The new year had begun and it seemed, like standing before a locked threshold with no window to peer through, no doorman to request an entrance inside. What was beyond the door? One would imagine warmth, a hearth with a crackling fire, and a table set with a meal and good company, safety, the sanctuary of a place. On the streets it had been catch as can, belonging nowhere, sleeping in doorways until shooed away and hoping for a scrap of something to sustain. Gnawing hunger and cold on the street served with a side of loneliness and fear. 

My husband was told he could not come back until he was "all better". He had sworn at an usher in our church who refused to let him leave when he was upset. My husband begged the man to step aside so he could pass through the door and go home but the usher said "No, I can see you are upset, tell me about it and we will pray." One blocking the doorway, one pleading to leave to get medication to take care of a medical condition that had arisen. "No" So in desperation my husband swore, the man jumped aside in surprise and my husband went home. 

The following day my husband met with the pastor and explained what happened and apologized for swearing. The pastor then explained that he "knew all about PTSD" and that my husband could come back to church when "He was all better". The door to our church home was closed to my husband and might as well have been to me. How could I continue to attend a church my husband was not allowed to attend until he was "fine".

We waited a year. I continued with the ministry I was engaged in on behalf of the church   praying for reconciliation, a new minister arrived. I met and then my husband met with her. Forgiveness,grace, mercy were not extended. Evidently swearing once in the lobby of the church, with no priors, was unforgiveable. 

I wrote a letter of resignation from the ministry I had been engaged in and joined my husband on the outside looking in. The Church universal is hemorraging membership annually. Our situation was totally avoidable. This story continues as I pray and seek God for new direction and purpose within or without the organized church. Currently my husband and I have been attending a small local church that has been very welcoming. We havn't joined. We are like divorcees who would prefer to live together unmarried than risk the committment of the ceremony at the moment. We shall see, time will tell.

We all fall down....

"Every one of us has had some sort of experience of leaving home, of responding to a call, of having to leave something or someone behind to journey in fidelity to who we are."
This was one of the statements on the Creighton university online Ignatian retreat for week 19 that I just opened yesturday. I was trying to catch a glimpse of a leaf releasing from a tree as I was walking My dog under the maples on the college campus near my home when a flock of geese flew over head followed then by a "murder" of crows; all answering a call I could not  hear but they could. 

Soon the landscape in this snow belt region will be bare and grey, actually by the end of this month. If the trees don't release their leaves and travel " light" through the winter season their branches will be stripped off by the heavy ice and snow. They might not recover from the damage. As I wondered what I needed to release this coming season, I ran into a few people with whom I realized I had not forgiven for what had happened in the past. God issued an ultimatum, it was time, to let that go. Let the anger and hurt go. 

Divine insight flooded my thoughts for a moment, a moment of grace. I don't have to let these folks back into my life, but they are forgiven, I have done it. God knows, I know, they know what happened and Grace has covered it. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  I can finally be at peace. 

So today, while visiting my elderly father in the hospital, he referred to the attention he was receiving from me sarcastically as being like Mother Machree. Having plenty of time to mull this over on the way home,as well as many other cranky comments he made during the visit, I decided to find out just who he was referring to. He would have been two years of age when the silent film was released bearing that name about an Irish immigrant single parent struggling to work and raise her family on her own. While not a single parent, my husband does have a medical condition that has caused us to decide he would be better as the a house husband and I as the bread winner. In Machree's time being a single parent would have carried a stigma, just as my husband's condition and our choice has. Machree is an anglised version of "Moi chroi", my heart, or "mother of my heart". The difficult choices my husband and I have had to make and live with were made with care and prayer. Being a mother of God's heart,"moi chroi", the way I choose to think of it, has a price, a price I am willing to pay today because of my debt that was cancelled so long ago by Grace. It is by that same amazing Grace that my dad's comments did not stick, sting or define me as once they did, and by that same Grace we are in God's eyes, children of His heart.

TD Jakes is a famous pastor and author of many books about practical applied Christianity. In the Dallas, Texas paper recently it was reported that one of his adult sons was arrested. Pastor Jakes picture and his son's mug shot were plastered on the front page of the paper complete with a detailed account of the arrest. What was important is that the reporter recorded verbatim what Rev. Jakes wrote. It became a Kingdom moment, a teaching moment for all of us who have ever had a child, if we are a parent, or a friend, who has done something terrible wrong. I thought that you would find it interesting and insightful and a good response. Here it is:

06:17 PM CST on Saturday, February 14, 2009

By SAM HODGES / The Dallas Morning News samhodges@dallasnews.com

Bishop T.D. Jakes of Dallas says he is offering “help, support and restorative grace” to his son, Jermaine.

