Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Because I have to... desert weather

Forgive the past highly unprolific month of non-posting.

I have to post something here, mostly because as a Seminary student, I can't have a post that remotely condones illegal drug use headlining my blog for 2 weeks, as it has...

But I also feel like I need to post something if for no other reason than to drive myself through this lack of creativity and lack of impetus to get my thoughts out of my head and onto 'paper'.
I don't know what it is.. maybe I am outgrowing the blog phase, or maybe I just don't feel I have anything meaningful to say... but I think it's really just that I have had so much output in recent weeks that I just don't feel like I have anything left to put out.

I am uninspired by politics, the things that are in the news are so over done by the mainstream media that even the important issues, like the Shiavo fiasco, are just leaving me cold. I have no interest in discussing them, which is wierd for me.

I am over-inspired by things at school. Meaning simply that I could probably fill pages and pages of this blog with things that I think are really great and cool, but most of it I have not come to fully understand myself, so my relating it here is immature at this point.

No one cares about the Mets but me, so posting on them is pointless.

I don't post about my marriage.

So hopefully there will be more to come...

But not right now. It's dry season.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

"High Times"

Check out this link to discover your true identity - Your "stoner" name.

I knew I had an alter ego back in my college days, but I did not know it was...

Jurassic Jointmaster

How sweet is that?

I could think of several negative connotations, since I'll be 30 this year - but I left that guy back in 1999 - so I guess the connotations just don't matter now.

Hit this site and tell me what your stoner name is - it's good for a laugh, even if you've never been a stoner.

Saturday, March 19, 2005

oh the frustration...

Monday I sat in class taking notes on my laptop, which is the normal order of business. Some of my friends still kick it old school and hand write their notes, but I can't even read my own hand writing, and I never really learned how to take notes correctly. So for me it is a fast paced exercise in trying to type, as closely as I can, everything the professor says...

That being said, it is pointless for me to carry on about how important my laptop is for me at school, so I'll just carry on...

Well, there I was, typing away feverishly when it happened. I never saw it coming... I did not feel a breeze or wisp of air as death reach over my shoulder and touched my laptop.. I only saw the briefest 'blue screen' of death and then nothing... a deep, black void replaced my MS word and the last few words out of my professors mouth never made it passed the no longer blinking cursor of life...

I knew what it was as soon as it happened. I knew what was wrong and I knew I was in trouble.
But I didn't think it was as bad as it turned out to be.

I through my hands in the air and had to seriously dig deep to resist the immediate urge to chuck my laptop the length of the auditorium and scream out in primal rage... instead I packed up my gear and left with 20 minutes left in class... without my laptop it was pointless for me to be there.

I went directly to circuit city, which turned out to be a wasted trip, for although my laptop is still under warranty (one of the only times I have ever done that by the way - bought the extended warranty) - but they no longer send out the machines from circuit city. So I went back out to my car and called the customer service line. The lady was nice enough and she had me do a few trouble shooting operations, which were absolutely useless, because when your mother board fries (which was what happened to me) you computer doesn't do anything. It turns on, the cd-rom spins, and then nothing... not even crickets. But I humored her to expedite the process, and I received a box the next day to ship my ailing machine out to the PC doctor to get new guts. When I sent it out, I filled out the paperwork and asked specifically that they not change any of the data on my hard drive, if they could any way help it. When a mother board dies, it should not effect any of the rest of the equipment inside - there was no reason for me to fear for my data - but I asked anyway, pleaded really... and then I waited.

Today that wait ended.. I got my laptop back and quickly went to plug it in a start it up to see how much better it was running.. and it is quite remarkable how much faster it is running and how much smoother it loads... and how different my OS looks... and how much space there is on my cleanly wiped hard drive...

I could be upset about the 7 gigs of music I had stashed on my drive... I could be upset about gigabytes of programs i had installed and how tuned i had my registry and how happy i was with the overall setup of the system... but I'm not... not really...

