Welcome to our Saturday breakfast gathering here at the iMonastery. Grab a cup of coffee, a muffin, a donut, a couple of biscotti, some bacon and eggs, toast, pancakes, waffles, Frosted Flakes, juice, and a bottle of Tums. Everyone comfy? Good. It’s time to ramble …
Our government is back to work. Are you happy? And what better way to end the long standoff than for the House of Representative’s stenographer to go off on a rantabout God and Freemasons? Is this a great country or what?
Ed Stetzer has an interesting take on the rhetoric espoused during the government shutdown. Painting with an extremely broad brush, Stetzer says most church-goers are Republicans and most non-church-goers are Democrats. The floor is now open for you thoughts.
Research by the Barna Group shows that many who take their smartphones or tablets to church are using them to “fact check”the preacher’s words during the sermon. What? Now preachers have to be accurate? Next they will be required to not take scriptures out of context…
For two years now I have been working on compiling Michael Spencer’s upcoming book: Reconsider Jesus – A fresh look at Jesus from the Gospel of Mark. On some recent Fridays we have been giving you some “sneak peeks” into this devotional commentary.
Initially a lot of effort was put into finding Michael Spencer’s written studies on Mark; transcribing sermons and bible studies; and sifting through blog entries that mentioned passages from Mark. These have all been collated into a matrix that takes each Bible passage and matches it up with all of Michael Spencer’s material. I had some wonderful help with the transcriptions from Internet Monk readers and commentators. Scott Lencke pitched in, and together we have been able to complete about nearly 20 “mini” chapters of the devotional commentary. Each “mini” chapter represents a subsection of a chapter of Mark.
The problem is that there are nearly 80 of these sections in total and we have hit a bit of a wall. My own personal life has been very exhausting with the recent death of my Father-in-law, and a job that continues to be very demanding of my time. (The job security on the other hand is very appreciated.)
I do want this project to keep moving forward, and so I think that it is time that I again enlisted the help of others in the Internet Monk community. I am looking for individuals who would like to help in compiling these sources into the devotional commentary. What I am looking is individuals who have good writing skills and have some significant amount of time on their hands that they can volunteer. Priority would be given to those who:
Have contributed through the comments at Internet Monk
Or have demonstrated excellence in writing in other ways.
Or have already helped in this project through the transcriptions.
I really think that this is an important project. Many people have emailed and said how much they want to see this completed. Are you able to help? If so, send an email to michaelspencersnewbook@gmail.com. I will provide some guidelines and some samples of some completed sections to help you in this task. I will continue to provide additional editing to ensure that the commentary has a consistent flow.
This is going to be an amazing commentary when it is finished. Let’s see if we can accomplish this together.
You don’t need to wonder about what my views are about John MacArthur and particularly about his latest “Strange Fire Conference.” Suffice it to say that I think the name of his teaching ministry — “Grace to You”— is rather a misnomer.
I’ve been aware of MacArthur for forty years now, and frankly, have never found his approach to Scripture or Christian faith appealing or convincing. He has said things I’ve appreciated over the years, but we have fundamentally different understandings of so many matters that I’ve pretty much just moved on and tend to ignore him. However, he has been getting quite a bit of buzz around the web for this latest conference and so I thought I’d give you the opportunity to check him out for yourself. He is a strong voice in certain segments of the conservative evangelical world, and he is unafraid to call out even those closest to him when he thinks they are going astray.
Here are a couple of paragraphs by Tim Challies summarizing John MacArthur’s opening message at his “Strange Fire Conference,” in which he denounces charismatic Christianity:
The charismatic movement continually dishonors God in its false forms of worship. It dishonors the Father and Son, but most specifically, the Holy Spirit. Many things are attributed to the Holy Spirit that actually dishonor him. In many places in the charismatic movement they are attributing to the Holy Spirit works that have actually been generated by Satan. Again and again MacArthur stressed the great danger for those who worship God flippantly. It is a tragic and agonizing irony that those who claim to be most devoted to the Holy Spirit are following patterns that blaspheme his name.
He paused to state that he is not discrediting everyone in the movement. He knows there are charismatics who desire to worship God in a true way. Yet the movement itself has brought nothing that enriches true worship. It has made no contribution to biblical clarity, biblical interpretation or sound doctrine. The church had all of these things long before the charismatic movement happened. A Christian today can go back and read the apostles, the Reformers and the Puritans and find richness, understanding and clarity; the charismatics have not added anything but chaos, confusion, misrepresentation and misunderstanding. People have been saved in charismatic churches, but nothing coming from that movement has been the reason they were saved. Nothing within the movement has strengthened the gospel or preserved truth and sound doctrine. It has only produced distortion, confusion and error.
