Coffee Shop Journal

Tonight I am preparing to fly across the country to attend a family wedding outside of Portland, Oregon. I have to admit that I am still geeky enough to enjoy a day of travel under the right circumstances. I’m looking forward to seeing new places and new people, something Craig Groeschel has been talking about over on Swerve, the Lifechurch.tv blog. Craig talks about intentional “disruptions” to your routine, a process that allows new thoughts and ideas to find fertile ground. It gives ideas room to breathe. So I am hoping to find some intentionally disruptive time in Oregon. Considering all the family that will be gathering, I’m pretty sure there will be a disruption of one type or another! Remember that prayer, asking God to help me come to the end of myself? Yeah…he’s getting ready to answer it.

As I go, I’m thinking still about the range of people Dan Merchant talked about in Lord, Save Us From Your Followers. I am praying for opportunities on this trip to open conversations that maybe I would never have started before reading this book.

There’s a lot about faith and God that I don’t quite understand. I’m okay with the fact that “full, complete, perfect love” is beyond my reach and beyond the reach of this world. I know I’m probably limited to grasping sand-sized bits of understanding, but I’m grateful for those little bits. Each and every one of the meetings, conversations, and interactions I had along this journey brought me so many grains of sand closer to understanding what real love is.

In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day - Chapter 8

It has been awhile since I’ve posted a Snowy Day post. Life has been busy! But tonight I was drawn back to Mark Batterson’s book, and we are now on chapter 8: the importance of looking foolish. Let’s start with a quote:

We try to look like everybody else. We try to talk like everybody else. We try to dress like everybody else. And the end result? We become like everybody else. We hide our idiosyncrasies and insecurities behind the mask of who we think we’re supposed to be. We stop being ourselves and start being who we think everyone wants us to be.

But something invaluable and irreplaceable is lost when we cave in to conformity. We lose our personality. We lose our originality. And at some point we lose our soul. Instead of becoming the one-of-a-kind original we were destined to be, we settle for a carbon copy of someone else.

Here’s the deal, as Mark Batterson says: if you aren’t willing to look foolish, you’re foolish. I’ve been praying lately for God to take me to the end of myself, to get me to the point where all I want is what He wants. A big prayer, but life is a journey. And then I pick up Snowy Day and realize the chapter is about looking foolish while we are dreaming the big, limitless dreams that God gives us.

I don’t know of anyone who more exemplifies this kind of holy foolishness than Carlos Whittaker, a man I’ve actually never met (yet!). Read his blog. Carlos is willing to be childlike, creative and unorthodox in his never-ending quest to be an authentic Christ Follower in this world. This week alone the Ragamuffin Soul was willing to show us his Ragamuffin Top as he begins a fitness quest. We’ve seen him dancing with his daughters, playing ping pong with his co-workers in a riveting live-stream. We’ve seen him interviewing leaders, riding the bus, fast-forwarding through his day, and leading us in worship. He opens his world and is willing to be transparent to show us the real world, a real dad, real ministry. Yeah, Ragamuffin Soul looks foolish. I wish I could, too.

Mark Batterson, who knows Carlos by the way, and would probably agree with my assessment, tells the story of riding in the van with his wife and kids, music blaring. Mark and his wife Lora get all jiggy to the music they have going. Their kids think they are crazy, but the people in the car behind them really think they are nuts. He writes:

But who is crazy? Is it us? Or is it the people who can’t hear the music? I’d like to think the crazy people are the ones who aren’t dancing because they can’t hear the music.

There is an old proverb: “Those who hear not the music think the dancer is mad.”

I’ve been praying for God to take me to the end of myself, and this chapter of In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day (please, Mark…can you think of a shorter title next time?) reminds me that perhaps the fears I am facing really result from my fear of appearing foolish. I’ve been praying this prayer, but I’m a little afraid God is going to take me up on it.

At least I’ll be in good company.

I recently watched a video based on the book Jim and Casper Go to Church. The book, which I haven’t read yet but is on its way (thanks to Amazon 1-click!), is the story of  an atheist who visits our churches and offers up his opinion. I am anxious to read his words, painful as they are likely to be. If you want to, watch the video over on Ed Bahler’s blog, here.

