Alone Time With God

It’s been a couple weeks since I wrote anything on this blog. I have a good excuse, I really do.

Two weeks ago I took four days to backpack into the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area of West Virginia to spend some alone time with God. The next week Paula took five days to go to a silent retreat at a Trappist Monastery to spend some alone time with God. I’m not quite sure how Paula’s absence that second week kept me from writing my blog, but somehow it seemed to.

But what I want to talk about is alone time with God. It’s absolutely vital, and in our modern society it’s very hard to get enough of it.

Of course, it doesn’t need to be four or five days at a time. A little time every day, a little more time once a week, can make a huge difference.

Writer Henri Nouwen tells of the time he visited Mother Teresa. He spent quite some time telling her all the concerns he had about his life and his spirituality. Her response was simply this: “Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything which you know is wrong, you will be fine.”

Wow!

The first part reminds me of St. John of the Cross, who would spend hours just “gazing.”The second part reminds me of John Wesley’s definition of Christian perfection: to reach a place where you are not aware of committing any known sin, and everything you do is done in love. Put them together and I think Mother Teresa was on to something.

Paula told me a great phrase she came across on her retreat: Christians should seek to take what is implicit in Christianity, and make it explicit. What is implicit? God is love; God made us to love; when two people love each other, they love to be alone with each other. You make that explicit by getting alone with God.

It doesn’t have to be four or five days, it doesn’t have to be a wilderness or a monastery. It can be your car while you drive to work, if you can just turn off the radio. It can be your house before anyone else wakes up, if you can ignore the newspaper. It can be the church when nobody else is there. It can be your basement or back yard or a closet.

Wherever it’s just you and God is fine. Lovers find a way to sneak off someplace and be alone together. There’s no special way you have to do it. Just find a way, and get alone with God. And listen.

Not Everybody Connects With God the Same Way

Twice a month, 12-15 people gather at our house to learn how better to recognize and experience and follow the Holy Spirit. We call the group "Flowing in the Spirit." We met this past Sunday and I'd like to share a little of it with you.

The conversation was around the different ways in which different people most easily experience the presence of God. One of the books I’m reading is Sacred Pathways, by Gary Thomas, who also wrote Sacred Marriage (“What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?”). He points out that many people feel frustrated or even guilty because the ways in which they are advised to grow closer to God don’t seem to work for them. For instance, we are often told that to grow closer to God, we just need to lock ourselves away in our prayer closet for longer and longer periods of time each day. Thomas says this works great for some people, but not at all for others, and it’s not a problem with those others, it’s just that God made them differently.

This was illustrated by the group discussion. Among the ten or so people there (several were away, it being August), we identified at least five or six different main ways in which different ones of us connect with God.

After that discussion, I briefly outlined the nine ways Thomas has identified as how different people connect with God. Then we made a two-part assignment for next time, which will be Aug. 23. The assignment is:
• Try a new way of connecting with God. Pick one of the below that you haven’t done much or at all, and try it.
• Think about what “connecting with God” means to you. How do you know if you have connected with God? What are the signs? How can you tell which of the below works best for you – and what does that mean, “works best?”

Here are Thomas’ nine pathways, very briefly summarized. For a more detailed discussion see the book.
1. Naturalists: don’t need buildings, books or bands. Learn about God from watching nature, feel close to God by being in nature.
2. Sensates: experience and love God through their five senses. Want to be lost in the awe, beauty and splendor of God. In worship, they want their senses to be filled with sights, sounds, smells, feelings, tastes. Love intricate architecture, stained glass, classical music, formal language, even incense and the feel of kneeling or holy water.
3. Traditionalists: love God through ritual and symbol and sacraments. May have a very disciplined life of faith, they like structure, they may not like change to the way they do things in church.
4. Ascetics: love God in solitude and simplicity. They want nothing more than to be left alone with God in prayer, without pictures or music or liturgy to distract them. Their worship is primarily internal.
5. Activists: love and worship God through their actions. These actions are often confrontational, standing for God against evil and calling sinners to repentance. They may experience God most deeply as they lobby or picket or march for a cause. They see church as a place to recharge their batteries for the real worship which takes place out in the world.
6. Caregivers: love and worship God by taking care of other people, like Mother Teresa.
7. Enthusiasts: love and express God with mystery and celebration, clapping and shouting “Amen” and dancing. May feel they haven’t worshiped if they aren’t experiencing and feeling and being moved by God’s presence.
8. Contemplatives: love God through adoration. May often refer to God as their lover, and use images of a loving Father and Bridegroom. Focus is not on understanding or serving God, but loving God as purely and deeply as possible.
9. Intellectuals: love and worship God best when studying the Bible or grappling with theological concepts. They may feel closest to God when they first understand something new about him.