You can follow the Live Stream of the conference itself HERE. and at the GTY Blog, where you will also find posts related to it.
I have a friend who used to summarize John MacArthur in these words: “He ain’t neutral about nothin’.” If you want to hear JM at his most “non-neutral,” this will probably be the conference for you.
Many of us look for role models to guide us in our lives, our work, our faith traditions. I like to honor people who defy categorization, who are thoughtful enough to recognize that life’s palette contains more than black and white, who are humble enough to bow before mystery, bold enough to embrace truth and wisdom wherever they may be found.
This is why I’ve appreciated people like Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Eugene Peterson, Marva Dawn, and Robert Webber. This is why I love Marilynne Robinson.
Robinson is the author of one of the best American novels ever written, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (see the IM review HERE). She has also written books of essays critiquing contemporary culture. Ms. Robinson is a mainline Protestant in the Calvinist tradition, a Congregationalist (United Church of Christ) who gets kudos from conservatives like Rod Dreher as well as words of gratitude from President Obama about the impact of her writings. Dreher says that, for him, “Robinson serves as a corrective from the leftish side of Christianity in the same way that Pope Francis does. That is, she challenges me to rethink my positions, and to go deeper into my understanding of my Christian faith and its implications for living in the world.”
Marilynne Robinson represents a voice that has been all but lost in the cacophony of the culture wars: that of a traditional and, in many ways conservative, mainline Protestantism. She embodies a form of Christian humanism that is rooted in solid theology, immersed in church tradition, and committed to both intellectual integrity and a compassionate society. This is a woman who takes Calvin, the Western heritage of Christian thought, and the straightforward words of Jesus in the Gospels seriously.
Long quotes her as saying:
Well, what is a Christian, after all? Can we say that most of us are defined by the belief that Jesus Christ made the most gracious gift of his life and death for our redemption? Then what does he deserve from us? He said we are to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. Granted, these are difficult teachings. But does our most gracious Lord deserve to have his name associated with concealed weapons and stand-your-ground laws, things that fly in the face of his teaching and example? Does he say anywhere that we exist primarily to drive an economy and flourish in it? He says precisely the opposite. Surely we all know this. I suspect that the association of Christianity with positions that would not survive a glance at the Gospels or the Epistles is opportunistic, and that if the actual Christians raised these questions those whose real commitments are to money and hostility and potential violence would drop the pretense and walk away.
Political conservatives find some of the conclusions she draws unacceptable. For example, this is her take on how Americans should view governing themselves and caring for the needy:
As Christians, we must be concerned with outcomes—are the hungry fed, are the naked clothed, are the sick visited. The more strategies that are brought to bear on the problem—which current policy or lack there of has made a pressing problem—the greater the likelihood that it will be dealt with as Christ, who identifies himself unambiguously with those in need, tells us it must be. There is no analogy to be drawn between a beleaguered community governed, in effect, by a hostile and alien occupation and a modern society that can indeed govern itself and care for its own as it chooses. If we were indeed a Christian country I think we would be making other choices than many self-proclaimed Christians are trying to impose on us now. No talk of compassion impresses me when the tone of all reference to those who are struggling is hostile and judgmental. And of course anyone can be open-handed. But, as an American, I want to be able to help an American child in Detroit, an American family in Alaska, because they are as much my own as my dear Iowans. The national government is without question the most efficient means for this kind of ‘redistribution,’ a word that distracts from the deeper fact that one naturally wishes to share one’s blessings with one’s own.
Now I happen to think that is a pretty brilliant analysis and an eminently sane point of view. Others may disagree, but as conservative Rod Dreher opines, “I totally respect that position, which is not to say I entirely agree with it. But see, Robinson and I could have a conversation, and work together, across political and religious lines.”
On the other hand, Robinson’s insistence that we do not abandon the intellectual and moral heritage of our forbears is thoroughly conservative and difficult for many liberals to swallow.
