Toothpicks and Legos

Like most households with young boys, mine is full of Legos. Designated containers hold all the ones that don't fit in the nifty, see-through vortex chamber in our vacuum cleaner. I have come to regard them as the trademarked building materials of young, male life. Yes. I've seen and own the girl's sets but they don't seem quite so indispensable yet (though they're actively working on that). At any rate, the imaginations of any day take shape through them and get brought to me for display. I have a reputation for being tough on fragile things so they frequently come with special handling instructions like; "Don't touch this, Dad. Just look at it", or "Don't try that lever. It's not finished yet." More than once, the creation has been nervously snatched from my hands only to implode on its own. Thankfully, these are usually quickly built and easily repaired.

Scripture says our lives are likewise a building project that gets tested in the end. The goal is to build something that lasts into the Kingdom, something fireproof. We all start with the same foundation, Christ, and go by the same basic rules. But that is perhaps the end of the similarities. Some build mansions that blow away in a stiff breeze and some build sheds that double as bomb shelters. One clue we're given is to carefully select our building materials. Some burn. Some don't. Patience, generosity, selflessness, and the like are generally invincible. The more earthen things, not so much. But don't think the earthen things are automatically useless. Just like safety glass is made from sand (a bad foundation for sure), generosity and selflessness are often made from groceries and hand-me-downs.

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Another clue is there's a careful balance between the earthen materials and the eternal ones. The resources we spend on getting and maintaining that bigger, better anything are resources generally diverted from generosity and the like. I say that on the assumption that none of us are working with endless resources (If you are, I'd like a large, interest free loan). In our own favor, we really can do a lot with a little when we're devoted to it. I was always proud of one school project in particular where we had to build a toothpick bridge. Beyond a few dimensional specifications, the design was up to us and the finished bridge was tested for its strength to weight ratio. My instructor doubted my minimalist design but it went on to set the record with toothpicks to spare. In toothpick land, I could have built built a shelter with what I had left for the people who lived under my fantastic bridge. Get it? Got it.

To perhaps put you at ease a bit (though not too much I hope), when The Judge was here in person, no one got rebuked for being rich, though some got rebuked for being mastered by riches - their wealth determined their character. Another perk is you'll have trouble building anything eternal that doesn't benefit you now. You're basically plugging your favorite virtues into the "goes around - comes around" circle. But however we work the balance, we don't get to turn in our project with special handling instructions. Some slide through the test with little more left than a red hot surf board and singed hair while others receive a rich welcome. Whatever you build, don't forget the foundation is Christ. Then, you'll at least have a place to call home, even if the test peels the roof off. You'll have have time to build a better one anyway.

Missing the Point

Growing up, church often seemed like a lot of strange fragments loosely connected through Christianity. Healing was one of those fragments. Everybody liked it. I did too, it was fun; lots of excitement and loud prayers bossing Satan and his sickness causing demons around like we were the masters of the WWE spirit world, "in Jesus name" of course. I can't criticize the excitement too much because Christ's first round of disciples were initially excited about it too, until he redirected their excitement to The Lamb's Book of Life. I imagine their transition was as difficult as ours. Legit or not, the natural sensationalism of miraculous healings is much more immediately gratifying than a guaranteed ticket to the good side of the afterlife.

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My family and I have been sick in the last weeks same as many of you, not the worst but still the kind that makes you wish faith, anointing oil and group prayer where as magical a combo as we're led to believe. Misery really tests us. I do join the rest of you in praying for other people to get well, especially when it's close to home. It's a matter of obedience, and, despite my tone, I don't believe it's any more futile than it is predictable. But I do think we might be looking at it from the wrong end. As I hacked in bed and contemplated the credible healings from scripture, a striking thought recurred to me; They're all dead! In all the hope and excitement, I don't think that point ever stuck with me as well as it should. Christ even made it himself while he was healing people!

The fresh meaning struck me when I asked when sickness started, between coughing fits. I'm a young earth creationist so the answer is the curse...from God. Uncomfortable as that point may be, it makes solid sense of why scripture frequently connects healing to proof of authority to forgive. God put the curse (sickness and punishment) in place with his own authority and he alone can lift it (healing and forgiveness), as he pleases. And his earthly life was a preview of that bigger plan. As novel or necessary as a healing may be, The Lambs Book of Life really is the offer you don't want to miss. And with the authority of that greater offer already well established, miraculous healings for perishable bodies may be the dead horse God isn't going to beat much anymore. Guess I'll have to slum it this time and rely on his perpetual miracle of my immune system.

Your WHAT Hurts?

It's been a rough couple weeks...also really good...but rough. I say that with all due humility in light of the fact that I'm winding into the second half of an unprecedented six week vacation on behalf of a generous Paid Parental Leave policy from my employer (stop cursing me. I'm about to make you laugh). I repeat as a family man the proverbial sentiment, You can't make this stuff up. The "rough" comes from a few different sources.

