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The Chapel Light - June 2008 |
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Shepherd's Scrips
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Written by Pastor Chris
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Tuesday, 17 June 2008 |
I enjoy collecting proverbs and concise pronouncements of truth from my reading. For your pleasure and benefit, here are a few that I've come upon recently...
Everything should be made as simple as possible - but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
We should love both: those whose opinion we follow, and those whose opinion we reject. For both have applied themselves to the quest for the truth, and both have helped us in it. - St. Thomas Aquinas
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save. - Will Rogers
To God, nothing is secular - not even the world itself, for it is His workmanship. - Justin Martyr (2nd century Christian philosopher)
The man surrounded by dwarves looks like a giant. - Jewish saying
We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. - President George Washington
The 'good man' is being superseded by the 'nice guy'. - Rabbi Shraga Silverstein
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. - Theodore Roosevelt
Go not for every grief to the physician, nor for every quarrel to the lawyer, nor for every thirst to the pot. - George Herbert
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. - Benjamin Franklin
Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory. - General George Patton
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. - Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
If the church wants a better pastor, it only needs to pray for the one it has. - Anonymous
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The Chapel Light - May 2008 |
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Shepherd's Scrips
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Written by Pastor Chris
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Tuesday, 13 May 2008 |
My wife and I are entering the next phase of life. The nestlings are getting their wings and moving out, starting homes and families of their own. My second daughter, Amy, will be home this month from Liberty University and we’ll commence working on her wedding, slated for July 26th – preparing all the decorations and flowers and whatever other paraphernalia accompanies such a glorious event.
I offered to assist in the choosing of the wedding dress, and spent some time perusing online dress catalogs with Amy. It was all very exciting, but I found that all of the dresses looked the same: white. Amy did not find my perception helpful. She wanted me to observe the crucial distinctions between cream, champagne and ivory. I failed not only at this, but at perceiving distinctions between various fabrics, designs and accoutrements – all of those highly complex and evasive mysteries of the highly complex and evasively mysterious feminine world – and so I wasn’t invited to go along for the actual dress shopping. I stayed home and soothed my wounded soul by watching a game and eating chips and salsa, I think, all the while going out of my mind wondering what the dress would look like, and all the while knowing it would be…white. After a few minutes I got over the rejection, and settled back into my old comfortable and well-suited role of “pack mule”.
Yes, I am a pack mule….the family pack mule. I’m not complaining. Just stating the facts. I love and enjoy the role. I’m a happy pack mule! The pack mule is not the center of attention, not the focus of every eye and every whisper, not a thing of beauty to be beheld or commented upon (though one thoughtful congregant upon seeing me in a tuxedo, said, shocked: “Wow! You clean up pretty nice, don’t you?”). No, friends, the pack mule isn’t a show horse. He’s there before the show, getting dirty behind the scenes. The pack mule bears the burdens quietly and patiently. He takes whatever load is placed upon him and pulls it. He takes joy in pulling and carrying. He pulls until he’s told to stop. He gets the job done. It’s not the pack mule’s to worry about the destination or the end result. He doesn’t have to know why he’s carrying what he’s carrying, or what it’s going to be used for. That’s high-minded weighty stuff – someone else’s business. Never mind all those technicalities. Don’t trouble me with details. Put the load on there, tell me which direction to head, and let me pull. Throw me some oats now and then, and some water, and an occasional rest to get my breath, but let me pull.
Pack mules don’t say much; they are actually pretty reluctant to speak (the Bible mentions one pack mule saying something one time, I think), but I have just a brief word to share regarding this upcoming wedding. Many of you have walked the Christian pilgrimage with my wife and me and our children for 10, 15, 20 and some of you for 25 years. We’ve shared joy and tears and disappointments and victories. We’ve grown to be friends at various levels, depending on how intimately our lives intersected. In the past five years that circle of friends has expanded with all of the wonderful new faces at MVC; some of you are still just acquaintances, and some have become good friends already. We love you all, and we invite you all to share the joy of Ben & Amy’s wedding, but if we don’t limit the number of guests invited to the reception, the pack mule is going to collapse under the burden and end up shipped off to the glue factory! Just mine and my wife’s families are a party in our own right (almost 70 people), but we thought it would be really nice to invite the groom’s family to the reception as well. Accommodating 500 MVC’er’s beyond that is just an impossibility for us, so one of the more difficult and unpleasant tasks of wedding preparation for both the bride’s and the groom’s families has been the trimming of the guest list. I speak for our family and the Galaskas' when I say that we’d all like to have EVERYBODY there, but we just cannot do it. If you don’t receive an invitation to the reception, I trust that your feelings won’t be hurt excruciatingly, that you’ll understand there is no animosity intended and I’d kindly beg the indulgence of your patience and understanding for a middle-aged happy pack mule.
