Blind Hog Finds Acorn

On the way to church on Sunday we drove south on Mur-Len past the old Dillon’s (now Price Chopper) and the beautiful row of pin oaks that lines the street there next to the store. I relayed the story to my family how four years ago in October I was running along there one morning when plop, out of the sky fell an acorn that bounced off the sidewalk in front of me. I caught it in natural running motion without even a hitch in my stride. That run was after the 2005 Twin Cities Marathon which was something of a debacle for me.

By the time I got to TCM my hamstring had been acting up for a month or more and race day was windy! As we came around a few little lakes during the middle part of the course bearing straight into the predominately east wind I knew I was used up by mile 16. When you’re feeling bad at mile 16 of a marathon it is going to be a long morning. By the end I had taken several walk breaks and came in with one of my slowest times. Aside from the wind it was a cool and beautiful fall morning throughout, and the finish in St. Paul was wonderful even though the race itself had been a brutal slog.

So two or three weeks later when the acorn bounced perfectly into my hand I wondered if in some way there might be in it a reassuring message from the Lord. My dad always says that every blind hog finds and acorn now and then. Could every injured runner now and again find the grace for healing and another good race? April 2006 finally came around and the Lord granted me the strength to finally, on my third attempt, run a good race in Boston – and not only a good race but a personal best at that. In Boston. Nice acorn. Thank you, Jesus.

Which brings us back around to the present. I have been struggling in life and running for a good couple of years now. A nasty hamstring injury kept me out of Boston in ’08. Worse than that I missed Boston in ’09 because of a torn ACL and the subsequent reconstructive surgery. Also lost a couple of jobs roughly in that stretch of time. A lot of stuff just has not seemed to go right. Nevertheless, God has provided employment and a new baby girl from Ethiopia. She alone is the most amazing gift and her coming to us is like a breath of fresh life into our family. Still, on the running front, I am sad. My knee recovery is going very slowly and I am sad that fall is here and I am not gearing up for a marathon as I have done every fall for the last 6 years. But as God’s grace would have it, I have a wife who really listens to me and hears my heart.

She spent Sunday afternoon out praying and reading her Bible. She said she really needed a spiritual re-charge and some time alone, and with a new baby in the house I really understand that. But besides just re-charging herself, she came home with a present for me! She brought me a running book. And she passed on to me another running book. She said she listened to my story about the acorn and she knew how much I was missing running. (I mean running hard runs and long runs, not the little 4 milers that I am now constrained to doing no more than 4 times per week). She understood.

I am going to read these books for sure. One is about a runner who survived the genocide in Burundi that spilled over from Rwanda back in 1994. The other is about a guy who loves running and writing but never had the guts for a long time to really strike out as a writer. The books, even if they turn out to be terrible (which I doubt), represent an acorn that bounced right up into my hand. Who gets to have a wife like this? I am thinking, almost nobody. I am blessed indeed.

Over 43 now, with the clock ticking, and due to my knee my body unable to train at the high level I would like to, I am now stuck with wondering if my fastest marathon is now behind me forever, and that’s a bit hard to swallow. But maybe, just maybe, might I again find the grace for healing for one more great race? God knows. The rest of us will have to stay tuned.

For those who have ears to hear

How will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? Hebrews 2:3.

This verse that I read as part of Bible study with a friend intersected for me with a passage I was studying on my own. In Luke 16 Jesus tells the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. As it turns out Lazarus ends up in heaven while the rich man who lived a life all about his own comfort ends up in hell. From hell the distressed rich man pleads that Lazarus be sent back from the dead to warn his brothers so they will not suffer the same end. Abraham answers him that they have the bible already – they should pay attention to it! Knowing his brothers will not repent at the plain message of the Scriptures he says that his brothers will listen if someone returns from the dead to warn them. But the sad ending of Jesus’ parable is that no, in fact, they will not change their ways even if someone rises from the dead and comes to them.

