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Gloves Off Gospel

My pastor says things much more eloquently than me. He draws inferences from the Good Book, and I thank the Good Lord for it.

Some times I find myself just wanting to haul off and punch people.

But fortunately, I have people around me who teach biblical truth. A wife who loves first and foremost.

It stops my fist before it leaves the proverbial hangar.

Yesterday, Mark spoke on Revelation and made a connection to loving people I’d never heard in my 32 churchgoing years.

And before you stop reading, let me say right here that it wasn’t another LG,LP message. He didn’t make it about holding hands and skipping or anything.

It’s what I like to call Gloves Off Gospel.

It wasn’t highfaluting wish wash, but something that dug in and hit home.

The question he led with: Do you love as well as you used to? (Taken out of context this could mean anything. But here, for a Christian, it means what it says.)

Revelation 2 instructs every believer to – “do the works you did at first…”

This harps on how love diminishes in everyone who starts on warp speed, with mad love for God, and then, well, fizzles out.

Life, politics, saccharine packets, and bad pizza take their toll on our hearts metaphorically and literally. 1st world sucker punches happen and we think this somehow makes it okay to stop caring. I don’t know about you, but I’m not okay with any punch to my gut. From friend or foe.

My stomach hurts just typing this. I want to avoid the lull of carelessness. Forever.

Can we pray for impenetrable faith? Do we need extra compassion injections over time? Are we being the body we’re called to be?

January is cold and nothing can insulate like good works & faith.

Do I love as well as I used to?

 

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Language is Universal.

It’s easy to lose our love for words & conversation.

Language can become nothing more than consonants, vowels strung together and overlooked on social media.

I take them for granted every day. I misuse them, too. Saying things I don’t mean.

Writer friends of mine can do beautiful things with grammatical units, prepositional phrases.

Phonemes and morphemes constructed to make magic to listeners in any native person’s land.

I love the impact of language. How it can transport us in fiction like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird to 1930s Maycomb County, Alabama, or relay world news pertinent to us in 2017. It can unite (and often divide). It can be succinct and to the point. It can also be long-winded and meandering. (Much like me…)

But, at it’s core, language serves a purpose: to communicate.

Fun Facts–

  • With 6,500 languages in the world about 2k of these have less than 1k speakers.
  • Mandarin features almost 1 billion speakers (well over double those of us speaking English).

“Ni hao,” “Hello,” & “Hola” all greet peoples of the world. And can mean different things in the way they’re said.

I love the unity of language.

You might ask, “But doesn’t language divide & confuse us daily?”

To an extent, but linguistics unifies as well.

Studying languages as obscure as the Pirahã language of Brazil (comprised almost entirely of phonemes) merits importance to those still speaking it. Likewise, just because those natives of North Sentinel don’t want to be invaded by outsiders doesn’t cheapen the Sentinelese language spoken on their restricted coasts.

I like not knowing some things about the French language. It’s mysterious. There’s a hidden code in every language. It allows people groups to learn from one another, share, and also hide in the comfort of their uniqueness as well.

Did you know inhabitants of the island of La Gomera use a whistled language? Or, that the Pawnee tribes’ (Native American) language involved a love affair with syllables (some words possessing over 30 syllables)? Or, that the Taa language in Botswana literally translates to “the language of human beings”?

I found the English language WordClock online and it states there’s a new word added every 98 minutes. As I type this post, the clock shows: 1,005,366 words in the English language. That’s 14.7 new words per day. See it here.

Do you think language unifies or divides? Should it be kept in a lockbox only for natives to speak to natives? Should North Sentinel Island be invaded for the sake of conversation? (Ok, that one is a bit pointed.)

Are you a wordsmith secretly planning to now learn Pawnee, because you read this blog? Buy Rosetta Stone for Pirahã if it exists?

I love the discussion of language. No matter where you are on this blue planet you can take this blog, copy & paste it into a word app on your phone, and in a minute (maybe less), you know exactly what I’m saying. You process it in an exquisite, God-given brain, and you respond.

