Beneath The Dirty Hood

10 Things...

...a janitor can teach you about leadership.  It's kinda long.  I read the whole thing.  Had to.  (thanks dalythoughts.)

A lot better at talking than walking, and now...

Gee, I guess we're in this mood today.  Joel Belz (HT WorldMagBlog):

Now Mr. Barna and his number crunchers say that a whole lot of Christians aren't even bothering to talk with all that much seriousness. His recent survey focuses on what kinds of goals parents are setting for their children—not, mind you, on how well they're doing achieving those goals—but just describing the goals themselves. Even on that front, Christians come across as timid and flabby.

...wouldn't you think that people who have tasted...mercy for themselves would list as a primary goal for their children that very same experience? The fact that they don't makes you wonder how real their own experience of God's goodness has really been.

What about the change?

Ron Sider and "The Evangelical Scandal" (from ChristianityToday):

I find it incredibly ironic that in the last few months, the importance of political life nurturing moral values and wholesome families and so on is center stage. And then you have this astonishing data that evangelicals live just like the world in terms of divorce. And it's incredibly ironic that one of the issues—and one I agree vigorously with—is concerned with how public life affects marriage. I'm in favor of the marriage amendment. But at precisely a point in time when our political rhetoric as evangelicals has focused on that, we have to face the fact that we're not any different from the world. And that's just incredible hypocrisy and it undercuts our message to the larger society in a terrible way.

And...

I would think that evangelicals would want to get biblical and define the gospel the way Jesus did—which is that it's the Good News of the kingdom. Then we see that it means that the way to get into this kingdom is through unconditional grace because Jesus died for us. But it also means there's now a new kingdom community of Jesus' disciples, and that embracing Jesus means not just getting fire insurance so that one doesn't go to hell, but it means embracing Jesus as Lord as well as Savior. And it means beginning to live as a part of his new community where everything is being transformed.

One of my favorite examples is the story of Zacchaeus. He is involved in social sin as a wicked tax collector. When he comes to Jesus, he gives away half his goods and pays back everything that he's taken wrongly. Jesus says at the end of the story, "Today salvation has come to this house." There's not a word in the text about forgiveness of sins. Now, I'm sure Jesus forgave the rascal's sins; he clearly needed it. But what the text talks about is the new transformed economic relationships that happen when Zacchaeus comes to Jesus.

Fond of Jesus

Who said this and who was she talking about?

And you know it's funny because he ends all his speeches with "God Bless". He studied; you know, he was an altar boy. He was considering becoming a missionary. He's read the Bible cover-to-cover twice. He's been saved seven times, including twice by Billy Graham.

Find out and read about her spiritual journey here (scroll down).  She never mentions holiness or sin or guilt or forgiveness or the cross, or even the idea of those things, but then maybe I'm one of those "linear fundamentalists" she refers to.

What we want...(is not far from each one of us)

Peggy Noonan ("Why They Ran," April 21, 2005), saying more than she may realize, on the crowds running to St. Peter's Square when the "we have a new pope" bells began to ring:

People are complicated. You can hit distracted people with all the propaganda in the world, you can give it to them every day in all your media, and sometimes they'll even tell pollsters they agree with you. But something is always going on in their chests. Some truth is known there; some yearning lives there. It's like they have a compass in their hearts and turn as they will, this way and that, it continues to point to true north.

We want a spiritual father. We want someone who stands for what is difficult and right, what is impossible but true. Being human we don't always or necessarily want to live by the truth or be governed by it. But we are grateful when someone stands for it. We want him to be standing up there on the balcony. We want to aspire to it, reach to it, point to it and know that it is there.

I need a little difficulty and suffering

From Hungry Heart  #4/20:

It is well to remember that the deepest and truest spiritual qualities are not learnt or established in us by our happy or enjoyable times, but in the difficult ones! There is nothing wrong in times of great joy and spiritual blessing; in fact we long for more of them, and look back perhaps to some days of much blessing in our lives or in the work of the Lord; but in the securing of Christ in greater measure in our lives, we find that it is by the things which we suffer that we learn most. So let us give thanks for the joyful days, and learn all that the Lord intends by the days of waiting and difficulty.

Little House liked by Cheri

The Little House on the Prairie mini-series on ABC wraps up Saturday.  Cheri Pierson Yecke is getting a lot out of it.  (HT PowerLine)

Just as intriguing as the historical context of this story are timeless lessons that can apply across the ages.

For example, the Ingalls family comes upon a lone man and his wife whose horses have run away. They are in the middle of the prairie, miles from anywhere -- yet they refuse to leave their belongings. They would rather die with their possessions than abandon them.

Contrast this with a scene near a raging creek where material possessions litter the shore -- items that had to be left behind due to their weight and non-utilitarian value. If something weighs down the wagon and has no practical value, it has no place on the prairie.

