Just So You Know

I have been blessed with Grandfatherness. My son Trent and his wife Heather have a son Sailor. He is five months old today.
You need to see him. This is totally selfish, but if we are going to visit here, you need to know the truth. Sailor is a great part of my truth these days. So…

The "No Big Deal" Big Deal

Tomorrow afternoon my wife Annette will walk into a familiar office, sit down and let a perfectly wonderful woman stick a needle in her arm. The nice lady will fill three or four vials with Annette's blood and put a brightly colored band around Annette's arm. It will be no big deal.

The six month check-up has come again. We always have lumps in our throats when check-up time rolls around. It was a lump that started all this in January, 2004. Breast cancer is a beast—a threatening, voracious beast. We hate it without apology. Annette has been scarred by surgery, sickened by chemotherapy and seared by radiation. She stands today blessed to have no trace of cancer…but they are drawing blood tomorrow. We will hear from the doctor in a week. It is a long week between the tests and the truth.

We anticipate no bad news. But Annette invites your prayers for her peace and her health. Thank you. Deeply and sincerely.

We have not been able to walk any of this journey without our faithful friends. Walk with us a bit farther. They are drawing blood tomorrow. It should be no big deal.

Family Debts

I did a funeral this morning for Dr. Luther Marsh. He was eighty. He had been sick. Life had been getting increasingly difficult for him. His death did not rob him of any life. It did help him into the next phase of his life at just the right time. The state of the family was the outstanding feature of this funeral. The daughters, Laura and Debbie, were radiant. Their happiness and humor filled everyone with light. I was blessed just standing with them.

This is not how all funerals are. Some cannot be. Sudden deaths leave families reeling. Some deaths are so tragic that a sense of proportion is going to be months, even years, down the road. Now and then, though, a funeral is wrapped like the one today—wrapped in brighter colors. The difference? The difference is that sometimes a family has had the time, inclination and courage to live with its emotional debts paid up. Sometimes the people who should have showed up did. The words of encouragement, apology and forgiveness found their way into all the right ears and hearts before death came. The members of the surviving family expressed care and love for each other. No one child had to be seen as "the one who really cared." No one had to be designated "black sheep" just to expiate the guilt of the family. Somehow, in the face of great challenges, a family can come to the shadow of the valley of death all paid up. As their loved one moves into the valley, the family pauses and, then, moves together out of the shadows into the light as the journey of life continues with joy.

I was there today. I saw it happen. It made me think about my own debts. I have some apologies to make and some forgiveness to give before I should come to an end. Right now the end of my life could leave a ragged edge or two. Right now I don't want some folks to die because I still have relational business to do with them. Perhaps I should get to it!

Sometimes It Is Hard to Quit

Today, I withdrew from the class I was taking on conflict resolution. I was so conflicted about the class that I decided to quit. Ironic. I had to decide whether I could do all the things that I need to do as the preacher around here on four hours of sleep a night. I decided "probably not." The hardest thing about quitting was swallowing my pride and admitting there was something I couldn't do.

But the signs of my eminent demise were around. I had told Annette, "This may not go well. I said 'yes' to the conflict resolution class without saying 'no' to anything." I had heard in my head, "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly." Rationalizations come easy at times like this. Finally I was in a Luke 14 world where Jesus told folks to count the cost before choosing discipleship. He said that we should not be like the king or the builder who began tasks with inadequate resources. I felt like I had promised to build a castle when all I had was one box of TinkerToys. Not bright.

Soooo... I am getting over being embarrassed at starting and having to stop.

The only deep reflection I have is that quitting something we need to quit is much better than hanging on to a task, a project, a habit when we know it is only stubborn pride making us hang on.

Building a Community of Faith

Lately I have been slammed up side the head with the challenge of helping create Christian circles of fellowship. The realities of human differences and the nature of dynamic conflict sober the idealistic notions of Christian fellowship and community. I have lately decided that Christian community is a place of process even more than it is a place of tranquility. You might chew on the notion that tranquility and peace are not even synonyms.

Tranquility creates images of ponds without a ripple, leaves without a wiggle from any breeze. Peace or "shalom" carries a rich sense of a balance and blessed environment in which all are becoming what God's best thought imagined them to be. The urgent need for tranquility can create a kind of fellowship that has no real peace at all because all the dynamic elements of personal interaction and growth that create real peace have been declared inappropriate. The tranquility-based system despises the unsettling aspects of peacemaking. The tranquility-based system claims to love its own kind of peace. However, it actually inhibits the creation of peace worthy of the name.

As a church here at UCC, we are conflict adverse. I am a tranquility-based system.

Do we love peace or are we settling for tranquility? Perhaps our discussions should be more lovingly lively as differences of opinion are shared enriching the content of the conversations and leading to better courses of action. Scary huh?