For most people, one or a combination of a few of these feel very natural and good, and some others don’t help at all. Others are more able to experience God in a variety of these ways. I personally feel that one way of measuring our spiritual growth is by our increasing ability to worship in different ways. It is good to try different ways just to see if one works for you that you never tried, but it is also important to recognize that none of these ways of approaching or worshiping God is more or less spiritual than any of the others. In other words, individuals or denominations that focus on social action in serving God are neither more nor less spiritual, by that fact, than those that focus on silent prayer or doctrinal understanding. Structured liturgical worship is not necessarily more or less spiritual than free-flowing charismatic worship. We need to encourage and support each other in all of these.

I'd love for anyone reading this blog to join us at our next gathering - just email me for details. But whether you can or not, I want to encourage you: if you just haven't seemed to be able to get the hang of connecting with God, try a new way. God for sure wants to connect with you!

Kayak Camping the Outer Banks

Recently my son Jed emailed me with an invitation. Could I break away and meet him in the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina for a couple days of kayaking and camping?

When your grown son, who is in the Army and lives 800 miles away, extends an invitation like that, you do whatever it takes to make it happen. I loaded the kayaks on the car, he got in his truck, and we met in Havelock, NC.

The next day we put into the water at the Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center, he in the 15-foot sea kayak, I in my very impressive 8-foot flat-water yacht, which I have named “The Brain of Pooh,” after Pooh Bear’s honey jar boat. We had our camping gear, 5 gallons of Gatorade, and 3 gallons of water. Camping at CLNS is primitive, with no water or other facilities most places.

The weather was beautiful, the water warm, the breeze brisk. It was glorious – at high tide. Unfortunately, most of the times when we needed to land or depart it was low tide. That meant dragging the kayaks across grass and mud and shallows, sinking sometimes to our knees. When we could float, the breeze was often so stiff that we had a hard time keeping our course. (My kayak has no rudder, and Jed’s legs are so long he couldn’t use the pedals on his.) At one point we found ourselves towing the boats through sharp-edged cord grass up to our knees, then carrying our camping gear several hundred yards across Core Bank through marsh grasses up to our eyes. We felt like Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in “African Queen.”

The real excitement, though, happened the first night. We had set up camp on the sound side of Shackleford Bank. After a yummy meal of canned chili, canned potatoes, and canned peas all mixed together (kayak camping is different from backpacking in that the emphasis is on bulk, not weight), we watched the fire die, the sun go down, the wild horses wander and the beach come alive with thousands of fiddler crabs. Then I started toward where I had laid out my sleeping bag. As I walked toward it, my headlamp trained just ahead of my foot, the beam of light suddenly illuminated a textbook example of a copperhead snake – one of the most poisonous snakes in North America.

Jed verified that was what it was, and while he kept the beam of light on the snake (which wasn’t at all worried by our presence), I carefully removed my sleeping gear. We retreated to the other side of the point and slept on the sand just above the high tide line. Perhaps surprisingly, I had no trouble at all falling asleep.

What are the odds that I would choose to go up to bed just as the snake chose to come to that same place? What are the odds that it would be just where my headlamp shone, at just the time that I shone it? What are the odds that I would have, a few days earlier, decided to buy a headlamp to take with me, rather than the tiny squeeze light I usually used? What are the odds that I would have bothered to use the lamp instead of my normal practice of moving around camp by moonlight? Had any of those things not happened just so, I could easily have stepped on that poisonous snake, or gone to bed only to find it already nestled in my sleeping bag. And we were a two hour night-time paddle from help.

Statistically, the way you calculate a combination of odds is that you multiply the individual odds together. Multiplying the odds against all those things happening just as they did, the result is either an astronomical coincidence, or answered prayer. I firmly believe it was the latter, because I had bathed the whole trip in prayers, for guidance, good weather, fun, and especially protection. Maybe that's why I was able to go to sleep so easily.

