Category Archives: random

Blessed Be Your Name…really?

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A few days ago my daughter asked me to sing these words to her in bed. It struck me more deeply than it ever had just how powerfully lyrics can capture both the story of life as it is and life as we wish it were.

 

Blessed Be Your Name
In the land that is plentiful
Where Your streams of abundance flow
Blessed be Your name

Blessed Be Your name
When I’m found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed Be Your name

Every blessing You pour out
I’ll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

Blessed be Your name
When the sun’s shining down on me
When the world’s ‘all as it should be’
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name
On the road marked with suffering
Though there’s pain in the offering
Blessed be Your name

Every blessing You pour out
I’ll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

Music isn’t really my thing. Jess makes fun of me because of the sheer volume of lyrics that I don’t know. It really is shocking. I just don’t connect with music. But in singing this song to India I was struck by the strangeness of how this song so captures the messiness and brokenness of life as it is and yet also makes an attempt to speak a new reality into existence. Or rather, the song itself isn’t attempting to speak a new reality into existence but is trying to capture a new reality that God is able to speak into existence. That’s what God does, he speaks and things that did not exists begin. When Jesus spoke things happened, reality changed, existence was different. That’s just what God does, it’s who he is. It’s why Christians speak of new birth, its why they cling to the symbolism of baptism, its why they speak of resurrection–because they celebrate the miraculous emergence of new things.

Back to the song…In the midst of cancer, in the midst of divorce, in the midst of whatever darkness that happens to be closing in on us, are we really able to say “blessed be your name”? Is it even appropriate to say that in those moments?! My quick answer would be a resounding “no!” Of course it’s not appropriate to say “thank you Jesus that I just lost my child”. It’s appropriate to scream at God, to be angry, and to be outraged. So often we feel forced to move into a place of happiness in the midst of pain or to act as if everything is better.

Here’s what I think (at least what I’m thinking now). I think that the invitation of this song is not to artificially say “thank you Jesus” in the midst of our dark places. I think the refrain “blessed be your name” invites is to place our hope in the only place we know that can handle our brokenness. It invites us to not mask our grief but to allow our grief to be carried by God who has experienced the death of a child, extreme physical pain, social rejection, and divorce. Claiming the lyrics to this song is to own the brokenness of life as it is now while also placing hope in the only source of hope beyond life as it is–it is to live in the tension of life as it is and life as we wish it were–the exciting part, though, is that in Jesus life as I wish it were is actually a possible reality…and that’s something that brings hope.

Not many songs speak to my heart. Not many lyrics actually stick in my brain. This song did both. Thank you India Jayne.

What am I doing?

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I keep asking myself what I’m doing. Or better yet I keep questioning what should I be doing? Part of me desperately wants to get back to life as normal. And so I have someone drop me off at the coffee shop down the street where I’ve spent way too many hours over the last two years. It feels normal to see old friends and to even to continue making new ones. In an effort to get back to normal the wife and I went out on a double date, I’ve scheduled a meeting or two, and I’ve been trying to frantically catch up on coordinating our second annual Compassion Vancouver event. In an effort to feel normal I try to walk as much as possible, do housework, and play and interact with the kids as normally as I used to. In an effort to get back to normal Jess has scheduled girl time with a couple different lady friends (though there’s never enough time!), we’ve done a couple mini-grocery trips, and run occasional errands. Normal stuff. Everyday life stuff.

But things still aren’t normal. My body still hurts; my back still feels as though there are ropes tying my shoulder blades together. My right side is still paralyzed and doesn’t work right; it cramps and as the day goes on my whole body stiffens and gets difficult and painful to move. I can’t bathe myself, I can’t drive, and can barely make it down the stairs from my bedroom without help. While my extreme emotions are not as extreme as they were even a week ago I still find myself having a short fuse with my wife and children. As a matter of fact the level of emotion in our family swings as quickly and extremely as our kitchen’s swinging door. The children, while early on ecstatic to be back at home with mom and dad quickly realized that life was not normal. Dad can’t play on the floor with them, he can’t pick them up, he can’t put them in bed, and he doesn’t have the same energy level he once did. Jones also knows that dad might have cancer and the thought plagues him. Every day he asks me if the tumor is benign. The kids recognize how stressed mom is, they recognize the burden she’s carrying, and they act up and intensify in order to compensate—and mom and dad have little physical and emotional energy to respond appropriately. We kind of constantly feel like bad parents as we respond in ways contrary to our normal parenting preference or methods. Knowing your parenting badly is a heavy burden to carry isn’t it? So we try to create breaks by having the kids spend time with grandparents—it is a blessing to have grandparents in town! But the kids want to be with us, they should be with us, they need to be with us…and yet we continually ship them off…because things are not normal.

I want them to be normal. I want to better participate in our Sunday Arnada Community Meal, to be available on Monday nights to dream the Grassroots Conspiracy into further reality, and to live into the rhythms that have defined our Community House for the last eight months. But the energy comes in spurts, the kids freak out in flurries, and my mental capacity to process through my schedule still seems off.