I think Dreher is asking the right questions when he reflects on the challenge of someone like Marilynne Robinson:
Question for the room: if you are someone who counts yourself as a conservative or traditionalist religious believer, are there any voices from the liberals in your faith that you take seriously, and listen to? Likewise, if you are a liberal within your faith tradition, are there any conservative or traditionalist voices that speak to you, and serve to challenge you in a constructive way? If so, who are they, and what is it about them that captures your attention and respect?
Let’s do all we can to avoid “hardening of the categories.”
The way of the righteous is like morning light that gets brighter and brighter till it is full day.
– Proverbs 4:18 (CEB)
Remember your creator in your prime, before the days of trouble arrive, and those years, about which you’ll say, “I take no pleasure in these”— before the sun and the light grow dark, the moon and the stars too, before the clouds return after the rain; on the day when the housekeepers tremble and the strong men stoop; when the women who grind stop working because they’re so few, and those who look through the windows grow dim; when the doors to the street are shut, when the sound of the mill fades, the sound of the bird rises, and all the singers come down low; when people are afraid of things above and of terrors along the way; when the almond tree blanches, the locust droops, and the caper-berry comes to nothing; when the human goes to the eternal abode, with mourners all around in the street; before the silver cord snaps and the gold bowl shatters; the jar is broken at the spring and the wheel is crushed at the pit; before dust returns to the earth as it was before and the life-breath returns to God who gave it.
– Ecclesiastes 12:1-7
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We waited in the hospital room: the old woman’s son, his wife, and me. She had died an hour before, after years of struggle with debilitating Alzheimer’s disease that had changed her personality, stolen her dignity, and ultimately taken her life.
We were waiting for her husband. They had been married nearly seven decades, tying the knot after he returned from doing his duty on a warship in the Pacific. For more than forty of those years he worked for a major corporation until deregulation broke it into a thousand little pieces. In their retirement years they traveled to or through nearly every state in the U.S.
It had been a good life, lived out mostly in America’s halcyon times. As parents they raised five children. They had buried two of them, one a victim of AIDS, the other of suicide, so they had explored the depths too. It might have been a mercy that she didn’t spend the last months of her life remembering them.
We were waiting at the hospital because her husband had left after visiting in the morning. It was now mid-afternoon, and when she died, they had to have him paged at the gym where he was on the elliptical machine. At nearly ninety years old.
When he arrived, I greeted him and handed him off to his family. He sat down, looked at her for a few moments, then put his head in his hands and wept. Son and daughter-in-law wrapped their arms around him, trying to find the words to comfort their dad. I moved back several steps and looked at the floor out of respect for their privacy. By nature a cool and practical man, his effusion lasted only a short time and then it was time to sit together and talk about what would come next.
The contrast could not have been more vivid. A man and his wife, two disparate depictions of old age. One filled with vigor, having a sharp mind and wit, the other a lifeless shell whose capacities for reasoning and relating had departed long ago.
The aging of the body bothers me. It is irritating and at times unpleasant. I don’t look forward to the physical changes we all know are coming. But the prospect of losing my mind terrifies me. Getting older ain’t for the faint of heart.
One of the primary realities underlying the current political turmoil we’re experiencing in our country is the prospect of a rapidly aging population. According to the U.S. Census Bureau:
Between 2010 and 2050, the U.S. population is projected to grow from 310 million to 439 million, an increase of 42 percent. …The population is also expected to become much older, with nearly one in five U.S. residents aged 65 and older in 2030.
As usual, it is beyond the scope of this author to discuss the public policy challenges of such a large elder population. I myself will be one of those senior baby boomers and so this whole subject is getting more personal every day. It is also of great pastoral concern to me. While others are thinking about the future of the church in terms of passing the faith on to coming generations (an important matter), I find that I think about what parts we older folks might play as “the elders” in our families, communities, and churches.
I heard about it through reading a column by Ronald Rolheiserthat is worth your while and which serves as a good introduction to the book. He responds to The Force of Character’s suggestion that it is not by accident that we humans ordinarily live long past our reproductive years. As Hillman puts it:
Instead, let us entertain the idea that character requires the additional years and that the long last of life is forced upon us neither by genes nor by conservational medicine nor by societal collusion. The last years confirm and fulfill character.
The aim of aging, in other words, is not dying. That is its natural biological end, of course. But perhaps “aging” is more than the degeneration of our physical beings. Maybe it is also meant to transform human character — as the aging process does certain fine wines.
