Revival in the Rain

During my seminary years, I re-united with a friend after he and I had taken some time off from classes for about a year.  "Were you able to rest?" I asked him?  I knew that he was a student Pastor from Tennessee and that he commuted every weekend to Charlotte, North Carolina to attend classes.

"Not really," he said, "but I did meet a person that changed the way I was living my life.  My spiritual life was stale.  I was living in the valley of dry bones, so to speak.  I was praying every day.  I was reading scripture.  But I did not hear God's voice and I wondered if he heard mine. My sermons lacked something, and my relationship with the congregation of my church was suffering.  I thought God had deserted me.  So I increased my efforts.  I worked harder and longer, but the results were the same.

One cold, rainy morning I decided to take some time for myself and go to a local coffee shop; order myself some coffee and a sausage, egg and cheese biscuit; and sit near the window, read my newspaper and watch the rain fall.  But, before I could take a bite of my biscuit I had this feeling I was being watched.  I looked around, but there were only two others besides the woman behind the counter.  I looked out the window.  Standing across the street in the cold rain was a man with an untrimmed beard, wild hair, dirty clothes, staring at me as I attempted to eat.  He looked as if he had been living in the streets for quite a while.  I could not read or eat or drink my coffee because each time I looked up, his eyes burned a hole through me.

I was about to change seats, but then I heard God speaking to me.  After all of those months of silence, I heard God's voice again.  And he said, "Go to him."  Here I was, in a warm, dry coffee shop, with food, and a newspaper to read and the last thing I wanted to do was go out into the cold rain with no umbrella.  But, God is persistent.  "Go to him."  Finally, I went outside and walked up to the man and stood in front of him.  "OK, now what?" I asked silently.  "Put your arms around him," said God.  The man was wet, and dirty and I wanted no part of him.  "Put your arms around him."  So I did.

And God spoke again.  "Tell him that I love him."  "God loves you," I said.  The man did not move or acknowledge what I had said.

"Feed this man." said God.

"But God, I don't have any more money.  I spent it on the sausage and egg biscuit and coffee."

"Feed this man."

So I took the man inside, out of the rain, sat him at my table, and gave him my biscuit and coffee.  The waitress behind the counter had been watching me through the window and when we came in she brought us some towels to dry off.  She also brought me some coffee and another biscuit.

"Who are you?" she asked.

I told her I was a student and a pastor.  "What church do you preach at?" she asked.  I told her.  "I don't go to church." she said.  "But lately I have been wanting to go.  But for some reason I have been waiting.  And now I know why.  I want to go to your church.  I want to know God the way you know God."

After that, things were different for me.  I didn't worry so much about feeling in control, or feeling God's presence.  I know now, deep down, that God is always in control and is always present, no matter how I feel or how hard I strive.  I have quit trying to meet God on my own terms and in my own strength.  I know God is with me.  All I have to do is sit quietly and listen and then obey where he leads.  You can never go wrong being where God wants you to be."

The Dogwood Tree

I planted a Chinese dogwood tree last Sunday with the help of my family and some friends.  We planted it in memory of my daughter’s dog, Heffner, who died of lymphoma on the first day of May, 2014.  After Sunday lunch, we walked into the front yard and found a good spot.  I dug the hole and sat the tree in it.  Erin, my daughter, took Heffner’s ashes from a box the Vet had given her, and carefully scooped a few of his remains into the hole and then we covered the hole with dirt.  And then I prayed that we would be given the strength to move forward and to celebrate and cherish his memory.

Erin and Heffner had been together for almost eight years.  He was just two months or so old when he went to live with her.  Through the years, he had been her constant companion, greeting her each morning when the alarm clock rang, seeing her off to work, and meeting her at the door when she came home.  They watched Lifetime movies on the couch at night, played a version of hide and seek, ate meals together, laughed together, and cried together.  She shared her secrets with him and he never told anyone.  He was a good friend.  He never let her down.

Heffner loved water.  Most dogs don’t like to be bathed but to Heffner a bath was a treat.  Erin once took Heffner to a pond that she and a few of her friends rented for an hour.  Heffner was the first dog into the pond and the last dog out of the pond. 

