The Truth will set you free.

 The Thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy... Jesus came that you might have overflowing life in Him.

Please don't blame God because you made a bad choice.

And please... stop lying to yourself.

There is nothing for you there.

The Truth will set you free.

The Net-Mender

Once upon a time lived a simple mender of nets. He lived in a simple village near the river, in a simple home and enjoyed a simple life mending nets for the fishermen who found vocation in the sea. The sound of the surf, the laughter of children and the chatter of birds-- these he held dear. The smell of sea at night and the scent of the hills by day, these were his canvas.

He once was a fisherman, himself, and enjoyed the tug of both oar and net, unafraid of long work and hot days pulling and putting nets, sorting and selling his catch, repairing his gear by night so that he might enjoy a new day the next morning. When the storms came, and they always do, he would pull up his boat with the tide and repair what was needed after the danger was past. It was a rhythm; it was life's own tidal sway.

When the big storm destroyed his last boat, he decided to help a friend mend his nets instead of rebuilding his own bark. He discovered that-- in enabling another to more quickly return to the harvest, he could benefit from the catch and start a new vocation. And so he did. Fishermen would trade catch and currency for the mender to ply his trade, quickening their returns while enhancing his own commerce and connection throughout the village and beyond. When the fishing was fallow, he would weave for pottery and things terrestrial... everyone used net, and for a mite he would lend his leathery, dexterous hands.

As time turned into age, and age turned into thought, the years produced a change that the mender had not considered: What if he was no longer needed? What if his simple life became simply unsustainable? The elders of the village turned from lore into loam, and the youth of the village had little taste for the ways of old. The fish were playing out, so the village was fading into the farmlands to dig a new life from a different kind of sea. And the laughter of children faded. And his stiffened hands-- what were they to do? What was the purpose for an older net-mender?

credit: https://www.ourstate.com/does-the-sun-set-over-east-coast-beaches/

"All these years I have toiled for You..."

The prodigal.
Never responsible. Reckless. Carefree. Living only in the moment without regard for consequences. Disrespectful in his selfishness.
He can't wait for his dad to die to get his third of the inheritance, he wants it now to spend it on partying in the big city; whatever happens after that, he'll figure it out. He is truly prodigal-- he spends money like it cost him nothing, as if money's sole purpose is to bring him pleasure now.

The older son.
The strength of the father, defender of the family name. Destined to inherit a double share for the burden he bears always being responsible, serving the family, being proper, showing respect, maintaining appearances, working alongside the servants in the field and managing the estate.
He is both outraged and disgusted when the prodigal dares ask the Father for his inheritance without waiting for protocol. When his younger sibling leaves the nest, he can't quite fathom that all the Father has to leave as the remaining estate is going to be his; the younger has already sold out his shares. All that the Father has... is his? Except the Father is still the patriarch, still the head of the family, still the master of the estate.

Then one day the younger son, Junior, finds himself destitute and on skid row, a Jewish boy wanting to eat with the pigs. The wages of his work have finally caught up with him; the path he chose finally arrived at the obvious destination-- the deepest poverty that comes when the soul invested in hedonism finally gives birth to its eventual progeny: the deepest form of nothingness that pulls everything to itself like a metaphysical black hole. Situational death with no soul to show for it. Dead man, walking.
Like all narcissists, he carries a mental ledger of all the resources he can take advantage of because people are only of value if he can get something from them for himself. But he has exhausted his list; he has used and abused people in his sphere so much that there is nothing left for him in the big city... and then: he remembers his dad.
He knows that culture dictates that when a son treats his father like he disrespected his dad, that son is "dead" to the family, cut off and not spoken of like a skeleton in the family closet. He has no leverage left in his sonship, no access to using his Father as a resource. He is dead; dead man, walking. Yet he remembers how his father treats the slaves, the servants in the estate... they at least were cared for, they had enough food and clothing... perhaps, what if he came to his father, not as a son but a dead man, walking? Even if his Father rejected his offer he would be in no worse shape than now; he has nothing to lose, and a glimmer of hope from the deepness of this abyss.