Hillman is fighting what he sees as a pervasive materialistic “ageism” in our culture, where the breakdown of our physiological organisms is seen as the fundamental reality, while consideration and talk about “soul,” “character,” and “formation” have become “accessory decorations to lighten the despair and disguise the ‘real truth’ about old age.”
What will it be — the view of Proverbs or of Ecclesiastes (see the quotes above)?
An ever-growing light until the fullness of day?
Or “days of trouble,” when “the sun and the light grow dark” and we return to dust?
Of course, it may be both. In weeks to come, I will devote some time to reflecting on James Hillman’s book and his thoughts about aging. I think it’s rather important, don’t you? For unless something intervenes and cuts life short,
I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep. (Robert Frost)
Note from CM: I am so happy to announce that Adam McHugh will be writing a regular monthly post for us here at Internet Monk. Adam has been published in The Christian Century, The Washington Post, Leadership Journal, RELEVANT Magazine, Psychology Today, and Conversations Journal, as well as in other publications and websites. He is obviously a talented writer, and I have always felt a kindred spirit with him through his writings and our common ministry experiences. Check out his blog at Adam S. McHugh.
Recently, Adam had quite an interesting personal journey. Please welcome him to the IM community as he shares it today.
* * *
A Tale of Two Roads by Adam McHugh
This last season of my life is best captured by two roads. It sounds like a tired metaphor, except it’s not a metaphor. I have in mind two actual paths. One you drive and the other you walk.
The first road was a way of salvation for me for many years. In my spiritual life, the Damascus Road or the Road to Emmaus do not hold a candle to the 101 freeway. No one who has ever driven on the 101 near the 405 interchange would ever call it the road less traveled. But every few weeks, when the work of ministry had taken more than it had given, I would sneak off to the 101 North and drive up the California coast to the Santa Ynez Valley, the wine country just past Santa Barbara.
There is a point on the 101, right around Ventura, where your car emerges from the gripping congestion of greater L.A. and you are greeted by the Pacific Ocean lapping the central coast of California. As the road opens up, so does the landscape, and with the blue ocean on my left and the emerald hills on my right, my soul would take a deep breath. I called these jaunts “wine retreats,” though admittedly at first they weren’t particularly spiritual. I was parched from ministry and I hoped some good Pinot Noir would quench my thirst.
I had two things on my calendar yesterday besides my normal work day responsibilities: one was a dentist appointment and the other a church council (board) meeting. My visit to the dentist was just a cleaning and check-up (hallelujah). The council meeting involved dealing with our church budget for 2014.
I’ll tell you right from the start. I would rather have spent the whole day in the dentist chair enduring root canals, pulled teeth, and all manner of obscene torture than to attend a meeting where we talk about church budgets.
Yeah, I hate it that much.
Even so, overall the meeting turned out OK and we went home on good terms. Though we didn’t agree on everything, there was a general consensus going forward.
Your chaplain happens to be a hopeless idealist and has never cared much about money and practical realities. I won’t tell you about all the (many, many) times that has gotten me into trouble and hindered my leadership and effectiveness in various situations, but I readily admit the fact. When I went into ministry, I somehow simply believed that Christ had called me and would provide for my needs. I’ve never fully gotten beyond that childlike (and in some cases childish) idealism about Jesus and the nature of the Kingdom.
On church boards over the years, I’ve witnessed an ongoing conflict between idealists and pragmatists. You know, the people who say, “We only have a few loaves and fishes; how can these feed everybody?” and those who say, “Who cares how much we have? Let’s just start giving it away and see what happens!”
[If you haven’t guessed by now that “Field of Dreams” is my favorite baseball movie, you haven’t been paying attention. Of course, if you build it, they will come!]
Anyway, I got to thinking this morning about a verse on this subject that everybody knows, and it struck me that I’ve been misinterpreting it all these years. Now I’m starting to wonder if even a hopeless idealist like me has given these words their full value.
More self-indulgent thoughts on my life. Skip if that annoys you.
In the middle of this week, I heard some seriously bad health news about a good friend. Yesterday, I had to turn down an opportunity I really wanted to accept. Last night, I got a confusing and frustrating work-related letter. Today, I’ve really struggled to relate to the three worship experiences I’ve been part of. Tonight I received an email from a major blogger bluntly telling me about the depths of my “self-absorbed” character.
I could drive myself bonkers thinking about spiritual warfare on days like today. When I was a young Christian I imagined the devil tormenting me with all these difficulties while God stood by waiting for me to do the right thing, i.e. pray some prayer, take a bold stand, rejoice….something.