At the dog park, Heffner ignored the other dogs in favor of the doggie swimming pool or any water source.  He would gather or steal all loose tennis balls and sit with them in the pool of water or mud.

On my desk, I have the tennis balls that Heffner and I played with the last time he was at our house.  He was sick and taking chemo treatments and losing his hair, but he still ran after those tennis balls for all he was worth.  I suppose those tennis balls will be somewhere on my desk for as long as I have my desk. 

Heffner loved to eat and I loved watching him eat.  Erin thought that I over fed him and I suppose that I did (he gained weight each time he stayed with us).  One Christmas he took his eating too far.  We were attending the Christmas Eve service at Church, and Heffner used that opportunity to raid the trash can.  He found a large ham bone, carried it upstairs to the master bedroom, placed the ham bone on our bed, found a favorite toy, took it to our bedroom, climbed up on our bed and feasted on his ham bone for several hours.  This story is told and retold every Christmas and is now part of family legend.

There are a thousand stories that we could all tell about Heffner.  He touched all of our lives, in a good way.  And now we have his ashes and the dogwood tree to remind us of his life and the spirit with which he lived his life.

We will all miss him. 

Wildroot Days

In the late 50's and early 60's the hairstyle that men and boys preferred was a combed, slicked back, wet look.  To achieve this look, we used various hair oils (yes oils), or hair tonics as we called them.  There were tonics in bottles.  There were tonics in tubes.  And later there were tonics in spray bottles.  Some of the many brands available were Vitalis, Wildroot, VO5 and Brylcreem (a little dab will do you).  Many tonics were scented and made your hair smell like a flower garden.

Some hair tonic companies also made shampoo- such as VO5.  My sister once confused my VO5 hair tonic with her VO5 shampoo.  By the time she figured out why her shampoo would not lather she had used half a tube of my hair oil.  Her hair was flat and oily for days.

My friends Joel and Van and I discovered that if we leaned back in our chairs in Sunday School Class and balanced our heads against the sheetrock wall, an oily smudge appeared behind us.  Soon this developed into a contest to see who could make the biggest oil spot.  To win this contest, I selected the oiliest hair tonic I could fined in the house, which I thought was Wildroot.  I slathered it into my hair each Sunday morning.  Joel and Van found their favorite and did the same.  Soon there were 3 large grease spots on the walls of our Sunday School Class.

The years went by and Joel, Van and I grew up and left home. One summer, on a whim, I visited my old Sunday School Class.  The room was the same as I remembered except for a fresh coat of paint.  But, through the paint- very faintly, I could see three oil spots.  "They keep bleeding through." said the custodian. "We don't know where they come from."  So I told him.  "Man, those hair tonics must be some powerful stuff." he said.

But when I looked at those spots on the wall, it was not the hair tonic that I saw.  It was three friends whose lives had intersected for a brief moment in time.  Three friends who were trying to leave their mark in this world; to prove that they existed.  And there on the wall was the persistent proof of our existence; bleeding through the paint, struggling to be seen; their source forgotten by the passing of time.

Yes.  Some powerful stuff.

Forgetting My Brother

I did not own a car while I was living at home.  On the rare occasions that I drove, I drove one of the two family cars- a Rambler or a Buick Le Sabre.  Most of the time I walked to school, but sometimes I was allowed to drive.

One morning, my Dad asked me to drive to school and to take my little brother, Mitch, to his elementary school.  Since Mitch's school let out earlier than my high school, I parked the Rambler in a spot that was midway between the two schools.  Mitch was to walk to the car and lock himself in until I arrived 30 minutes later. Today that plan would be considered insane by all normal people and we would have been arrested for neglect by the Department of Social Services.  But it was a different time in which we lived.

The day passed slowly by as all of my high school days did.  When the final bell rang, I went to my locker, grabbed the books I needed for the night and walked straight home.  Arriving home, I turned on the T.V. and watched some of my favorite Westerns (Cheyenne, Sugar Foot, Maverick) while Mom prepared dinner for the family.