Out in the fields the oldest son is working in the heat of the sun, tireless plodding alongside the servants, trying to guide the oxen to make the straightest furrows and break up the compacted soil. With God's blessings and a good rain they can sow and reap another crop before winter comes and turns farming into ranching. "Just keep moving... gotta encourage the men to stay at it," he coaches himself. So tired, like there's nothing left; as if he were almost... dead; dead man, yet still walking.
It seems a lifetime ago that Junior left him to do all the work after his Father became too old to work in the fields. And what's it all about anyway? Who knows whether he will even live long enough to see his Father's inheritance? No man knows the hour of his reckoning with death. Wouldn't it be ironic that he die before his dad, having nothing to show for his years in the field except a memory and a stack of rocks out back? Day in, day out, the same routine of making a living and providing for the family as if the burden of responsibility was squarely on his shoulders alone. Is this living?

A long day today, maybe even a bit hotter than before, but the cool of the evening was helpful and now signals time to head back to the tents and be refreshed, rested and ready for another day in the morning. But something has changed. Instead of the quiet of a tired evening, the homestead seems to be alive... with music? He yells to a servant who comes running to meet him. "What is the meaning of all this?" he asks, confused by the disruption of his crepuscular rhythm.
"Your younger brother has returned home, and the Master is preparing a feast for him in celebration of his return!"
Returned? Feast? Celebration? Has his Father lost his mind? Is he under some codependent spell that he would welcome into His home such a son as this, one who would betray them all for the sake of complete selfishness, and then have the audacity to dare come back to pillage them more?
"I'll have nothing to do with him," replies the eldest, sending the servant back toward the sound of celebration. "He's dead to me!," he yells to the back of running servant.
The long shadows of his approaching Father reach him with his earnest plea, "My son, come join us in this wonderful celebration! You of all people should enjoy the fattened calf that we have been preparing for such a time as this!"
"Father, how can you do such a thing for a disgraceful man as this younger son of yours? He has betrayed our family and spent your hard-earned wealth on whatever his flesh beckoned do next. I have never stopped doing what you've asked, always in the fields, always trying my best to please you and honor you, but never once did you say, 'Son, let's celebrate you with a cabrito fiesta and have a party with all your friends,' ...Never!".
The Father looked at his eldest son, his firstborn child, the sign of his strength, and pleaded, "My son, everything I have is yours to enjoy, everything that you see-- it is yours; enjoy whatever your heart desires. But your brother has  returned from the dead and has begun to live again, he was lost but now is found, so we must rejoice and celebrate such an event as this!"

And then...?

How did this first-born heir respond?

In the Gospel of John, chapter 5, we read the story of a man who was crippled by illness for thirty-eight years. He waited alongside others by the pool of Bethesda, hoping that someone would come and help him into the stirred water, that he would receive his healing. All these years he waited, thinking maybe one day would be his turn to be healed. And he waited, there on his mat, his self-made station in life refined by repetition over generations, hoping maybe it would be his turn, but not really believing such a thing would come to a man such as himself. After all, he by now new how to navigate this familiar routine, how to do this inkling of a life.
Then Jesus shows up.
The query is poetry: "Do you want to be healed?"
Do you want to be healed? It is a simple yes-or-no question. Do you? or not?
Is that which has become so familiar what the Father has for you, or is it about what you have settled for? Do you barricade yourself from the prospect of "more" with excuses and iterations of rationalizations for settling for what is familiar?
What if the Father offers you more than you are comfortable with?
What if His heart beckons: "All that I have is yours"?
"Do you want to be healed?"
It's actually a terrifying question.
What if the supernatural was reality? What if there was more to life than pig slop and unending labor?
What if Jesus looked you in the eye and commanded: "GET UP! Take that mat and start walking!"?
Would you lay there, surrendered to the familiar prison of the familiar?
Or would you embrace the profound foolishness of abundant Grace and enter the party?

Band-Aids and Civil Disobedience

The world seems to be crashing down around Dixie these days.

Innocents were run down in the streets by evil men.

