Our Need To Move, Part 2

Last week I wrote a blog called ‘Great White Sharks, CS Lewis, and Our Need to Move’ in which I thought about the fact that we need to keep moving in life and in faith or we will slowly die.

The sweetest joys, the Christmases can’t be kept in a jar to hold onto forever or they will lose their sweetness and their meaning. Likewise, the pain cannot be held onto forever like a badge. We need to move, we were made to keep moving.

But how to move on? For me it is music. Playing it. Creating it. Immersing myself in it. It is where I can celebrate, commemorate, and breathe.

However, what spurs me to action and life is probably not what spurs you.  Leave a comment and tell us what keeps you moving…

Collecting Our Stories

Do you collect anything?

Me? I collect guitars (see the ‘Guitar’ tab at the top of the blog). I think my wife collects patience.  Over the years my sons have collected lots of things – rocks, Pokemon cards, bottle caps, assorted anime inspired plastic toys, broken glass and shells found at the lake…

And while most of what we collect will not make us money or hold our attention for long, I am learning that there is something we can collect that will increase in value and shape our hearts.

We can collect our stories.

Stories of joy and pain, stories of family and origin, stories of traditions and history, and stories of God’s faithfulness in the fabric of our family.

At our house we have several stories banked – the Story of the Luggage Cart, the Story of the Pledge Bandit, the Story of the Christmas Bear, and the Story of the Angel in the Forest to name just a few – and now we have a new one, gathered just yesterday – the Story of the Broken Defroster:

My wife was out of town this weekend and I promised Watson and Bean-Pole that we would hit the Mall and Quaker Steak and Lube (our favorite restaurant!). I was at church most of the day yesterday, first leading Worship in the morning and then taking part in a Memorial Service in the afternoon. I came out f the building to heavy snow falling and the discovery that the blower in car had stopped working. So, while my heater technically  ‘worked’, it was useless since there was no blower to move the heat around the car. I fiddled with it for a while – flipping the dial back and forth, banging on the dash – all to no avail so I drove home in a cold car.

I picked up the boys and we headed off on our adventure – Mall first. I told them about the heater breakdown and they tried flipping the dial and banging and kicking various parts of the car, again to no avail. We finished hanging out at the Mall and headed for Quaker. On the way there, I realized the potential danger of the situation – no defroster and heavy snow means that windows fog up and any liquid on my windshield freezes. You can use washer fluid to clean off the windshield but after the first couple of swipes, that freezes and then you have to do it again. And again. And again.

In a slow and deliberate manner, we got to Quaker and had dinner. I didn’t really enjoy it, though because I was watching out the window hoping the snow would stop and our drive home would be less nerve wracking. The restaurant was pretty empty due to the Snow Advisory (who knew?) and everyone seemed a little antsy to get out and get home in this mess. After we finished, we went out to the car (still snowing…) and I said a silent prayer for safety. I started up the car and tried that defroster switch one more time…

…and on it came. Full blast. “Thank you, Lord,” I breathed.

You might see it as a coincidence, but here at my house it is another story of an involved God who cares.

The Story of the Christmas Bear

**Warning – this blog entry is silly and a little twisted. If you don’t enjoy silly and a little twisted, skip it!**

My mother is a life long knitter.  As far back as I can remember, she would be sitting on the couch with those needles clicking and clacking. And though the yarn would fly, I never thought about where those knitted items went to… until I was in college.

Home on a break, I wandered down to our basement and came across a pile of sweaters, made for no one in particular (according to my mom); a wide variety of sizes and styles and colors. As a college student always on the lookout for cool, odd or eccentric clothes, I was thrilled and several of the sweaters made their way into my closet (neon orange and green sweaters were soon to become infamous on that Iowa campus in the mid 80′s…) I would regularly check the pile every time I came home. And then one year I found this:

I was drawn to it for the colors -red (my favorite) and green – making it an obvious Christmas sweater. The large grizzly bear? I didn’t really pay much attention to that…

…until years later when my then-4-year-old son, Bean-Pole, asked me what the bear had to do with Christmas. Now, being faced with a question that I didn’t know the answer to, I did what all good dads do… I made something up. The story had to be something that would appeal to a little boy raised on the legends of King Arthur, Middle Earth and the land of Narnia with images of battles and dragons and orcs and axes and swords and wizards and magic dancing around in his head… so here, for the first time in print, is the story I told him… the Story of the Christmas Bear.