At 5:15 my Dad arrived from work and Mom called us all to the table.  I noticed Mom staring at us, looking at us one by one.  She looked at me; she looked at my sister, Wanda; she looked at my brothers Phillip and Keith.  She looked at my Dad, then back at me and asked the question that I will always remember, "Where is your brother, Mitch?"

I looked at the empty chair beside Dad and slowly it began to dawn on me what I had done.  I had forgotten that I had driven to school.  I had forgotten my brother was to meet me in the car after school.  I had been home for nearly two hours, watching T.V. while eight year old Mitch was who knows where.

I said nothing.  I simply stood up and walked to the door, then ran, like the track athlete I was, the fastest half mile in the history of the world; flying past slow moving cars and neighbors; running by the high school to the street where I parked the car.  I ran up to the car and looked inside.  And there was Mitch- sitting in the driver's seat with both hands on the steering wheel, pretending to be driving.  I unlocked the door, Mitch scooted over, and I drove him home.  Mitch ran into the house, sat down in his chair at the table while I, under the steady gaze of my Mom and Dad, tried not to laugh with my brothers and sister.

This is funny even to this day.  But this story also reminds me that our lives can become so routine, and we can become so focused on the immediate task at hand, that nothing else exists outside our narrow vision of the world.  And when this happens, we forget our brothers and sisters.  But they are there, waiting for us to remember that they exist; that they are people with lives; with hopes and dreams, just like you and me.

In Pursuit of God

Everyone wants to be happy.  Our Declaration of Independence states that one of our inalienable rights is the pursuit of happiness.  So, as Americans, we have a right (given by God) to pursue happiness.  Are we happy?  Maybe. Maybe not.  The World Happiness Report ranks America as the 17th happiest country in the world.  Granted, this is a subjective report, based on how people rate their overall happiness.  But, according to this report, as other nations' happiness rankings are rising, ours is falling.  We currently rank behind Canada, Costa Rica, and Mexico.  Only 33% of our population regard themselves as very happy, down from 35% in 2008 and 2009.  Despite our standard of living and our material wealth we are less happy.  Why is our happiness quotient falling?  The report sites greater instances of depression and anxiety as contributors to our unhappiness.  Age plays a role, with younger people being less happy than older people.

In addition, a very high percentage of people regard themselves as either religious and or spiritual (maybe as high as 90% of our population).  Should these people not be happy?  If a person truly believes in God, a God who is a God of love, a God of mercy and grace, a God who forgives and gives second chances, should this person not be ecstatically joyous?  Should spiritual people (even those who are not religious) not know peace in the midst of chaos?  Should this not be cause for great happiness?

If so, why are we not 90% happy?  Because we have been pursuing our religion and our spirituality as if they are material things.  And in this pursuit, if we are not careful, we may lose our faith in a God of love while pursuing tangible, material proof of God's love through our vision and mission statements; our goals and objectives; our budgets and expense reports; our building renovations; our progress dashboards (with green lights, yellow lights, and red lights); our committees and structures and our systems. God's presence cannot be reduced to the slogan, "if we are not growing we are dying".

It is my belief, that God wants us to be happy.  After all, we were created to be in relationship with God. The fact that we are not happy has more to do with our own failure to take God's hand and walk as a child of God.  Buddha once said, "Your work is to discover your work and then with all of your heart give yourself to it,"  We must discover ourselves as children of God, then with all of our hearts give ourselves to living as children of God.  This is the path to true happiness.

2721 S. Church Street

We have come to expect change as normal.  "Things change" we say.

 And then, we stumble across a place that time does not seem to touch.  And we are changed.

2721 S. Church Street was the address I memorized when I was four years old.  It was the address I gave my first grade teacher when she asked me where I lived.  Occasionally I will revisit it when I visit my hometown and I am always amazed that the house and the yard and the neighborhood look the same as the day we drove away.

The road beside the house is still unpaved. The old detached garage with the dirt floors and weathered sideboards still stand in the back yard.  The cement picnic table on which my brother, Keith, and our friend Alan Ray, and I climbed and jumped off trying to fly, sat like a monument to those days.  The brick barbecue still stood beside the table, with its chimney reaching upward. The house with the wooden screened in back porch, where our toy box sat that dad nailed together and painted and mom put decals on, is essentially the same.