Now I believe this is simply life in the fallen world. It’s being human. It’s being 53. It’s being in relationships. It’s working with people. It’s writing. It’s just a day. In fact, this collection of blue days is so much better than most people’s lives it’s embarrassing to think about it.
In Galatians, Paul warns us not to grow weary in doing the right thing. If that’s the case, it’s also true that we should be on the watch for growing weary in the daily grind, the problem relationship and the unsolvable, uncomfortable problems that come along with staying with things.
And that’s right at the core of things. Staying with it.
I’ve stayed in ministry, and that means I’ve stayed around to see a lot of people be sick, suffer and some die. Hopefully, if I stay around for the whole show, I’ll see them again in much better shape and in much better circumstances.
I’ve stayed at one place for 18 years, and that brings the inevitable personal conflicts that simply won’t be resolved. I can waste my time explaining things for the 100th time, trying to fix things or I can just do my best, live, learn and keep my hand to the plow. There are a LOT of ways to look back when you are in long term ministry, including by looking forward or away. Don’t give up, even when the people around you are always going to be who they are without real change, and some of them just can’t like you and never will.
I’ve stayed with worship leadership and worship attendance when every ounce of my strength has told me to walk away for my own survival. So there are days that I am drowning in what evangelicals call “worship,” but that’s because I have chosen to stay and not quit. Not give up. Sometimes it’s a long time between gasps of air, but I’m still afloat.
I’ve stayed with writing and earned a place, opportunities and an audience. Along with that comes the feedback of people who don’t know me. The more I write, the more readers will write to me to say whatever they think. That’s the deal. Mentors tell me that it’s time to stop reading the mail. I don’t want to be an addict in a medium that thrives on addiction. But it’s hard to be that person who says “I don’t care what anyone thinks.” We’ll see. It’s not easy.
Staying the course doesn’t get any easier. Not at work, church, writing, life or family.
I’ll get up tomorrow and read my Psalms. Then I’ll share this prayer with my prayer group. It’s John Wesley’s “Covenant Prayer.”
I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed by you or laid aside by you, Enabled for you or brought low by you. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things To your pleasure and disposal. And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, You are mine, and I am yours. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, Let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.
Stay the course. Walk the path. Boast in the cross and the crucified one. Don’t look at what you’re gaining or losing today. Be determined to gain Christ in the end.
Love where you can. Forgive as you go. Humbly admit your errors. Seek other pilgrims.
Note from CM: It is my pleasure to welcome Chris Smith again, with another thoughtful article about how the ethos of life in a technological, mobile, fast-paced society is diminishing our ability to relate well with others. This piece was first posted on his blog, Slow Church. I’m eagerly awaiting his upcoming book of the same name.
* * *
The recent government shutdown, frustrating as it is, should not really come as all that big of a surprise.
In Western culture – and particularly in the United States – we have been cultivating habits for many decades that are dissolving our capacity to talk civilly and live peaceably with our neighbors, and especially our neighbors who differ from us in prominent ways: politics, economic status, race, sexual identity, etc. This history has been chronicled over the last thirty years by important books such as Habits of the Heart by the late Robert Bellah and others, Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam and more recently by Bill Bishop in The Big Sort.
In a similar vein, I have recently finished reading Jane Jacobs’s last bookDark Age Ahead(2004), which enumerates the ways in which she believes that our culture is on a fast track toward self-destruction. In the book’s introduction, Jacobs emphasizes that they defining mark of a dark age is forgetfulness: “During a Dark Age, the mass amnesia of a survivors becomes permanent and profound. The previous way of life slides into an abyss of forgetfulness, almost as decisively as if it had not existed.” There are indeed many things we have lost, or are losing, as a result of the long-nascent fragmentation of individualism: the ability to live healthily and fruitfully in community with others, civil dialogue, etc. Jacobs presciently describes our times: “Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor. Someone has aptly called self-imposed isolation a fortress mentality. … A fortress or fundamentalist mentality not only shuts itself off from dynamic influences originating outside, but also, as a side effect, ceases influencing the outside world.” Jacobs identifies five “pillars” of North American culture (she was living in Toronto at the time the book was written), that are essential to our culture and in serious decay:
1) Community and Family
2) Higher Education
3) The Effective Practice of Science and Technology
4) Taxes and Governmental Powers in touch with needs and possibilities
5) Self-policing by the Learned Professions
While others might point to other serious issues like “racism, profligate environmental destruction, crime, voters’ distrust of politicians, and the enlarging gulf between rich and poor,” Jacobs suggests that these undoubtedly key fragmentations follow from her primary five above. Despite the ominous title of the book, Jacobs does recognize the possibility that we might with significant attention and energy, be able to avert a dark age.
