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Psalm 141
I’ve read many times that Billy Graham preached with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. During times like these it is tempting to choose one or the other. We can stick with Bible and ignore the world around us or we can toss out the text and preach from the newspaper. It’s especially true with Psalms, isn’t it? We can read it exclusively as David’s exchanges with God that have little relevance to our own circumstances and try to understand the grammar and the structure of the Psalm. We can read it as not only meant to be read as David’s struggle with wicked men…
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The Ghost in the Machine
William Bridges wrote “Transitions” 35 years ago and reading it helped me think about the difference between “change” and “transition.” It did not seem like much at the time but the distinction is important. Change happens all the time, and it doesn’t matter if it is small (switch grocers) or large (death of a spouse or a loss of a job). On the other hand, transition is psychological and is a process whereby people gradually accept the new situation and the adjustments that come with it. What matters most is making the transition from one thing to another. Every transition has three stages: The ending, the wilderness (or neutral zone) and the new beginning. To make a…
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Psalm 42
1. Some of us are prose people. We like things spelled out and clear. We want our truth to be linear and full of facts. Others of us are poetry people. We like to read in the gaps and to guess at the meaning or even make up a meaning of our own. T.S. Eliot said that “genuine poetry can communicate before it can be understood.” That’s not what a prose person would choose. Do you remember the old Dragnet series with Sgt. Joe Friday saying, “Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.” Some of us are like that. But then some of us are more like news reporters today…
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A Closer Walk
Marilyn and I often pass each other walking in the mornings. She comes out her front door and turns to the right going up the hill as I am coming down from my home. Sometimes we only wave and smile as I am always listening to something on headphones and distracted. Other times I stop and briefly ask how she is doing. She doesn’t have the same compulsion to make this time well spent with podcasts or NPR. She simply walks her course every morning in silence. Her husband, Frank, died several years ago after a long bout with cancer and a host of other complications. Even though she now…
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A Guide to the Perplexed
Many years ago, a friend and I set up a new fund for our giving to ministries. While both of us had our favorites, we wanted to do something other than simply write checks to those select few. We started looking for a way to create categories for our giving, thinking that would give us some guidance and diversity. After a search, we landed on Matthew 25 and the parable of the sheep and the goats. It looked like there were six acts of showing mercy (hunger, water, strangers, clothing, sickness, prison) that made the eternal difference and, wanting to be on the right side, we chose to name the…
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The George Option
I’ve made light of country and western music for as long as I can remember. The titles like “I’ll Be Over You When The Grass Grows Over Me” are catchy but embarrassing. As well, it seemed so blatantly hypocritical to sing about carrying on Saturday night at the honkytonks while the next track would be “Just A Little Talk With Jesus Makes It Right.” The world of country music is filled with paradox and contradictions. But my opinion has begun to change after listening to “The King of Tears,” the latest episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, “Revisionist History.” On the way home from Dallas I listened to Malcolm discuss the reasons…
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Psalm 136
On the way home from DFW on Friday night I listened to the latest episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast “Reconstructionist History”. The episode is titled “The King of Tears” and it is about why some music is so emotional and actually brings tears to our eyes and other music is just music with lyrics. But, as Gladwell does so well, he takes a comparison of country western lyrics with rock and roll and comes up with a bigger theory about why there is a split in the country between the elites who don’t understand the lives and values of country western people and the rest of the nation. It’s worth…
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I Am Somebody
Two times in the Gospels the disciples are caught asking who will be great in the Kingdom. It’s not a bad question. In fact, asking questions about ambition is something I encourage younger people to be serious about for how we define greatness sets the course for our lives. What does interest me most is the differences in the two times – three years apart – it is asked in the Gospel of Luke. The first is in the early days of the ministry where the words tell us the disciples are having a debate among themselves. It’s not an argument. It’s almost a good-natured competition. They are going at each other about greatness…
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Psalm 19
1. The beginning and ending of this psalm are some of the most quoted and familiar words in history. That’s appropriate because, in a sense, they are book-ends of our entire experience with God and Christ. In the beginning is God and his creation and in the end is our being found blameless and innocent through the sacrifice of Christ. That is the point of this whole meditation, isn’t it? The first six verses remind us of the passage in Romans 1 where Paul argues that the evidence for God is overwhelming. It is not just the heavens and the firmament but the entire creation – from infinitesimal to infinite…
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R-E-S-P-E-C-T
I have a couple of quirks – or so I am told. I never read ahead of time about places I am going to visit. I don’t do travel guides or look for the best places to eat or even the history of the country. But when I return home I will buy several books about a country or a city to learn more about what I saw and even what I did not. Then there is this. I have never fished in my life but I have read eight books on fly fishing. Even though I think it is the most elegant sport of all and I love hearing…
