Do you have a favorite saying?  A quote from somebody that just resonates in you for one reason or another?  I’d love to hear it at some point.

The first one that I adopted only makes sense in Spanish.  One of my best friends came up with it when we were kids, and I decided that I would remember it.  It goes like this: “Talvez no somos machos, pero somos muchos.”  In English that means, “we may not be
machos (and all that connotes – strong, dominant, aggressive) but we are many.”  If you look back “machos” and “muchos” only differ by one vowel.  It’s a colloquial way to say that there is strength in numbers.  I think this is my motivation to join others so they will be strong in their causes, and the need for others to join mine.  The “me and God constitute a majority” doesn’t work for me.

There are others for me – like “it’s easier to steer a moving object.”  Think steering a car that has lost it’s power steering – it’s a lot easier to turn the steering wheel if you get the car moving, even if just a little bit.  Spiritually this makes sense to me.  If I just sit on the couch, God will have a much harder time to direct me than if I am out and about doing things, availing myself to the direction of God.

This week I have heard two more, one that’s just funny, and the other helpful.  One was a quote from John Glenn – “all I could think of as I was hurling through space in that rocket was – every component in this rocket was provided by the lowest bidder.”  That’s funny right there.  The other one came from a guy who stood up to give a speech at the American Association of Caregiving Youth fundraiser I was invited to.  The guy stood up and said a few things and then quoted a friend who had said about speeches: “Be bold, be brief, and be gone.”

I like that one.  As a preacher, there is always a tension between doing justice to the text and being brief, between being thorough and staying within people’s attention span.  Conciseness is not always clarity, so, what do you do?  Be bold.  But be brief.  And when you’re really done, be gone.  There’s nothing like a dramatic and timely exit.  There’s a great story about George Washington on that one that I’ll tell you sometime.

Jesus had the ability to turn a phrase that people could not forget.  He could conjure up a word picture that would stick with people.  We call these now Bible verses.  But they were helpful phrases that turned into sayings that became guiding rules in our lives.  When he told Nicodemus that he must be “born again,” those two words together have defined Christianity.  They have turned people’s lives around.  And like that, we could fill a book with His sayings.  Oh wait, somebody already did.  They’re called “the Gospels.”

Are any of your favorite sayings Bible verses?  Some of mine are: “Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added onto you” is one of mine.  We could share these together for a long time, I’m sure.  I think we should work on these, because
people remember us by them.  What phrase do you often repeat?

Working on the wordsmithing,

Craig

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.  Psalm 19:14

The other day I read a term or word that I had never seen before.  Now, there are plenty of words that I haven’t heard before, but this one sounded funny, was being quoted from a famed writer (Annie Dillard), and one which the context gave me little cue as to what it meant. When I went to look it up, I was genuinely surprised at what I found.

Here’s the quote I read: “We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God.”  It comes from her book Holy the Firm, which I intend to read at some point.

OK, so what’s a hurdy-gurdy?  I didn’t even fancy it a “thing” when I looked it up, but it turns out to be a musical instrument.  Someone, in the 10^th or 11^th Century, turned a violin into some kind of mechanical organ with a crank making a wheel turn that serves as a bow to three strings, which in turn are pressed mechanically by stops controlled by a keyboard – yeah, you need to look it up to better understand the contraption. It can sound like bagpipes, or a Middle Eastern stringed instrument.  It’s very unique, and also not what this article is about.

The quote intrigued me more.  Annie Dillard, while an amazing writer, is not a Christian writer.  So, while lyrical, it’s not devotional material.  But I read it as a Christian, and want to think about it with you. Do we not control some of the switches in our lives?  I think God is eternal, omniscient and omnipotent.  That means that things must be predestined.  So maybe no.  But we have been created with agency, will and power.  That means there is free will.  I think we toggle many switches in our lives, we are just not the makers of the switches, nor the only ones with access to them.  We, and God, are not the only ones who can derail the train tracks of our lives.

The hurdy-gurdy fascinated me, I enjoyed its ability to drone and play melodies at the same time, but I would never, ever, fall asleep to it.  Its very name connotes uproar or disorder in Old English.  I can’t sleep to anybody’s hurdy-gurdy.  But when we wake, do we wake to the “silence of God?”