“Each year on Christmas Eve after all the children of the world have gone to sleep, the Christmas Bear comes around and one by one sniffs each child. If the child has been good, the Christmas Bear simply leaves. But… if the child has been bad… the Christmas Bear rips his throat out!”

Bean-Pole’s response to this heartwarming Holiday story was, and I quote, “Yaaayyyyy!”

Merry Christmas!

Love Wearing Waders

There was a popular song back in the 90′s called ‘From A Distance’… a Bette Midler song, you may remember it… a big hit… on the radio constantly… here’s the chorus:

God is watching us
God is watching us
God is watching us
From a distance…

I absolutely hated this song.

On the surface, it feels good – there is sort of a warm spiritualness to it, but really it is stark refutation of all that the Gospel is about. And no time of the year shows that more clearly than Advent, the time of preparation for the birth of Christ. Not the birth of an idea or a philosophy or a pattern but of a physical baby.

This past weekend at church, our pastor’s message centered on this truth – that Jesus came in the flesh – fully human and fully God to live among us, not at a distance. And it is this fact more than any other that drives me, personally, to my knees.

My youngest son hates going upstairs alone.  When he has to go upstairs he will turn to me and say, “Coming Dad?” I have tried to reason with him and let him know that I am here in the house and that he is safe with me down and him up. No dice. I have tried to encourage him to be the brave 10 year old and let me sit there in my chair. No go. It isn’t until I walk upstairs with him that he will go. I don’t have to do anything upstairs, I just have to be there with him.

I am fully aware of the mess that is my life. The places I struggle, the places I fail, the ‘upstairs’ that I fear, the messes that shame me and the sin that poisons me. And it is precisely because I live in this mess that I hate that Bette Midler song.

A God who watches me from a distance is of no interest to me. I don’t need a ‘lifeguard’ at the edge of the pool watching from the outside. I need a God who is in the thick of it with me, like a ‘fisherman’ who puts on waders and goes into the stream where the fish are. Only a Savior who walks into my mess can lift me out of it.

This is exactly what happened at the manger… Jesus came into our world as an actual person, fully human while still fully God. He has come to us ready to meet us in the midst of our life, not from a distance.

That is Love wearing waders.

The Little Foxes

About a week ago I was in a Freedom of Espresso shop getting some coffee and hanging a poster for the JOURNEYMAN CD Release Party. This particular FOE has a single step up when you walk in the door. After I had finished my business, I took my coffee and headed out… forgetting about that single step back down.

Now, I can jump off a pretty good height and land without hurting myself, but that didn’t seem to matter to the small step down that I forgot about. This step was only four or five inches tall, not a big drop. But, stepping out expecting to land on a continuous surface and landing hard left me with a headache and a twisted back all day. Big drops = no problem… one small step = pain… go figure.

Song of Solomon 2:15 says, “Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom.”

Why does he care about the little foxes? Seems to me that you would be more worried about the bigger animals that can get in and leave a wide swath of damage and destruction… and maybe that is the point. We are always on the lookout for those bigger animals. But those little foxes, we don’t worry about them – they are so small, what can they do? And then they get in and swarm around and destroy our vineyard.

Had that step down in the FOE shop been a staircase, I would have seen it – but who pays attention to a single, little step? Not me and I paid for it all day.

Makes me wonder what other little foxes I am ignoring as they try to ruin the vineyard of my heart…

The Church Is Like A Guitar

When I first became a follower of Jesus, I assumed that all Christians were the same. Not the same in a cookie cutter sense – I have always been aware of God’s incredible and diverse artistry, but the same in basic faith and motivation.

