Category Archives: Ramblings

Ramblings, Theology

The greatest enhancement

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Stop and think.  Think of God, better think of God’s mind. Imagine God with a concept of creation.  To create something that is perfectly designed, perfectly built, and perfectly understood. Think of a God who made decision after decision in the design of man. And once built, watching intently the happenstances and sometimes chaos resulting in His design.  Get inside the mind of God and seek the trillions of detailed decisions He made before He made it all. And He said it “WAS GOOD”.

We stop and think and wonder strange things and we ask questions.  “God why did you make the Duckbill Platypus and mosquitoes?”  And that is just the point of the greatest design enhancement, the greatest augmentation to his ultimate creation was to allow us to ask, “WHY.”

Culture, Ramblings

Questions are better!

Answers are often wrought with criticisms, dubious jumps of logic, and sometimes outright lies.  Answers are always are based upon the assumption of truth. It comes with the assumption and expectation of the holder as being true and therefore for true for everyone. The Issue is we do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. Our truth is not the same as anyone else’s truth.

Whereas questions are always honest, seeking and hopeful. Questions answer doors, renew discussion, build up ideas, create self-examination and most important they are most personal. Questions seek, questions try to understand, questions expose.

Answers are the temporary stopgap to questions. Answers are temporary responses.  Answers are subject to changing of accuracy and shift of decay over time.  The answers need to be reformed, remade and reevaluated as the self, community, church, and the world changes.  

God is found in questions not in answers.

Church, Church History, Ramblings

Sadness of lost potential

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I am troubled.  In my Bible studies, it is not often my emotions are bent to the melancholy. I am currently trying to comprehend the Church as it existed between Pentecost and the end of the century.  It is often characterized as the Apostolic age. The sadness comes from the fate of the Hebrew Church.  The very nature of the church in this age was inextricably tied to the faith of Israel.  For the years after Pentecost the church was a sect, a part, a division of Judaism.  What took my usually flatline mood was ultimate fate of the church that Jesus came to establish.  “First to the Jew” as Jesus said, did not come to a great revival of the Son’s of Abraham.  The church to which Jesus came to change never really happened.  The Church for the Hebrews, for all intents and purposes simply did not make it.

There was always a remnant and even today there are bits and pieces of the Hebrew church.  But for the most part, it is a gentile church.  For many in the first century and beyond, Jewish followers of Jesus did not form a different functioning religion. They lived in Judea and the Galilee, and as long as the Temple stood, they participated in its rites.

These chosen people of God who proclaimed Jesus as messiah were ostracized by their own families, their community, and ultimately by the church as it moved to a primarily gentile emphasis. The dual identity of the earliest followers of Jesus became the also rans of Christianity.  Seen as a threat to the established religion of Judaism and seen as an part of an anachronism in its death watch.

I read of some of the second generation of Christian leaders proclaiming those who believe in the Messiah Jesus and still practice Hebrew customs as an absurdity. I find a sense of intolerance in the church as it transitions across the century line which could well have contributed to the death of the Hebrew Church. 

What could have happened if the church stayed within the arms of the Mother of Judaism, we will never know. Could God’s design have been furthered by the incorporation of the traditions and customs of the Chosen people?  

Why am I sad? I would suppose, it is the could of, should of, would of world of conjecture. How much could the rich culture have added to the church’s beliefs of today?  Hence sadness.

Personal, Ramblings

God in the trunk.

Sometimes God seems distant.  You know what I mean, sometimes the Preachers sermon doesn’t quite hit the right spots for you.  It is when you go about your day and you know full well that God is everywhere, but you feel as thought instead of being in the passenger seat but more like back in the trunk. I don’t think that the God I serve and love and adore and most highly esteem is hiding but He seems a little far off.  It is as if He may well be taking a rest from all the junk He has to put up with from me.  I stick my nose into something when I shouldn’t, or I make a supposedly humorous remark that puts someone on edge.  It is probably a self-imposed distance, but it is hard to not notice the gap sometimes.

The good thing is that in a 50 years or less, God will not know me better than He does right now. He knows my weaknesses and my foibles yet He still loves me.  The second thing is that in 50 years or less I will know God much more than I do now.

Ramblings

NO!

