I'll Take Door #3

Years ago when I was teaching school, I was sitting around with some fellow schoolteachers trading stories about our classroom experiences. One of my friends taught kindergarten and told of a first-day incident with a very precocious kid. They had just returned from lunch and as soon as they walked back into the classroom, this little boy walked over to the center rug and lay down on a comfortable spot. My friend walked over and knelt down beside him, quietly whispering to him, “Honey, what are you doing?”

Without moving a muscle, the boy responded, “It’s naptime. I’m going to sleep.” My friend suppressed a laugh, and then said, “Sweetie, you’re in school now. We don’t have naptime.” The boy’s eyes opened as he looked at her in disbelief. She said, “Really. So go ahead and go back to your seat."

Reluctantly, the boy sat up. After a few moments of reflection, he slowly stood up. As he walked away, my friend could hear the child muttering, “Well, I sure didn’t sign up for this.”

And don’t we all know that feeling?

I’ve had times in my life that I’ve wished I was a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal, bartering with Monty Hall, Drew Carey, or Wayne Brady. I’ve wished he would say, “So, Lynn, do you want to keep your current life, or do you want to trade it for what we have behind Door #3?” And I’ve known I would pitch it all in for Door #3 in a second! To walk away with a pool table and a hanging lamp would be such an improvement!

All week, our Tennessee roads have been icy and our yards have been blanketed in snow. Our children have been out of school an entire week! In Tennessee! This is the South, for heaven’s sake! And it would be charming if we were hearing “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…” on our radios, but it’s approaching the end of February and we’re getting tired of this. We did not sign up for this!

But this is such a relatively small thing. Life can hand out much more complicated obstacles that we certainly didn’t sign up for…illness, job loss, financial stress, rebellious kids, and so many other things that don’t feel like something we signed up for.

So what do we do? We’re in awful places in our lives and our options don’t include anything nearly attractive as a new pool table.

Some people begin making truly stupid choices, looking for ways to make the frustration and the inner stress go away. I won’t even begin to list here all of the bad choices a person might make when life becomes complicated…I don’t have to. We see them all around us. Some of us have made those bad choices. And some of us know that those choices just lead to further complications in life.

Our best choice when life gets hard…our only real choice…is the same choice when life is simple: Follow Jesus. We should follow him in the easy times of life; we should follow him in the difficult times of life.

Why? Because Jesus is the Light. He will always show us the way.

“When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’” (John 8:12).

Sign up for that.

Marked for Life

Today is Ash Wednesday. Yesterday was Fat Tuesday, also known as Mardi Gras, which many of you have heard of, associating it with the craziness that goes on in New Orleans every year at this time. 

Today also begins a forty-day season known in the Christian church as Lent. Many of you already understand that Lent is the period of time leading up to Easter. The reason for its being forty days is tied to Jesus’ time in the wilderness of fasting and praying just before he began his ministry (see Matthew 4:1-11). Christians use those forty days to prepare our hearts and minds to fully celebrate Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection—his sacrifice for our sins and his victory over sin and death.

We begin that period with Ash Wednesday. It is a day to repent…to acknowledge our own shortcomings and our need for God’s grace in our lives. It is a day to grieve the sin that continues to oppress the abused, the disenfranchised, the needy in the world. It is a day to mourn the hearts that have yet to hear the good news and to lament the times that we have fallen short of the call of God on our lives to carry the message of God’s love in large and small ways to a needy world desperate to receive that gospel.

I grew up in the Baptist church and then joined the Nazarene church when I was seventeen. Ash Wednesday was not a significant part of our church calendar throughout most of my life. It’s only been in the relatively recent past that our local church has begun having an Ash Wednesday service. It has become an incredibly meaningful day of the year in my life; the evening service has a powerful effect on my heart.

Ours is not a highly liturgical church, meaning that we do not have a formal set of rites, a traditional sense of dress among our clergy, and a given series of readings. But for our Ash Wednesday service we borrow a tradition from the liturgical churches. Following communion, or the Lord’s Supper, one of the church elders will use ash to smudge a cross on each of our foreheads. This symbolizes the death of Jesus for our sins.

The first time I received a cross on my forehead, I immediately began weeping. Weeping, by the way, is not the same as crying. Weeping comes from a deep sense of grief, and I was grieving. That cross on my forehead brought home a deep sense of responsibility and a deeper sense of connection to the one who had taken the responsibility for me.

I play one of the keyboards at my church and when I returned to the keyboard, I was unable to see the music through my tears. All I could think was, Jesus died for me. Jesus actually died for me. Oh, thank you, Jesus!

After the service was over, we all left the sanctuary silently and somberly. What I had not prepared for was the vision that awaited me out in the foyer of the church. Every forehead I saw had an ashen cross smudged on it. Every single one. This time I started crying tears of joy.

Just before he went to be crucified, Jesus prayed to his Father, “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:22-23).

We were all marked for life. Oh, thank you, Jesus!

Change Your Lens

Photography is amazing. I love to sit down with a National Geographic and admire the powerful images taken by some of the world’s most skilled photographers in some of the most varied and remote parts of the world. I enjoy taking pictures too, but I cannot call myself a “photographer” in comparison to the people who take the shots for N.G. and other beautiful magazines.