I actually used that experience as a sermon illustration this past Sunday, in a sermon I had already planned to preach, called “Deliver Us from Evil.” (You can download an audio podcast of it from trinityannapolis.org.) We don’t often hear about how to pray prayers of protection, but it is a very practical thing to know and do.

I’d rather not go through something like that every time I need a sermon illustration. But God is good, and God answers prayers. And kayaking the Outer Banks is a lot of fun!

Lesson from a Church Auction

This Saturday is our church yard sale to raise funds to help our sister church in Turkey buy land for a building. Church yard sales tend to remind me of something that happened our first year or two in the ministry.

The tradition in the Mount Airy, Maryland area, where Prospect United Methodist Church is located, was to have auctions rather than yard sales. At an entry-level pastor’s salary, we were very limited in what we could buy even at church auction prices. But that evening, after everyone had gone home, Paula and I walked across the street from the parsonage to look around at what had been left behind for the trash collector.

That’s when Paula saw the bed frame , and old wooden headboard and footboard and side rails. It was in such poor shape that nobody was willing to pay fifty cents and carry it away. I agreed with them. But Paula saw something in it that I couldn’t see. She kept exclaiming about how beautiful it was. So, just to humor her, I carried it across the street to the parsonage.

Paula went to work with stripper and scraper and stain and polyurethane, and she created a wonderful transformation in that old bed. She scraped away the layers of dirt and grime and peeling finish, and brought out what that bed was originally created to be. And just as she said, it was beautiful. Nuances of texture and grain and color just shone.

We really didn’t have room for another bed in the parsonage, so the next time we visited Paula’s parents on their farm in Missouri we put it on top our old station wagon and took it out there. Her folks loved it, and every time we visited for the next decade or so, that’s the bed we slept in. Then when they moved to the city, we brought the bed back and now Joy sleeps in it. It’s still comfortable, and it’s still beautiful. I’m so glad Paula was able to see beyond the damage of years to see what it could become.

And I’m so glad God sees beyond the damage of years to see what we can become. When our mistakes and bad decisions and downright sins have covered us with layers of gunk and grime and we feel like we’re not worth fifty cents, God still sees something in us. He wants to pick us up off the trash heap of life and clean us up and refinish us and make us beautiful and useful. The only difference between us and that old bed is that once Paula decided, the bed didn’t have any choice. We do. But I’ll tell you what: let God have his way with you. Standing strong and beautiful in a nice bedroom is so much nicer than rotting in the county landfill.

Take a Vacation!

Right after the big celebration (of Trinity UM Church’s 100th anniversary – read all about it in the July newsletter available on the Trinity website), I went on two weeks of vacation. That’s why you haven’t seen anything new here for a while. Now I’m back, and raring to go!

Vacation! Is there any lovelier word in the English language? (Of course there are – love, commitment, sacrifice , and many others – but that’s for another time.)

If you read the Old Testament right you’ll understand that God commanded his people to take vacations. Not just the Sabbath, the one day in seven when God instructs us not to work. We all need to take that seriously, and if more of us did, I personally believe we’d all be a lot healthier, in spirit and mind as well as body. But God actually commands his people to take vacations.

God set aside nineteen days a year as feast days. As described in Leviticus 23, these were essentially national holidays. Two of them, the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Feast of Tabernacles, were a week long. The others were one-day feasts. These holidays, scattered throughout the year, were specifically set aside for eating and celebrating, like Thanksgiving. Besides eating, during the week-long feast of Tabernacles, the people were specifically instructed to go camping! God understood the importance of getting away from our normal surroundings if we are to really experience mental refreshment.

We are not ancient Hebrews, so we are not subject to those particular laws. But we are God's people, so the principle applies. It is important to take time away.

We went to Shenandoah and Monticello, and visited our son Jeremiah and his family in West Virginia. It was a wonderful time. We talked, we ate, we explored, we played games, we just relaxed and spent time together. It was great. And we all came back feeling refreshed.

So if you haven’t taken a vacation yet this year – and I mean a real vacation, one that gets you someplace else for at least a few days, even if it means mooching off relatives to do it – get out there and vacate! After all, it’s in the Bible.