I'm only upset about the 2-300K I had in MS word documents that marked the progress of my semester.. I feel like the last 2 or 3 weeks of my work have been erased, and that is pretty frustrating. I am generally good at backing things up like that - I copy my school work to my desktop at home for just such emergencies, and I do it just about every week.. but for some reason, ordained before the foundation of the world, I hadn't backed up for a couple weeks...
My own fault... but it doesn't make it any less of a HUGE pain in the butt... and I'll probably spend most of my break trying to get it back to normal working order... sheesh, how annoying.

i know.. i'm just whining right now... i'll be over it tomorrow.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

They Never Told Us About This in Seminary

Bob Vincent is providing me with a valuable service. Not only is he giving me and others the head-sup on what to expect in ministry, but he is also giving me good blog material while I am bogged down in mid-terms.

So enjoy this new kernal of wisdom and visit Bob at http://www.rbvincent.com
(Don't let the midi file scare you - there's good stuff there)

"I think that most seminarians cannot comprehend the kinds of things they will encounter from some parishioners once in the pastoral ministry. Hearing it is one thing; experiencing it, quite another.
The strain on a pastor'sfamily from living in a "glass house" can be devastating . . .

(1.) On a pastor's wife:
Virtually all congregations used to provide their pastor with a manse(parsonage, rectory, vicarage) in which to live, and wise congregationswould treat the manse as the pastor's home, keeping their distance unlessinvited. Sadly, that is not always the case. In one church that I served, mywife decided to make new curtains for the living room. I paid for the fabricout of my own pocket, and she slowly labored with her sewing machine forseveral weeks. They looked great. But one day several of the "Women in theChurch" decided to drop by to "visit" -- that is, to engage in manseinspection. When they saw the new curtains, they became upset and verycritical of my wife, demanding why she had taken it on herself to do this.

Over the years my wife and I have listened to a lot of pastors and their wives. Many pastors' wives are terribly depressed, some having problems with alcohol or prescription drugs. An affair is not unknown. It's tough on women when their husbands are out night after night, often leaving them alone with small children: Sunday night service, Wednesday night service, session meetings, deacons meetings, committee meetings, visitation nights . . . to say nothing of all the events that you're supposed to attend for people in the church and their families: wedding rehearsal dinners, funeral visitations, dinners for people's anniversaries, birthdays, retirement and various awards . . . stuff that's not strictly speaking "work," but stuff which if you don't do, you'll end up on somebody's black list. Never underestimate the power of somebody to blackball you with subtle comments once you've ticked them off.

1. On one occasion, I put in eighty hours in one week. That's just insane. But what do you say when the phone rings attwo in the morning, and somebody's boy has shot himself in the head? You splash water on your face, comb your hair, throw on a suit and chug down a cup of lukewarm water with three tablespoons of instant coffee in it, hoping you don't throw up.

I am very grateful for the church that I currently serve. Other than asking about possible repairs and maintenance, they treated the manse as our house. Nobody here has ever been critical of my wife's not attending Sunday School. She would dress our children and drop them and me off at the church and then return home, put some music on and spend the time in prayer before heading back for morning worship. Our children are now grown, and we do much of the non-preaching work of the ministry together. Doing visitation and then going out to eat can be a kind of date, no kidding. I now do all counseling of females with my wife. Not only does she pick up on things that I don't, shekeeps me out of trouble.

(2.) On a pastor's children:
My mother was a child of the manse, her father having been a Presbyterian minister. She used to tell me that even in adult life people would say, "But you're a preacher's daughter." Mama's now dead, but her last remaining sibling, my beloved Aunt Ruth, still quotes the phrase with such sarcasm in her voice -- it must have really stung. People may sometimes mean well, but critical comments made to pastors' children have pushed some children away from church for good. It's one thing that I urged people never to say to my children: don't correct them by the standard of being a "preacher's child;" correct them because of the standards to which the Lord holds all Christians. However, on one occasion, feeling quite desperate with one of my children during the teen years, I said, "If you keep acting like this, you're going to make me lose my job." It wasn't completely untrue -- I had gone to the session and confessed that I wasn't in control of one of my children and offered to tender my request to resign to presbytery -- but it was a really stupid thing to say to a teenager and put an enormous power in the hands of achild.