I also have been haunted recently by Alasdair Macintyre’s famous words from the close of his classic book, After Virtue:
What matters at this stage [in history] is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.
Macintyre’s words about the barbarians who “have already been governing us for quite some time,” make me chuckle uncomfortably, not only at their timeliness in this government shutdown, but also with the realization that our barbaric leaders in Washington were elected by us, and reflect who we are. Building on Macintyre, I have previously argued that local churches can be communities that either guide the larger culture to avert a dark age, or to survive through one.
My intent in talking about the possibility of a coming dark age is not one of fear-mongering. Jacobs emphasizes the massive inertia of a culture such as that of North America, and I agree with her; many of the fragmentations that have brought us to our current position have been snowballing for decades or even centuries, and thus there’s no sense in getting all worked up about our fate as a culture. But as Wendell Berry has argued in his recently televised interview with Bill Moyers (this segment starts at 24:30), the way out of this mess – dark age or no dark age – is to start living a different way in our own local communities. At its very heart, Slow Church is about challenging and empowering church communities not only to reorient themselves to a different way of being that is attentive to our many fragmentations, but to be catalysts in our neighborhoods, energizing change toward the health and well-being of their communities.
I hope that this government shutdown and the ever-impending possibility of economic default serve to get our attention. Our North American culture is unraveling, but the sort of change we need is not the top-down sort of bandages that Washington can offer (though those might just enable us to limp along until better alternatives emerge), but what we need most is radical transformation (the sort that St. Paul points to in Romans 12, for instance) as individuals, families, churches, neighborhoods, and – to the extent that all of these are transformed – the broader systems that sustain a culture. Such radical transformation, of course, although it might quietly take root in a relatively short time, will take a long time to mature and bear fruit, and likely the length of time will be proportional to the scope of the change (churches or neighborhoods will take longer to change than individuals and states will take longer than neighborhoods, etc.).
We are, in essence, the barbarians at the gates of our North American culture, but the question remains: will we prefer to continue in the barbaric ways that have emerged over the course of the modern age, or will we be converted to a way of life that seeks not to conquer – other humans, land or the mysteries of life – but to live peaceably with all humanity, and especially those who are closest at hand in our faith communities and our neighborhoods?
I have found myself starting most days by reading the homily delivered by Pope Francis during his daily Mass. This week he had this to say.
Are you able to find the Word of God in the history of each day, or do your ideas so govern you that you do not allow the Lord to surprise you and speak to you?
The surprises of God. Most of us would say we seek the Lord and want to do his will, but we want it according to our own script. When God comes to us in a way we didn’t anticipate, do we follow where he leads, or do we cling to what we think our lives should look like, what we think is normal and right?
Scripture is filled with stories of those who were surprised by God.
Abram was told to take his family and leave his homeland. Where was he to go? That was a surprise.
Jacob was running away from himself when he ran into the last person he was looking for—God himself. An all-night wrestling match with the Almighty was not on Jacob’s agenda.
Moses met God in a bush that burned but wouldn’t burn up, setting in motion a series of surprises that threw Moses’s life into chaos.
David was anointed king of Israel while he was just a lowly shepherd, the runt of the litter. He didn’t campaign for the job. God choose David because of what was on his inside, not his outside.
Jeremiah was called to preach a message no one wanted to hear. Responding to God’s surprise landed Jeremiah in prison and made him an outcast among his people.
Saul met the One he was persecuting in a flash of light that left him blind but, surprisingly, seeing.
Peter was busy trying to deal with thousands of new converts while protecting the faith from heresy when God showed him through a vision that the hated Gentiles were also welcome in the kingdom.
Welcome to our Saturday breakfast gathering here at the iMonastery. Grab a cup of coffee, a muffin, a donut, a couple of biscotti, some bacon and eggs, toast, pancakes, waffles, Frosted Flakes, juice, and a bottle of Tums. Everyone comfy? Good. It’s time to ramble …
(see the IM review 
.
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