Category Archives: Personal

Another sort of different

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It’s amazing what you can find randomly wandering around the Internet. Usually, you don’t (or at least I don’t), but there are times when Web panning turns up a nugget. I was surfing aimlessly yesterday for a couple minutes while my brain tried to track something down, and I landed at Doug Hagler’s blog, only to find myself in the blogroll. I would not have expected that. Doug’s good people from what I can tell—we’ve never met personally, I only know him from around the blogosphere, and primarily from his comments on Jim Berkley’s blog—but he and I don’t agree on a whole lot. (I would have said we don’t agree on much of anything, but from his blog, it’s evident we agree on Tolkien, anyway.) Doug’s one of those folks in the More Light/Covenant Network stream of the PC(USA), and I’m . . . slightly not. Still (especially these days), one is always grateful for those with whom one can disagree intelligently and civilly, because there can be real value to those conversations; and I’d certainly put Doug in that category. (Besides, you have to like someone who can write, “You’re only allowed to take me as seriously as I take myself. That should serve to restrain both of us.”) As such, I’m happy to return the favor and add him to the blogroll. I’d especially recommend his post on eucatastrophe, which is perhaps my favorite of Tolkien’s concepts. (This all ties in with my earlier post on Alison Milbank’s book.)

I should also note, I’m grateful to Doug for tipping me off to a development I’d missed during the whole packing/moving process: Peter Jackson has settled his legal squabble with New Line Cinema, and he and Fran Walsh are back on board to do The Hobbit (and also a sequel; my wife was wondering if they’re planning to make a movie of the journey back home, which Tolkien completely glossed over). There are legitimate criticisms to offer of the work Jackson, Walsh and Philippa Boyens did with LOTR, but that said, I can’t come up with anyone who would have done a better job. Jackson et al. doing The Hobbit is clearly the best-case scenario, and I’m glad to see it.

Settling in

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Well, we started moving into our house on the 11th, and I started here at the church on the 16th, and now enough stuff is out of boxes and put away that it’s possible to get around; I still have a lot of books to get organized on my office shelves, but it’s beginning to look like someone actually works here. I keep getting sidetracked, though. This morning I pulled some of Stan Grenz‘ books out of a pile and put them in their place, and then I just sat down and looked at them for a while, and remembered. I can still feel the shock I felt in March 2005 when I was surfing the Web and tripped over the fact that he had died the day before, of a dissecting brain aneurysm. I can’t claim any sort of special relationship with him or his family; he was one of my favorite professors at Regent/Carey, and I met his wife Edna on a couple of occasions around the school, but if he’d been asked to make a list of his favorite students, I have no reason to think I’d have been on it. He was just good to all of us, that’s all, and I learned a tremendous amount from him, and enjoyed him greatly as a professor; you never quite knew what was going to happen when you walked into his classroom. He might be sitting there with his guitar, or the TV might be set up for Star Trek (he was a big Trekkie) or X-Files, or it might be a theological evaluation of a Gloria Estefan song. I won’t say anything was possible, but he was never completely predictable, either.

And while I don’t want to get into the arguments back and forth over the emerging church (at least, not today, anyway), I do want to say this. Dr. Grenz’ name is conjured a lot these days in those arguments, and he’s criticized pretty harshly by those fighting the emerging church; and I don’t recognize the straw man they’re holding up. The Stan Grenz they attack and vilify just doesn’t sound all that much like the one under whom I studied. It’s too bad; I learned a great deal from him, and I think those who consider him their opponent probably could too.

On the move

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The movers are here early this morning. They’ve already gotten started (they were here Saturday), and the hope is to get most of the packing done today; I think the computer will be up until Wednesday (they have to be down in Denver Tuesday), but I’m not sure. In any case, the roots are coming up, and we’ll be transplanting soon.

Five things I’m thankful for

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bearing in mind that “the best things in life aren’t things” . . .

For starters, and by way of introduction to this post, I’m thankful for Hap, who tagged me with this meme. Mind you, that’s not the reason I’m thankful for her, though it isn’t a bad thing, either. She’s been a dear, firm friend for—what are we on to now, fourteen years? a good chunk of my life, anyway—a woman steeped in the presence of God who’s as faithful as the sunrise and as true as eternity, and after my family, one of the people I love most on this planet. Glad you didn’t go to Spring Arbor, sis. 🙂

Carrying on, in reverse order . . .

Bronwyn, my youngest, currently snuggling on Daddy’s lap, chattering at me unintelligibly and pretending to drink water out of the cup in her older sister’s ball-and-cup toy. Almost 20 months and a complete Chaos Child, she’s also a complete charmer and something of a clown; I know she gets away with more than her sisters did because of it, but sometimes it’s hard to help.

Rebekah, my middle daughter—the original Chaos Child, she’s four now and more manageable, since she can be reasoned with (not that she always buys the reason). Absolutely fearless about most things, which is a good corrective and counterbalance to her older sister, she’s our rampant extrovert. We spent an hour or so one night standing in the hallway of a hotel in Ogallala, NE because of a tornado warning; when Rebekah wasn’t running full-tilt up and down the hall, she was walking up to total strangers, touching their elbows and asking them all sorts of questions. (Fortunately, they were all gracious about it.) She just loves everyone, and assumes they’ll all love her too.

