A Little More Lenten Help Along the Way

I took a vow that I would not watch television during the 50 days of Lent. Along with this vow, I also promised that I would take the supplements provided by the kinesiologist I chose to see on the high recommendation of a friend.

God is often very funny when he takes us at our word. Not only have I been too busy to watch television, our DirecTV cable does not work. I tried to turn on the television for my granddaughter and her friend, Jake, but for some reason, it just wouldn’t cooperate.

Checking the cable connections in the back, the little notations on the back of the television over the electronic holes were all written in techno-Greek, and it truly was techno-Greek to me.

But I got the point—God was gently reminding me that I had made a vow and He was going to gently help me keep it.

Yesterday afternoon, I had a little time, fiddled with the remote commands, and got the television working. We had a clear HD picture, clear audio, the channels switched as designed. “Television’s working,” I reported to the houseful of people who were wondering what had happened to the TV. “Don’t ask me how.”

But I didn’t stay to watch it. I marched upstairs (only to get out of bed and take the handful of supplements I had forgotten to count out and swallow) and finally, went to bed.

“Present your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable worship.”
This is the Scripture I’m chewing this month (some teachers call it meditation, but the word in Hebrew, I’m told, means “to chew on”). It is Romans 12:1. I am slowly working out what it means to be holy and acceptable. I still have a lot of figuring to do to fully understand this, but I know it has something to do with me getting healthy, learning how to sleep deeply, and not spending hours zoned out in front of the television.

God has made that perfectly clear (and there are people who say they don’t hear His voice, can’t guess His intentions). That is not my experience, not my experience at all.

I spy God!

Jake Can Do It!

I have been on an extraordinary schedule the last month—a January trip to visit possible filming sites in the Dominican Republic, a board meeting in California, starting up our missional community at the church, grandchildren visiting, back to the Dominican for a film shoot in February, home to a preaching assignment, then out to California again for a book I’ve been contracted to form.

All along the way, I’ve felt like a surgeon in the operating room where efficient, highly trained nurses place in my hand the exact tool to get the job done. In addition, I’ve tried to catch up on all my neglected medical exam (didn’t show up for a thyroid examination, and missed to breast exam appointments). David has been taking phone and Skype interviews on the documentary film he put together that focused on the slaughter of Nigerian Christians at the hands of the Boko Haram, Islamist extremists.

I’ve had people over for dinner and our eldest granddaughter took her spring break to introduce the new boyfriend to this side of the family. My journal (when I’ve gotten to it in the midst of all this busyness) is a record of evidences of God’s care.

Take the granddaughter’s new boyfriend, for instance. Jake arrived in our home just in time to haul the leather chair out of my daughter’s home, get it in the back of her truck, then take out the old recliner in David’s study that now refused to do anything but recline. The discarded chair was moved into the garage and the new leather recliner (well, the one I bought at Goodwill for $14, at any rate) was hauled upstairs. (It looks great—very.)

Jake had also spent a half-hour shoving Christmas boxes up that were waiting for a hand in the garage (and crowding our car when we parked it). Not only did he happily and willingly give a hand with the physical stuff, but he also helped David set up the new iPod that was purchased so he could Skype for these video interviews as well as have a portable means of communication so that he would not be tied to the personal computer at the office.

Oh, let’s see, it’s March, I really need help getting those boxes up into the attic—WHOA! Jake can lend a hand.

David’s knee has been bad, but I have a truck and some strong college kids. We can get the broken chair replaced with that stylish leather chair.

How in the world are we going to get this iPod figured without help?—oh, wait; we have help. Jake can do it.

I can go on and on, but I think you get the point. This morning we talked with a classroom of Palestinian children. Their teacher, a daughter of a friend of ours, had been reading them our book, Tales of the Kingdom. So we Skyped one another, and there were all the kids popping in front of the camera, waving their hands to ask questions. We talked for a half-hour before their school day ended.

And guess what? It was all to the exquisite timing of our granddaughter bringing her new boyfriend up from Indiana Wesleyan where they both go to school who “just happened” to be around when we needed him. Jake can do it. (Scalpel. Forceps. Needle and thread.)

Thank you, God. I spy You!

A Little More Lenten Help Along the Way

I took a vow that I would not watch television during the 50 days of Lent. Along with this vow, I also promised that I would take the supplements provided by the kinesiologist I chose to see on the high recommendation of a friend.

