The Low Man

I am the rich man.
I fear it.
I kneel on the warm side of my door.
I am the rich man.
I feel it,
In prostrate comfort on my bedroom floor.

In affluent dismay,
My prayer begins.
The low man lights the way.
Remember him?
He pleads from phantom cage
To let me in.
A holy light sustained
Yet flickers dim.

Entrapped in pleasures drowning desperate sounds,
I feel the distance.
Sparse excess I have dared to go without.
A grasp at closeness.

How large a gift yet sacrifices slight.
A holy ember strains to flicker bright.

Draw him near or take me far,
From both within me, here we are;
That mindful place, that abstract home,
In low man's space we fear to roam.

Between prayer and prayer again
I am the rich man, now and then.
I cast a glance. The gold grows thin.
I bid the low man let me in.

Mind Blown

The best reactions to being a calico adoptive family happen to my wife when she's out without me. Today in Walmart she changed directions in an aisle only to find another woman in her face who asked, "This is gonna sound weird but can I blow your mind?"

"Uhhh...maybe," my wife answered trying to make the abrupt transition from grocery list to stranger danger with all five kids in tow.

The lady pulled out a large wad of twenties and appeared to debate how many to part with while evaluating Lani closely. A single twenty was offered with the advise that it was for ice cream or something else fun for the kids... "not cigarettes and alcohol." At this point the evidence indicates this lady didn't realize the kids were adopted so the impression was that my wife "gets around" and still doesn't have a man to help her through Walmart. Tough life.

Scripture says if someone's gift is giving let them give generously. So twenty bucks bought an awkward "thank you", a four pack of kids movies and some fancy school folders. Mind blowing? Uhhh, maybe. God has a good sense of humor that's hard to track with sometimes. But even when the joke happens in the canned tuna aisle, it's funny. If anybody needs a mind blowing twenty dollars, I can officially afford to pay it forward now.

Growth

I'm tired of hearing about the church's ambition to grow. To be fair, I have to carefully balance my own perspective. We all like the "body of Christ" analogies and I think it has a lot to offer on this topic. If you have the mind for it, feel free to analogize just about everything that follows. I'm sure you'll see I'm only scratching the surface of this smelly sticker enough to see if its aroma makes your mouth water.

First, growth in general is good and good growth calls for rejoicing. It replaces dead cells and adds new ones where more strength is needed, whether for bones and muscles or immune and circulatory systems. It turns babies into youths into adults. It makes hair fun to cut and style and it makes finger and toe nails resilient tools. And all this good growth has one obvious thing in common, only God has true control over it. We can boost it with steroids or send it sideways with gluttony, but we are helpless when it refuses to happen and sometimes equally helpless when it just won't stop. That's the pattern for countless disorders.

If the world is teaching us anything right now, could it be that growth is not always good? Stock market bubbles. Cancer. Inner-city food deserts. Extremism. etc. Can we make the transition to concerning ourselves with the health of Christ's body rather than it's size? Not only do we have much more control over that but scripture aims us straight at it with the assurance that a healthy body grows (and stops growing) "as God causes it to grow" according to what's best for it. There are already books on this topic so I won't try fit one in the space of this post. But I would definitely encourage you to give it some thought before we're too spiritually obese for our part of the body to support itself.