The Guiness Book of World Records – I actually had one of those once. And truthfully, I didn’t think they published them anymore. I thought it was all online. But a quick search on eBay shows that for $22.00 you can buy a 2026 version, and for $10.00 buy one from 1976. I enjoyed reading the records of the tallest person, or the fastest car, or the largest animal in that bicentennial year. Now in our sestercentennial year, I only read about records online, usually in a back-page article in the news. Yes, in the last 50 years The Guiness Book of World Records chronicles not silly records necessarily, but shall we say, “creative” records. Like recently, a 90-year-old woman by the name of Ann Crile Esselstyn got in the book for holding a dead hang position for 2 minutes and 56 seconds, hanging with her bare hands from a horizontal pipe she had hung from the ceiling in a bedroom. Speaking of nonagenarians, an Australian man just got into the book for being the oldest person to become a grandparent for the first time, at 92 years and 209 days old. For those of you who are still waiting – there’s hope!

          And for the most “creative” right now? An Arkansas woman got in the book for wearing the most T-shirts in a half-marathon. OK. “How many?” you might ask. 55. “Why?” you might ask next. Well, she says to replicate the weight she has lost running for the last 17 years. I don’t know how much those 55 T-shirts weighed, and I don’t know what the rest of the 54 white T-shirts said, but the 55^th one simply read “Colossians 3:12.”

      Colossians 3:12 reads: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” I love that! Usually, you see people putting references up like John 3:16, or some other evangelistic verse. Meredith Smith, this woman from Arkansas, chose to ask us for kindness and gentleness. I think this should be the rallying call of Americans right now. Particularly in the United States today, Christians should call one another, not other people, to be compassionate, and kind, and humble, and gentle, and patient. That verse addresses Christians. It says, “as God’s chosen people.”  That would be us.

        Now, compared to some of the violent rhetoric we hear in the national news, we can easily say we’re not doing that. But I think God would call all of us to recall the conversations we have more locally – with our family and friends, and our Christian brothers and sisters. Would others characterize our words, all our words, as compassionate and kind? That’s what the apostle Paul calls us to in that letter to the Colossians. That’s what the Lord is calling us to, as American Christians.

Let’s work on it.

Trying to think of something to get me into that record book,

Craig

Finally, all of you be of one mind, having compassion for one another;
love as brothers, be tenderhearted, be courteous. 1 Peter 3:8 (NKJB)

              My parents designed and built a very modest (there was a half-inch gap between the front door and the floor, for instance) modular home in Costa Rica. It wasn’t fancy, but it was ours, and the next-door neighbors had a boy my age who became my good friend. I loved that house. The other day my Mom had us bring out four boxes of mementos from those years, a trip down memory lane that lasted several hours.

As you entered that very drafty front door, on the right was a low bookcase filled with a growing set of National Geographic magazines, various other books (you would find the World Book collection on another bookcase), and a guestbook. I always thought it awkward to ask people to leave a register of their presence at our house back then, now, I think it was brilliant.

          I didn’t flip though that little book. I ran my finger over each name, as if that would give me some physical contact with those people. So many people. A LOT of people came through our house. College students coming for Bible study. Missionaries coming for social gatherings. Family from the US. School friends of mine coming as adults to visit. People that I haven’t thought about in 50 years. People that were precious to us then, people that have indelible marks on me now.

          The book humbled me for a couple of reasons. One is that I didn’t remember that book at all through my own adult life, and hence we don’t have one. And two, my guest list would not be as large. Well… I don’t know, but still, the pages of that book created a “cloud of witnesses” (as the apostle Paul might call them) that flooded my memories and filled the house as I recalled some of them to my Mom and brother.

          From the book of Revelation, we learn that there is a “Book of Life.”  This book is inferred from the words of Jesus who said, “rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20b). My image of that book is directly informed by that guest book on the bookshelf by the front door of our home in Costa Rica. It’s not so much that we get to the gates of Heaven and St. Peter checks to see if God got around to writing our names in it like a guest list, but more that what St. Peter finds is my signature, my recording of my presence in the Kingdom. God invites us all to the party, but not all of us accept the invitation. (Remember the parable of the Wedding Banquet in Matthew 22?)  Some of us are too busy. Some of us RSVP but then don’t show up. I think the Book of Life is more akin to my parents’ guest book than the posted roster of those who made the final cut for the football team.

           Is your name written in the Book of Life? Mine is. I first signed it years ago, whether it was when I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer with my Dad, or when he baptized me, or when I went to camp and delighted in the proximity with the eternal. I don’t know when I first signed that book, but I know I can hardly recognize the penmanship it was so long ago.
          

Is your name in the Book?