“It is in moments like these that I am so grateful that we do not preach that we are the solution, but we look to Christ for resolution,” Jakes, pastor of Dallas’ megachurch The Potter’s House, said in a written statement provided to The Dallas Morning News late Friday night.

“So then, as a very human family with real issues, like many other people, we will draw from the same well of grace to which we have led others to drink and be refreshed,” the statement said.

His father's comments were what struck me as being so right on and such a witness for something that gained such public exposure in a newspaper, evidence of God taking something bad and paradoxically turning the boys father's response into a declaration for all to read of the Kingdom of God. If you know and love a wayward adult, you may be asking yourself why do they have to do what they do? I ask the same thing in the situations in my life. Maybe we have been asking the wrong question and like Moses need to be asking instead in the wilderness spaces, " Show me your glory". May God reveal His glory this week, may there be a burning bush, may the goodness of the Lord pass before you and may God proclaim His name to you in the midst of the rebellious people you love and try to lead. May we all feel and extend the grace of God to each other in moments like these.

Emancipation Proclamation

Do you know that in the first century AD the word baptisim referred to dipping light colored fabric or yarn into a dye bath? Once the fabric or the yarn was dipped into the dye it’s color changed forever from the origonal to the new hue. Dipping it, baptizing it, would change it. When we were dipped into the waters of baptism we were baptized into Jesus’ death and burial and raised into newness of life. Like the cloth or the cord, we started out one color and came up from water the color of the ressurection. Our life was placed in His and we died and rose with Him. No longer slaves to sin and the old ways of behaving and thinking. No more stumbling around hoping to keep up with Him. He promised to live in us and we are to live in Him. This makes His power our power, His ways our ways, His thoughts, His desires, our desires. This is His Emancipation Proclamation to us from the slavery to sin. We are now free to serve our new Master. We have now been adopted into the Master’s family.

Consider this: that even if we do sin, God is intent on forgiving us as His beloved children, because that is exactly what we are, His children. We are to “reckon” or claim this as true, that He is our Father and we belong to Him.

Being His, we are to present ourselves to God as those who are ALIVE from the dead, as those who are no longer helpless victims of lustful urges and uncontrollable weaknesses. Christ has opened the door to death’s cage and we are free to fly.

Some of us sadly in the body of Christ today are not flying. Some are still sitting in the cage thinking that the door is not really open. They don’t know enough about the word of God to know that What God says is true. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word. Some are too scared to fly out of the cage, they need to claim the promise that perfect Love casts out all fear. Some think, well if I do try to leave this cage, I will never be strong to be able to take flight, not knowing that the joy of the Lord is their strength. We get trapped in cages and lose our freedom when we believe things that are not true. Only the word of God is true.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus was presented a demon-opressed blind mute man and he healed him. The man spoke and saw, amazing everyone. The man was healed of physical and spiritual blindness and was able to use his mouth to testify of it. This moment of rejoicing, however, was scoffed at by the legalistic Pharisees who told the people in the village that Jesus had accomplished this healing with the help of Satan. Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them all, in Matthew 12:25: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” Jesus was esplaining that if they would only look at the fruit of the healing in this man’s life, it was plain to see that this was a work of God and that Jesus was therefore acting in concert with God. The Pharisees were the ones trying to divide God’s house with their rumors and murmurings against Jesus to the people.
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Three years before the sucession of the eleven states of the confederacy Lincoln delivered an address to his Republican colleagues in the Hall of Representatives. Even Lincoln's friends believed the speech was too radical for the occasion. His law partner, William H. Herndon, thought that Lincoln was morally courageous but politically incorrect. Herndon said Lincoln told him he was looking for a universally known figure of speech that would rouse people to the peril of the times. here is part of that speech:

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Convention

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.

Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.

In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

One hundred and fifty or so years ago our nation was double minded on the issue of slavery and states rights resulting in the terrible bloody conflict, the Civil War, with stuggles in subsequent years of even to this day concerning civil rights. This event occured in the natural world, in the spiritual world we too can be so double minded that we become at war with ourselves, half instead of whole heartedly walking with Christ. Walking around like we are half slave half free. Claiming the freedom we have in Christ when we have developed habits of wordly thinking and doing can be hard. But habits can be broken.