The words that convicted me are these: Matt Casper asks us as Christians to invite him into our homes and our hearts before trying to “sell” him on our religion. This statement, from an atheist, is perhaps the best theology of hospitality that I have read recently. So many times in our homes and in our interactions in the community we are only willing to extend a superficial friendship, a shallow grace. We are willing to sit and chat with an “outsider” (to use the term the book unChristian uses), but we are very slow to open our hearts in true friendship. To some of us, it is even unthinkable if we are honest with ourselves.

And yet, through the ages of Christianity the act of sharing a meal in friendship has been the most powerful demonstration of just what Christ did for us. Matt Casper’s comment reminded me of a chapter in Brennan Manning’s class book The Ragamuffin Gospel. Consider this quote:

In the year of 1925, if a wealthy plantation owner in Atlanta extended a formal invitation to four colored cotton pickers to come to his mansion for Sunday dinner, preceded by cocktails and followed by several hours of brandy and conversation, the Georgia aristocracy would have been outraged, neighboring Alabama infuriated, and the Ku Klux Klan apoplectic. Sixty or seventy years ago in the deep South, the caste system was inviolable, social and racial discrimination inflexible and indiscretion made the loss of reputation inevitable.

Today the lines of reputation in the Christian community are not based on race, as in 1925, but they are based on insider standing. Outreach to an outsider is permissible, perhaps coffee, but inviting them into your home? Scandalous.

So I ask you, have you lost your reputation yet? I know my reputation is still largely intact, a matter of conviction that Matt Casper so kindly pointed out. And he is so right. One more quote from Ragamuffin Gospel.

Through table fellowship Jesus ritually acted out his insight into Abba’s indiscriminate love — a love that causes His sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and His rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike (see Matthew 5:45). The inclusion of sinners in the community of salvation, symbolized in table fellowship, is the most dramatic expression of the ragamuffin gospel and the merciful love of the redeeming God.

Once in awhile I hit overload. Too much information comes in, and I need time to process it! And yet…to go without reading is like a day without breathing. Impossible. So I spent the last two days reading a couple of mildly interesting books that required little interaction on my part.

The first is Beautiful Boy by David Sheff. This is his website. What a powerful story! David Sheff tells about the life of his son, Nic, and his journey into and through drug addiction. Unlike similar memoirs I’ve read in the past, the author managed to portray Nic as the beautiful, loving, incredibly smart child that he was, as well as a sense of place to their life. This background of vivid writing helped me feel the rollercoaster ride as Nic picked himself up from relapse after relapse. I don’t have any addicts close to me (that I know of…one thing I learned from this book is that you truly don’t know whether that statement is true), but Beautiful Boy helped me build empathy for those who do. Like so many others, I have often been guilty of simplifying an addiction down to “Why don’t they just stop drinking/using/smoking.” Not any more. David Sheff opened my eyes to an alternate reality, and he made me care about his family. Well done.

The second book I read was Serve God, Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth. Dr. Sleeth and his family embarked on a journey to reduce their ecological footprint and use the money savings to support relief efforts overseas and here at home. None of the ideas in this book were radically new, but Dr. Sleeth combined them with real life examples that reminded me that each of these ideas is quite doable. Did you know that if we all just replaced 5 lightbulbs with fluorescent or LED lightbulbs we could take 21 coal factories offline? Small, achievable goals are the focus of this short, fun read. Perhaps especially useful is the daily, weekly and yearly goal checklist in the back of the book. I didn’t think this book affected me a whole lot, but David keeps telling me I’m talking about it every ten minutes, and I did find myself wondering whether I shouldn’t go to Whole Foods EVERY day, but maybe should plan ahead? I’m kind of joking (and kind of not). David and I are trying to think through our stewardship of energy and resources, and this book was a helpful addition to that process.

That’s all for today…I’m taking a day for laundry, cooking something fun and watching David build a computer with his friend Matt.

Tonight I found a fellow blogger who paid a visit to Bill Strickland’s Manchester Bidwell center. You all know how I feel about Bill Strickland, so head to Jeff Shinabarger’s blog to read what he has to say! One of these days I’m going to get lucky enough to tour the place myself.

I told you about this book last week, when I spent many happy days curled up in the comfy chair at Starbucks reading about all the places on earth that would make me happy or miserable. This book, by Eric Weiner (yes, pronounced whiner), takes a whirlwind tour of some of the happiest places on earth. And some of the most miserable places on earth. I wondered if the book would wrap the pursuit of happiness up in a neat little bow, but it doesn’t. Instead, it offers a look at how the geography of where you live impacts your life.