Magic. Voilà!

 

 

 

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Slice of Nostalgia: How Many Do You Remember?

Searching for the band BareNaked Ladies on a school browser and immediately regretting it.

Discovering the face of Jesus in a slice of rectangular-shaped pizza in the school cafeteria.

Purchasing pencils, pens, & paper out of one of these:

Losing more oxen than you care to remember on The Oregon Trail.

Eating a nutritious pack of Gushers to curb your appetite before lunch.

Eating the other pack of Gushers before making it into the lunchroom.

Using your lunch money to buy Fruitopia out of the machine.

Playing Candystand & Nabisco World Mini-Golf in class.

Wearing JNCO jeans you got at Goody’s, because it was absurd not to. (Plugg Jeans were a nice backup.)

Metal choker necklace – check.

Hair glue – double check.

A worn in pair of Airwalk sneakers – always.

Forming a WINDBREAKER club afterschool.

 

 

 

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4 years 273 days at Sea.

4 years. 273 days. That’s the length of time one couple has sailed across various oceans of the world with Princess Cruise(s).

I only know this, because of a bulletin that recognized them as distinguished on a recent trip.

I couldn’t process that milestone. 1,733 days at sea. 1,733 vacation days. 1,733 days passed willy-nilly with endless watermelon and copious entertainment. How?

I haven’t had anything last that long in my life, have you?

I mean, apart from marriage, education, and well, breathing. [I’ve been alive that long but not much else.]

The couple’s picture was prominently displayed on the cruise line’s bulletin and I wondered what brought them out on the waters so much. Why would they keep sailing? And how the heck did they pay for it?

Has anything ever drawn your attention for so long? Any passion? Any hobby?

I can safely say I lose interest in things longer than a Netflix season.

This couple obviously found something in those 4 (almost 5) years at sea. But what? Did they secretly know where sunken treasure was and didn’t want to tell anyone else? Their secret resting miles below the ocean’s surface.

Maybe love was prodding them out to nature as they aged. It seems they could almost name a ship after you, if you cruised for 5 years with the same company.

Obviously Princess Cruises thought them significant enough to print their picture. But what was their story? What prodded them to embark for an eternity? Was it a Melvillian fixation with marine life?

Remember that song from the 90s by the band Fastball called “The Way”? It was about an elderly couple (Lela & Raymond Howard) who wandered from home one day and tragically drove over a cliff. Authorities indicated that they left their belongings behind and suffered from forgetfulness in their final hours.

I sometimes wonder what grabs our interests and keeps us enthralled. Imagine that something lasting for 5 years.

What do you care enough about to pursue for 1,733 days?

 

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Home is more than an address

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I think about home a lot.

Especially since moving away.

 

Home –

“the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.”

 

I like this definition better than some of the others online; it includes that one word, the adverb ‘permanently’.

The image seems truer somehow, even if it’s not the reality you (or I) experienced.

If you’re like me, the word home seems more distant now than it ever has.

 

If you’re from southern Kentucky (specifically Wayne County), you know exactly what Monticello-born author, Harriette Simpson Arnow meant when she said this about her mom’s view of home:

… she (Mama) knew most of the families … in Wayne County. If Mama didn’t know at least who their grandparents were, she considered them strangers. Because she’d grown up that way with the Denneys. There was Denney’s Gap and a Denney post office and two Denney graveyards, and Denney’s Store. And she’d grown up surrounded by her Denny kin. I don’t think she ever felt at home after leaving Wayne County and her close relatives.

 

The sentiments ring true for me. They make the world so much smaller. In my head I think, I’m from where she’s from, my grandparents still live in Denney’s Gap, I know where those graveyards are and that store. I feel what she felt.

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Have you connected with a place like that before?

A place that makes the world suddenly smaller, more intimate?

Do you travel home as much as you’d like?