Throughout history, there have been many people, “grace killers” who have inadvertently served him like the Pharisees of Jesus’s time, planting seeds of doubt, fear, stirring up confusion, divisiveness, misunderstanding, selfcenteredness. Through manipulation and rigid control grace killers can kill or cripple the spirit of fellow human beings keeping them from flying out of cages of bondage into the freedom of Christ, dashing their hopes and dreams to the ground, convincing them they are unloveable, unwelcome, unsuitable. From personal experience I can say I have been hindered by “grace killers” in my walk with Christ and I have also been a “grace killer” at other times towards my brothers and sisters in the Lord using God’s word as a hammer to beat people over the head and control them. That is not the way of Grace, Amazing grace.

Habit’s and grace killers aside, the evil ones design is to try to divide and conquer. Any way a conflict or a misunderstanding can be stirred up the adversary , he will prowl about looking to do it. He started in the garden of Eden. His signature was written on the first murder of Abel by his brother Cain.

Jesus gives us a way to overcome the work of the devil through three things outlined in the book of Revelation12:11.
“And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.” Repentance and claiming the blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, over our life is the first important item mentioned. When we sin we need to restore our fellowship with The Father this way. We also have our testimony. A testimony is something that we have experienced in or from God that we tell others about. It is our personal life changing story. The last thing we need to have to overcome is a selfless mind. “And they love not their own lives onto death”, by having the mind of Jesus, the selfless mind, the desire to put self first is nailed to the cross and Jesus is enthroned as King of our lives. Jesus said something about Satan in the gospel of Matt.16:23 when he was rebuking Peter for allowing Satan to use him. "Get behind Me, Satan! You are an offense to Me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men." When we are mindful of the things of men we give satan a foothold, when we are mindful of the things of God we become grace builders.

If you are in the bird in the cage looking at the open door, grab hold of the truth in God’s word, claim it and fly out to freedom. You are the adopted sons and daughters of the King! A royal priesthood. Teach and use the example of your lives to show everyone around you that the freedom from sin and shame we all have in Christ they can have too. Isn’t that Good news? You don’t need to worry, it is God’s job to restrain them if folks get carried away with their freedom. God does His job so much better than we do ours. We allow others to choose, we let go we let God.

Letting Go ( author unknown)
To let go doesn’t mean to stop caring,
it means I can’t do it for someone else.
To let go is not to cut myself off,
it’s the realization that I can’t control another.
To let go is not to enable,
but to allow learning from natural consequences,
To let go is to admit powerlessness,
which means the outcome is not in my hands.
To let go is not to try to change or blame another,
I can only change myself.
To let go is not to care for,
but to care about.
To let go is not to fix,
but to be supportive.
To let go is not to judge,
but to allow another to be a human being.
To let go is not to be in the middle arranging all the outcomes,
but to allow others to effect their own outcomes.
To let go is not to be protective;
it is to permit another to face reality.
To let go is not to deny,
but to accept.
To let go is not to nag, scold, or argue,
but to search out my own shortcomings and to correct them.
To let go is not to adjust everything to my desires,
but to take each day as it comes.
To let go is not to criticize and regulate anyone,
but try to become what I dream I can be.
To let go is not to regret the past,
but to grow and live for the future.
To let go is to fear less and love more!