The horrors of Hate, visited upon our fellow mankind. 

Nobody talks about the cause of Hate, or if they do it is couched is such thick psychosocial-jargon that it comes across as empty vanity prancing in the shoes of academics. And nobody seems to listen; they just find people to talk with who share the same views, so they don't have to listen, and the cause of Hate grows deeper into our world. Fear.

Fear is a murderer, not Hate. You can hate someone, even despise them, but if there is not even a single hint of Fear about them, there is no violence.

On the other hand, every day people kill people out of fear, victims who are not hated at all, just feared.

How many times did we see a white trucker, dragged from his rig by black youth who were trying to bash in his head with bricks? Or the video of Rodney King being assaulted by those who broke their vow of civic trust? So who brought us that loop of footage? into the safety of our homes? 

Who shows the brutality of street violence for the world to see? And who is more likely to be shown as the aggressor? The Media shows the black man to be a criminal who is like a pit bull: one moment relaxing and strong, the next moment murderous and out of control.

Then the media shows us white police officers shooting an unarmed man, so all white police have been painted by the Media as murders in a long line of strange fruit.

Who paints POC in shades that are to be feared? Who stirs the oppressed and marginalized communities into acts of incivility? Why do the major media outlets get a free pass to brainwash citizens toward destruction, conditioning them for the siren song of hate-groups who offer solidarity of force in a ever-thickening cloud of fear?

What happened in Virginia is not new. We see it every week on the streets of France or Syria or Gaza or Venezuela. We see it because the Media brings it to us, not to inform us but to gain viewership ratings so they can make more money by using Fear to generate crisis; this rallies our species to stop thinking critically and switch to reacting-mode.

We are being played by the greatest power in the world to make a buck off us, leaving us terrified of people who are different from us, because we are IGNORANT. Ignorant of other cultures, of other religions, of other communities that live 5 minutes from our homes. And that ignorance is deadly.

But what we also see, if we choose to not be ignorant, is the amazing way people are capable of loving each other. There is no greater illustration of this than the fellow believers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. I have never in my years seen a greater demonstration of the power of love.

And perfect Love casts out Fear. 

That Jesus would pray to God for those who were torturing him to death... torturing him because of Fear... that humbles me in ways that I struggle to see myself following. Emanuel showed me the power of "dying to your self", to vengeance, to hate-spawned-by-fear... the amazing people of Emanuel AME showed me that ordinary, amazing people are indeed capable of following Jesus, even to the cross. 

The dynamic tension between White Supremacy racists and BLM bigots will validate mutual violence until the scriptures in John 10:10 are fulfilled: the Thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. And this destruction comes not from Hate... it's from Fear... and that comes from not knowing people who are different from yourself: Ignorance. 

And there are very real issues that need to be addressed, to be dealt with in our daily life in America. Because we are still blinded by the band-aids that surround us, blinded, unless we have a friend from deepest, darkest Africa who needs a bandage on her forehead.

Mortality and Jesus: a change of seasons

As the trees prepare for winter time, and leaves begin their fall, 
may the sight of hummingbirds and butterflies remind us all 
that life goes on to a different place, beyond the winter's chill;
a place of sanctuary and transformation,
a place of dreams fulfilled.
And though this season fades from green to orange, then to gray,
The Spring will come, and Life returns, and night gives way to day.

Left-handed in a Right-handed World?

So I seclude myself yesterday into my man-cave, thankful for the junked fan that blows hot air around my garage, a recusal from the torrent of this last week of societal insanity and chaos. As I loose water-weight to the heat and Zika-vectors swarming my ankles, I stand at my work bench, thankful for the comforts of my tools and my self-taught skill-set.

For almost a month I have been working through the aftermath of an apparently injured ulnar nerve that shuts down my full use of my right hand. On occasion I will don the borrowed arm sling to force myself rest for my mysterious injury, using my left hand, an unskilled proxy, an apprentice much in need of life experience, especially if my injury progresses and I no longer have the option of right-hand awesomeness. My left hand is an awkward fellow, the Napoleon Dynamite of my limbs desperately in need of some dance moves. So it was yesterday when I switch-hit for the cleanup of my yard tools that I got a glimpse of a world hidden to my left-brained lifestyle: my garage is right-handed.