I use a little digital camera and rely on my computer to adjust lighting, color, and other aspects of a particular photograph. But with a more expensive camera, the beauty is in the lens. I’ve watched as a knowledgeable photographer has been shooting pictures and, in seeking a different image, has decided to change the lens. You get an entirely different picture when you change the lens.

Have you ever known someone who sees the world “through rose-colored glasses”? My sister is one of those. Christie sees the world filled with gorgeous light and she goes around filling the world with that light. It’s not that she doesn’t know about the dark corners of the world, but she’s chosen her rose-colored lens to view life and it has made her—and the many people who know her and her Rose Water Cottage industry—very happy.

By contrast, do you know people who see the world through a dark, gray lens—or whatever sort of lens would drain all the color from the world? They see every event as potentially hazardous and they view the people in their life as troublemakers and burdensome. They can drain all the energy and happiness out of a room just by walking into it.

They need to change their lens.

Life is hard sometimes. And that “sometimes” can stretch into a very long time. But we all choose with which lens we will view life. Will we view life through the “My parents / my siblings / my spouse never loved me” lens and allow that to color how we view everything else in the world? Will we choose the “I’m not as good-looking / wealthy / healthy / strong / popular / educated as so-and-so” lens and use that to excuse our lack of effort in every area? Will we use the “My heart was broken” lens to keep us from ever trusting to love again?

I know this may be messing too close to home…stepping on toes here. I know that because this is something I’ve had to deal with…many things I’ve had to let go of in my own life. Bitterness I held onto for way too long that began to eat away at the joy and the grace everywhere else in my life.

So consider the lens the psalmist was looking for when he wrote this:

My tears have been my food day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
    “Where is your God?”
These things I remember as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
    under the protection of the 

    Mighty One
with shouts of joy and praise
    among the festive throng.

Why, my soul, are you downcast?
    Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
    for I will yet praise him,
    my Savior and my God. 

    (Ps. 42:3-5)

This is the sound of a lens being changed. This is the “hope” lens being put into place. And when we look through the lens of hope, everything looks better.

 

Let It Shake It Off

Shake it off and let it go.

It's funny that the two biggest pop songs of the past year had titles that mean basically the same thing. And if I had a nickel for every time I heard either one of them . . .

It’s also amazing how often I’ve found myself using those same phrases in conversations with friends lately . . . only to laugh that they are, indeed, straight out of pop tunes that have lit up every teenager’s iPod the last twelve months.

Too many of my friends are carrying around too much that they need to be turning loose. Letting go. Shaking off. It’s a common problem among moms, but not just parents. Many folks with compassionate hearts tend to hold onto other people’s problems as their own. We find out that someone we love is going through a difficult time or facing an awful challenge, so we internalize that problem and begin to carry it inside until it becomes our burden too.

Loving them does not mean owning their problems.

We see this problem or challenge as something we need to solve. We worry about what will happen in the lives of our friends and family members, and we own their issues as if they were our own obstacles to overcome. We create internal lists of our many difficulties and add stress to our life as we see all of these problems as our own.

We know how to pray for each other, so that’s not the problem. Many of us are wonderful “prayer warriors” and spend many hours lifting up other people’s lives to our loving heavenly Father. Part of the problem is that when we get up from our knees (physically or virtually), we reach down and pick the problem back up. It’s as if we’re saying, “Thanks for listening, God. Now I think I can really handle this better. I’ll let you know how things turn out.”

But a bigger problem is that these are not our problems in the first place . . . they’re other people’s problems. That doesn’t diminish the reality of each situation, but we should not be considering them our own issues.

A great book came out years ago called Boundaries by Drs. Cloud and Townsend. (I highly recommend this book for everyone!) It is very important to establish personal boundaries and only own those problems that are your own.

One of the biggest reasons to stop owning other people’s problems as your own—even your children’s and your spouse’s and your parents’—is that God does not give us grace for other people’s problems . . . only as they directly relate to being our own responsibility. In other words, if God has called you to counsel, guide, support, or have some other role with another person, God will give you the grace and wisdom for that purpose. But God will not give you the grace to worry about the problem; fear and anxiety will only exhaust you.

Matthew 6:26 says, "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Can you imagine if a cardinal started worrying about what a blue jay was going to eat? What if a woodpecker started putting away seed for the nuthatch? Do you see how absurd that would get . . . quickly?

So shake it off.

Prayers gonna pray, pray, pray.

I Hate Valentine's Day

I said it right there in the title. I hate the day that's all about love.

Well, actually, it's not about love. It's about romance. Contrived romance. And I hate it. It's all hearts and roses and cards and candlelight and it's a big fat phony. Or it seems that way to me, anyway.

Oh, I have someone to romance. I have a dear husband whom I love very much. And he loves me. He will do something special on Valentine's Day to participate in this holiday to show that he loves me because that's what's expected. I will receive it with gratitude because he is a wonderful husband and I will appreciate the considerate gesture.

But I still hate Valentine's Day.