1) Two of my children are (re)learning that they have to eat what they're served. It's an understandably bad turn of events for them when mom (the loving, gourmet, short order cook of the universe) has ever patiently indulged their every taste for last several eons of their lives. Perhaps, even worse from their perspective is that she seems to have been permanently corrupted by dad recently.
2) The children have gotten even. I believe the strength and perseverance of the crud they brought home to decimate our digestive and respiratory systems for the last two weeks was intentionally selected by them. They must know they're more resilient and we're responsible for the mess. I'm sure that some of the cough's from around the corners of my house have been covered up laughs at listening to me eject a partial trachea. No one has escaped it's wrath.
3) Spicy food. Normally harmless to the trained consumer, I have (carefully and responsibly of course) trained them in it's righteous usage. Sometimes nothing feels better on what's left of a partially ejected trachea than some plain old heat, the kind that makes you sweat a little even if the food is lukewarm.

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So this ends up having a comic upside as well, starting with dinner and Mr. Bean's Holiday (Don't judge me. It's a good movie). Laughter really is exceptional medicine but it's also an exceptional headache when you can't stop and you've already been coughing all day. None the less, it helps clear the lungs... and a bit more than that apparently if you've had spicy food and stomach problems recently (Related? Nah.). My youngest son jumped up in the middle of the movie to use the restroom. Within a few minutes, we heard some nearly honest blubbering from the porcelain throne calling for the loving, short order emotional comfort of the universe (yes, same lady). She was holding an onion poultice to her ear to ease her own pain so I answered the call myself. I was as gentle as I could imagine when I opened the door but the tears and sadness vaporized the moment he saw me, like he was fishing for blue gill and hooked a shark. The next look was a perfectly composed one that said, "Everything couldn't be better. You can leave now." I asked what was going on just to be caring and responsible. Without breaking his composure, he took only a second to come up with a cheerfully delivered answer that would explain everything, "My butt was hurting. It stopped." Couldn't have said it better myself. Actually, couldn't stop laughing to say it at all.

Playing the Odds

Surveying my house after the last storm, the trend is obvious. Nature is trying to destroy it (and I'm a little slow to repair it). Some of the paint is cracking. A shingle has been relocated to the yard from the roof. And my recycle bin is a little more broken from another wind driven tumble down the street. But the odds still favor my house because I'm here to take care of it.

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Yes. Of course this is a spiritual analogy so you can bail here if you like. In kind, it's a tired analogy too, a spin-off of the tornado-in-junkyard example where a whirlwind happens to assemble a Ferrari (or a Honda, depending on whether the junkyard is in Japan or Italy). Watching anything deteriorate at the hands of nature serves the same purpose, one that's still convincing and ironically encouraging to me regardless of how tired it is. It goes like this: In regard to home maintenance or the existence of anything beyond a perfect vacuum, the odds don't favor us (though they do seem to favor insurance companies. I think there's something going on there). Anyway, we cling to million-to-one odds (or much worse) as if the the rest are merely non-instances, non-events. We just need enough one-in-a-million successes in a row and we will get our desired result, say a house. And the infinity of numbers provides however many one-in-a-millions are needed to build it, so long as we pay no attention to the 999,999 shingles the odds blow off for every one they place correctly. But leave those out and it becomes believable that the house could not only build itself but could gain consciousness and decide how best to do it. We just need enough one-in-a-million's.

Let's cut to the point. My reasoning proves that I'm a marginalized, unscientific idiot. Wait...I meant my point, not everyone else's. I just read it in the funny's this morning. Moving on, at present, nature as we can observe it does not produce things like us. It produces things more and more similar to junkyards and black holes, and leaves us still searching for the thing that produces things like us or complexity in general. For me, this rationally leads to the conclusion that order of any kind is a supernatural product, even nature itself. And, again, not as we imagine but as we actually observe, we are the pinnacle of order and complexity in the natural world. A supernatural creator is indeed what we are rationally looking for. And whether I like him or not, I haven't found one more convincing than the God of the Bible.

Hi Guy!

I have four children now! That's my good excuse for not posting in a while. Our nearly two year old daughter came home to stay last Saturday. Her history has made family titles a little confusing for her and left me with the simple title of Guy. I'm glad to have it. It's as cute as you can imagine to hear an affectionate "Hi Guy" from her quiet, high pitch voice when she sits up in in bed in the morning before anyone but me is awake. Needless to say, I'm wrapped around another set of little fingers. She's adjusting wonderfully.