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The Chapel Light - April 2008 |
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Shepherd's Scrips
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Written by Pastor Chris
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Tuesday, 01 April 2008 |
During my morning commute I often listen to Michael Smerconish, an extremely intelligent, reasonably conservative Philadelphia attorney-turned talk-radio host and newspaper columnist. In January, after a Gallup poll revealed that 17 percent of the American public wouldn’t vote for the Mormon Mitt Romney because of Mormonism’s weird beliefs, Smerconish waxed sarcastic in his Daily News column… "…We're clearly aided by an ability to spot a whopper when we hear one, a skill obviously lacking in…Mormons. Maybe it's our grounding in the Old and New Testament that enables us to easily size up the preposterous nature of the customs that guys like…Romney follow. …After all, we know that the earth was created in seven days, and that the son of its creator was born to a virgin mother. Indeed, a star over Bethlehem led three wise men to the scene of Jesus' birth, and, 30 years later, he walked on the water of the Sea of Galilee.”
Presenting these thoughts on his talk show, Smerconish’s tone and phrasing sounded to me like this was a spiritual awakening of sorts for him – an “aha” moment. He’d always assumed the Christian religion to be reasonable; he simply accepted the biblical tradition, and had scoffed at the outlandish notions of Mormonism, Islam and the other religions. Now he was thinking differently. He wrapped up his article with: “Truly, one man’s faith is another man’s bunkum.”
I found Smerconish’s “aha” moment refreshing, because I think there are lots of nominally Christian people – including fundamentalists and evangelicals – who are having similar “aha’s” for the first time. Smerconish is two years younger than I; the USA of our early 1960’s childhood was still thoroughly baptized; Christian ideas were accepted and assumed. The atmosphere has changed radically and our religious beliefs and traditions are being cast in a much more skeptical light.
C’mon – can a virgin really get pregnant??? Can a man really walk on water??? Can a dead man really come to life without the intervention of advanced medical technology and start walking and talking again???
These aren’t new questions. A small number of scholars have raised them since the early days of the Christian faith. The apostle Paul faced those kinds of doubts on Mars Hill. The apostle had the scholars’ ears until he mentioned the resurrection of Christ. “…And when they heard the resurrection of the dead, some mocked…” (Acts 17:32). What is new, however, is the more educated, more scientific, more ‘enlightened’ populace who understand and increasingly embrace the skepticism of scientific professionals.
In my youth it was honorable and respectable to be a religious Christian, even for educated people. That notion is changing; your sanity and intellectual integrity are questioned more and more. It’s an uncomfortable shift, but there is also something refreshing about it. Suddenly, the command to “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ” is no longer a simple thing. It is a confrontation to our hearts, our souls, our minds, our strength. We must think seriously about what we really believe. We must choose – and stand.
Many sermons will be preached this Easter Sunday in “Christian” churches which will attempt to sidestep the importance of believing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s that unpleasant non-scientific thought that we’re kind of stuck with. Many people will be told that it doesn’t really matter if Jesus really got up from the grave. They’ll be told that the resurrection is really only a picture, a parable, an illustration of living life in a new and invigorating way, following the example of Jesus, and that is what’s really important about the story of the resurrection of Jesus.
Very pretty words, these. But not Christian words – even if the preacher who speaks them wears a cross around his neck. The apostle who met the risen Jesus on the Damascus road saw it much differently: “And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. Yes and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up, if in fact the dead do not rise, for if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile – you are still in your sins!...If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.” (1 Corinthians 15:14-17,19)
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The Chapel Light - March 2008 |
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Shepherd's Scrips
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Written by Pastor Chris
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Sunday, 09 March 2008 |
With all the talk of small groups in the air, some folks have expressed concern about cliques developing in our church. People label as ‘clique’ any group from which they find (or feel) themselves excluded. We always use the term pejoratively and infer with its use the accusation “That group is bad because it excluded me.”
The Spirit of God says “love believes and hopes all things,” meaning love always chooses to believe the best options first, to give the benefit of the doubt; love doesn’t quickly accuse others of wrongdoing or malicious motives. So why, at the suggestion of the creation of small groups among adults, would we right up front start expressing concern about cliques and exclusion? For many of us it’s a residual habit we learned in childhood. As Jonathan Swift observed in Gulliver’s Travels and as the 1992 Disney film Honey, I Blew Up the Kid! illustrated in comedic form, children can be very nasty and dangerous! Most of us have in our growing-up years experienced intentionally malicious exclusion from a group. Perhaps some experienced it often enough to make cliquishness a knee-jerk fear or concern whenever we think of having to join in a gathering of some sort.