Place. That is what The Geography of Bliss is about. How place—in every aspect of the word—shapes us, defines us. Change your place, I believe, and you can change your life.

This quote, by the author on his website, truly sums up the book. So what did I learn in exchange for those afternoons spent with The Geography of Bliss?

1. People have an innate “fit” with certain places on the globe. Unfortunately these are not always the places they are born or are living. Also, Moldova apparently fits no one.
2. Iceland sounds amazing: cozy, book-loving people living on an ice cube.
3. The closer you look at happiness to evaluate whether you have it, the less likely you are to be happy.
4. Most happiness appears to spring from trust and the ability to give yourself to something larger than yourself, something worth pursuing.
5. The author has an amazing ability, born most likely of his journalism career, to connect with local people and develop the sense of community in a short time. I envy him this ability and tried to analyze how he did it. Still working on that!

After meeting a bartender appropriately named Happy, the author offers this interesting summation of his stance.

But Happy [the bartender] is wise, for only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

Good lessons to learn, and a good payoff for a few days traveling the globe vicariously with the author. I’d love to hop on a plane and follow the happy trail myself! I leave you with a quote that perhaps I should paint and hang on my wall!

The Icelandic saying goes, ‘Better to be barefoot than without a book!’

Living in the paradise of South Florida, perhaps I may change that to “Better to be barefoot WITH a book.”

This morning I sleepily looked out our bedroom window and did a double-take. Our neighbor’s yard, normally picture perfect and beautifully landscaped, had a fence taken down and their “insides” exposed. They are in the middle of replacing their fence around their garbage enclosure/air-condiitoner, water-softener etc. pad. Looking out and seeing the insides of their fence on the outside, so to speak, reminded me of walking into a public restroom, opening a door, and finding the stall occupied. It is shockingly unexpected!

It got me thinking today: how many times do we clean up what we present to the world, when reality is far different? I began to look around my own house at how many times I shoved a stack of books under a couch before a big party. We clean up for the outside world. By the way, I don’t think that is all bad! There are some things in life that are necessary, but not beautiful for public display. Things like my neighbor’s water softener. What about in our personal lives? Are we guilty on one end of the spectrum or the other? Do we display what ought to be private? (This is often called gossip, by the way). Do we hide what needs to be shown the light?

In the interest of self-disclosure, I thought you would like these three pictures. The first one is the picture I would take for a “show me your stack of books to be read” picture. I grabbed the nearest books, stacked them and snapped. The second picture is my REAL stack of books to be read on the coffee table hidden in my bedroom. Don’t judge me - you know you must have one like this somewhere! The third picture - and yes, you can judge me for this one - is LITERALLY under my couch. I just stuck my hand under the couch and snapped.

I’m enjoying this little exercise in self disclosure. As Randy Jackson would say on American Idol, “Just keeping it real, man, just keeping it real.”

What’s under your couch?

I know that some of you all out there are real John Maxwell fans. Just thought I’d mention that he will be speaking live three times this weekend at our Church, Christ Fellowship. You can watch the live stream of the service. His topic is on “Three chairs: how to make sure people are in the right seat.”

Streaming live is at Saturday, 6 PM Eastern, Sunday 9 and 11 AM Eastern.

www.goChristFellowship.com 

I mentioned “The Bliss of Geography” yesterday. I’ve been humming along on this worldwide tour in search of happiness, and enjoying every minute of the ride. The author literally traveled around the world in search of the geographical place where people are the happiest. So far I have traveled to Rotterdam, Switzerland and Bhutan with him. Not surprisingly, in each of these places the happiest people were not the ones who were trying to be happy. Happiness came as a byproduct. The author, Eric Weiner, is not a Christ Follower, so it is interesting to see him reason through the role of faith, purpose and spirituality play in the search for happiness. He is also a gifted writer, and I’ve been struck on every page with a new thought or a unique way of phrasing a question.

