Hospital visits

I've now worked at two different churches in my time in ministry.  Every church has its own culture, own expectations, and own priorities.  Each church's culture and expectations are no better or worse than the church down the street, just different.  The two churches have been pretty similar in a lot of ways, but one of the differences that I noticed quickly at McKinney was the importance of doing hospital visits.  Every pastor does them regularly, whereas at Countryside we did not do them daily but would visit if a member we knew well was in the hospital.

As a young pastor, for whatever reason I viewed regular hospital visits as somewhat old fashioned, like something you expected pastors to do a few generations ago, when they were paid in produce and poultry.  It's not that I didn't enjoy doing them, in fact from the very beginning I've loved that opportunity to go and visit with those who are sick, those who are bringing new life into the world, or those who are hoping to hold onto this life for a bit longer before going to the land of the living.  In many cases this ministry of presence is the most pure and humbling ministry I do all week.  As Paul says in Romans 12, "we weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice."  That's the ministry of hospital visits.

I was recently studying Ruth 1 in Hebrew and came across a passage that gave me a more pure perspective of this visitation ministry.  In Ruth 1:6 it says, "for she had heard in the land of Moab that the Lord had visited His people in giving them food."  That phrase, "that the Lord had visited," in the Hebrew is  פָקַ֤ד יְהוָה֙, (paqad Adonai).  The verb "paqad" has a variety of different meanings, but often means "to visit" or "to care" in association with the Lord.  This is the construction used in Exodus 4 when the LORD says He has visited or has concern for His people and in I Sam. 2 when the LORD has concern for Hannah's grief at being barren.  In each of these instances, what greater news could Naomi or the Israelites or Hannah had heard, than that the LORD, the God who is alive had visited, had cared for and was concerned for them?  

Certainly there are passages instructing us to visit one another in the NT, but this concept of the paqad Adonai is the foundation of the the ministry of visitation as it is grounded in God's nature as a God who visits, ultimately in the incarnation of Christ.  For He left the glories of Heaven and visited this world for a brief thirty years, making His presence, concern, and care for humanity known by visiting our world and even our fallen human nature.  Though our hospital visits do not come with the same power, or miracles as the paqad Adonai, we visit to show our concern, our care, and ultimately to be present with our brothers and sisters in Christ.  We visit because our hearts are full of gratitude because of the grace and concern we have been shown from the paqad Adonai.  

Not the Way it's Supposed To Be

Jen and I recently updated our zoo membership to the Fort Worth Zoo.  As we left Stillwater, a sweet family bought us a family membership to the zoo at Fort Worth (as they had heard about how great Fort Worth's zoo is).  It was one of the most thoughtful gifts anyone gave us and turned out to be very useful and cheap entertainment to a poor seminary family!  We've probably used it somewhere around 15-20 times over the last fifteen months.

I love taking the boys to see all of the different animals.  They each have their favorites and those favorites seem to change from one trip to another.  The excitement in their eyes as they see a cheetah dart into a clearing, or a set of otters dive into the water would be well worth the price of admission.  More than the excitement in their eyes, I enjoy the conversations that are sparked as we see the diversity and creativity among the different animals.  I get the chance to talk about the God we worship to Hudson and observe his eagerness and willingness to ask me about why God made the orangutan so big, or the jaguar afraid of the water.  As parents, Jen and I pray for those conversations and are thankful for an environment where those conversations can be accelerated as we enjoy the creativity that He has put on the earth.

But to be honest, the zoo is a bittersweet trip.  As I walk around and see these magnificent animals, I can't help but feel that this isn't the way it's supposed to be.  My heart hurts as I hear people yelling at the bears, hoping to entice a growl, or making goofy faces at the silverback as if seeing him run into the glass is humorous, because this wasn't the way God designed us to interact with creation.  Certainly God designed man to rule over all of his creation, and to bear his image and likeness to it, and the idea of image and likeness has an authoritative role to it, but not like this.  Man was not made to cage the animals, and poke and prod at them, laughing and making fun of their lack of freedom.  Instead, man was to serve as God's representative on earth, ruling and reigning with care and justice.  In this way the zoo serves as one more reminder of the consequences of the fall.  Adam and Eve did not just lose fellowship with God and with one another due to their sin, but they also lost fellowship with creation as a result of their rebellion.

I usually end my trip to the zoo on a high note, as it reminds me again of the longing I have for Christ's return and I believe those animals and all of creation long for the same thing (Romans 8), when all of this world will be restored and reconciled with one another.  At that time no bars will need to separate me from tiger or lion, as this world will once again be the way God created it with the God Man ruling over all of it with care and justice as God designed in the beginning.  And perhaps this is the very best conversation I can have in those moments of the zoo with Hudson and Athan, that though we enjoy seeing these animals and the creativity that God has revealed in them, the best is still yet to come!