I resent any effort by society to force the people in my life to demonstrate their affections toward me. And I especially resent any tradition that we encourage that makes anyone in our society feel inferior or insecure just because they aren't currently in a romantic relationship. There's no good reason to focus on that when people might already be going through a great deal of pain over that very thing.

Instead, how about if we have Love and Friendship Day? We could all just send cards celebrating the people in our lives whom we love: best friends; our parents or grandparents; our kids; neighbors; helpful co-workers; our siblings; classmates; pastors and leaders at church; people we know through volunteer or church work; and, of course, our spouse or partner who means the world to us.

What if, instead of having Love and Friendship Day once a year, we have it every month, like on the 1st or on the 15th? See, I could really get into something like that.

Or, how about if we just did it every day? What if we sent cards to the people we think are really wonderful all the time? Wouldn't it be great if we bought each other little reminders of how much we adore them every time we thought about how much we adore them?


I'm sure St. Valentine was a really terrific person. Actually, we don't know anything about him except when he lived and that he was martyred. Not very romantic. So I would like to just skip his day. Let's just get on with loving each other a lot.

Every day.

That Moment When . . .

I love the “that awkward moment” jokes on Facebook. Like, “That awkward moment when someone yells at you for clicking your pen, but you have to click it one more time to use it.” Or, “That awkward moment when someone in the meeting says, ‘Let’s get down to business,’ and you were just about to ask if they think Mister Bates is really in trouble on Downton Abbey.” Or the really cute ones like, “That awkward moment when you realize that Santa has the same wrapping paper as your mom.”

 

Sometimes the jokes come with a picture that really drives the joke home. Often they’re really ridiculous and they beg for me to share them with my friends too. And once in a while they connect with me and I think, “Oh my goodness, I’ve been there!”

Life can be filled with awkward moments. We have to learn to just ride them out with grace. Some of my days are just filled with “excuse me” and “I’m so sorry” as I navigate many awkward moments among people.

But we can also find ourselves in moments that are more than awkward. And those moments may stretch into minutes, and minutes into hours, and hours into . . . well, who knows? Life can be difficult at times and we may find ourselves in storms and dark places that leave us looking for help and longing for light.

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, we find the story of a woman who had been in a dark place for twelve years. She had been suffering from some sort of bleeding for that long. This condition would have disqualified her from marriage and from any religious life in general (see Lev. 15 and 20). But that didn’t stop her from seeking the One who could change her life:

A large crowd followed and pressed around him [Jesus]. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” . . . Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” (vv. 24-30, 33-34)

Do not be mistaken: If this woman had touched someone else’s clothes thinking that would have done the job, she would have left the same way she came. Just thinking it’s true doesn’t make it so.

But connecting with the power of Jesus through complete trust in him . . . that’s faith. It’s like completing an electrical circuit—just don’t ask me to explain how that works! I only know that they’re alike in that there is a completion of a flow of power with an energy source.

And all it takes is one touch.

Can You See Me Now?

The Super Bowl was on last night, along with the famous commercials that keep everyone talking for days about which ones were the funniest, the silliest, and the most memorable. One of the ads that caught my attention was the Nationwide ad featuring Mindy Kaling, who decided that she was, in fact, invisible and proceeded to do, well, whatever an invisible Mindy thought she could get away with . . . including sneaking a selfie with Matt Damon. Didn’t work so well.

I thought about it later and realized that I remember a time I felt invisible. We moved back to Orlando when I was halfway through the tenth grade and I went from a high school in College Park, Georgia, where I knew literally every person in my class, to a school that was so huge, I got lost every day the first week.

Each morning I would board a bus for school, and then I would arrive to a teeming mass of almost three thousand students swarming through the halls and sidewalks of a huge campus. I recognized a few faces from elementary school, having lived in the same neighborhood years before, but only one friend made a connection with me. The rest would swim around me between classes as if I weren’t there . . . or invisible.

Until I made it into the choral ensemble that summer. I had played the piano for years, so I auditioned to accompany the select choral group for the school, and I was chosen along with another girl to play for the group. We would spend six weeks in summer school practicing music and preparing for a busy year of performances and competitions. And those six weeks would change my life.

I had friends now. I had an identity. When school started back my junior year, I had a family scattered throughout the population of the school and I felt connected, united, to the other members of my group. Beyond the select ensemble, I was also closely connected to the members of the chorus so that gave me an even broader “family” unit throughout the school population. I was no longer invisible.

Mindy Kaling and the Nationwide folks make invisibility look fun . . . but it’s not. It’s terribly lonely. A lot of kids feel invisible at school; young people, you need to look around and see the other people around you more. Patients often feel invisible in the hospital; we need to visit folks who are sick more often. Family members feel invisible at home; we need to stop to look and listen to each each other more. Whenever someone is feeling invisible, something is terribly wrong; something is broken. It needs repair.

One of the worst places for people to feel invisible is in the church. Yet, that is where we hear the complaint so often: “I went to church, but it felt like nobody even saw me.”

So let’s get busy fixing that one. Look at the people you see at church. Look them in the eye. Say “Hi, there!” and put some feeling into it. Stop and shake a hand. See them. Make sure they feel visible.

Maybe they’ll come back.