While in Holland, Weiner visits the World Happiness Database, an ongoing research project into happiness. It is here that he determines his itinerary by finding out which countries rank high in the happiness factor. Holland is one of them, and the author concludes it is because of their tolerance. After a period of free-wheeling tolerance, however, the author realizes that for him tolerance would breed unhappiness and an undisciplined life. Next up? Switzerland, one of the happiest places on earth apparently. While rushing around precise Switzerland the author realizes that the Swiss are wealthy and patient, a rare combination.

Then it dawns on me. The Swiss are wealthy and patient, a rare combination. They know how to linger. Indeed, I’ve been in Switzerland for two weeks now and not a single person has looked at his or her watch — that perfectly synchronized, gold-plated Swiss watch — and said “I have to go” or “I really should be getting back to work.” In fact, it is always me, the loafing writer, who is stealing glances at my fifty-dollar Seiko.

With the help of a friend, I had set up a blog to solicit comments from the Swiss about happiness. One in particular caught my eye, and I’m reminded of it now.

“Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else. Maybe the current conditions in Switzerland make it simply easier to ‘be’ and therefore ‘be happy.’

Somehow I am oddly encouraged by Eric Weiner and his search for happiness. I am discovering that I am quite happy, myself, and that I am not alone in this. America, by the way, is well down the list of happiest countries. We have — according to the author — too many voices screaming at us day and night about the disasters around the block and around the country. We have too great an access to media, too great an addiction to activity even if it is meaningless, and too little time for compassion. Wow. He’s not far off. On the other hand, it is clear by chapter three that the author is searching in all the wrong places for his happiness. I will be intrigued to see where he finds his solution. I know where my rest, my happiness come from, and it isn’t a geographical location that resembles Paradise. He is on a quest, but he is settling for the echo, the whispers of Eden, rather than searching for the real deal.

This week I have been reading “a matrix of meanings” by Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor. The subtitle is “finding God in pop culture. This is one of the books in the resource list of “Pop Goes the Church” by Tim Stevens. I thought it would be a quick, kind of fun read. I was wrong. In fact, my brain is on overload. This is a scholarly, academic work with a lot of theology thrown in as a bonus. I’ve been digging deep into the author’s brains, and am sure a lot of it will be flowing out soon.

Today, I’ve been reading about the celebrity culture that we have created in America. We love our celebrities, both famous and infamous. Usually when a Christian begins to speak about celebrities it is with a negative tone, but “Matrix” builds a compelling case for looking closer at the role celebrity plays in our lives.

Celebrities perform a valuable social and theological function. Celebrities sharpen our ideals, bear our disappointments, and promote our hopes of immortality.

In other words, the celebrities are another “whisper of Eden” to remind us of all that we can be, all that we can achieve. They personify our hopes and dreams, reminding us that anything is possible. And, regrettably, they sometimes fall off their perches and remind us that to be human is to share in a brotherhood of failure. The best celebrities teach us how to get up again.

In Christianity’s past, the tendency toward celebrity was expressed through sainthood. We hold up models for ourselves, reminding ourselves to pour out our lives in trying to grow, become, make a difference. I liked this quote from the book, too.

Poet Phyllis McGinley calls sainthood “haloes for heroic virtue.” She points out that “in times of crisis we need saints. They appeared by the hundreds in the first centuries of Christianity when Europe was struggling out of nearly universal darkness into what then passed for the light of civilization. Whenever and wherever an evil has existed, from slave-trading to the miseries of famine and war, saints have sprung up to mitigate those evils.

Please don’t get hung up on that word “saints.” Substitute “leader” if you like, for that’s what Phyllis McGinley was describing. Wherever an evil has existed, God has raised up a leader to show the way to combat that evil. My mind turns to Corrie Ten Boom, William Wilberforce, Mother Teresa. Closer to home I think about Lamont Hiebert working with the International Justice Mission, the score of 3 minute presenters at Q detailing how they are working out their faith, my friend LT working in the second generation Chinese church in Pittsburgh, Bill Strickland working in Pittsburgh, my friend Garry Williams working with the homeless in his church here in South Florida. Wherever there is a need, God calls.

Doesn’t that energize you? It does me. For one thing, I’m not called to do all those things! Good thing, because this woman doesn’t have that kind of energy. I’m called to do my thing, where God has put me. I’m called to pray for all those people up above. I’m called to finance them. I’m called to love the people who wander across my path.

So here is my question of the day: who are the heroes God is raising up right now, and what do they say about the needs we are confronting?