Lydia, my oldest, my miracle child. Her delivery was a crisis, and then she needed an operation when she was two days old (albeit a minor one, if any surgery on a newborn can truly be called minor), so we kept her very close for the first few months; it still seems a little strange, when I think about it, that that was seven years ago. She’s an introvert, like both her parents (though oddly enough, our only one), but fortunately not too shy—certainly much less so than I was at her age. All our girls ask lots of questions, but she set the standard (and still does). She’s in first grade and absolutely loves school—she can be running a fever and throwing up, and she’s crying that she has to stay home; it no doubt helped that she had a certifiable genius for a kindergarten teacher (thank you, Jane Hill), but by nature, she’s the sort of kid who goes through life with her nose in a book. She’s a loving, generous, helpful child—even with her younger sisters, usually. 🙂

And finally, most of all, my wife Sara. Ten years is a pretty good start. I am richly, deeply blessed by her love, her wisdom, her insight, her care, her great gifts, her deep and strong relationship with God (even through the hard times we’ve had here) . . . I am blessed to know and love her, and to be known and loved in return. (I should note, she’s one of the reasons I’m thankful for Hap—who introduced us. 🙂 )

Anyway, I tag the Thinklings, both as a whole and in part. Y’all didn’t like the last meme, guys, but you should like this one.

One other hymn

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My wife argued me into posting this—it’s a communion hymn I wrote a while back—thinking that there might be folks out there who’d want to use it. For whatever it might be worth, it is available to use by permission; just send an e-mail to the address in my profile or post a comment here if you happen to be interested. (If you aren’t familiar with the tune to which I’ve set the text, the link is below.)

Jesus Calls Us to His TableJesus calls us to his table,
Here to celebrate the feast;
He invites us to remember
How from sin we were released.
Here he calls us to communion
With each other in his name,
And assures us of the coming
Of the kingdom he proclaimed.

We remember Christ descended
To the human life we share;
We remember how we led him
To the cross and nailed him there.
We remember how he conquered
Death by rising from the grave;
We remember that he did this
All for us he came to save.

So we gather at the table
Joined together hand in hand,
Men and women of all races,
From all times and every land.
We assemble as a body,
Joined in Christ who is our Head,
Knowing he is with us always,
And in him our souls are fed.

Thus we stand in hope of glory,
Of the dawning of the day
When we’ll see God’s kingdom fully,
All his saints, in bright array.
Then we’ll gather at his table,
There invited by his grace,
And in wonder, as he promised,
See our Savior face to face. Words: Robert J. A. Harrison, 2006
Music: Attributed to Benjamin Franklin White; from The Sacred Harp, 1844
BEACH SPRING, 8.7.8.7.D

Packing up the dreams

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For the last eighteen months, since May 2006, I have been in the process of searching for a new call—looking for a new church to serve as pastor. Last Wednesday, I accepted a call to another congregation; following subsequent developments, I’m finally feeling secure that nothing’s going to happen to derail this.

I have no doubt that this is God’s move in God’s time, from the way everything came together; but it’s still hard. For one thing, I had a lot of hopes and dreams for this congregation in this place, for what Christ could do in this community . . . and most of them haven’t been realized. What has been accomplished is really pretty remarkable, given the history of this church; I’ve been here longer than any full-time pastor in Trinity’s history except one (though my “temporary” predecessor was here on a part-time basis for eighteen years), and in that time, I think we’ve managed to break the congregation out of its death-grip survival-ministry mode, which is no small thing. There were a lot of issues and a lot of buried conflicts from past events in the church’s history, and it took a long time and considerable work to bring those out to the point where they could be addressed; mostly, I think, we’ve done that. One of my colleagues in Michigan likes to say, “In ministry, you’re either digging rocks or you’re following the guy who dug the rocks.” Here, the rocks were big enough and heavy enough that digging them needed two stages: before they could be moved, they had to be excavated. That much, at least, we’ve done. It’s not nothing. But it’s so much less than what I’d hoped, it still doesn’t feel like enough. I’ve learned to accept that, largely thanks to colleagues in the presbytery; but I’m still a little disappointed.

That’s ministry, though, often enough; and at this point, what’s done is done and cannot be changed, and it’s time to pack up the dreams I brought with me, using the lessons I’ve learned here as packing material to keep them from breaking, and carry them along to Indiana. I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with dreaming big, and I go forward hoping that what I didn’t see God do here, I’ll see him do there; after all, what’s the point in asking for less than his best? And if I’ve begun to understand along the way that it truly is Christ’s ministry, not mine—if I’ve come to see, at least dimly, what Andrew Purves means when he talks about the crucifixion of ministry (on which more shortly)—well, while it’s been painful, it’s been worth the learning. God send grace that I will be the pastor my new congregation needs to become everything he wants and calls them to be, now and (I hope) for many, many years to come. Amen.

