ve truly put my life and the life of my family into the hands that formed the universe and said, “Okay. Show me what you’ve got.” It’s scary. There are days when I wonder what the heck I’ve done. There are days when I want to say, “No! I take it back!”

It’s like falling in love with the person you’re meant to be with for the rest of your life: there is no safe. It’s all risk – but you never feel more alive than when you take that chance. And you never feel more certain that you blew it than when you let it pass by.

Jesus knew all this stuff, of course. He knew when to push, when to withdraw, when to challenge and when to comfort. As it says in John 13:3, “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.” Jesus knew who he was, whose he was, and what he was supposed to do. This is the image that we’re being conformed into: it’s not one of weakness or timidity, it’s of power and love and sound judgment; it’s not one that is easily defeated, but it’s more than a conqueror; we are not conformed to the things of this world, the ideas and beliefs that tell us to settle and hold tight, but we are conformed to the image of the One who didn’t think equality with God was something to hold onto, who instead submitted Himself to death on a cross so that His Spirit might echo in our hearts, telling us the will of the Father is for us to “Go.”

So I’m going. It’s Graduation Sunday, after all.

What if you chose likewise? What if you didn’t accept the premise that safe is best? What if you put your hand into the hand of God and said, “Show me what you’ve got?” What would change? What would be different?

Because here’s the thing, and it’s unavoidable: the world is changing. Grayson is changing. The things that people hold as right and dear and true are changing, and we are called to be witnesses to them. But how can we tell them with a straight face, much less convicting power, that the greatest Truth in the world is that God loves them and wants to change them into the likeness of His Son, if we ourselves are content to sit tight and not change a thing?

Risk is Right, Piper says. So says the Lord. What will you do with that truth today?