(3.) On a pastor himself:
(3.1.) You find certain types of people in most congregations: the huge group of the less than committed, the smaller group of the visibly committed who do a lot of the work and a handful that you try to pour your life into. It's no big deal when somebody in the first group decides to leave and join the big church on the other side of town: you lose some to them; they lose some to you. But it really is devastating to lose somebody you were slowly grooming for leadership. They don't all move away; sometimes they get caught in some scandal. Years ago one of my elders came by the office to see me.
What's wrong?" I asked.
"I got fired."
"Fired!? You've been the plant manager for years. What on earth happened?"
"I got caught stealing. I'd been embezzling money for years. My secretary caught me and turned me in."
"Why?! How could you sit in church and listen to sermons and serve people communion? Didn't your conscience eat you up?"
"I was trying to please my wife and keep up with our friends."

I was crushed. He was one of the elders who showed real aptitude for doing the work of the ministry.

(3.2.) "What have you done for me today?"
That's a comment my Daddy used to make -- he was a health officer and knew that his job sometimes hung in a political balance. He meant that people quickly forget the things you did for them in the past and always want more. I remember a family in whom I had invested well over a hundred hours: the husband had been mangled in a wreck and took over a year to heal. I faithfully visited him in the hospital and in their home after he was discharged. Their live-in grandson got involved with drugs and stealing. When they were out of town for a couple of weeks, and their grandson got arrested for possession of marijuana, I bailed his sorry behind out of jail and took him into my home until they returned. Some years later the boy got into real trouble and went to the penitentiary. I would go to visit him, but it was over two hours one way, plus almost an hour waiting for them to bring him out -- in short, it ate up pretty much a whole day. So I became less frequent. One Sunday night at the end of the service, his grandmother came up to me:
"When was the last time you visitedJoe?" she demanded.
"About six months ago," I said.
She then proceeded to bless me out, and the family eventually left our church.

Going back to an earlier satire <http://www.rbvincent.com/tareswheat.htm> on a comment a fellow pastor once made to me:
Charismatic churches attract psychotics; Reformed churches attract neurotics. That is true -- really and sadly true, and some of these nut cases end up on church sessions.

(3.3.) Money.
There are certain lifestyle expectations that come with being friends with others. I eat lunch with various men in my congregation every week. Not wanting to be a mooch, I like to pick up the tab if I've asked the other person for lunch. If it's regular, we alternate. It's just that when I spring for a twenty-dollar lunch tab, it's out of my pocket, and there's alot less in my pocket than in some of my guests. Evening meals are even more expensive, so we are cautious there because we can't afford the reciprocity. When my wife and I have attended pastors' functions in certain communities, we've both marveled at what some of those clothes had to cost. But my wife buys some of her stuff at Goodwill, and I'm happy for a second hand suit. This past year I received two fine suits from a dead man -- two grand a piece -- I love them; they're beautiful. But I usually buy my dress shirts at Sam's -- pressed, under a two thousand dollar suit, who can tell I paid around ten dollars?
Don't get me wrong. I'm blessed financially. It's just that it's easy for a preacher to get himself head over heels in debt, trying to keep up with his congregation.
What's the old loan company saying about to whom you shouldn't loan money? Was it the infamous "P"s: preachers, plumbers, policemen,politicians?

(3.4.) Women.
I've ministered to more than one pastor who fell into adultery. Women scare me to death -- not women themselves -- my awareness of the potential for sin that's still inside me. Very few people suddenly start stealing after a lifetime of honesty, or getting drunk after decades of sobriety. But it's not that way with sex. A man can live a very disciplined life for years and then be hit with something (like falling into real pride, for example.) that can eventually lead to adultery. I know more than one minister who has experienced women in his congregation making romantic overtures toward him. In the mercy of God, it hasn't been that way for me --my wife tells me that it's not because I'm not handsome. (Smart woman! But I need to warn her about flattering me too much.) She says that it's that I don't "send off signals." Whatever . . . it's grace . . . that's for sure. But some women are attracted to power, and they see real power in the influence wielded by preachers. They're seduced by that power, and they try to seduce the preacher in turn. One pastor friend confided in me that he had had an emergency call a couple of months back. The woman deceived him into coming over late at night by telling him that her husband was desperate to talk or something like that. Only her husband wasn't at home. When the pastor arrived, she opened the door and was buck-naked. He turned and fled.