Reminiscing,

Craig

P.S. This is NOT an announcement about signing the Connect Card. ��

“He who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name from the Book of Life; but I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels.” Revelation 3:5 (NKJV)

      A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of taking a group from our church to Orlando. I intended the trip to provide folks from the church a glimpse of the Children’s Home, a ministry of the United Methodist Church in Florida aimed at helping at risk children. They call it Residing Hope nowadays, and they indeed have a residential program close to Orlando in Enterprise, FL. We are great supporters here at First Boca.

       Because of when the program was to start on Thursday morning, I decided that the group should go up the night before and do something in Orlando that Wednesday afternoon. Which we did. We went to the Titanic Experience.

       If you haven’t been to that exhibit, let me tell you just a tidbit about it. One wreck diving crew got the license (I don’t know who gives that permission) to dive the wreck and bring up from the Titanic whatever they could salvage. The rationale goes that the Titanic is breaking apart, and at some point, there will be nothing to salvage, so do it while you can! So anyway, one group got to pick items from the Titanic, but under the condition that they could not sell any of them. They brought thousands and thousands of items up from the depths of the ocean. All kinds of things, including pieces of the actual ship, and even things like wrapped postcards that somehow were still intact. It’s pretty incredible. The only way they can monetize their work is to put on these exhibits and to sell coal. They brought up a ton of coal. There was a large piece of coal in the Gift Shop, with a $500,000 price tag on it. Yes, a half a million dollars! Wow!

       I want to share one memory from that experience with you. They had recreated the radio room. They had set up a first-class bedroom suite. They also had recreated a dining room. And after touring all of that, you went to an upper area where music was playing. Having grown up in church, I recognized the tune. It was a hymn, played by a string ensemble. The hymn? “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”  The musicians (and they had a list of their names, none of whom were invited into the lifeboats) were asked to play “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as people were plunging into the frigid waters–and as they approached their own demise on the sinking ship.

       I felt torn between thinking it incredibly ironic and, conversely, perceiving it comforting that they played that song. Many of those people, whether they knew it or not, were getting “nearer to God” that night. That might be construed as ironic. But the first verse of that hymn says:

E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,
Still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee.

I think of two things when I read that. My Mom, approaching her last days on this earth, expressed to me her gratitude for the beauty and the grace that God had surrounded her with all her life, even to the very end. I want to say, like her, that “even if it’s a horrible death that’s before me, still my song shall be one of desiring God.”  My Mom is modelling that for me. But as we celebrate Easter, my other thought is that Jesus, as he was raised on that Cross, in His final words said, “into Thy hands I commit My spirit” (I’d never noticed the Trinitarian aspect of that statement!). Jesus trusted God not to the end, put through death. Death was just one middle point in His ministry. And we are to trust, and love, and praise God not to the “end of our days,” but all through the days of this life, and into the next. That’s why Jesus died. To conquer death. And so that we could sing before it, in the midst of it, and Hallelujah!, after it, “Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee.”

Closer to the Father because of the Son,

Craig

Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship
in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God
in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought
near by the blood of Christ. Ephesians 2:12,13 (NIV)

       Moses, in Exodus 2:22, said that he had become “a foreigner in a foreign land.”  Those words came to me the other day as I accompanied my brother and my son to a car show. I go to car shows on a regular basis, but none like this. Every car in this show, and there were hundreds, had been “slammed.”  I mean every one of them. Slamming a car means that you cut out the wheel wells, lower the geometry of the suspension so that the body of the car can rest on the ground, and then you put airbag suspension in them so that you can raise them enough to get on the road.  And then lower it again when you park.

       Oh, and every other car also had a bad case of negative camber. Do you see why I thought myself a foreigner in a foreign land? What does “negative camber” even mean? Negative camber is when the top of your car tire is closer to the car than the bottom of the tire is. Your tires wear a lot on the inside edge when this happens. Normal people go to Tire Kingdom to have that fixed. These people do it intentionally and in exaggerated ways to make the car look cartoonish.

        So here I am, a foreigner in a foreign land, and I find out that a big YouTuber car guy was there too. He is a native to this foreign land, I am not. I hadn’t even heard of him. He does one thing on YouTube, and one thing only. He stands next to a line of guys in their cars and takes a picture of a car, goes to the car behind it, and asks three questions. The first question is (as he shows the driver a picture of the car in front of him): “How would you rate this car from 1 to 10?”  Then he asks the driver how he would rate his own car. And finally, he asks a very insightful question: “How do you think other people would rate your car?”  He has done over 2000 of these. My brother got interviewed in his Toyota MR-2, I only got schooled in foreign car culture.