Kids

I haven’t written much recently. I’ve been spending time with my kids.

Josh and Julie and their children Moses and Lucy are spending May with us as the last leg of their three-month visit back to the States from their home in Turkey. Joy is home from college for the summer from Oklahoma. John and Suzanne arrived Tuesday evening from Illinois for a week. We just picked up Jed at the airport from Tennessee. And Jeremiah and Becky and their children Isaiah and Malachi are on the road from West Virginia as I write this. Four sons, a daughter, three daughters-in-law, three grandsons and a granddaughter will be spending the Memorial Day weekend with us.

So I’ve taken kind of half-vacation time and I’ve been trying as much as I can to hang out with my kids and grandkids.

It’s an interesting thing. Many people have told Paula and me that we have wonderful children - they all love the Lord, they all earned major scholarships to college, I could go on. A lot of folks have asked us what the secret is to raising such great kids. We have even been asked to teach a parenting class. But as soon as we start talking about what we did and what we feel was important in raising our kids, people don’t want to hear it. We had to cancel the parenting course after the second class because people stopped coming.

I’m on the subject now, so I’ll go ahead and say it. It seems to me the one key element is spending time with your kids. Lots of time. Sure, “quality” time, but also lots of quantity time. Paying attention. Stopping what you are doing to be with them.

For instance, just as I was writing that last sentence I heard Moses waking up from his nap. The middle generation was out for some time by themselves. So I dropped what I was doing and Paula and I spent the next forty-five minutes or so with Moses, until his parents came home.

I believe that during the twenty or so years that a person is privileged to raise children, nothing else is so important. And the way that is played out is to spend time with them, paying attention to them, interacting with them in ways that teach them by example to interact with other people.

So that’s why I haven’t written on this blog in a while. And that’s why I’m stopping here. Gonna go be with my kids.

P.S. A lot of neat stuff happened during our prayer week, including some pretty awesome healings. I wrote about it in the Trinity Church June newsletter. You can read it online at the church website, trinityannapolis.org.

God Invented Sex

I’m preaching a six-week sermon series on the real-life issues we all have to deal with. Things like life and death, and politics, and when God doesn’t answer prayer. Yesterday’s sermon was, “God Invented Sex.” (You can listen to a podcast on our church website, www.trinityannapolis.org.)

At the 9:00 service it was my turn to give the children’s sermon. Most of the kids are between two and six years old. I asked them if any of them were married, and they laughed and one said no, they were too short. Then I asked them what married people do. I was thinking about things like taking care of each other, so I was a little surprised at the chorus of snickers from various parts of the congregation.
Why is that the usual reaction to this topic?

Forty years ago, 8% of children were born out of wedlock. Twenty years ago that had climbed to 18%. Today, depending on what you read, the percentage of children born to single mothers is between 40 and 51%. Adding in the wide availability of birth control, and the number of children conceived by single mothers who are never allowed to be born, that points to a huge amount of sexual activity outside of marriage. And more and more couples I talk to in pre-wedding counseling have no idea that God even has an opinion about that.

That’s not something to be snickered at.

Then there’s the increasing visibility of the GLBT population: those who consider themselves gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.

This is not just something we read about in the newspaper. Most of us know unmarried couples of all sexual orientations living together. Often they are in our families.
Somebody asked me recently, “How do I treat these people? What do I say to them?”

The simple answer is this: you love them. How can they ever know that God loves them if we don’t show them God’s love by loving them ourselves? That doesn’t mean we condone what is obviously unbiblical behavior. Encouraging people to continue in anything less than God’s perfect plan is not loving them.

But these folks know the church doesn’t approve. They don’t need us to tell them that. They may not know God doesn’t approve – in the eyes of many people there is a big disconnect between God and the church – but they’re not likely to take our word for it.

Our job is not to condemn non-Christians for acting like non-Christians. The Holy Spirit is the one who convinces people. Our job is just to love them, and tell them what Jesus has done for us.

Most of us grew up in a time when the Christian view of sex was accepted as the common morality. That is no longer true. If the church doesn’t tell people what the Bible says, nobody else will.

But if we don’t love them first, why should they listen to us?