Godly silence is a gift.  Godly silence drowns out the noises of this rat race we call life.  It mutes the conversations in my head, whether self-defeating or beneficial.  Think Elijah – God was heard in a “still, small” voice, not in a loud hurricane or earthquake or fire (1 Kings 19:11-13).  A calming silence is a gift of God.

But did Annie Dillard mean that God doesn’t speak, that when we wake all we hear from God is… crickets?  Neither in life nor in death is God silent. God speaks in the beauty of one Bird-of-Paradise flower against the backdrop of a jungle of green (Romans 1:20).  All the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1).  God is anything but silent.  And God speaks to us, we are not alone.

Check out the rest of her paragraph (and listen for how lyrical it is!): “And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home.”

I think the time to “break our necks for home” is now.  Now is the time to run towards Jesus at a neck-breaking speed.  That home that we run towards is the foot of the cross.  There we find that God is love.  There we find that God is involved in our affairs and cares so deeply for us that He died on a cross to redeem us. There we find, not a body, but the darkness of the holes left by nails that could not contain Him.  O the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free, rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me.

Run, Christian, run!

Listening for God,

Craig

The LORD loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love.  Psalms 33:5

A friend of mine is a pastor in Okeechobee, FL.  Because of him, I have paid more attention to Okeechobee than I would otherwise just driving from one side of state to another on State Road 70.  Okeechobee is a bigger town than just a drive-through might belie.  And it has a lot of lake front; but you can’t see the lake from there.  That seems kind of weird.

You know the Hoover Dam?  Lake Mead was created when they built this humongous wall called the Hoover Dam on the South end of a portion of the Colorado River.  Since the river flowed down a canyon, building the wall (it’s hard to think of the Hoover Dam as a wall, but it is a REALLY big wall!) started backing up water up the backside of the wall, and up the ravine, and then back up the Colorado River.

Lake Okeechobee doesn’t have a dam.  It has a dike, a dike that pretty much runs all around it.  When I started discovering the town of Okeechobee, I realized that the dike is all the way North in Okeechobee, as it is all the way on the South side.  Rather than a dam creating a lake, this dike forms a ring around the lake, creating protection for the flat and low land of South Florida.  The South end of the lake is actually a little higher than the North End which sounds counterintuitive. 

Two things about the dike. One is that it is preventative (versus the Hoover Dam that creates a lake). The ring around Lake Okeechobee is meant to contain the lake. The second thing is, you know the name of the dike? The Herbert Hoover Dike. Not unlike the Dam in Nevada. Interesting, right?

Anyway, when my friend Don told me that the dike circles the lake, I started thinking of a flood, like Noah’s from last Sunday. The thing would fill like a bathtub.  So whether you were in Okeechobee on the North side or Clewiston on the South, living on the downside of the dike would be worrisome.  And they all do worry about that, particularly when lake levels are high, like they have been lately.

Floods are devastating.  Read up on that for Lake Okeechobee.  Or look at Dubai, of all places!  We create dams and levees and dikes (would somebody please tell me why they call it the Okeechobee dike and not levee?) to mitigate against rising waters.  They protect us, or are intended to so anyway (think New Orleans during Katrina).

I think our social and personal lives, and our spiritual lives, come with floods.  Sometimes life can overwhelm us.  Sometimes we lose friends and family, sometimes several at one time, and grief can overwhelm us.  Sometimes the dark thoughts of depression overwhelm us.  Our heads can doubt God, or Scripture, or the church, and our souls can get overwhelmed in the process.  The floods can come from many sources.

At the risk of taking forever here, let me introduce one more flood control.  A canal.  The Okeechobee Canal was built to raise boats on one side of Lake Okeechobee, and to lower them on the other side.  The locks are worth visiting.  There are five locks to accomplish this.  Building canal locks and accompanying dams are complicated, but important.  I think we need spiritual canals.  We need multiple ways of lifting us up.  Scripture, prayer, worship, fellowship, study, all elevate us from the depressed states we can find ourselves in.  And in the other direction, when the floods get deep, those same “locks” of Scripture and the like, will ease us back down to where we need to be.

My prayer is that today in church, or anytime during the week, that you will find the music that elevates you to a healthy and delightful relationship with the Lord.  I pray that Scriptures read, and word proclaimed, will do the same for you.  And I pray you are building the locks strong, because you know what, rains come.

Building my house on the rock,

Craig

The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him, and delivers them.  Psalm 34:7