God is often very funny when he takes us at our word. Not only have I been too busy to watch television, our DirecTV cable does not work. I tried to turn on the television for my granddaughter and her friend, Jake, but for some reason, it just wouldn’t cooperate.

Checking the cable connections in the back, the little notations on the back of the television over the electronic holes were all written in techno-Greek, and it truly was techno-Greek to me.

But I got the point—God was gently reminding me that I had made a vow and He was going to gently help me keep it.

Yesterday afternoon, I had a little time, fiddled with the remote commands, and got the television working. We had a clear HD picture, clear audio, the channels switched as designed. “Television’s working,” I reported to the houseful of people who were wondering what had happened to the TV. “Don’t ask me how.”

But I didn’t stay to watch it. I marched upstairs (only to get out of bed and take the handful of supplements I had forgotten to count out and swallow) and finally, went to bed.

“Present your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable worship.”

This is the Scripture I’m chewing this month (some teachers call it meditation, but the word in Hebrew, I’m told, means “to chew on”). It is Romans 12:1. I am slowly working out what it means to be holy and acceptable. I still have a lot of figuring to do to fully understand this, but I know it has something to do with me getting healthy, learning how to sleep deeply, and not spending hours zoned out in front of the television.

God has made that perfectly clear (and there are people who say they don’t hear His voice, can’t guess His intentions). That is not my experience, not my experience at all.

I spy God!

And Works His Lenten Purpose Out Through Internet

On Friday, as I was spending the day pulling my sermon for Sunday morning together, a news story popped up on my computer screen. I did not call forth this story—it actually interrupted my Web research—and I almost erased it, but then noticed it was about the traffic sinkhole that opened up in the small town of Seffner, Florida, taking out the bedroom where a young man, Jeff Bush, age 38, was sleeping.

The story caught my eye because one of the points of my sermon was the fact that there are lies we tell and lies we don’t know we are telling. According to psychologists, these hidden faults are called lacunae. Webster’s dictionary defines a lacuna as a hole, a ditch, a gap in what used to be. I was emphasizing that these hidden lies are dangerous if we don’t pay attention to them. Just as I was thinking about closing the news story, I realized that God had given me the perfect illustration for the black holes in our soul that we must come to terms with when we develop a lifetime practice of becoming people of penitence.

Can you imagine how powerful this story was to the hearers of this sermon?

“The rest of the family were wakened by a loud crash, then the cries of Jeff Bush. By the time his brother, Jeremy Bush, reached the bedroom, the furniture was going, the floor was gone and he could hear his brother’s cries from the bottom of the sinkhole. Bush frantically tried to rescue his brother by standing in the hole and digging at the rubble with a shovel until police arrived and pulled him out before he too became a victim to the still sinking hole. Eventually the cries were no longer hard and monitors found not sign of life.

“I couldn’t get him out,” wept the brother. “I tried so hard. I tried everything I could.”

These quotes were also given to me: The first from Fyodor Dostoevsky in Notes From the Underground:

“Every man (and woman) has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.”

The second quote was from Joseph Conrad’s book Lord Jim, in which the character Marlow says:

“It is my belief that no man ever understands his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”

At the close of the sermon and before taking Communion, we all meditated on Psalm 51. “Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me! Then I shall be innocent and blameless of great transgression.” In other words, “Help me to become aware of the sinkholes in my own soul so that they will not be able to suck me into themselves.”

It is an incredible feeling to realize that you are in a communicative collaboration with God your Maker. Indeed, He helps us to do His work in the world.

I spy God!

The Work of Lent: Noticing What I’ve Failed to Notice

Sometimes (most of the time) the sermons we preach to others are really the sermons that we should be listening to ourselves. In the sermon I gave in our church, using the life and music of Johnny Cash as a springboard for thoughts about repentance (Lent According to Johnny Cash), I mentioned this quote from R. D. Laing:

The range of what we think and do—

Is limited by what we fail to notice;

And because we fail to notice—

There is little we can do to change

Until we notice how failing to notice

Shapes our thoughts and deeds.

Admittedly, this quote has to be read several times to understand what the little saying means, but it is profound in its potential impact.

Failing to notice (or neglecting to pay attention to) own motivations, character frailties, or inner knots is a human default. We don’t really want to know what it is we don’t want to know about our selves.