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Still, I've been reminded this week how being an adoptive family is unique from a child's perspective. For children too young for advanced reasoning, it's especially tricky. I noticed something amiss with my youngest son, five years old now, after Aria had been home a couple days. He was increasingly bothered by Aria stealing the spotlight and started competing aggressively for our attention. We anticipated his difficulty adjusting to not being the youngest anymore so I pulled him aside for a heart to heart when he seemed near his breaking point. As he sat on my lap with my arms around him, I was ready to hear how much harder than expected it was embracing a new sister. "Yes," he confirmed with that tremble in his voice that tells any experienced parent there's a lake of emotion behind a flimsy dam. "What's the hardest part?" I asked. He burst through tears, "I don't want you to get rid of me." My heart broke.

Perhaps we take it for granted that our family is our family. Kai doesn't. He know's very well that Aria came to us because someone else wasn't willing and/or able to keep her. And he's too young to reason that his own situation is any different than hers was. Perhaps we take relationships for granted in general. We expect something besides ourselves to make them work and last. It reminds me of a question my wife asked when we were newly married, "How do I know you'll never leave me?" I answered, "You don't. You'll just have to see me never leave you."

I had a wonderful father/son talk with Kai and he's better than ever now. He understands with new depth what it means when I call him, "son". At the core, it's devotion alone that secures any family. Natural family members abandon their roles all the time. And, though generally more conscious of being family by choice, adoptive families are breakable too. But there is a perfectly trustworthy adoption. The apostle Paul said it's not the natural children who's place is secure in God's kingdom, it's the adopted children, the one's who are his by choice, not default. That is matter-of-factly the only way God builds his family. I know an imperfect yet compelling version through the love I have for my own children, and it adds depth to joyfully anticipating my own adoption as his son. I strongly encourage anyone to adopt their family (children, siblings, parents, etc). Whether naturally yours or not - make the decision that they are yours no matter what and let them know. If you devote yourself to it unconditionally, it will try you in every way and it's the closest to understanding the nature of God's family that you will get on this earth.

Border Line

I avoid politics (except to declare that I avoid them and then write about them). That's like saying, "There are absolutely no absolutes". Except the person saying it would leave out "absolutely" because that makes the absurdity of the statement too obvious. So back to politics (that I don't actually avoid). What I actually avoid is being too judgmental about politics. I don't suffer from the delusion that if the whole world viewed things my way, everything would work out. That's my disclaimer to everything else I'm about to say here.

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A friend recently asked me how I would handle the recent and ongoing topic of refugees, immigrants, stray pets, etc (yes, I'm blaming a friend for this post). More specifically, how do I think Christ would have us handle it. The old WWJD. Knowing very well that there's a tremendous gulf between ideas about how things should be done and actually doing them, here's how things should be done. Based on God being the one who establishes the times and places of nations for the purpose of leading their occupants to himself, we have the obligation to protect whatever Godly attributes underpin any particular nation. Our own underpinnings are transparently put forward in our Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

There's a lot of signatures on those statements, Christian and otherwise. What they established for our nation was a practical, nonreligious reverence for a singular, virtuous, creator God. The short list of virtues originating from him that needed official recognition and protection were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those who signed it were ready to die for those and proved it. I am fully convinced that every detail of those statements is entirely credible to this day, and even more so in our scientific age. If you embrace the same thing for yourself and others, you're welcome here. It's the foundation of the superpower nation that followed and I do love being one of its citizens.

That's the end of answers that fit this format. However far away from those roots we are is how far we are from being able to govern ourselves with the success of our past. For Christians, the obedient times of Old Testament Israel are an example of good foreign policy. Aliens and foreigners who shared the national values provided by Israel's Creator God were welcomed and treated as equals, not stray pets. The everlasting kingdom we're looking forward to makes the same offer but it's immune to the selfishness that degrades all purely human governments. Till then, as long as it will have me, I pledge allegiance to one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Because I Said So

I'm going to shoot for generically relatable this time. I'm also going to assure you that everything's fine and I still love Jesus. Now that that's done...
If you've lived through much at all, there's times when you give up on things making sense. By necessity, we have to go on even if we can't line up the loose ends in our minds (that's a lot of loose ends for some of us). It started when we were young and learned to recognize "because I said so" as a final warning that things were about to deteriorate rapidly if we didn't relax and comply. Perhaps we had questioned things too much by that point. Perhaps the first question was too much.

So I've gotten older and nothing has changed except the person that says, "because I said so." The phrase is rendered a little different most of the time now; "That's just the way it is", "If you don't like it, there's the door", "One more time and I'll kill you", etc. But it's essentially the same: you don't have to like it, you just have to deal with it.

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Sometimes, It's God himself who says it, and I respectfully respect that. I've said before that, in the present, I know God as an accomplished ventriloquist and that's still true, but here's my scriptural translation. "Before Abraham was, I am" reads "because I said so". "I only say and do the will of the Father" reads "That's just the way it is".  "Will you leave too" reads "There's the door". I'll leave it up to you to sort out "One more time and I'll kill you".

Work, home and the world at large have that tone lately. And I think I'm just going to let the loose ends spark and crackle like high voltage power lines for a while. It's a good show but it's not mine.