Madeleine L’Engle, RIP

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One of the unfortunate things about real life is that you can’t put it on pause while you do other things. It’s been a crazy busy summer—the busiest in my nearly-five years in Grand Lake, which is saying something—and it’s stayed busy rather longer than usual; on top of that, I have some major personal/professional things going on, taking up a lot of my time. All of which is to say, for the last several months, real life hasn’t been leaving much room for any thought that isn’t in some way work-related. Which is a bummer.Still, I’m getting back to this—for a while; there will be another hiatus coming in a month or two—and glad to be doing it. Truth to tell, I’ve had the time for a few weeks now; it’s just been a matter of getting back on the bicycle. It always helps when you get a push . . .Before I get to the push, though, I can’t start blogging again without noting the death of Madeleine L’Engle. Late to the party, I know, as she died on September 6, but I can’t let that go unremarked. As Heather McDougal of Cabinet of Wonders says, there was a great deal of power and beauty in her books, and for me, she was one of the writers (along with Tolkien, primarily) who taught me the connection between the two—how beauty is a far higher and deeper and more perilous thing than we realize. I know that, from a Christian perspective, L’Engle had some problematic aspects to her theology, and I acknowledge the points of criticism Sally Thomas raises in First Things (note: this article is subscriber-only until the end of 2007; just one of many excellent reasons to subscribe to FT); still, whatever may have been fuzzy around the edges of L’Engle’s vision, the power of that vision came from the great truth at its core, and for that, she is worthy of all honor. In the end, I can give her much the same encomium as Thomas does:

I was captivated by the notion that there was such a thing as evil and, conversely, that there was such a thing as good. The idea, further, that even the weak and the flawed were called to the battle—that there even was a battle—roused something in my imagination that years of Sunday School had somehow failed to touch. What these novels provided me with was something I cannot remember having possessed before I encountered them: a religious imagination. Perhaps I should have been reading them through the lens of the Bible; instead, as a teenager, I turned anew to the Bible with these stories alive in my mind. The novels themselves were not the gospel, and I don’t think I ever mistook them as such. But they awakened my mind to the idea of a universe in which, even in distant galaxies, God is praised in the familiar words of the Psalms, as the creatures on Uriel sing: Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein. . . . Let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord.

Request for help

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It’s been a busy couple weeks. I was gone for several days, then came home to find that a young man in our community had been in a terrible motorcycle accident—apparently, a truck pulled out into the highway right in front of him. His name is Michael, and it looks like he’ll recover fully, but his injuries are extensive and he has a long, long road of recovery ahead of him. Unfortunately, he’s a major wage-earner for his family; he lives with his parents, who are getting on in years and have significant medical issues at the moment, so during the months he isn’t able to work, things are going to be very, very tight for them. We’re still doing an inventory on the family’s needs, but it’s clear that we need to make sure, somehow or other, that the mortgage gets paid, the lights stay on, and the family has enough food; I understand that our local electrical co-op is pitching in, and the mortgage company might, but they’re still going to need a fair bit of financial help until Michael’s back on his feet again.

This is a great family, good people who are well-liked in our small community; as I’m sure you can understand, this has been taking a fair bit of my time, energy, and attention. I wanted to put up this post to let folks know what’s going on up here—and especially in case anyone feels led to help this family out. I can guarantee they’re truly in need and worth helping, and that any help anyone can give will really matter in getting them through this period. Please pray for Michael’s recovery, first of all, that there would be no major setbacks, and that his parents will get through this without any major health problems of their own; and if you want to offer any other assistance, you can call the Mountain Family Center at (970) 725-3257 and ask for Mollie.

Thanks. May God bless you.

Taking off the plastic

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After a long time away from this–due to illness, technical problems, and a whole host of other circumstances–it feels like walking into a house that hasn’t been lived in for a year and a half: the air has gone flat, there’s dust everywhere, and all the furniture is covered with clear plastic. Time to take off the plastic, sweep and vacuum the floors, dust the mantle, and get back to work.

Still here

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Rather a long hiatus, that–crazy summer + technical problems = dead blog. Oh, well . . . life here in the mountains is settling back into winter calm (which might seem odd, but outside the ski towns it really is pretty quiet up here once Labor Day passes), and we have time to think again.

One of my aims this winter is to read Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel–I started the first book, August 1914, years ago but was sidetracked before getting very far. It may seem like an odd ambition, but I was spurred to it by Daniel Mahoney’s recent piece in First Things, “Traducing Solzhenitsyn,” which is a brief consideration of the various ways in which Solzhenitsyn has been misrepresented and slandered in the West. It’s no surprise, really; he’s a true prophetic voice, and the established order doesn’t like prophets much. It never has. (Though if you listen to debates in the mainline churches, you’ll hear a fair number of people claiming the prophetic mantle for themselves–usually followed by yet another spiel as to why God supports the Democratic Party agenda. Funny, that.)