Nope.

People who claim to be Christian come in all sorts of shapes, views, motivations and opinions… and agendas… and that leads to tension.

There is tension between believers who focus on personal holiness versus those who focus on social justice; between those believers who feel called to overt evangelism versus those who feel called to let their lifestyle talk for them; between those believers who love old hymns versus those who love new songs; between those believers who want to gather the world to the church versus those who want to close the buildings and go be the church in their neighborhoods; and the list could go on and on and on…

I don’t like tension, but I do like guitars.

Guitars are odd beasts, a combination of two things that don’t necessarily go together, wood and wire. Taken separately (either the wood or the wire) they don’t do much but when you join them together (both the wood and the wire) and add around 200 pounds of tension (tuning the strings to pitch) – now you have an instrument that can really sing!

No matter how often Christians try to make the Church an either/or type of place (either grace or justice), God has created it to be a both/and place (both grace and justice). And we don’t get to split it up along the lines we find most comfortable and natural to us, we have to learn to live in the tension of God… that tension where Jesus loves both me and you;  where He can use both my abilities and yours; where He calls both you and me to die to self and pick up the cross; where He uses both those who gather and those who scatter…

I think the Church is like a guitar… when it lives in the tension of God, it becomes an instrument that can really sing!

Never Too Old To Unlearn

Last week the Lady of the Realm sent me an email with this quote from Oswald Chambers:

It is not true to say that God wants to teach us something in our trials. Through every cloud He brings our way, He wants us to unlearn something. His purpose in using the cloud is to simplify our beliefs until our relationship with Him is exactly like that of a child— a relationship simply between God and our own souls, and where other people are but shadows. Until other people become shadows to us, clouds and darkness will be ours every once in a while. Is our relationship with God becoming more simple than it has ever been?

What a thought – to unlearn something… in just a moment of considering, I easily came up with three detrimental things I have learned:

1. To kill time…
2. To rate people based on their usefulness to me…
3. To confuse my wants/desires with God’s will…

How different would my life be, my world, my walk with Christ if I unlearned even just these three things?

Learning to Make My Mark

For those of you who keep up with this blog or may have witnessed my recent foray into live streaming video (i.e. my internet cable access show on ustream.com), you are aware of two recent developments in my life… a new extension of my music ministry and a new dog. One of these things I sought after and one was ‘visited’ upon me; however, both seem to be intertwined in an odd way…

The dog’s name is Nerf. He is an 8 month old Jack Russel mix who came to us from a pound neutered and potty trained – a pretty good deal. I was told that because he had been neutered young, he would probably never ‘lift the leg’ to go to the bathroom and that has held true. But recently, he has started to try and mark things on our daily walks…

I am not sure where this came from – instinct or doggie pee(r) pressure (canine bathroom humor #1) or what – but the sad fact is that Nerf doesn’t know how to leave his mark. At first, I noticed that he would just walk up to a tree he had been sniffing and stand tall while leaning against the trunk, as though the mere contact would leave the mark. But then, I figure, he started watching other dogs do it and in a case of ‘doggie-see-doggie-doo’ (canine bathroom humor #2) he realized he had to pee on the object. So, he would do his best to straddle the target – which worked ok for small shrubs and the like but made trees difficult. Then a few days ago, my son Bean-Pole, saw him approach a tree and triumphantly lift his leg and… he fell right over.

Apparently, making your mark is an acquired skill.

I recently accepted the position of Worship Director at a church in my area, in addition to continued touring/recording, and am figuring out how to make my mark there. What I am finding is that, like Nerf, I am having to learn how to do it.

I have always believed that some of the marks of a Christian should be humility, a servant’s heart, and excellence in skill; and I know how that is done in a traveling music ministry… but ministering through music to one body week after week is an altogether different animal, and requires different tools. And I can’t just assume that because I am good at one set of things, I will automatically know how to do another.