At times things feel almost normal. I want things to be normal. But things are not normal. Things can’t be normal. Things can’t be normal because we still have not received results from the Mayo Clinic. They told us that we should hear in the next couple of days. Of course they told us that we should have heard five days ago and they told us we should have known twelve days ago. If we find out results today that that I start chemo on Wednesday (I am completely making this up) normal will be defined very differently! If we find out tomorrow that a miracle has happened and the cancer isn’t cancer then on Wednesday normal will be defined very differently. If we find out tomorrow that we’ve got to wait another week normal will be very…well…

Until we get that message—whatever it is—this is normal I guess.

Maybe in-betweens ARE normal. I don’t know. I don’t know what I should be doing in this in-between. I think I’m going to keep trying to be normal—keep trying to go to coffee—keep trying to walk normal—keep trying to ignore my back pain—keep trying to not be a jerk to my wife—keep trying to be emotionally and physically present for my children—keep trying to work—or maybe I’ll just rest, continue to write my thoughts down, journal, let my back heal, read some books, and wait. Maybe I’ll do it all…or maybe I’ll just blog about it!

Thank you all for listening. My blog started in December of 2005 as a joke and has turned into a cathartic exercise that keeps me sane. I think its working!

Why I Don't Give Blood

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I had a friend offer me his liver yesterday. No joke. I don’t need a liver and I don’t plan on needing one, but if I do need one I genuinely believe that I’ve got a liver available to me. Not for any good reason but because life if just like this, the two of us had not talked in a couple of years so it was great to have a short but in depth conversation about life, the stuff my family is going through, and what’s been going on in his world. Here’s the thing, this guy is the kind of person who is serious when he says that he’ll give you his body part. I’ve never seen him give a body part away before but I’ve  seen him give his jacket off his back to people (literally), I’ve seen him give generously to people time and time again because that’s what he does. He gives.

Another friend of mine just registered as a bone marrow donor. Donating blood is something, donating a couch to Goodwill is another, but donating bone marrow makes you a pretty awesome person. Lets all raise our hands if we’re registered as a bone marrow donor? Anyone? Bueller…Bueller…When I asked him about it and tried to show how impressed I was by his awesomeness (as a quick side note it brings me joy that ‘awesomeness’ is actually a word) he seemed slightly annoyed that I’d even think it was anything beyond what a normal person would do. He asked me why he wouldn’t register to do it…and I quickly came up with a number of reasons that I kept quietly in my head. He seemed to think that it was a normal and decent thing to do to give something freely that you had available and that could possibly save someones life. I’m not sold on his logic but I see his point…ok, maybe he’s right.

I’ve never given blood. Not once. I don’t like needles. My friend gives his liver away, my other friend gives his bones away, and I’ve never given an ounce of my blood away.

After being in the rehab facility for a few days I woke up one morning at 4:30 AM to a woman touching my arm while gently waking me. It was a phlebotomist and she was going to draw my blood…yes, at 4:30 in the morning. Turns out they were worried about my platelets and my morning poke became a ritual for the remainder of my stay in physical therapy. Every morning between 4:30 and 6:00 a phlebotomist would come in and jab me for some blood. It became ritual, I’d anticipate their arrival, they’d use the same bruised hole every time, I’d always make some goofy joke, they’d never laugh. It was nice. It became normal.

My friends give their bodies away piecemeal and the only person I’ve ever given a part of my body or blood away to was myself. What’s up with that!? I want to be like Daniel and Chris. Who’s with me? Who wants to give away a liver or two (we have two right)?

Tomorrow I’m throwing my liver in the ring and there’s nothing you can do about it.

PS…should this have been a Father’s Day blog?

Guest Post: Blessed are the Uncool

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I’m stealing this post from Rachel Held Evans. I’ve never read any of her books (though they’ve been recommended) and this is the first blog of hers I’ve ever read. But I liked it and I like her vibe and I like her perspective and I like this sentence not having any commas. Enjoy…

People sometimes assume that because I’m a progressive 30-year-old who enjoys Mumford and Sons and has no children, I must want a super-hip church—you know, the kind that’s called “Thrive” or “Be” and which boasts “an awesome worship experience,” a  fair-trade coffee bar, its own iPhone app, and a pastor who looks like a Jonas Brother.

While none of these features are inherently wrong, (and can of course be used by good people to do good things), these days I find myself longing for a church with a cool factor of about 0.

That’s right.

I want a church that includes fussy kids, old liturgy, bad sound, weird congregants,  and…brace yourself…painfully amateur “special music” now and then.

Why?

Well, for one thing, when the gospel story is accompanied by a fog machine and light show, I always get this creeped-out feeling like someone’s trying to sell me something. It’s as though we’re all compensating for the fact that Christianity’s not good enough to stand on its own so we’re adding snacks.

But more importantly, I want to be part of an un-cool church because I want to be part of a community that shares the reputation of Jesus, and like it or not, Jesus’ favorite people in the world were not cool. They were mostly sinners, misfits, outcasts, weirdos, poor people, sick people, and crazy people.