Living in the fall years of my life, the most feared word in my world is “NO”.  No, means I shouldn’t, or can’t, or must not do something or have something.  One of the first words we all learn as very small children is the word “NO”. And now that dreaded negative faces me every day.  Whether by respect of others or knowing full well that I will often ignore the admonition of “NO”, there are few that would tell me to my face “NO”.  What has happened is that here in my now and whatever is left of this finite number of years is most of the “NO” in my life has become self-imposed. With all honesty it is easy to say “NO” to my self urge to go run a marathon. “NO” is easy to someone with who understands the changes to lifestyle that comes from making a few more cycles around the sun. 

I have learned that going to COSTCO and buying 2,000 rolls of toilet paper may not be a good thing because the last 2,000 rolls are still taking all the storage space in the laundry room already.  When the pre-pubescent counter person at the local fast food restaurant says, “Would you like to supersize that?”, I have learned to say “NO”.  How did I learn to say “NO” to my self?

I have learned to say that word because I have figured out for every “YES” which I do say, inherently I have to say “NO” to something else.  I have learned with every decision I make, another decision is made for me.  If I say “NO” to two pounds of French fries covered with another pound of chili all covered again with grated sharp cheddar cheese, I am saying “YES” to being able to sleep tonight.

I am studying Haggai in the Old Testament.  The goal of all the city of Jerusalem was to rebuild a temple which had be destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar 70 year before.  The new King Cyrus the Persian sent the craftsmen and builders to rebuild the temple.  They had reset the foundations and then stopped.  They decided their own homes were more important.  I saying yes to their own needs they were saying “NO” to their religious and principal duties.  It was Haggai the prophet that had to remind them they had their “YES”, “NO”, priorities messed up.

What was going on in Haggai was the “NO” were getting in the way of their “YES”.  So I am going to be more careful in self imposed “NOs” with the hope of being about to say “YES” more often.

Culture, Personal, Politics, Ramblings

Fertile soil of life

Chesterfield wrote that “without a good moral soil, art and reason will never flourish.” As I look around me, whether in politics, art, music, reason, discourse, conversation and culture, it is all about self. The culture today is one of no central moral soil.  We have no real moral compass that allows art and reason to find a home.  Without an environment of living for more than self, there will be no great art, no great discourse, no great progress, no great furtherance of life.

I just don’t see this infertile soil of morality today nurturing the best things, the progressive things, the living things that makes life worth the living.  Trying to live in a culture where what ever is good enough, is nothing more than a life of just getting on.  It is a life of pure pragmatism.  It is a life without hope. It is a life of what ever works.  There is little trying to make things better.  It is a pragmatism which settles for the moment and never for the possibility of future.  It is a place where majority ideas and thought patterns become the new norm. Further, this new norm changes from day to day.

Our culture just follows along, just staying a step ahead of the slowest.  Never excelling, never having a thought of our own. The mantra says, “What ever works for you must be good enough for me.”

I read some parts of social media.  The idea for a place to share your thoughts and ideas is a great concept.  But it has become a place of redundant re-post after re-post.  No new ideas, no sharing of who we really are.  All shares are of things or ideas of others that agree with you; fully expecting by taking the effort to post something at all is making the assumption that someone might be persuaded to think like you.  There is no critical thinking, no trying to learn of the person behind the pretty head shot picture.  There is no effort to learn more or to understand.  It is all being more impressive and thought provoking by posting someone the common drivel of some one else. There is no discourse for understanding. “If you don’t agree with them, that must be your problem. 

Meaning, purpose, commonality, adventuring spirit, an ever pushing ahead is simply not tolerated. And heaven forbid if I disagree with your post.  “Don’t do that, it offends me.” If you are going to post an idea of someone else you need to be able to defend that position, not to sit in the corner yelling, “I don’t love you anymore mommy.”

All that remains for our unthinking pragmatism is a comfortable existence of being OK.  No excellence, no reason, no meaning, no purpose, no excitement, no zest, no reaching out, no life but the status quo.  In the end, in doing only what works for you in the moment, will result in the discovery that it simply does not work for you.  Your life becomes a habitual malaise. Contrary thought is condemned.  Finding the reason for action becomes just too much work.  Purpose becomes, “just getting along.”  Life is nothing more than “safe spaces” and political correctness. It is a place where everyone gets a trophy.  It is an environment where equal rights become a demand for equal results.  There is no place for excellence.