You never think about it; you never need to consider it unless you have a life-altering event that shifts the frame of interacting in the confines of your comfort. My world is right-handed. I have a right-handed ignition on the car; a right-handed refrigerator door; right-handed scissors and metal shears (seriously--you try using a "lefty" scissors for a month and tell me it's no big deal). I perpetuate this invisible bias by arranging my living space to maximize the use of Righty, and I had no conscious awareness of any of this until yesterday when I was trying to hang up my square-bladed shovel in it's correct niche on the wall... I could not really do it with my left hand because of the how I arranged that physical space.

And then I thought of all the race-riots this week: Euro-cops killing Afro-civilians in Baton Rouge, and then in Minnesota; an Afro-civilian assassinating five officers in Dallas proclaiming that he wants to kill white people, especially white cops. Black Lives Matter activists plotting with officials to disrupt political conventions to create civic chaos and radical shift in power structures, countered with white-supremacist groups gearing up to counter this, or worse... use it as an excuse to perpetuate what they perceive as America. Crazy! What happened to our Country, Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty?

And then social media blew up, with non-stop slap-fighting between, "You can't understand because YOU'RE WHITE! vs "I may be white but at least I know NOT TO RESIST COPS!" vs "You don't even KNOW ME, how can you judge me.. because I'm WHITE?! /BLACK?!"... and so it went. Folks posted studies and research and opinions and pointed fingers; white scholars apologized for being white; black scholars pointed to the systemic injustices of our current culture; a few Americans walked across the street and hugged the others. And I felt it... in my right hand.

Our culture, our systems, our institutions in America... we're right-handed.
And my Irish-immigrant hands are white.

Peace.

Ouch... I believe this stone is yours?

I am a sinner, saved by Grace, so I have no room to boast.
I am not perfect... like I said: I am a sinner. I keep screwing up.

The good news is a wonderful paradox-- there is nothing I can do to be "good enough" for God; my only hope comes at the expense of a perfect sacrifice offered on my behalf to take my punishment in exchange for a life-changing intimacy with The Father-- this historic Jesus, born of the line of David, in Bethlehem, was uninterested in political power or military might. The people wanted a fighter, someone like David to shed the blood of the oppressor... so they used the political system to brutally and publicly assassinate him.

There is a popular perception that somehow America, or other countries for that matter, are no longer the Christian nations that they used to be. I have read enough history to doubt whether any nation is Christian, but to qualify that, let me explain what I mean by "christian".
Jesus taught his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecuted them. All of the original disciples were killed by the secular and religious authorities of that time, though John outlived most of them. They did not die in gun battles or sword fights; like sheep they were led to the slaughter. Although impulsive and passionate Peter used his sword to try to protect Jesus, he was rebuked and later allowed Rome to crucify him... upside down because he was unworthy to die like the Messiah.
Thousands of these Jesus-followers were stoned to death by Jewish communities trying to "purify" and "purge" their community from this sect. Thousands of others were used for sport in the Roman arena. They huddled in shadows with secret codes to avoid persecution.
In time the good news of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus reached Caesar and other heads of state, but in assimilating it as an institutional religion, transmuted it into something very different from The Way.

Today I see the Christian faith still in this age-old struggle between authentic obedience to the teachings of Jesus  and the institutional power that conveniently adheres to Christian ideology when it suits its agenda. The former is not the same as the latter.
An amazing display of follower-ship was recently seen at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston. Those families better reflected Jesus than any evangelical celebrity in the media. The very outrage created in the hearts of radical militants by their courageous faith to forgive gives testimony that the Church is not dead yet, though not likely to be seen in the media outside of opportunities to sell advertisement.
I see a great parallel between the original Church and the black church, the Coptic church, or other marginalized communities that follow the Lord's command, "Come, follow me."

So as you throw stones at what you do not understand, I challenge you to consider your role in history, who you stand with, and who you stand against.