My wife and I wish that we could take a week every so often and do a seminarfor seminarians and their wives. It isn't that the ministry isn't terribly fulfilling. It is. It's just that it isn't anything at all like we expected back in the sixties. <http://www.rbvincent.com/pastortrials.htm>

Thanks again, Bob

back to the books!

Friday, March 11, 2005

From someone who knows...

This was posted on an e-mail group I have contact with, and it was rather encouraging to me. I know many of the folks who read this are on a similar path as I am and may also reap some fruit from it. For the rest... perhaps a glimpse into the world of being a pastor in Christ's Church.

This originates from this man: www.rbvincent.com

When I think about the work of the ministry, I look back on my mother's father,* a Presbyterian minister who served churches in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee, at the end of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries. How differently he must have approached his work than I do. He never showed up at the church building except for services on the Lord's Day and midweek prayer meeting. He did not have an office or office hours; he studied at home and visited his members in their homes in the late morning and afternoon. People were almost always home, and husbands would leave what they were doing to join their families when the pastor came to call. Unless it was some kind of emergency, pastors tended not to make calls after dark; people were home with their families at night.

People had certain expectations of their pastors, but they were not unreasonable, because society was stable, divorce virtually nonexistent and most families practiced self-reliance. The Christian Sabbath was observed by the whole community by means of Blue Laws, and there was no television, nor, in the early days, movies either, so people went to church, attending both the morning and evening services on the Lord's Day, and they looked forward to it. Boys could talk to girls after church, and older people got caught up on the news -- along with the Protestant public school system, the church was the center of people's social life. The local Methodist and Baptist preachers believed the Bible, preached salvation by grace alone and held to the moral standards of the Ten Commandments. Pastors were not well paid, but they got by, and people saw that their children did not lack for the necessities of life. My grandfather had six children who lived into adulthood, and all of them finished college. The vast majority of people respected pastors, and when special services were held at a particular church, most of the townsfolk attended.

Now, I know that I have painted an idyllic pastoral scene, and it was not all a bed of roses a hundred years ago in the South. My grandfather only stayed one year at the wealthy Presbyterian Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi, 1909. Something must have happened between him and that congregation with the gold hand on top of their steeple. My mother told me about a banker who was the treasurer of a church pastored by my grandfather, and the man would browbeat him, almost making him beg for his salary -- one day my grandfather had had enough and said to the banker, "You look like a monkey behind that cage." Mama also told me about the time my grandmother, a child of the manse herself, ran off a woman who had eyes for my grandfather. The woman was on her way to my grandfather's study with a cake, and my grandmother spotted her and asked her to leave.

How differently I go about my work. I have a study at home, but I keep office hours, too. Unless the people are retired or sick, I have to visit them at night, after supper. So with Sunday and Wednesday nights always committed and other meetings here and there, I count myself blessed if I have three evenings at home a week. That was hard on my children, but not nearly as hard on them as my often having to break commitments because of an emergency. I've cut short a vacation because of a death.

The twenty-first century is a strange time to do the work of the ministry. Western society is in an upheaval -- child molestation, incest, pornography, homosexuality and adulterous affairs are pervasive. Divorce is rampant -- two of my former elders are now divorced; both are bitter at me -- they are no longer in church. Medical doctors dispense psychotropic drugs at the drop of a hat, and people who would never think of sipping a glass of wine, think nothing of zoning out with Zoloft and Xanex.