Is it home like you remembered? Or, do you find yourself longing for another home?

Something C.S. Lewis once surmised, saying, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

It clicks in my head and my heart, as I write this blog in Tennessee. The world isn’t too large to make the trip back, but the miles seem endless staring at this electronic screen. The years busier, and the friends older. While I might not be able to stop time and make my hometown exactly as I remember it, I smile when I think of that one word, and the notion of eternity for all of us.

Not here in Chattanooga. Not there in Monticello. But, another world – permanently.

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How to Break Free

Jim Burgen’s, No More Dragons, from Thomas Nelson Books.

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(on shedding decades of gnarly scales)

 

His sermons (while at Southland Christian Church in Kentucky) were instrumental during my college years, and this book has taken it a step further with messaging that centers upon curing a hardened heart.

Jim challenges the reader saying: becoming a dragon is a dangerously sneaky process.

He uses the C.S. Lewis novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, as a fitting example of a boy becoming a dragon unawares. The boy finds treasure, falls asleep on it, dreams, and awakens as a dragon concerned for his treasure hoard. Upon awakening, he discovers he cannot remove his dragon scales without the help of Aslan the lion, protector of Narnia.

Once the scales have been cleansed from his back, Eustace’s friend says, “You have been – well, un-dragoned.”

This is a status most of us (if we’re honest) would like to reach at some point in life: un-dragoned.

Have you ever felt this freedom?

Free of the past. Hopeful for the future. Very much alive in the present.  When we can look in the mirror and not see a monster staring back, is a good day.

What will get us there?

Is there a moment when you can assuredly say you’ve arrived?

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How one album can change your world

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Think about your favorite album of all-time.

From lyrics and liner notes to catchy choruses and amazing guitar solos.

Got it?

Now, think about the memories attached to each track on the album.

That road trip you wish never ended. The youth group church van. That one time you were grilling out with friends.

Kumbaya.

A lifetime of firsts took place with that revolution of ten to twelve tracks.

If you’re older, maybe it was vinyl (or eight-track). Slightly less old, a cassette tape deck with worn rewind buttons from playing the favorites again and again. Even newer folks, a compact disc with scratches all over the disc not because you weren’t careful with your favorite but loaning it to that one careless joker caused the disc harm and now it skips every time. Millenials & beyond, maybe the mp3s and iTunes and streaming gadgets have profiled your favorites as a result of playing the same album tracks so many freakin’ times. Regardless, we all have the album in mind and we know the track progression like we know our own souls.

For me, it was a small, Nashville-based band and a self-titled album with a couch on the front of it. My peers in school were immersed in this disc non-stop. I still remember picking it up from a Christian bookstore and sitting in a blue van on my birthday. Mom asking if it was the right one. Me telling her it was the only one.

That album got played to death. (I’ve replaced is more than twice.)

Fast forward to 2008, my wife walks down the aisle to the final track from that album, What Will Your Anthem Be?, done up in a beautiful piano rendition by a best friend.

Move on to present day, my church grants me access to create music playlists and of course the couch album is featured more than a couple of times on the intro and outro set list.

Two decades later and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to my obsession with it. What about your playlist? What still provides goosebumps every time it’s cycled through and you’d never imagine hitting the ‘next’ button? Why is it so important to you?

Here are the lyrics to What Will Your Anthem Be?:

When the glitter fades, It fades so fast
What really lasts, what will the anthem be?
Did we sing of rock and roll?
Did we sing if sacred souls?
Has the heart and the harmony met pleasingly?

When the flicker fades, it fades so fast
Nothing is left. What will be legacies?
Cause guitars burn you see
Recollect no memories
Of the lights and the cheers and the human vanity

Should I give?
Should I sing some rust?
Pity me for my golden lust
This one’s for the lily
And this one’s for the rose

Here it is, let the truth be told
Here it is, we would like to know
Here it is, what will the anthem be

What will your anthem be?
What will our anthem be?
What will the anthem be?