I want to fly with Superman

My new neighbors have small children and two large great dane dogs. When they moved in they put a big wooden fence around the back of their property to contain their kids and critters, keep them from straying. Whenever I go out in my yard, I can see their great big dogs peering at me over the top of the fence yearning for their freedom. This fence is up safety. There are other kinds of fences, not so benign. Fences we erect in our minds when we add more rules to God’s commandments. This is called legalism and instead of building up the walls of the church, helping the lively stones become fit together, it tears the stones off the wall and throws them down.
Paul's wrote to the Galatians to reason against those who taught that Christians must keep all the Old Testament Jewish laws in order to be accepted by God. Paul made it clear that all believers Jew and Gentile alike, enjoy complete salvation in Christ . Paul showed how the gospel of grace leads to true freedom and godly living. The central message of Galatians is that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ" .
Legallism takes the mystery out of our faith and turns it into religion. It makes it neat, organized, repetitive, habitual, and predictable. It will kill grace. It can manifest itself at times in these ways as : expectations, traditionalism, manipulation, demands, negativism, control, comparison, perfectionism, competition, critcism, pettiness, shame, guilt, and many more. God starts seeming like a clock going tick tock tick tock, very predictable, ordered and controlled. God in a box all neat and packaged, no mystery, no wonder, no awe, just a legal document. Legallism wants to define us limit our possibility just like the poor eagle who thought he was a prairie chicken. Have you heard this boy scout story? There once was an indian brave that was walking down the trail when he discovered an eagles egg had fallen out of it's nest. He looked up and saw that the nest was too high for him to return the egg. So he placed the egg in a nearby prairie chicken nest.
When the egg hatched, the little eagle thought he was a prairie chicken. Prairie chickens stay on the ground and eat only worms and grubs. So, as the eagle grew, he ate nothing but worms and grubs and walked around with the other prairie chickens.
One day, he looked up in the sky and saw some eagles soaring high above. He asked one of the prairie chickens, 'How can they fly up there while we are down here eating worms and grubs?'
The prairie chicken answered, 'They are the eagles, they can do that but we must stay down here. We are prairie chickens and that is what we do.'So, the eagle spent the rest of his life flying very little and eating worms and grubs just because he was told that was all he could do.
We are far more important to Jesus than what we doand we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us! What we are inside our heart is what is most important to our Father God. That is how He sees us. His people. His sheep. We don’t have to do anything to please anybody else except Him. We can’t do any thing to win His favor, we can’t do enough good things to merit it: can’t pray harder, tithe more, attend more meetings, read more books, keep a cleaner house, do better at work, do more deeds of any kind to win God’s favor. We have God’s favor just because we are His children and He is our Abba Father. We have His unmerited Grace, amazing grace, because He first loved us.
When I was a kid I had a collection of Superman comic books I used to swap with Billy Elliot down the street. I used to wish I had Superman’s super powers. Superman could fly! I used to think of God like Superman. When I got older, I enjoyed the Superman movies with Chris Reeves playing Superman, flying Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen around Metropolis in his arms. If Superman had let go, they would have dropped like rocks to their death. Discipleship, becoming more like Jesus is not about teaching people how to fly or learning how to fly yourself. It’s about how to stay connected to Jesus, the only Superman who ever lived. Only the God man Jesus can fly, people can’t, we can’t pull off the divine goodness. We could climb the tallest building and jump off a ledge and have the illusion of flight for a few moments until the gravity of the situation asserted itself. That’s why they call it “the fall”. Taking matters into our own hands, into the wisdom of our own hearts and understand always leads to “the fall”. But we can fly with faith in our Lord. Grace wants faith to fly.
Grace also wants faith to be on the solid rock of Jesus Christ. We are not to add or subtract to what Jesus said and to err on the side of Love and mercy if we are to err at all. “On Christ the solid rock I stand all other ground is sinking sand”. Christ is the Rock stricken that the Spirit of life may flow from Him to all who would drink it. He is the foundation the cornerstone and He tells us in 1 Peter, “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
In his book The Grace Awakening, Chuck Swindoll writes: “ In vain I have searched the Bible looking for examples of Christians whose lives were marked by rigidity, predicatbility, inhibition, dullness and caution. Fortunately grim, frowning, joyless saints in Scripture are conspicous by their absence. Instead the examples I find are adventurous, risktaking, enthusiastic, and authentic believers whose joy was contagious even in times of painful trial. Their vision was broad even when death drew near. Rules were few and changes were welcome. The contrast between then and now is staggering. The differnce, I am convinced is grace. Grace invites us to chart new courses and explore everexpanding regions, all the while delighting in the unexpected. While others care more about maintaining he fence and fearing those who guard it. Grace is constantly looking for ways to freedom. Grace wants us to say “Praise God” at the end of the day not “praise my ability to get it right”.
Reading the blogs of some other pastors across our conference I came across this comment: “The church, I’m afraid, really likes people to visit who are like them….perfect. I say that tongue in cheek, but the church as a whole wants people in the pews who have worked out their salvation and are in the process of becoming perfected. But what if the church encountered a whole lot of people who were just trying to figure out if there is even a God let alone what it means to be in a relationship with Jesus. Are we willing to put up with messy people who aren’t Christians, believers, followers.... do we want them in our churches?” Baby believers, like infants are messy and need lots of attention and care. And then there is the whole question of permissiveness. How or when do we discuss with them (the messy people because we all know that the people in the pews have everything all right) the consequences of sin and the God’s answer of the cross?” I think the answer to that question is grace. We need to let people know that we too are works in progress, that we also are on a journey of faith and don’t have all the answers save one, Jesus Christ crucified, died, rose again and sending the Holy Spirit to empower those who believe. Our hope is built on nothing less.
The word of God says that “ If the Son shall set you free then you shall be free indeed.” This week let us share the freedom and joy we have with someone who is not so fortunate, fly with Jesus and show them how much easier it is to soar with the Savior. For those on shaky ground show them how to drink in the Spirit of life. Let us step forward into God’s reign on earth as it is in heaven knowing it is not by our might or by our power but by God’s Holy Spirit.