It is only in finding more than self, more than the status quo, more than just getting along, more than pragmatism, more than being politically correct, more than being the perfect mediocre.  It is only within the eternal does the temporal find its relevance.  There is nothing without that eternal compass, that fertile soil seeded with the eternal which gives life more meaning.  IT is not things, or posts or the number of likes.

It is an eternal environment, not a temporal temporary that brings life.  It is only in the eternal that you ever really live.  Why?  Because it pushes us onward, one step at a time, toward the better way.

Life, Personal, Ramblings

Relationship Ideas!

I have a file in my desk that captures all the things which I need to incorporate into my writings.  It is called “IDEAS”.  It is often surveyed for current relevance and note-worthiness.  Today I pulled one out that seemed to be apropos for today.  I seem to remember this list as a culmination of the teachings of Jesus from the Gospel of Mark.  A listing of relationship concepts that need to be nurtured and kept close to my heart.  It is in no specific order than being typed here.

  • We need an attitude of determination to have relationships.
  • We need to be willing to learn from others and be willing to change.
  • We need to recognize the authority of Jesus Christ.
  • We need to know Jesus personally.
  • We need to be dependent upon God.
  • We need to keep near the warmth of Christian fellowship
  • We need renewal and restoration includes confession to God.
  • We need to accept the responsibility of servanthood.
  • We need to love enough to lay down our lives.
  • God is faithful to us.  We must be faithful to Him.
  • God’s purpose in our personal world is to lead us to greater things.
  • We must let the Word of God stand in judgement of our lives.
  • Good News!  God loves me and loves you.
Life, Personal, Ramblings

Pressing on

Where have the years gone? I sit here in my office. It is a place of study, writing, devotion and occasionally my granddaughter’s computer game room. I contemplate my life and wonder if all the ups and downs of my life really mean much.
Jobs have come and gone: from a janitor to an information technologist, from a meat cutter to a minister and a technical writer to a project manager. Jobs that could well range from a gritty endurance to pure joy.
Travel to special places and not so special are a part of my history. Formal education entitles me to put a few letters after my name. Fifty years of marriage, three kids and now two grandchildren make up my family. I have suffered market crashes and car accidents. I have relocated to Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and now make my home in California. There have been times of laughter, sadness, boredom, excitement, pain, dwindling health, and disappointment.
If there is one constant in my life it has been continual change. But now, here in my office, there seems to be an accepted permanence. It affords me time to write more often in this blog, write my second historical fiction, create Bible studies for men’s ministries, create videos for those who would ask. But change is inevitable.
It has been said there are but two constants in life: death and taxes. Sitting here reflecting on life I must disagree. Looking through my life the only relentless constant is God. It matters little if I have followed him every minute of every day or had some low points, God is still present in those times. I could have done better. I have failed to live up to my own expectations. But through it all God has been there. There has been special standing on the mountaintop type of moments where all is well. Conversely, I have dived the depths of the slough of despond. But God has been there. God has been my constant companion. Even when I did not realize it. His grace covered me and this love has guarded me.
It was Paul who said, “
In all the vicissitudes of life—every mountain-top moment and every lonely valley—God has been my constant helper. His presence has comforted me; His grace has covered me; His love has guarded me.
If I have learned anything, it is that we should live with an eternal perspective. If we seek happiness in this life only, we will miss the eternal prize.
Paul, by inspiration, says it best: “But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.” (‭‭Acts‬ ‭20:24‬ ‭ESV‬‬). Again from Corinthians, “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
In the meantime I plod along doing what I can and pressing toward the mark. I invite you on my journey.
Just Larry.

Bible Study, Personal, Psycolog, Ramblings

Leadership Dilemma

There is a myriad of stories of Bible studies, small groups, even churches that have less than stellar endpoints.  We look to many causes. “It was the building was not welcoming.”  The heat and cooling were not to my liking.” “There was not enough commitment from the church board.”  “There was an economic downturn in our area.” “The ministries were not meeting the needs of our socioeconomic mix.” And the list goes on and on.

I teach a regular Bible study specifically designed and presented to a subset of the congregation.  It is Men ministering to men.  The attendance has not always been equal from week to week and I am amazed at the progress each of these Christian disciples has come.  Never-the-less, I have to do personal inventory on a constant and continual schedule.  I want to make sure I am not the person that causes the change in attendance.