But do mature adults intentionally and maliciously exclude people merely for the joy of being spiteful? I have a really hard time believing that to be a common occurrence. Rarely have I seen such malice in a church. What I’ve seen more often is people who react quickly and emotionally to any perceived slight and who fail to give others the benefit of the doubt instead of thinking through the actual dynamics of the way groups work.
Whether you’re talking about a church, a team, a family, a Scout troop or any circle of friends, a group is a group because bonds have been forged between the members. The longer a group has been together and the more experiences its members have shared, the stronger, the greater and the more numerous the bonds. Any time a new person comes to join such a group the newcomer is at a disadvantage because he hasn’t participated in the experiences that molded the group. Newcomers don’t understand the group’s history, the various relationships between members, or the fun inside jokes, subtle looks and catch-phrases used in the group’s communication. A sensitive newcomer may interpret a group’s normal interaction as rejection. “I don’t understand” leads to “I feel stupid for not understanding” leads to “This group is trying to make me feel stupid” leads to “They think I’m stupid” leads to “They don’t want me. They’re a clique.” Love interrupts this logic early on: “I don’t understand because I haven’t been part of this very close group. They’re not trying to hurt me. I have to get over feeling stupid and go through the uncomfortable natural stages of being a newcomer until I learn enough to feel comfortable fitting in.”
Sometimes moving through stages of life can make us feel rejected by a group. A few years after we graduated from college my wife and I returned to campus for a group conference. We were so looking forward to reliving the good old days. But when we got to campus, we realized that the thing that made school so great was the people, not the campus. None of the students knew us or our accomplishments; we weren’t important to the life of the campus. We weren’t greeted or lauded. We were pretty much overlooked and ignored and left to ourselves. It would have been very easy to feel rejected by our college; instead we just noted that we’d moved on to a different stage of life, and we rejoiced in our memories and took pleasure in watching the new generation of collegians making their own memories.
Young people will experience this once they have children. Suddenly you don’t fit with your unmarried friends. “The singles” start going places without you. Are they maliciously excluding you? No – they just realize babies don’t do too well white-water rafting or rock-climbing. Love believes the best and moves on – no hurt, no blame, no accusations.
The reverse can also be true. Singles can feel excluded by married friends, simply because when you’re married and start having children, your perspective generally changes. The issues that concern you are no longer the issues of your single friends. The common bonds that make a group a group start to disappear. Love believes the best: My married friends aren’t ignoring or rejecting me. They’ve moved on to a new stage of life with concerns that are different from mine and that I won’t understand until I move on to that stage of life. Our own friendship will not be as intense as it used to be – and that’s fine. This is how love talks to itself to prevent self-pity and accusation of others.
Finally, there are some groups to which we just can’t belong because we’re not qualified to belong. The Bible college I attended required Christian service projects every semester. I wanted to go to churches on the weekends with a school gospel team (a singing group). I can’t read music and I had no voice training, but I signed up for a tryout anyway. And I did miserably. The music professor criticized me from the first note that I sang, and he rejected me as unqualified. In my immaturity (I was 17) I charged the school musicians with being a snotty narrow-minded clique. The truth was that I was unqualified musically – and that I had too much pride to acknowledge that fact. Crying ‘clique’ was much easier. Love would have believed the best of the professor and wouldn’t have vaunted itself the way I did.
Recognize that people can easily be hurt in the ways that I have mentioned, and that it’s very easy to feel rejection where none is intended. Be sensitive to outsiders and newcomers – ‘aliens and strangers’ to use the Old Testament terminology – who want to fit in and belong. Make the extra effort to help them to understand your group and its idiosyncrasies, to eliminate every possible roadblock that would make them say ‘clique’.
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The Chapel Light - February 2008 |
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Shepherd's Scrips
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Written by Pastor Chris
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Wednesday, 13 February 2008 |
I’ve read Scripture in front of lots of people on many occasions. But as I looked down at the black words on the white page this time, I had trouble finding my voice. “…And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes…there shall be no more death…nor sorrow…nor crying…” The next sentence brought a knot to my throat. My eyes were burning, and I couldn’t hold back any longer. I let the grieving flow and read through my tears: “There shall be…no…more…pain.”
Those last three words were so hard to get out at my father-in-law’s funeral, because they summarized the life of the man who I had come to know and love. My father-in-law, Clarence Dunnett, was born in Toledo, OH in 1926. Conceived close to his mother’s change of life, Clarence was so small that his mother didn’t know she was pregnant. She went to the hospital that October morning to find that what she thought was an attack of appendicitis was actually labor pains for her fifth child. His mother was unprepared to have a baby that late in life. She even gave the task of naming him to Clarence’s sisters, almost twenty years his senior, and Clarence was always perplexed as to how such young women could name a boy something as unromantic and uninspiring as “Clarence Elwood”!
