Our Journey with Christ

Life Changes in a Moment

My beautiful, perfect healthy wife, Katie, has been diagnosed with cancer.  Just typing that sentence is surreal. 

We have had the privilege of walking through cancer with other friends and family, but have never experienced cancer on “the other side.” Katie’s prognosis is great.  She’s healthy as can be and the cancer seems extremely contained (thank you, Jesus!). We have hoards of people praying for us and wonderful doctors working hard for Katie’s complete healing.  Ever where we turn (sometimes spun), we see God’s loving hand of providence.  We know that Deut. 33:27 is true!

Please pray for us as we seek God’s will for our next steps.  Cancer treatments aren’t an exact science, but our God is a perfect Good Shepherd. 

Getting new stuff and keeping the same

Caleb, our soon to be 12 year-old, asked me one of his great questions while we were at my folks cottage in the Finger Lake region of Upstate, NY.  “What did Grandpa do up here before he built the barn?”  Caleb noticed what joy grandpa got from being in and around his barn.  It truly was the center of his existence while at the cottage. 

The barn is awesome!  It’s more new than rustic and more cozy than productive.  We don’t have any animals (at least no livestock!) in the barn and although my dad owns two beautiful red Farmall tractors (an “M” and a “Super C”), we don’t have any fields to plow.

But the barn has become an indispensable part of the cottage experience.  The barn is where the boys sleep (and the girls too when we have more company than our tiny little cottage can hold). The barn is where we have two additional refrigerators (one containing the “adult beverages.”).  There’s an old chrome table that my dad scrubbed to shine like new that reminds us of days gone by.  The barn is filled with stuff that makes my dad’s heart sing.  He’s got cool stuff that reminds him of his farming days as a boy, stuff that reminds him of soldiers and world wars, stuff that he can use around the cottage and he knows exactly where all his stuff is located.  Just ask him! The barn has enough room for 2 tractors, a car, a boat, an old horse buggy, and lots and lots of other stuff.  The barn is where my dad can play “hide-n-seek” with the world around him and use a walky-talky to communicate with the cottage a few yards away. 

Caleb is right in asking, “What did he do before the barn was built?”  My folks bought the cottage in 1969, the year of the Miracle Mets!  So much of my life has been shaped by that place.  I spent the best summer days of my childhood there. My DNA was shaped there.  I’ll NEVER get it out of my system!  But for 30 some years there was no barn at our cottage.  What seems such an indispensable part of our experience now wasn’t even in existence until a few years ago.  What did we do?  How did we manage? 

Truth is, we managed just fine.  It’s the same old awesome place with a new barn.  For things that we hold dear to our hearts there is always the fear that doing, or building, something new will take away from the old.  The stuff that made you fall in love for the first time.

Orangewood is about to build another “barn,” an education building.  I’m so thrilled that we are moving forward.  I hope and pray that it will be a place like the barn.  A place for families to truly grow healthy and strong.  A place where we say, “What did we do before the education building was built?”

Let’s keep moving forward, building as we can (don’t forget a sanctuary too) and not fear that we’ll take away from what’s dear to our hearts with the old, but will add to our experience and love with what is new!  Our God loves doing something new while staying completely the same!

A God Who Groans

Does life make you groan more than you thought it would?  I never realized how many times life would make me groan.  Life is hard.  There is so much junk and pain in this world and so much junk and pain in my own life that makes me groan and sigh.  Katie reminds me that I groan like a baby when I don’t get my own way (she’s right).

I attended a funeral today for a 44 year-old husband and father.  Lot’s of groans there.  The minister read familiar passages from Romans 8, but verse 26 jumped out at me as if I had never read it before.  It was beautifully powerful and made me love our God even more.  Here’s the verse:  Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.   

Did you catch it?  God groans too!  Wow.  Things are so painful and deep that even God the Holy Spirit groans when words just aren’t sufficient for the pain.  Isn’t that just marvelous?  A God who groans. 

O how I love God because He first so loved me!  (1 John 4:19)  I can’t get over God the Father loving sinners like us so much that He would demonstrate that love by sending His Son to rescue us (Rom 5:8).  I am in awe of God the Son who demonstrates the greatest love that the world has ever seen by laying His life down for us (John 15:3) and who is able to “save to the uttermost” and lives to intercede for us (Heb. 7:25).  I am smitten with God the Spirit who lives inside us as Comforter, Teacher, Helper and Groaner! 

Truly greater love has no man ever known than the love of our Triune God!  It causes me to love Him with my whole being!  I don’t have words to express my love for Him…. come on, Holy Spirit, groan for me!

Sometimes you gotta stop and take a look around

“Sometimes you gotta stop and take a look around!”

According to Ferris Bueller’s philosophy of life in the movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (truly a classic!), we must get off life’s merry-go-round once and a while and take a look around.  Maybe do an inventory check of our lives.