I am a very boisterous, loud, opinionated, strong personality. And this personal character must be kept in check within reason or there may well be an exodus from attendance. I don’t want to be an emotionally unhealthy Christian leader.

This emotional deficit is caused by a lack of inward understanding of my own feelings, my own weaknesses and limits.  It is this emotional detachment that also prevents an understanding of other’s feelings and perspectives.

Leadership that does not look inwardly will ultimately alienate all that is around them. As a remedy for this inward continual desire to be heard understood and agreed with comes a tendency to work a little harder, to volunteer for one more thing, to give of my time talent and treasure until they have little left.

This type of leader ends up engaging in more and more activities that what can not be sustained.  They seem to continually give out FOR God more than they receive FROM Him. They serve others to share the joy of Jesus because there is little joy in their efforts alone.

In their more honest moments, they admit that their cup with God is empty or, at best, half full, hardly overflowing with the divine joy and love they proclaim to others.

As a result, with all the balls in the air, a leader must continually grab at the next one lest one should fall.  And in the heavenly juggling act, the time and effort due to the current ball in hand go into “good enough” category.

In the process, they obscure the beauty and perfection of Christ they say they want the whole world to see. No well-intentioned leader would set out to lead this way, but it happens all the time.

Culture, Ramblings

Soap box time

I set here at my desk thinking about my two grandchildren and how their lives are saturated by screens.  If it is not a laptop, then a tablet, or even a smartphone.  They seem to be grabbing the very life of my perfect little ones.  I would suppose my mom and dad felt the same way about television, never-the-less, I think it is much worse.  I am not condemning all technology; if I was I would have to throw stones at myself.  I use technology to build Bible studies, sermons, blogs, Christian videos and I am constantly researching the latest insights from great preachers and theologians, all with the help of my computer and its associated screen.  There are concerns.

For those who can absorb information at the rate of hundreds of texts, tweets, emails, Facebook posts, all the while viewing the latest YouTube videos, I can’t imagine by the time they grow into adulthood that a thirty-minute sermon at the church will not be able to hold their attention. It seems there is a shortening of attention span and the lack of a comprehensive learning styles bode well for today’s preachers.  So, does the preacher just keep shortening his sermon and become just one of those legacy things that ultimately pass away?  Or does the preacher of tomorrow have to work harder to open the word and let the Holy Spirit lead to all understanding?  I think the latter.

This social media generation is also being fed by this all-encompassing media blast a very low view of authority.  I believe social media and the tyranny of the screen exclaims itself as the great equalizer.  Everyone has a voice. Facebook tells us we have the right to post the most trivial and the most mundane events, with the expectation that all your friends will read them will all due attention and comment and press the like button. My trip was so good you have to envy me. Opinions become egalitarian; everyone’s post or reaction to a post is presumably important to the whole world.  Everyone has an opinion and there is an assumed equality of importance.  There is no authority other than the mob.  With total equality, there is no authority.  The pastor’s views are no more valid than the teen.

This Facebook mentality is simply too easy.  It requires no commitment beyond a simple click.  We control the message, the duration, intensity, and level of contact. At any moment, we can simply stop reading.  Only to be pulled back because we feel left out.  The level of true understanding of people and committing to a relationship is simply not there.

Some would disagree and state, “I know a lot more than if I wasn’t online.”  I know when my cousin is in her garden, I know about my brother is safe, I know what was preached on in three prior church affiliations; all good stuff. But it is all on a surface level. In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011), MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes, “On social-networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else—often the fantasy of who we want to be”. My friended friends might well feel as though they are connected, but, they are just a little further away from who they really are.

There is an art of writing.  To look at a sentence and know it is what is intended, just feels good. When I read most Facebook posts it looks like the education level of the writer is still in the fifth grade. Sure, it is easier to leave a voicemail or send an email than to talk to someone face to face. Turkle notes. “The new technologies allow us to ‘dial down’ human contact”.  Yet we seem to crave real contact and settle for much less.

The solution?  It is not going into a hole and throwing away all our screens.  They are just tools.  From my view from the pre-screen era is that technology is not sinful.  But like any other tool, it can well add an additional vehicle for it.  Where two or three are gathered together, I will be in their company. Turn off the screens and open your Bibles.  Contact someone today and tell them you love them and explain why.  A relationship has to be more than an icon to be clicked on to show your affection.