Yet among all these people are God's elect. The task of my grandfather's day is still our task today: to call lost people to the Lord Jesus as he is offered in the gospel, then baptize and teach them whatsoever our Lord has commanded. But that task is hindered, as it has always been, by people within the Church itself, sometimes in its leadership. Pity the pastor who has elders who are dominated by their wives and not respected in the world. The man who gets kicked around everywhere else and finagles getting on a church session can make the life of a minister pretty miserable.

Here is what I would say to a minister or to someone who aspired to it.

1. Maintain a devotional love for the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, making diligent use of the means of grace.

2. Take your sins seriously, but take the gospel more seriously. We are justified by faith alone. Our sins were put to the Lord Jesus' account; his righteousness has been put to ours. Remember that you are far worse than you think you are, but so is everybody else. You have an impeccable, unimpeachable righteousness imputed to your account and you can never come into condemnation.

3. Watch out for women. Many an earnest Christian has made shipwreck of his faith because of a sexual dalliance. Frankly, I am terrified about the possibility that I could fall into the sin of adultery, even after all these years of marriage and ministry. The drive is still there, deep down in the old man -- it scares me to the point that I never step inside the door of a woman's home unless her husband is there, or unless I have my wife or an elder or deacon with me.

4. On the basis of God's grace plead his promises and expect God to do grand things, things that he may sometimes permit you to see. Pray especially for the success of evangelism. Nothing so encourages a person as seeing lost people come to the Lord Jesus to be set free from reigning sin.

5. Maintain a healthy relationship with your wife: pray with her; share problems with her, making her your partner in the ministry, doing much of your counseling ministry with her at your side; take her out on regular dates; develop and maintain a healthy, regular sexual life.

6. Take time to be a father to your children. If you have sons, get involved in something like the Boy Scouts with them.

7. Make yourself accountable to a small circle of brothers.

8. Demonstrate that you love your people -- a congregation will put up with an awful lot if they know that their pastor loves them.

9. Don't take yourself too seriously. You are an idiot at times, but so is everybody else. Drink deeply and daily from the Romans 8:28, divine cordial. God, not the session or your peers, is the ultimate judge of success in the ministry. You will never get all your work done, but what God requires of you is faithfulness to Scripture, not cleverness and not even meeting measurable goals.

10. Choose your battles carefully. If you are going to win the war, you simply cannot fight every battle. There are a lot of things that you are going to have to overlook. Establish yourself as a man of God, developing a strong pulpit ministry. Stress the essential truths of Calvinistic, Evangelical Christianity. Build on that foundation before you take on more controversial, peripheral things, because the core of the gospel, with its backdrop of total depravity and foundation of unconditional election, is controversial a plenty.

11. Maintain a devotional love for the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, making diligent use of the means of grace. Yes, I already mentioned that, but it's fundamental.

Regularly meditate on the fact that you are a hell deserving wretch, still after all that God has done for you and in you. "How many things are necessary for you to know, that in this comfort you may live and die happily? Three things: First, the greatness of my sin and misery. Second, how I am redeemed from all my sins and misery. Third, how I am to be thankful to God for such redemption." (The Heidelberg Catechism, 2)

Linger over the fires of hell and look at the cross on which our Savior died, because it is the blood of Jesus alone that washes away your sins. Fundamentally, what you do -- when you do the work of the ministry -- you do to show your gratitude to God for his free gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ. You never do it, primarily, for the people. They will betray you, lie about you, deceive you, let you down. You do it for Jesus, and when you do, many times you will discover that the Great Shepherd has entrusted to your care some of his choicest sheep.

I will never forget an elderly woman who had never married; Miss Mary was a member of the church that I served in Kansas back in the early seventies. She had been a missionary to China, then after Mao, to Japan. When she was forced to retire, she moved to Wichita and spent her days riding buses all over town gathering children for Bible clubs, especially the children of Asian immigrants. She did this until she was too blind to ride the bus and finally ended up in a retirement home.