      I eventually got back to my own “Country” and looked up that YouTube guy. One or two videos went a long way for me. But the questions lingered. What if the videos weren’t about cars but about Jesus? What if somebody showed you a picture of Jesus, and asked you to rate how good Jesus was? And then they asked you how good do you think YOU are? And THEN they asked you how good do you think other people think you are? Or it could be something more vain: perhaps they show you a picture of the person in front of you and ask you to rate their looks. Then they ask you to rate your looks. Then they ask you how you think other people would rate your looks. What is the “delta” (as the engineers like to say) between the two numbers?

      Jesus had little patience for people whose delta (difference) was large. To the Pharisees, he said: “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” (Matthew 23: 27) Ouch! They put on airs and thought of themselves 10 out of 10. But Jesus, and I would imagine most other people, could see right through that veneer. The “delta” was great between what was on the outside and what really was on the inside.

     All of us would rate our cars, or ourselves, highly. And some might agree with our assessment, and others not. Our culture teaches us to not care what others think of us. And while we don’t want to live a life trying to impress others and begging them to like us, sometimes putting ourselves in the shoes of others and focusing back on ourselves is a good exercise.

I want there to be continuity between what I think of myself, what I know of myself, and what others see in me, too. That kind of integrity is important. And matters to Jesus.

Back home,

Craig

Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but whoever takes crooked paths will be found out.
Proverbs 10:9 (NIV)

Starting a new tab in Firefox, I landed on a “news” item that touted: “The weirdest things people have seen on Google Maps.”  Now, I like Google Maps app and use it all the time. And I haven’t really seen that many “weird” things on there, except blurred people and an occasional blurred house. But apparently some people look hard for these things. Things like a guy, dressed in the same clothes, holding the same camera – in two different States! What are the odds of that!?

       In another shot, which I really think merits a follow up, the Google car passed one of those radar detector signs that first state the speed limit and then post yours. Driving in a 25 mph School Zone, the Google car pictured itself going 32 mph.

Can you say self-incriminating?

       Another funny one was a screenshot of a little development in Nova Scotia. Off of Nova Scotia Trunk Highway 7 is, and I looked this up to verify it, a little development consisting of one street off of the Highway, and two little streets off of that. A small development. The street coming in is “This Street.”  The first street off of that is “That Street.”  And you guessed it; the second street is “The Other Street.”  As Larry the Cable Guy would say: “That’s funny right there, I don’t care who you are.”

       Other pictures showed the inconsistencies of the algorithms at Google, where some faces get blurred, like the Statue of Liberty, and some others are not. Sometimes, even pets get blurred and some don’t. In one, you can read the airline name of a plane that photobombed the satellite imaging somewhere in Mongolia if I remember correctly. In the rest of the world, it’s remarkable how you don’t see planes – there are a lot of planes out there!

        I smiled at these things because, well, it’s nice to know that the computer and the algorithms are not perfect. To be human is to be flawed. Machines can be sterile, but humans aren’t. If we were all perfect, we would all be the same. The idiosyncrasies we develop, the imperfections we find in ourselves, the mistakes we have made along the way, give us character. That truth not only makes us human but makes us likeable. People that pass themselves on as perfect lose credibility for me.

        Now, God wants us to be perfect (Matthew 5:48). And I, we, aspire to do that. And someday, in heaven, we all will be. And what a day of rejoicing that will be! But in the meantime, we need to appreciate one another’s character, one another’s imperfections.

        In Galatians 6 the Apostle Paul said, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”  I think bearing one another’s burdens often means dealing, in a positive way, with the idiosyncrasies of others. What burdens one person is not necessarily what burdens another. I suppose in illness we can find uniformity – but even there, how one person deals with the adversity of physical ailments may differ from the way another one does. Or how burdensome a particular job, or financial constraint, or spouse or… how burdensome something can feel for me may be different than the way you deal with it, and together, we can make those rough places in life plain (to misquote Isaiah).

         Every person we meet has as many idiosyncrasies as we do. Let’s give each other grace in that. And stand together as brothers and sisters in it. It’s funny how the glitches of a computer got me to that thought. One of my eccentricities, I suppose.

Wishing you a smile today,

Craig

And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted,
help the weak, be patient with them all. 1 Thessalonians 5:14

In Galatians 6:2, Paul says the following: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ.”  I think that’s a beautiful description, and call, of Christians living in community. When one person finds themselves burdened with grief, the community expresses their love by visiting with that person, praying for that person, and bringing them meals that they might otherwise skip because of their grief.

I gave just one example. You could come up with three more, I’m sure. “Carrying each other’s burdens” can be expressed in a million ways, sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes spiritual. In England, however, they’ve carried this to a whole new and silly level. It’s called the Annual Wife-Carrying Race.