Well, today is one of those days.  Today is a picture-perfect, chamber of commerce day!  This is why we live in a place with huge bugs and oppressive humidity!  Today I’m taking the kids out of school and we are all playing “hooky” to go and watch a Spring Training baseball game.  Not just any game, but the New York Yankees!  Thanks to the generosity of some dear friends, I have 6 tickets to today’s game.  The whole family is going (except for JP because he, ironically, can’t miss baseball practice!) and we are all decked out in Yankee garb!  My beautiful girls have never been so beautiful!  Since JP can’t go, we have the privilege of having my dad join us. 

Baseball is the most beautiful game ever invented!  To sit in the stands with my family, eating hot dogs and drinking cold suds, watching Derek Jeter and the 26-time World Champion Yankees… it just doesn’t get any better than this on a day like today!  Kids can’t go to school and miss an opportunity like this!  Sometimes you gotta stop and take a look around!

I’m so thankful that Jesus can relate to this feeling.  Sometimes in the midst of His earthly life, He had to get away from the daily grind with His close friends and unwind.  How are you doing?  Is it time to play “hooky?”  Go for it!  Don’t feel guilty!  Love life enough to enjoy it!  Love Jesus enough to give Him thanks for days like today… and EVERYDAY!

No Jimmers!

I just don’t get it!  How do you use chalk to draw a picture like that?  I don’t get how a fax machine works.  I never will.  Someone once tried to explain it to me, but I’m still baffled.  Those who have artistic gifts befuddle me too.  My daughter, Jessie and her friend, Michelle Bradley recently won first prize for a “replica of a master” of this chalk drawing.   I am truly amazed and I’m so proud of my daughter, Jessie.

A good friend of mine named Jim told me that when he was a boy and came home from school with a “pretty picture” he was told, “that’s nice Jimmer, now throw it in the trash can.”  His works of art became known as “Jimmers,” stuff that got a quick comment and were immediately sent to the trash heap.

Don’t you wonder about what God thinks of the artwork of our lives?  Are they “Jimmers?”  Does He say, “that’s nice Jeff, now throw it away” or does the artwork of my life really matter?  Really matter to Him!

It’s absurd to think that Jessie’s award-winning artwork will be washed away with the next good rain shower.  All that hard work will be colored water running down the nearest drain.  What happens to the artwork of our lives?  Will it all just run down the drain?

Isn’t it great being a lover of Jesus and knowing that our lives aren’t “Jimmers!”  Isn’t it awesome knowing that we’re not just colored water running down the nearest drain.  Our lives in Christ are supposed to be replicas of The Master!  Jesus!  When our lives are a reflection of Him, they truly are stunningly beautiful! No “Jimmers” with Jesus!  Clothed in His beautiful righteousness, washed in His blood, made new through His Spirit… a Masterpiece!

Moses had it easy!

Moses had it so easy!  Okay, maybe leading a wandering nation of "stiff-necked," rebellious people through the desert for forty years, he didn't have it so easy.  Yet recently I wished my ministry was as easy as his appeared to be.

I'm reading through my ESV Journaling Bible (yearly program) and am in the Book of Numbers.  Numbers 8:4 is usually one of those verses that you quickly fly over when you're reading through a book like Numbers, but this time it caught my attention and actually got me a little ticked.  Here's the verse:

Num. 8:4 And this was the workmanship of the lampstand, hammered work of gold. From its base to its flowers, it was hammered work; according to the pattern that the LORD had shown Moses, so he made the lampstand.

Why would I be upset with a seemingly benign verse like this?  Well, Moses made the lampstand like the LORD had shown him.  That sounds pretty easy to me.  Well, now that I think about it, most things my father showed me, I still couldn’t do, but that’s not my point. 

I live my life as the senior pastor of Orangewood and so desperately want God to clearly show me how to make lampstands (or shepherd sheep, or preach sermons, or lead His people), but I don’t receive such explicit directions.  How did God show Moses the pattern?  How did Moses know that this was God’s way to make lampstands?  Most the time I hear about something being “God’s way” of doing things, I’m REALLY suspect that some yahoo didn’t come up with it himself and slap God’s name on it. 

Well, things got worse for me and my feelings of Moses’ cushy job!  God gave Moses a cloud that hovers over the Tabernacle (the place where God and His people meet) and, get this, when the cloud moved, the people were to move!  When the cloud stayed, the people stayed!  What kind of leadership skills are needed for that job?  “Hey, the cloud’s moving, blow the trumpets, we’re moving out!”  I think I could handle that one!  Where’s my cloud?  Why no cloud over Orangewood?  What signals does God give me? 

Hopefully, I made my point.  Moses was a stud for God!  No stud  for God has it easy, even if he talked face-to-face with God!  I have learned a lot about leadership through Moses.  I’ll pass more on to you in the near future, but for now, I’m looking for directions in lampstand making and trying to study meteorology.  Has anyone seen our cloud?