I'll never forget my last visit with her, shortly before she went home. She couldn't see and had lost a lot of weight, so much so that her dentures no longer fit her. She would take a mouthful of food, and when she did, her upper dentures would drop down, and she had to manipulate them back up with her tongue at the same time that she carefully put the food in between her tongue and her dentures. It was most awkward, to say the least, and I thought about what my attitude might be at her age, in her nineties. What was her attitude?

Sheer joy! I mean it, sheer joy, joy unspeakable, the real McCoy. I've only known one other person as happy as she, a Chinese lady who had been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. While she and her husband were imprisoned, Mao's Red Guards attacked their children, and one was martyred for the Lord Jesus. This woman exuded the presence of Christ; she was full of joy, too, in spite of a cupful of tragedies.

Being a minister brings me into contract with such choice sheep from time to time. I count being a minister the greatest privilege on earth.

-- Thanks Bob

Friday, March 04, 2005

My inflated sense of self-worth...

has just increased significantly:

I am worth $2,378,272.00 on HumanForSale.com

oh the inanity of the internet...

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

T.S. Elliot and the Holy Spirit (redux)

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

T.S. Elliot -- Little Gidding IV


I do not try to pass myself off as a poetry guy anymore. There was a time when much of my "free time", back when there was a whole lot more of it, was spent with pen and paper pouring myself and all my teenage angst onto a page blackened by my inky lifeblood. There was ne'er a feeling left untapped or an emotional episode left unrecorded. It is probably safe to say that those days were what lead to my eventual traverse on the stage and some wonderful years pursuing acting and singing. But this is not who I am today -- of course there are vestiges -- pieces of me that need outlet from time to time, be it by singing in the car or hearing a great opera or symphony, watching real actors (i.e. maybe 2% of the Hollywood crowd) really dig in and do great, gritty work. Things like that are few and far between, but when they happen the joy is unspeakable. Excellence is hard to come by these days, especially in poetry. I have made attempts to watch some of the publicized poetry that is out there now and, with a few certain exceptions, it is largely just politically liberal cry-babying that has no real soul. Maybe I'm jaded, my emotional spigot drawn in by the all to realness of reality and the height of the stakes at which the real is played. Life doesn't move moment by moment - life is epochal.
Now, don't get me wrong -- this is not some push toward some stoic, or Gnostic existentialism that says the now doesn't matter. It matters. But if you have a true philosophy of history then you know that moments are not for themselves, they are all moving towards something else, something that transcends each, a climax.
T.S. Elliot understands this, and phrases it in a way that nearly brought me to tears when it was first read to me. The backdrop is a series of classes on the Book of Acts (yes, that's in the bible...), more specifically on Pentecost and the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles of Jesus in Chapter two. We had spent weeks discussing what is happening in the passage, and looking back at the prophecy of John the Baptist in Luke, and looking at Jesus' own baptism. We had been going to great lengths discussing what it meant to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and Fire, and what the fire meant, the double entendre... and after our study on this section came to an end, my professor put this stanza of Elliot's poem on the overhead and read it to us, and in these two verse, crystallized all that we had spent weeks working to understand.
I don't know anything about T.S. Elliot. But after reading this stanza (I have yet to read the rest of the very long piece), I know that he knew scripture, he knew it well, and he had some personal knowledge of the Holy Spirit.
There is an urge in me to deconstruct these lines -- I want to take you through line by line and tell you each and every thing the author is alluding to, but I feel as though it would ruin it in my own mind, lessen it -- and I don't think I can do that.
But I will say this -- A couple of posts down I posted a verse from Deuteronomy in the Hebrew which read, "Our God is a consuming fire". Mr. Elliot understood and expresses this well, saying that we have no choice but to interact with that flame -- one way or another it will touch us, it must. It will be the touch of a refiner's flame, or the flame of judgment.
p.s.
I encourage you to study it yourself. Look through the bible at all the references for fire and it's spiritual 'uses' - what it does (Joel 1 and 2, Malachi 3, 1 Peter 1 - only for starters), and then read the accounts of John the Baptist's ministry/prophecy and the Baptism of Jesus in Luke 3, and John 1 -- then read it's fulfillment in Acts chapters 1 and 2.