Coming Up For Air

Commit thy works unto Jehovah, and thy thoughts will be established. Proverbs 16:3, The Darby Translation William Manchester was a friend of President Kennedy, so it isn't surprising that he would write sympathetically of the man and the job in The Death of a President . His writ reaches beyond the Oval Office, though, when he notes that presidents rarely move from A to B and that multiple hats do not rest easily on a head so often in motion. That, and the graphic work picture from Pastor Matthew Sink that the word distraction comes from a French torture involving being pulled apart by horses bring me to take quick recourse in Proverbs 16:3. We aren't sure precisely what will pull at us today, what happens we will try to keep a top our heads. Yet, we know there is integrity and wholeness in that first that may not be immediately apparent in every moment of every day. We can't envision every turn the day will take. We can't list every complication that could happen under...

When the master of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom. John 2:9 It takes a certain kind of love, McDonald's founder Ray Kroc says in David Halberstam's The Fifties , to fall in love with a hamburger bun. The servants on which the fourth Gospel reports in John 2:9 have a certain kind of love. Theirs is not Kroc's to build a business empire on mastery of efficiently satisfying consumer demands. Still, both these servants and Kroc see something greater in the daily details that go with the job title in which they find themselves. Kroc could multiply effectiveness in one transaction at one counter and see compounding dominance. Even when we can't, even when our jobs are more likely to show us if we have the heart of a servant by how we react when people treat us like one, John 2:9 entrances us to look again at the tasks the Son o...

Guard your heart with all vigilance, for from it are the sources of life. Proverbs 4:23, New English Translation In Simply Christian , NT Wright interestingly describes the collective reaction of the flesh to the Gospel. He likens its life-giving power to a natural spring, but he says humans are quick to restrict access to that spring. We put the force of culture to work, he says, sanctioning who can come, and who cannot. Little wonder, because this sanctimonious tendency starts on an individual level with the half-application of Proverbs 4:23. We little need that Word's admonition that our hearts are fragile and need guarding. Childlike, joyous vulnerability is an ephemeral stage. We quickly figure out that others don't value our hearts as much as we do. We wall up the spring, we think, as a means to necessary self-protection. By persevering grace, however, the Spirit over time keeps us reading. We forget, though, that the wise person guards his or her heart as a means t...

Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, but the night shines as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to You. For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb. Psalm 139:12-13 Three-year-old Lucy bounded into her parents' bedroom. "God knows my favorite color!" Sleepily, they responded, "How do you know?" "Because He painted the sky pink this morning," she responded with certitude. So it is that our guest theologian helps us understand the scope of Psalm 139:12-13. Grown up or grown cold, we can with some dispassion proclaim Him God of the cosmos able to orchestrate the sunrise. It takes a child's awakening faith, though, to see His personal touch in what to adults has become perhaps over-familiar. For, as the Psalmist seamlessly shifts, the God Who transverses the boundaries between light and darkness, Who, as all his readers would have known, proclaimed, "Let there be light," works with...

And they made His grave with the wicked— But with the rich at His death, Because He had done no violence, Nor was any deceit in His mouth. Isaiah 53:9 My attentiveness in normal, non-literary conversation is rarely admirable. I can boost it by sifting for words of above average quality and commending them out loud. I did this when a friend used the word facetious, and he said it came with an admission. In the military, that word allowed him to be respectful and disrespectful at the same time. So often, we mine for those words and expressions which straddle respect and disrespect. We may use a refined word to express just a tinge of unrefined feeling. We may hit the right note with our phrasing, but role the eyes just a little to give vent to our true feelings, and maybe a hint to the embittered and sophisticated that we share their sense of irony. We aren't, in truth, very good at occupying both columns in the expressions we convey. Readily, Pat Conroy admits in Beach Music , bitte...

And David said to Gad, "I am in great distress. Please let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are great, but do not let me fall into the hand of man." 2 Samuel 24:14 In Greatest Showman PT Barnum approaches singing sensation Jenny Lind. She asks if he likes her music, and this time he doesn't put on a show. Barnum says her reputation precedes her, and her reputation is more important than his taste. There we are, Christian, with the Lord. David is in such a place in life's drama in 2 Samuel 24:14. Faced with the consequences of his own sin, David trusts the Lord's reputation for mercy more than David's own ability to choose consequences. Like David, even if we walk closely with the Lord, we only sample a small part of His character at any point in time. Our experience with Him is filtered through our quirks and assumptions hurt, what could accurately be described with a label no more sophisticated than our taste. Comparatively, God'...

"By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, lest he who destroyed the firstborn should touch them." Hebrews 11:28, New King James Version "It's easy," writes R.C. Sproul, "to get faith into our heads. It's hard to get faith into our bloodstream." Thus I find it inspiring that the author of Hebrews 11:28 finds faith in keeping. On the other side of Passover's true meaning in the Last Supper and the cross, on the other side of everyone save Jesus missing that meaning, he won't discount the role of ritual and habit in demonstrating and building faith. The parallel, of course, isn't exact. The keeping of which Hebrews 11:28 initially speaks isn't veneration. It's risk. It's a captive people mistrusted already as a national security vulnerability marking their own doors with blood so that they stand out more to their Egyptian neighbors who are grieving and could easily be bitter and suspicious. Yet, how ar...