So, while Nerf is out practicing his one leg balance – I will be seeking out other musicians who both travel and lead Worship at home with humility, a servant’s heart and excellence of skill and learning some new skills of my own.

Humility on eBay

I love eBay. I love browsing through things I can’t afford… searching for toys or records or books from my past… I occasionally buy things there and more often sell things… In fact, my upcoming CD (JOURNEYMAN – Due Out This Week!!) was partially financed by income raised selling things on eBay. But, yesterday I found something on eBay I didn’t know they offered…

Humility.

As a seller, I always strive for honesty and transparency. I go overboard sometimes making sure I have listed all the flaws on an item. I try to answer any questions promptly, contact buyers ASAP after an auction and ship quickly. And to date, I have a 100% positive Seller Rating. However, none of those things matter much when a buyer is upset.

This past weekend I heard from a buyer about an auction item (one of Watson’s old toys that we put up so he could earn some spending $). Occasionally, if you sell enough stuff, someone will want to return an item. Usually no big deal. But the email from this buyer was rude and accusatory saying I had lied about the condition of the toy and that the whole auction was a rip-off. I offered a refund of the purchase price and shipping costs upon return of the item but that was met with another rude email about scamming this person out of money. Now, I was starting to lose my cool.

It is never an easy thing to try and defend yourself in an email altercation, partly because of the lack of clear tone in print, partly because people behave differently in the supposed anonymity of cyber-space, and mostly because we all have egos. But I tried anyway. I corrected some of the buyer’s inaccuracies about the auction and pointed out how they had played a part in the unsuccessful end of the auction. Shouldn’t have done that… the next email was downright rude/angry and ended with the buyer just saying the whole transaction was a lost cause and to just forget about it all. Now, I was angry.

Knowing that no good would come from continued tit-for-tat and feeling like the door had been shut by the buyer, I switched off my computer and (angrily) walked away. But, I couldn’t stop thinking about the whole situation. I wanted to rant, I wanted to defend myself, I wanted to point out the other person’s behavior, I didn’t want to own my own failure and I certainly did not want to go an extra step to make things better. Nope, they closed the door.

However, that is not the way Jesus calls His people to live. And I claim to be one of His people.

There was one more email to send… one more offer of a refund… no defending my honor, no subtle attack… pry that door open just a little… and it doesn’t even matter how the buyer responds because the battle was really in my heart with my self and my ego. Who knew that eBay offered humility?

And I didn’t even have to win an auction to get it…

New Adventures

Lots of things are going on in my world right now… lots of irons in the fire; lots of beginnings and endings; lots of adventures…

First up… today (June 9th) is our 21st wedding anniversary! (Ta da!) I have been more than blessed with the love of the Lady of the Realm…

The JOURNEYMAN CD, which has taken up most of my attention the last 6 months, is finished! The CD’s should be in hand next week (with several Release Concerts to follow). I can honestly say that out of the 14 records I have made over the course of my career, this one is the best thing I have ever been involved with. The whole experience from the songwriting and recording to the photo shoots and art design were a joy. And all of my mates were along to play on the album!

CA-tv, the weekly live show I have been doing on uStream, is coming to a close. Only one more episode left (Tuesday, June 14 at 8 pm EST)… this has been a lot more fun to do than I expected. What started out as an effort to raise the remaining Recording Budget turned into a scramble to come up with funny bits, stories and surprises to keep my viewers (and myself) entertained. Did we succeed? Click here, watch the archived episodes and let me know!

The biggest adventure, however, is surely this… I have accepted the call to become the Worship Director at Eastern Hills Bible Church in Manlius, NY. This means a big switch for me – from itinerant music ministry to one primary Community of Faith and the chance to minister there over a longer period. I will still be touring periodically throughout the year and recording new CD’s, but my musical plate has just gotten much fuller… (fuller – is that a word?)

So, here’s to new adventures… let’s get out there!