Addicted to doing

This is a word to preachers of the Word.

Do you often wonder why the faces of so many in your congregations are slack-jawed during worship on Sunday mornings? Do you often wonder why so few come back on Sunday evenings?

Here is the answer: most of your congregants are addicted to doing, and in that addiction, their minds and bodies are exhausted every week by Sunday morning.

There are your standard, by-definition addictions: tobacco, pain-killers, anti-depressants, alcohol, gambling, 'net pornography.

Then there are these: TV, internet social networks, cyber games, children's athletics, high-school football, band, college football, Monday night football, cheerleading, cheer competition, winter guard competition, church-league softball and basketball, fall girls softball, springs girls softball, fall and spring baseball, year-around training for any serious high school sport, wrestling, athletics booster club, band booster club, work, shopping, texting, drama club, math club, Spanish club, society this/society that, hunting club, fishing, yard work (yes, it can be an addiction) ...

I could go on. So could you, because many of you preachers are as addicted to doing as the people to whom you preach.

This addiction to doing is only 50 years or so old, roughly two generations. When I was a child, baseball for boys was the only non-school youth sport readily available. It started at age 7. Now, there are youth soccer, baseball, football, wrestling, basketball and volleyball. Soccer starts at 4. So does youth wrestling. T-ball starts at about the same age, doesn't it?

For serious participants there are year-around club versions of wrestling, soccer, volleyball, baseball, basketball, cheering and gymnastics. And if your kid is really serious about a non-football/basketball/baseball sport (translated, this means mom and dad hoping for a college scholarship), club ball is necessary to get your kid noticed by college small-sport scouts. When children are involved in these highly organized activities, so are their parents: back and forth to practice, fund-raising, weekend tournaments and summer camps ...

You know what is going on. Yet you wonder why your congregants sit on their hands during preaching, why so few adults volunteer their time. They are addicted to doing, and Sunday is their day of rest from almost everything, including serious study of the Gospel. They are so tired they hear instead of listen, they look instead of see, they feel instead of think.

Idle hands and an idle mind are the devil's workshops, as the old sayings go; so, too, are an exhausted mind and body. Be still and know God. Stay too busy, and know Satan ...

The love of family

A matter of vision

The art of photography is not a matter of resolution, focal length, or depth of field, or film speed, or grain, or lighting, or shutter speed, or color, or black and white; it is a matter of vision, a matter of seeing instead of looking.

We are made in His image, the Word says. We are not copies of Him, perfect in focus, in sharpness, in tone, in pose, perfect in reflecting who He is. Hardly. We are what He sees in our hearts. He does not just look at us, like He is watching an ant farm. He sees us for what we are. It is up to us to see Him for who and what He is, not just look for some kind of miraculous, clarifying, sharply focused shard of evidence in this broken world.

We cannot find Him by looking; He is not something to sought by looking under a rock, or looking through a microscope, or writing an algorithm. We can, however, see Him as we seek Him with vision. He sees our hearts. We can see His if only we will stop looking.

My chains are gone; I've been set free ...

Sunrise, sunset

There is nothing haphazard about a sunrise or sunset. I think that is something everyone can agree on.

Some say immutable physical law is the reason. Some say His plan is the reason. This is where the general agreement breaks down.

Those who hold physical law is the reason, upon taking their argument back to the beginning, then argue that such order was the coincidental result of happenstance born from chaos.

Those who believe His plan is the reason, upon taking their belief back to the beginning, then see order wrought consciously and lovingly out of chaos.

Where do you stand?

The importance of water

I have been bathing in our kitchen sink for two weeks now as our single bathroom is being re-done (Yes, I am that slow). I use a portable step at the sink to get first one foot, then in the other under the tap; other gyrations are necessary to wash the rest of me and shampoo my hair.

The novelty wore off in a couple of days, but I am managing to refrain from bodily stench - and learning again how important water is. With one foot in the sink, I am reminded that I have clean, running water available in our little shack even if we do not have a bathtub at the moment (it is sitting in the front yard, freshly painted and wearing freshly painted cast-iron clawed feet, awaiting installation). Running, fresh water in a home at all would be considered a blessing in much if not most of the world; a bathtub with running water would be considered remarkable, and perhaps wasteful, in places where potable water is scarce.

I can drink water from the tap, I can wash my hands under the tap, with contortions I can bath under the tap, I can make iced tea with water from the tap, I can get water from the tap for boiling pasta; how wonderful is the constant availability of fresh, clean water!

Yet this kind of water - a requirement more important than food for life on this world - has little importance when compared to a different kind of water, the living water that is Jesus of Nazereth. The water He offers is eternal. Anyone who knows Jesus as Savior will never run out of this kind of water no matter where on this planet he goes, whether to Death Valley or the Amazon Valley, the Gobi Desert or the Mississippi Delta.

As Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4: 1-42), "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

Consider those words the next time you draw a bubble bath, or wash your car, or pay your water bill, or drink a glass of clean, fresh water - or wash your dirty foot in the kitchen sink ...

He is the risen sun ...