Lent 2012

So this year I once again have been observing Lent. In the past few years I've given up Coke or Chick-fil-A but this year I decided to give up biting my finger nails. To give you some background, I've bitten my fingernails as long as I can remember. In fact, I don't ever remember using clippers on my fingernails. Now that I'm a few weeks into it here are some of my thoughts;

This has been way harder than I could have imagined. I used to bite them without thinking about it. I bite them when I'm worried, bored, hungry, tired, as you can see I used to always bite them! I've appreciated this difficulty for a number of reasons.

First, it serves as a constant reminder of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us. As I'm thinking about biting them, I've been reminded of our faithful and perfect High Priest who never sinned (Hebrews 4:15).

Second, it's also reminded me that the temptations we face in life are constantly present, real, and crouching at the door. I want to grow to be aware of sin in my life and the temptation to fall into it with the same cognizant awareness that I have sought to have with this.

Third, I've noticed how well I can do in spurts and how quickly it can end. I loved this reminder the other day as it once again reminded me of the seriousness with which I should approach sin and how slippery that slope can be.

I'll try to post pictures before Easter to show my progress!

Back from Blogger Sabbatical

Let me start off by apologizing about my break. I must admit, I got overwhelmed with school towards the end of the year with school and work and had to set blogging aside. Here's how the year ended;

• Missed my goal of 3 A's in Greek by one (factoring in the DTS grading scale)
• Nearly got Hudson to do a Packers b-day party but a stomach bug ended that dream for both of us.
• Taught Athan to say "Ma-ma" first, only to have him get stuck saying "Da-da" for the next three months.
• Decorated our apartment with Christmas lights that would remind you of a college apartment.
• Experienced a Texas winter filled with two days below freezing and Mother Nature teasing us of snow with frozen dew.
• 2012 started with a great dodgeball game between me and the boys. I actually think I lost.
• I just translated Genesis 1:1-8 from Hebrew to English, so yeah I'm pretty excited about Hebrew.

Moving forward, I'm going to keep the weekly blog goal with blogs about family, ministry, and theological observations. See you next week!

Renewed Appetite

This year my devotional time has consisted of heavy doses of the Old Testament. I've read some in the epistles (mostly in Greek!), but purposefully took a break from the Gospels. I wanted to take a break from them for a short time before coming back to them later in the year. During this break I've noticed a yearning in my soul for Jesus. I've loved my time of reading in the Old Testament and the principles and nuggets of God's grace I've found in those books, but I longed for the person of Christ. Jen and I are starting to read through the gospel of Mark together. As I read the 1st chapter recently, I didn't look at it through stale lenses of recalling what he does next and having my mind wander, but excitedly considered what this all must have been like for the Son of God to come to earth? Why on earth He called men to be his apostles (when rocks or clouds would have done the trick just fine)? Impressed by His compassion and His sense of purpose as the Light that would shine in a dark and desperate place. The break was healthy as it reminded me what drew me to Jesus in the first place.

This isn't the first time I've purposefully taken a break from a portion of Scripture, I've done it with the Law or Psalms before, but it is the first time I've done it with the Gospels. Sometimes as Christians we get too routine in reading a chapter in the Old Testament, one in the gospels, one in the epistles, and a psalm everyday or some other "system" that we or others have manufactured. In doing so I've experienced a lack of enthusiasm and excitement for God's Word as it just becomes a habit and not about the discovery of God. If this is where you are, just reading because that's what you do, day in and day out, then I would encourage you to take a "Sabbath" or rest from a section of God's Word. Don't put it aside altogether! I think what you'll find is a longing for the truths from that section of Scripture and an excitement as your return to rediscover those truths and find new truths you've never seen before.

Feelings vs. Faithfulness

Over the years, I've had the pleasure to get to work with a number of college students who have volunteered in the student ministry where I served as youth pastor. During that time I like to think I was able to impart sound Biblical advice to them and took a small role in their continual growth with the Lord. It never failed that sometime in our times of talking that they would open up to me about where they were with the Lord.

Many of them confessed with concern that they were not feeling the way they had when they first got to college, or got involved with our church. In some ways what they wanted was to know how to get "it" back, or reassurance that they were okay. I identified with their feelings and worries because years before they went through this feeling of a spiritual valley, I also had the same experience with the same concerns that they expressed to me. My hunch is that this is something that is much more broad among Christians than what I've witnessed, but is a truth of many of our stories with the Lord.

