Author: LAH

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Toilet Paper Prayers

Praying is as easy as talking to your best friend but it’s not always that simple. Even after years to talking to God, I have a lot to learn. I was asking a good friend to please pray for us, as our ministry is once again out of funds and we’re not getting any paychecks. Agreeing to pray, she also told me this true story:

Katrina had recently devastated the Gulf Coast, and my friend joined a team from her church that was heading for Mississippi to help in the recovery. They were partnering with a church near the coast that had been acting as headquarters for a whole series of similar church groups.

Hundreds of people were coming through the Mississippi church, sleeping and eating in the church buildings, but supplies were still hard to come by. At one point, one of the church elders approached the pastor: “We’re out of toilet paper! What are we doing to do?”

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A Timely Hug

Last Saturday, God gave me a huge hug. I’m still floating.

Last week, a few women in our home group decided it was time for a ladies’ day out. They planned to have lunch at a local tea house, then browse through some gift shops together. Normally, this wouldn’t have interested me very much—I’m not much of a window-shopper, and I usually don’t take well to “women’s events”—but this is the group we joined last May and I’m still trying to get to know everyone. Besides, I felt a nudge, insubstantial but very real, from the Holy Spirit, saying “Go!” So I went.

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Fear-Mongering

Not today!

It’s 9 a.m. The weather prediction for the rest of today reads… “Cloudy. Snow in the afternoon. … Highs 24 to 30. North winds 10 to 20 mph.”

I’m looking out my window at a pure blue sky, the sun is shining, and it’s already 30°. At least today’s forecast is more accurate (they did say 50%, not 100%) than one last summer that confidently proclaimed sunny skies and high temperatures, while outside a chill wind drove the pouring rain horizontally. You’d think the weather folks would look out their window before hitting that “publish” button!

Meteorologists are easy to pick on, but lots of people predict all sorts of things—cataclysms, wars, epidemics, economic disaster or economic recovery—usually with a tremendous amount of self-assurance. In fact we’re so sure we’re right, we invite the media to the show.

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Good Deeds: Orphans

It’s getting harder and harder to do a good deed anymore. This month and over the next two months, we’ll look at some case studies of good deeds gone wrong, and what we should do differently next time.

Africa is home to 15 million orphans and “children at risk.” Most Americans are very aware of this crisis, largely caused by the spread of AIDS. We also are familiar with James 1:27—“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress….”

Clearly, the church needs to step up and come alongside these children, but how? The traditional answer has been to build thousands of orphanages. But is that the right answer?

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Go Listen to Skye Jethani

One of the blogs I follow is SkyeBox, written by Skye Jethani. All his posts are insightful and worth reading (or listening to). This one is even better than that!

He recently posted:

Last month I spoke at the Lumen conference at Mariners Church in California. They asked me to talk for 18 minutes about why there is an exodus of young people from our churches. Rather than focusing on the sociological data, I used my time to talk about how the way we understand the gospel may actually be inoculating young people to genuine faith.

When the church presents a less than biblical understanding of how to relate to God, it leaves young people with a powerless form of Christianity predicated on fear and control. When this way of life proves ineffective, they may abandon both their faith in Christ and the church. So, our first job is to get the gospel right. Check out my talk and the brief Q&A afterward. Much of the content you see is based on my book, WITH.

His talk was so good, so right on, so insightful, that I am hoping everyone will listen.

I’ll be back next Tuesday with some thoughts about good deeds and orphans.

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Missionary Support: A Suggestion

How would you like to walk up to one of your friends and ask, “Hey, can I have $50 or $100 a month for the next umpteen years?”

How long do you think they’d stay your friend? Yet, this is what we expect missionaries and many other full-time ministry workers to do. It’s called “support raising.” Pretty awkward, yes?

We’ve managed to sugar coat it somewhat. We tell people it’s their chance to get involved in what God is doing. We promise significance. And if there’s any way we can connect them to what we do, we show photos of starving children or cherubic orphans.

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Supporting Long-term Missions

It used to be that a missionary heading overseas would say good-bye to friends and family with little expectation that they’d ever see any of them again. It was a life-long commitment, and frequently that life would be very short.

These days, any Christian can be a missionary. According to David Livermore, author of Serving with Eyes Wide Open, “four to five million Americans participate in religious short-term mission experiences” each year, spending $2.25 billion (yes, with a “b”) to do so.

At the same time, there are a little over 1.6 million full-time Christian missionaries, most of whom work in already-evangelized areas (Frontier Harvest Ministries). The numbers may be off somewhat (it’s very hard to get an accurate accounting), but the picture is clear—short-term missionaries greatly outnumber full-time workers. Keep that in mind for a moment.

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Geezerhood Already?

I can’t believe it. I just got called a “senior” by some new young pipsqueak of an associate pastor. I am seriously having a hard time with this. I am in my fifties, for heaven’s sake! I will begrudge you “middle aged”—but am I already a senior?! This is like calling a 30-year-old “past their prime.”

While I cringe at being referred to in this way, it does bring up some questions I don’t hear addressed very often—what does God consider “old age”? How does our role change as we get older? Is there some point at which we stop doing and start complaining how things aren’t as good as in the old days?

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Ewww, Gross!

Today I take a break from some heavy topics to settle an issue I’ve wondered about as long as I can remember.

For years as I was growing up, my mother cautioned me against perching my rear on a public toilet seat. It was unthinkable— you never knew who had been there before you. Why, one could pick up all sorts of horrible diseases!

This impression was heightened by those tissue paper toilet seat covers, available in all the finer public restrooms. Obviously, they wouldn’t be there if they weren’t needed for our safety. But they seemed so… flimsy. With my mind full of huge, anatomy-eating microbes, I wondered—could a simple layer of tissue really keep them at bay? Perhaps hovering was the better alternative.

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The Wages of Sin

I was reading my Google news feed this morning:

The sheer sinfulness implied by the headlines reminded me of a sermon I heard years ago. Entitled “How much is your sin going to cost me?”, it was preached by our former pastor, Ted Haggard, who would have done well to listen to himself. Ted related that he was an overseer for a large church in another state. The previous week, that church’s pastor had admitted to having an affair with another church member, and Ted had had to drop everything and go help the church deal with the crisis. As a result, he wasn’t here in town to perform a wedding for a couple who really wanted him to officiate. This other church’s pastor’s indiscretion had hurt a couple he didn’t even know.

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