Clarence was never a big man. The Dunnett’s weren’t towering stock to begin with, and being born just in time for the Great Depression to parents on the older end of the scale, Clarence Dunnett suffered poverty and malnutrition as a child. He may have reached 5’9” at his tallest, and for most of his adult life he wasn’t much more than 130 pounds. One of our family’s fond memories from this past Christmas was an “argument” he had with my daughter Amy (barely 5’4”) about who had smaller feet. Clarence often had trouble finding shoes small enough in men’s sizes, but when Amy challenged him to fit into her high heels, he tried – and lost the contest. Antics like this were common, and he often had the family in stitches.
Being small and poor, he was often the butt of jokes as a child, and being the butt of jokes he learned how to fight. He relished telling David & Goliath stories of fights from his childhood. Because of his quickness and speed he ended up being a very good boxer and an even better baseball player – and coach (though it took him awhile to realize the latter). In his seventies someone persuaded him to help coach the local Christian school’s girl’s softball team. A number of those parents were among the nearly five hundred that came to pay their respects at Clarence’s viewing, thanking us for the patient input that Clarence had had in the lives of their daughters. He also coached his children and grandchildren to excellence in athletics. You don’t want to play catch too long with my wife. To this day she can give your glove hand a pretty good beating! (She can box too – ask her to tell you the story…).
Perhaps it was the times, or her time of life, but whatever the reason, Clarence’s mother was very hard on her son and extremely critical of him. He grew up believing himself to be stupid. But this “stupid” kid ended up doing an honorable stint in the Navy; when going through his things in the attic the family found several achievement medals which we’d never heard about. He also ended up managing a very successful business engineering and selling cutting tools to the automobile industry. When word of his death got around, letters – not cold form letters, but very detailed personal notes – were sent from managers at General Motors and other businesses that dealt with him testifying to Clarence’s engineering expertise in this precision business as well as his truthfulness, his servant’s attitude and his outstanding business ethics. My father-in-law didn’t play games – he didn’t wine and dine people – he was a straight talker and he refused to lie – even when telling the truth meant losing a sale.
One of the most amazing things about Clarence Dunnett was that he built much of this success after he had been stricken nearly to death with a devastating combination of spinal meningitis and encephalitis in 1979. He was hospitalized for a month; when the doctors released him they told my mother-in-law they were sending him home to die. Carolyn, who’s quite a fighter herself, insisted that Clarence wasn’t going to die if she had anything to say about it.
That was about the time I met Clarence and Carolyn (1980). I’ve spent much of my adult life watching Carolyn stubbornly nurse him back to health and watching Clarence stubbornly struggle back to normal life against his own weakened body. I watched him build a successful sales business, despite his having to learn to drive again due to nerve damage in his feet (he couldn’t feel the pedals – riding with him during that time was a real hoot!), the residual effect of the meningitis, and despite regular debilitating headaches, the residual effect of the encephalitis. I have so many memories of family get-togethers where Clarence would suddenly pull back into a corner, cross his legs, and his head would drop into his hand, toughing out a headache without complaint. When the pain would pass, he’d come back and play with his grandchildren like nothing was wrong. He suffered so gracefully.
Last year a nasty bacterial infection (C. diff.) almost killed him. He was hospitalized for several months. While recovering a nurse administered the wrong medication which damaged his optic nerves, making him almost completely blind. He kept on. Once home he went back to work, and his cheerfulness masked the fact that he was almost totally blind. We would all forget about it until dinner, when he would stare at a full plate that he couldn’t see, and then would say, with a chuckle in his gravelly voice, “Would someone tell me what I’m having for dinner?”
A few weeks ago my father-in-law suffered a stroke and while in the hospital contracted several staph infections. His body battled once more with such focus that he went into a coma. On the morning of January 23rd, the family phoned us from the hospital room and said that my wife should say good-bye. They put the phone to Clarence’s ear; Chrissy said her goodbyes, and then began to sing “I’ll Fly Away." Just as she began the third verse, her sister came on the phone and said, “Chris, he’s gone.” He flew away.
“…No more pain…” The many memories recorded in this brief tribute rushed through my mind in the second that I pondered those words in Revelation 21. The tears flowed, not merely because of the loss of my father-in-law, but for the memory of the heroic and graceful endurance he demonstrated in life, and the joy that we have because our hope in Christ means no more pain.
No more staph infections.
No more strokes.
No more headaches.
No more struggles. No need to fight ever again. Just rest. Blessed rest. Rest in his true home – the loving arms of the Father of all spirits (Hebrews 12:9) to Whom he really and rightfully belongs.
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