While only in its 18^th year, the idea of the race comes from 19^th Century lore in Finland that says that gangs would raid villages and pillage women, carrying them out on their shoulders. So, this race recreates that image, which (and you might need to look this up) looks sillier than you think. Everyone enjoys a piggy-back ride. I enjoyed them as a kid and enjoyed carrying my kids as an adult.  But no, wife-carrying does not work that way. It appears that weight distribution happens better when the wife is inverted. Her legs stick out in front of her hubby, and her head is, well, depending upon her height, around his, um, waist.

So, while her head is throbbing from hanging upside down, and bouncing from his, um, back, she has the horrifying job of hanging on for dear life as they race up a hill. The guy has to run both and carry the weight, holding on tightly to her legs sticking out in front of him. Talk about taking the vow “to have and to hold” literally! Oh dear!

This past week, the race was in the English countryside, and a Finnish couple won first place. The runners-up (so to speak) were a British couple who will represent England in Finland’s race in July. And, this is just for free, you need to know that the race happened in Dorking, Surrey. Indeed!

Seriously now, St. Paul’s idea of carrying one another’s burdens gains some insight from this race. Let me share some thoughts:

1. Carrying one another’s burdens can be hard.

2. It can also be fun.

3. I think particularly as Americans, where we have been taught to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps,”

     receiving help can feel awkward. Being carried can often, but incorrectly, feel demeaning.

4. When the whole community gets involved, cheering the grace (I use the word only in a theological sense) on,

           the load lightens and the pace quickens.

Yes, there are lessons to be found in just about everything under heaven. Even in a wife-carrying race in Dorking, England. Let us be ever learning and uplifting.

Praising the One who has lifted all our burdens,

Craig

Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others,
as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.1 Peter 4:10

The El Rio Pathway provides me with a lot of thinking time. Lately, I’ve been spending a decent amount of time on it. It takes me a good while to walk the 12 miles or so from my house to its northern end where it has crossed Congress twice.

I have labelled different parts of my walk. There’s the hospital segment by Boca Regional. Then there’s the FAU segment (which I want to share a thought about), and then the intersection of the Tri-Rail station, I-95 and Yamato, all of which are bypassed by the Pathway. And then there’s the stretch to Costco (you never pass up Costco), and finally the Big Bend.

For the last couple of weeks, before we had these rains, the canal that gives El Rio its name started slowing down. Usually, a nice flow of water cascades over a little dam along the FAU segment of the walk (think 4^th Avenue and about NW 17^th Street). But as I walked from day to day, the cascade became a trickle, then just a trickle on one side, until last week when the flow had stopped altogether.

That made for a calmness reminiscent more of a pool than a river. I smiled at the tranquility; I think peaceful waters soothe us as humans. But it told me that drought season had started visiting us. And indeed, we had fires out west that first week when I noticed this. I started wondering what tranquil waters meant. Calmness is one thing, stagnation is another. Drought even more. What do March and April have in store for us? Is this exposed little dam a sign? And what does this drought-induced pond say spiritually? I’d run out of philosophical inquiry by Spanish River Boulevard.

On the way back, at that complex intersection where you go under the train tracks, I-95 and Yamato, you actually walk on a section of the path that is below the water level of the canal. It would have been great if they had built the retaining wall out of glass so that you could see the fish go by (or iguanas more likely). In this section of the walk, the wind had picked up a little, and the flow of the ripples on the water flowed up stream. The water was moving in the wrong direction! Suddenly I engaged the philosophical inquiry again. (This inquiry quickly ended at Spanish River again, just coming southbound this time).

The tranquil waters, or shall we call them stagnant waters, were now flowing in the wrong direction, subject to the whim of the wind. Instead of going nowhere, the water was going backwards. And you know that it could not really flow backwards, at least not for long. Sans the power of the water flow, the pooled water just moved back and forth at the whim of the wind.

I think this happens to us. If we don’t follow in the flow of God’s grace and His will, if we lose the power of the Holy Spirit moving us forward, we trickle down to stillness like the little pool down by FAU. And while it can look tranquil, it leads to stagnation and even to going in the wrong direction. Remember what Dr. Livingston said? “I don’t mind moving as long as it’s forward.”  If we stop moving forward, we have started the process of moving backwards. That is not God’s plan for us. That simply is not the best for us–we are made to move forward. Physically that’s true, even if our goals change, and it’s also true spiritually. Job 17:9 says it succinctly: “The righteous keep moving forward, and those with clean hands become stronger and stronger.”  It’s important to keep this axiom before us, regardless of our age, our health, our status, anything. The righteous keep moving forward.

This week the rain has started the flow again in the canal. Praise God!

Putting my walking shoes on,

Craig

 “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”  Isaiah 43:18-19