Sadly, too often in Christian circles weight is put on how we "feel" in our relationship with the Lord. Buzzwords like passion, experience, and zeal lead people to think that spiritual maturity is reflected mostly by excitement and enthusiasm. To say it another way, Christians begin to think that their walk with the Lord must be characterized by these feelings otherwise it isn't being lived out completely.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we shouldn't have a passion for Jesus Christ, that our emotions shouldn't be displaying our love and gratitude to Him, or that there shouldn't be excitement as we learn more about Him. The Great Commandment teaches that we are to love the Lord with all of our being, including our emotions. What I am saying is that we need to think logically about our feelings being a barometer for our spiritual state.

Its logical that we will experience times when we are growing, learning, and maturing at a quick rate that causes us to feel more close and in step with the Lord. But as with anything you can't keep that pace up. When you begin a new book often its easy to read quickly through the first few chapters, but it becomes slow moving as you continue through that same book. Why? Because you've heard some of these points now, its not as cutting edge or exciting the fourth time the authors referenced the same point. In the same way, our relationship with the Lord is a walk and a process. There will be periods where we feel close to the Lord, others where we don't.

This is where faithfulness comes in. Paul states, "It is required of stewards that one be found faithful," in 1 Cor. 4:2. In other words, a person who desires to be a servant of Christ, or a minister of the gospel they have to be faithful or trustworthy. Notice the requirement is not to have that passion for Christ, that feeling in your gut, or anything else related to emotion. Instead the requirement is very tangible, its something that can be seen, practiced, even measured, its faithfulness. Faithfulness is remaining true to the Lord Jesus and walking in obedience to God's Word. Faithfulness is determined not in days or weeks, but in years and decades. Faithfulness pushes through difficulties and dry periods, and flourishes at times of growth and development. Faithfulness isn't determined by passion, feelings, but is based on obedience and discipline.

For many of us its easy to love the Lord and be obedient to His Word when we feel close to Him, when we are learning and growing. The challenge we face as followers of Christ is to love Christ by obeying His Word in the dry seasons when we don't feel like we are growing or learning like we did before. That is the test of faithfulness and the example that Jesus has shown to us. Find comfort in these words, "even when we are faithless, He remains faithful."

Step #1-Big Worries Small Feats

Over the next few weeks I'll be documenting this move to Fort Worth and all of the ways the Lord has provided and met our needs in ways that left us speechless. The purpose is twofold, first its a way for me to remember God's goodness in the midst of a stressful time with so much unknown. Second, I hope it serves as an encouragement to others as they face challenges or concerns in their own lives.

Going into the move, the biggest worry I had was selling our home. It was a wonderful house that we loved and had put multiple hours of labor into improving. Despite those improvements it was going to remain a 2 bedroom house, which is not ideal. It worked for us but as I found, was an immediate turnoff for a number of potential buyers.

We decided to try to sell it ourselves, or at least try for a few weeks and see if we could do it without a realtor. We weren't going to make much on it and knew that going in, but my biggest nightmare was having a mortgage in June, about to leave a perfectly good job, for a time when I'll be going back to being a student with no salary. I remember going to a seminar during this process where a guy talked about selling his house in a day. I sat in the corner and thought to myself, "That's great that the Lord did that for you, but what about the rest of us?" That night Jen and I started nightly praying for this move and the sale of our home primarily. The monday of Spring Break, three weeks after putting our house on the market, we signed with a realtor. It was a friend of ours from church who had helped us buy the house. The next day I left on our youth ski trip and Jen went to Tulsa to stay with her parents. On that day our realtor showed our house. On Thursday, while we were both still gone, that couple made an offer and we accepted. Did I mention they wanted to pay cash and let us pick the closing date?

What I learned from this experience was just how goofy I look when I question or doubt the Lord. It wasn't a day, but selling our house in three weeks in this market is the hand of God at work. The Lord used this experience as a reminder of just how easy he can answer my biggest worries and concerns. I'm reminded of Nahum 1:3, "His way is in the whirlwind and the storms and the clouds are the dust of His feet". That which we view as so great and powerful is dust before the Lord. The God we worship is much more powerful than we can imagine, much wiser than we can comprehend and is working in a way that is good for us. Secondly, I learned just how sweet communal prayer is when its for specific requests. Through this entire experience Jen and I have prayed specifically and been amazed as the Lord has answered swiftly and abundantly.

Next I'll look at Step #2-Hospitality at its Finest