Lent is a time set aside by the early church fathers (and mothers) as a 50-day period to notice, to consider our own souls, to self-reflect on the error of our ways, so that we can develop the capacity for self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the goal of any introspection, and when we reach it (finally and often with some kind of agony), one of the byproducts is the capacity to notice what we have not been noticing.

No matter how old you are (I am 70 years of age), this process never ends. And because I preached a sermon last Sunday on this process, I have been asking myself, “What is it I am still not noticing?”

Since I have taken a Lenten vow not to watch television for these days leading up to Easter, I’ve also diagnosed the reason for too much time spent as a couch potato is the fact that I am fatigued by 3:00 in the afternoon and just holding on until I can go to bed by 9:00.

A friend sent me to her kinesiologist, and we began the process of discovering at what points I am nutritionally and chemically deprived that might contribute to fatigue, why I am not sleeping well, and what is causing the cycle of allergic reactions that plague me all through the year. To put it simply—watching too much television is only the presenting problem. The causes of the afternoon and evening fatigues that overwhelm me are rooted somewhere in the intricate balance and imbalances that make up the sum total of human entity.

It has been an intriguing journey, and I am popping all kinds of supplements morning and evening, but a month into this experiment, I am feeling better. I’m paying attention. I’m looking inward. I’m definitely noticing.

“That it may please thee to inspire us in all our several callings,

to do the work which thou givest us to do, with singleness of heart

as thy servants, for the common good.

We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.”

—The Book of Common Prayer

Familiar Faces at the Gate

The e-mail messages for this trip to the Dominican have been flying in flurries; there is so much to remember and to do. Copies of the film script need to be made in case we misplace our work scripts, and there may be a reason for other people to look them over. The shoot list, a schedule of must-get shots, needs to be prioritized and sent to the videographer; a day agenda of where we will be shooting and when must be compiled. The translator who volunteered to help needs to be contacted with information as to when we will need her. (Nothing complicates an out-of-the country shoot any more than the film team and the principals speaking different languages.)

David coached me on making sure we hit the bottom line of the script. My adult children, many who are involved in media—film, video and television—reminded me that this is a visual medium. Content is important they said but if we don’t get enough B-roll, there isn’t enough to work with in the editing room and the project is left with way too much talking heads.

I e-mailed Dr. Bibiana MacLeod, the Regional Coordinator for MAI in the Caribbean, and said, “Two days out from departure and I am getting the nervous-jervies; I am certain there is something major that I am forgetting.”

Phone call from the videographer: “Say, Karen. Are you sure we have reservations at this hotel? I’ve called and e-mailed, and they say they have no record of our names, and the hotel is full for the night of our arrival.” We both had visions of arriving in Santiago, gathering our luggage (including two carts of video and sound equipment), finding a taxi and arriving at the hotel, only to discover they indeed had no room in their inn and we would have no place to stay. Our couple on the ground was working in Cuba, to return shortly before arrival. Another e-mail to Bibiana for translation.

Last week I was worried about getting myself from the airport at night in a taxi, a woman alone in a mostly strange city. Then Paul and I compared arrival notes, discovered we were taking the same American Airlines flight from Miami, and that the three of us—videographer, audio guy, and myself (general gofer and untried director’s assistant, as well as script doctor and script editor) could take one taxi together to the hotel that we didn’t know whether or not we were booked into!

E-mail from Bibiana: “Not to worry. (Bibiana is an Argentina and speaks fluent Spanish.) I talked to the desk clerk (calling from her home in Canada). He has rooms for the three of you under my name.”

I don’t know why I can’t remember this; it seems as though I forget it every day (every day). God does not abandon us ever, not when we are in pain or sorrow, not when we are ecstatic with celebration, not when we are confused by chaos, not when we are lost or on standby, not when we travel.

Our flight to Santiago, Dominican Republic, went smoothly. We sailed through immigration control, picked up our bags, were waved through customs. Then we saw familiar faces at the gate where those long lines of family and friends and drivers waited to meet and greet all who disembarked from Flight 4537 from Miami.

Our translator had come to find us along with Hiram DeLeon, our contact on the ground who speaks about as much English as we speak Spanish (maybe more, which is not a lot) and without whose services this film project could not be a success.

Help me not to forget, Dear Lord, that You are always waiting at the gate to greet us, in the loving guise of people who sincerely care about doing the compassionate thing. Help me not to forget.

I spy God!