These two scenes juxtapose differing philosophies of life and tell a somber story: If we choose to take a chance on a new life, then we must abandon those items that will not help attain that goal -- be they a pump organ, a trunk of books, or a roll-top desk. If we stubbornly cling to that which does not support our goal, we will perish.

In addition to the lessons to be taken from pioneer life are the humbling revelations that come from looking at Laura's life.

When we visited Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Mo., where Laura and her husband Almanzo Wilder settled in 1894, we saw a photograph of the two of them in front of their car. Yes -- their car. That is when it hit me -- the changes that they saw in their lifetimes are nothing short of astonishing.

Almanzo was born in 1857 and died in 1946. Think about the span of this man's life: He was born before the Civil War but lived to see the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Laura was born in 1866 and died in 1957. She was born during Reconstruction, traveled in a covered wagon, and then died in the same year that Sputnik I was launched.

During their lifetimes they went from meeting native Indians and seeing wild buffalo to seeing two world wars and witnessing the introduction of electricity, the telephone, penicillin, movies, television, air travel and space travel.

Two humble lives, seemingly simple and uncomplex as they were lived, serve as yardsticks measuring the changes that swept across America. This realization forces the question: Will the changes we see over our lifetimes be just as profound?

On the team? Wear the uniform.

MarkDRoberts doesn't agree with Roman Catholic doctrine, but he also doesn't agree with the illogical thinking of some of the critics of the new pope (HT HughHewitt):

Throughout the last few days, as the talking heads buzzed about Ratzinger's potential papacy, and during several news reports today, I was struck by the way many people in the media describe Ratzinger's efforts to reign in "loose-canon" Catholic theologians. They tend to use words like "narrow," "extreme," "ultra-conservative," and "divisive" to characterize Ratzinger's behavior. His cardinal sin – from a postmodern cultural perspective – is expecting Roman Catholic teachers to teach Roman Catholic doctrine, at least when it comes to major beliefs and hot-button issues. It's almost as if secular commentators envision the Roman Catholic Church as a modern university where the tenured professors can say anything they want without accountability. This seems to be both naïve and sadly out of touch with Roman Catholic reality.

Consider a few analogies. If a Vice President for Apple starts publicly touting the benefits of Windows, should she keep her job? If a professional baseball player says, "Hang the rules. I'm going to take steroids anyway," should he be allowed to keep on playing without reprisals? If a university professor plagiarizes the research of others, should there be no consequences? If a reporter for the New York Times makes up facts in news stories, should that reporter keep his job? Every company, every organization, every institution has basic values and rules of operation. If people within that organization choose to reject the values or break the rules, then they are disciplined, and sometimes that discipline includes being excluded from the organization. To be sure, this sort of procedure can be abused by people in power. Sometimes it is vengeful and unjust. But sometimes it is both fair and just. If you're going to be a part of an institution that has clear values and rules, you must expect to live within them.

Restoring what the locusts have eaten

In Why Do Pastors Leave The Ministry? Todd Rhoades on Monday Morning Insight reproduces the brutally honest and bitter story of an ex-pastor.  One of the comments to that story gives a refreshing picture of restoration:

I retired from ministry at age 37 after planting a church, watching it grow to 2,000+ adults in four years, and then blowing out my life due to a moral failure.

And then God did the unthinkable. He restored my wife and family, gave me the stength to walk through a two year restoration process that ended in a new 'fit for ministry' declaration, and yet didn't put me back into a role at a church.

He did put into a my life a number of men that are daring to the impossible. These are men who are leaving (or being fired from) ministry roles at churches and are having to find creative ways to financially provide for their families.

We are beginning to really walk together around the Person of Jesus and simply love one another. We are also beginning to invest our lives into a few men that Jesus has brought into our lives and doing the same thing with them. We call it an Acts 29 experience - watching Jesus at work in the lives of His people.

And the best part - we're not down on the church. We love the church - she's the bride. We love her people. We feel called to bless and strengthen her people. Problem is, there are many of her people that often don't go to 'church' on the weekend anymore because they're hungry for something real, vulnerable, and transforming. And that doesn't happen for the most part at 'church'. It happens as Jesus gets hold of our lives and teaches us to really love Him and love one another.

So we all still go to 'church' on Sundays, but we use it as a time to orbit and pray that God will bring us to others who are hungry to be agents of change in our world. And we begin to teach and equip people to really walk with Jesus daily, walk with a few others in their life, and then to trust and wait on Jesus for direction and instructions on how to minister in His Name each day.

I'm having more fun than I've had in a long time. I'm not called pastor anymore, but I minister more effectively than maybe ever before.

"The things that stick with you..."

TJ at I Should Have Stayed Home describes the one incident that will stay with him from his time in Iraq...

It was in the first weeks after I got here. I was walking down a hallway in what was then the CPA headquarters, at about 8 in the evening.  There was an American Colonel staring out of the window at the moon...