The house across the road where Alan Ray lived has also been untouched by time.  As I stand in the backyard I see the shed where we used to play.  To my right is the back porch under which their dog Stumpy used to sleep.  Stumpy was born with stumps for legs and he was blind in one eye.  He had a mean disposition and would slither along the ground like a snake trying to bite me.  Luckily he was not too difficult to outrun. But, he was scary.  I would always approach that back porch on tip-toe, looking underneath, dreading the sight I would always see; Stumpy with his yellow teeth bared and his good eye looking hatefully back at me.

Our house sat in front of the train tracks where there was some sort of station that caused the trains to slow down and even come to a stop.  There was a steel structure called a "catwalk" that stretched out over the tracks.  It had a ladder that my sister and I used to climb to the top of it, and we would sit, dangling our feet as the trains passed underneath us.  At night I would hear their whistles blow deep into the night and I wanted to ride the trains, to go where they were going, and to see the things that they would see.

Because the trains had to slow down near this station, the hobos riding the train would take that opportunity to jump off the train and would walk up the road to our home.  Some would stop and ask for food.  Mom would give them what she had.

One night a box car exploded.  The night sky was lit up like day and all the fire engines and firemen in Rocky Mount were there fighting the fire.  We later learned that it was some sort of chemical that had exploded.  All of the adults were concerned, but for the children who lived there it was an adventure like no other.

My parents built a new home and we moved away from 2721 S. Church Street when I was nine. But if you stand by the road today, you can still see the house and the yard as I saw them.  If you stand by the tracks, you can still see the slowing trains coming in.  The rusting catwalk still stands nearby.  And the train whistles will still take you away with them.

Not the End but the Journey

A professional football player was recently quoted as saying “Not winning the Super Bowl makes you wish you never played in it.” 

Everyone wants to win.  If you play a sport, the goal is to win.  If you play cards, the goal is to win.  No one consciously wants to lose.  The problem is that no one wants to exert the effort if they cannot win.  People who try their best and come in second place are regarded as losers. 

The Buffalo Bills went to the Super Bowl four years in a row.  No other team has accomplished this feat.  This means that they were the American Football Conference champions for four consecutive years.  They owned the AFC.  But, because they lost four consecutive Super Bowls, they are regarded as losers, not as the winners that they certainly were.  Jim Kelly, the only quarterback to ever start four consecutive Super Bowls, has never watched those games, because the memories of losing them are so painful.  After the fourth Super Bowl loss, people in Buffalo were actually calling radio stations and pleading with the team members being interviewed not to take them back to the Super Bowl.  Apparently it was not worth the effort if they could not win.

There is a quote that is attributed to Henry Grantland Rice in the early 1900’s that ends, “It is not that you won or lost, it is how you played the game.”  Martina Navratilova, a tennis champion of the 70’s and 80’s, after hearing this quote, said “Whoever said that probably lost.” 

Winning, then, is the only thing that matters.  Not how you play the game.  Not how you conduct yourself during or after the game.  Not how you handle defeat.  Winning is the only worthy goal, and it overshadows sportsmanship, and courage, and honesty, and fellowship- everything.  This is why people cheat, or play dirty, or lie.  To win at all costs. Even at the cost of our souls.

In the 1925, Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur golfer (and some would say the greatest golfer), who ever played, was winning the US Open when he accidentally touched his ball with his club while setting up for a shot.  The ball moved slightly.  No one else saw it.  But Jones assessed himself with a penalty shot.  This penalty shot cost him the title.  When he was praised for his honesty, Jones said “You might as well praise me for not robbing banks.”  To Jones, not giving himself a penalty shot was the equivalent to stealing, and he could not do it.  He would rather finish in second place than destroy his character.

If we are to be a people of substance; if we are to keep our souls, winning at any cost cannot be the way we play the game. Winning, in fact, will be secondary to the process of playing the game; a process in which we will find that it is not the end but the journey that matters most.