Cool congregations can get so wrapped up in the “performance” of church that they forget to actually be the church, a phenomenon painfully illustrated by the story of the child with cerebral palsy who wasescorted from the Easter service at Elevation Church for being a “distraction.”

Really?

It seems to me that this congregation was distracted long before this little boy showed up! In their self-proclaimed quest for “an explosive, phenomenal movement of God—something you have to see to believe,” they missed Jesus when he was right under their nose.

Was the paralytic man lowered from the rooftop in the middle of a sermon a distraction?

Was the Canaanite woman who harassed Jesus and his disciples about healing her daughter a distraction?

Were the blind men from Jericho who annoyed the crowd with their relentless cries a distraction?

Jesus didn’t think so. In fact, he seemed to think that they were the point.

Jesus taught us that when we throw a banquet or a party, our invitation list should include “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” So why do our church marketing teams target the young, the hip, the healthy, and the resourced?

In Bossypants (a book you should really go out and buy this very instant), Tina Fey describes working for the YMCA in Chicago soon after graduating from college. This particular YMCA included, “a great mix of high-end yuppie fitness facility, a wonderful community resource for families, and an old-school residence for disenfranchised men,” so Fey shares a host of funny stories about working the front desk. One such story involves one of the residents forgetting to take his meds, bumping into a young mom on her way to a workout session, and saying something wildly inappropriate (and very funny—you should definitely go out and get this book). Fey writes, “The young mother was beside herself. That’s the kind of trouble you get when diverse groups of people actually cross paths with one another. That’s why many of the worst things in the world happen in and around Starbucks bathrooms.”

Church can be a lot like the Y…or a Starbucks bathroom.

We have one place for the un-cool people (our ministries) and another place for the cool people (our church services). When we actually bump into one another, things can get awkward, so we try to avoid it.

It’s easy to pick on Elevation Church in this case, but the truth is we’re all guilty of thinking we’re too cool for the least of these. Our elitism shows up when we forbid others from contributing art and music because we deem it unworthy of glorifying God, or when we scoot our family an extra foot or two down the pew when the guy with Aspergers sits down. Having helped start a church, I remember hoping that our hip guests wouldn’t be turned off by our less-than-hip guests.  For a second I forgot that in church, of all places, those distinctions should disappear.

Some of us wear our brokenness on the inside, others on the outside.

But we’re all broken.

We’re all un-cool.

We’re all in need of a Savior.

So let’s cut the crap, pull the plug, and have us some distracting church services… the kind where Jesus would fit right in.

***

Do you ever get the feeling that church is just one big show? Have you found a congregation in which Jesus and his friends would be welcome?

(as seen here: http://rachelheldevans.com/blessed-are-the-uncool)

 

Good News For My Son

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Did you know that a lifelong undiagnosed extreme fruit allergy will ruin and attack your immune system? It can cause chronic ear infections, wreak havoc on your digestive track (causing other sensitivities to food), and it causes neurological damage (not permanente) among other things. Essentially it messes with your body in intense ways…as if you’re eating poison…which you are.

After being off fruit for two weeks my sons body is healthier than its ever been. While it’s hard to articulate and it’s still up and down due to the nature of our life right now even his ability to regulate his extreme emotions and intense sensitivities has been transformed in this short period of time. Even further, and of the most importance right now, in these three days his swollen lymph nodes have begun to shrink to the point that yesterday our doctor exclaimed “There’s no possible way this boy has lymphoma!”. Turns out his lymph nodes were maxing out after years of storing up toxins due to this unknown extreme allergy! (my wife could write a three page article here detailing Jones’ medical history in order to show how many connections there are to symptoms of a bad fruit allergy and his health concerns since birth)

I cannot tell you how glorious yesterday was, how ecstatic all of us (including Jones) were to know that not only do we no longer have to fear Jones having cancer, having a biopsy, or having to have his lymph removed but we also get to see my son head down a path of health! He has been plagued his whole life with chronic ear infections, with food allergies and sensitivities, and with a brain that functioned so intensely that it often would get out of control. In the last two weeks he has shown a calmness and new level of emotional articulation that are new*, his body has looked healthier, and most importantly his lymphs have begun to shrink.

Anyway, the point to all this is that my son does not have frickin’ lymphoma! He’s not having a biopsy! He’s not having surgery in the next week or two! This is amazing, wonderful, glorious news and we have to thank all of you for your constant and vigilant prayers. I mean think about it, these prayers not only brought healing to his neck but are going to bring a holistic healing to his entire life. I wasn’t even asking for that…but now feel like I can and must exclaim in solidarity with one person from the Bible who said “Thank you God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ever ask or imagine!”

Maybe I just need a bigger imagination?

 

*Don’t get me wrong, all of us in our house are still struggling with very extremem emotions that swing at any given moment even on a wonderful day like yesterday…but that’s the blog I’ll be writing tomorrow!