To me this parable makes the point of Hebrews 2:3 even more poignant. God has in fact demonstrated His love for sinners by sending His own Son to be punished in their place, and He has in fact sent Him back to us from the dead. Any greater or more surprising plan that God could have come up with to communicate His love to us and deal with our wickedness I cannot conceive. We needed a heart transplant and God gave us His Son’s own beating heart at the cost of His life, but many refuse and some even despise His love and generosity. Indeed, how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?

Cool Jesus

I was reading someone’s blog today and noticed that she referred to God as “The Chief,” and it made me wonder about her motivations. Others had criticized her last post and she was playing the irrefutable divine inspiration card; The Chief had told her to write her last post. How can you argue with that! But more than what she had to say I was curious about her use of the word Chief. I suppose there is nothing wrong with that word – it certainly conveys some proper sense of divinity – but why not, as millions of English-speaking Christians have said for at least 500 years, Lord?

I don’t know but highly suspect that it might have had something to do with, at all costs, wanting not to sound in any way like a 1970’s born-again Southern Baptist. That would be the nadir of uncoolness, and The Chief forbid that she should ever sound like a church lady. And this got me to thinking again about something that has been bothering me lately, why does it seem that many of this generation’s Christians are obsessed with being cool, even to the point of inventing a “cool Jesus”? I think I know for the most part the answer to that question, but I’ll postpone that for a post on another day. For now, here are some things that have bugged me about the emerging cool Christian movement.

First of all, we have to be missional (yes, I guess this is now a cool English word…) and this means that we have to target people where they are, but it seems like maybe God is really only interested in cool people, so that helps narrow the scope of our missionalness. We must shoot almost exclusively for young twenty-somethings who are turned off to the last generation’s Christianity (probably because it was so uncool), consider themselves socially aware, have swallowed hook, line and sinker everything their public school upbringing has fed them about abortion, homosexuality, evolution and politics, are college educated, live in a loft in the city (not the uncool suburbs, and certainly not extremely uncool rural America), like alternative modern music but also consider 1930’s jazz and probably the Beatles to be very cool, and are natty dressers.

Knowing the target demographic, our church marketing departments can now really hone their foci. (Hey, I was a math guy, so I actually knew the proper plural for focus without looking it up. Anyway, I digress…). Hey, wait a minute, since when did churches have marketing departments? (I think the answer to that is since maybe about only 1990, but sorry, I digress again – maybe that should be another post). Anyway this all has serious ramifications for worship and preaching and fellowship and evangelism and everything! But I think the thing that bugs me the most often, though not necessarily the most deeply, is where this need for coolness has taken church language.

The standard line is that old churchy language is jargon and inaccessible to most “seekers.” So it must be changed. But I ask you, to your standard unchurched or non-Christian person, is “fellowship” really that much more weird than “doing life together”? I don’t think so. Although I know this is now the really cool term that is supposed to describe Christians spending time together, learning from each other and bearing one another’s burdens, I have to say that the phrase “doing life together” really just creeps me out. And honestly, I strongly suspect that your average 40-year-old factory worker probably feels exactly the same way, but I admit that our well dressed and highly educated urban dweller may not agree. The factory worker is not in our target demographic anyway.

Well, that is probably enough of that rant, but I am going to close with one more Christian coolness observation that really made my blood boil. The first time I heard Todd Agnew’s “My Jesus”, I carefully followed the lyrics and thought it was a good, challenging song, but then here he came, Agnew’s cool Jesus, the one who Todd was pretty sure would “prefer Beale Street (a center of really cool Blues clubs in Memphis) to the stained glass crowd.” I don’t know what this cool Blues-loving and organ-music despising Jesus really has to do with the poor-loving Jesus we had been hearing about in the rest of the song, but at that point I was finished with it. I personally don’t care for the old organ music and the “stained-glass” style of worship that I grew up with, but I have this thought for Mr. Agnew. How dare you. My nearly 80-year-old mother has lived her whole life for Jesus Christ, loving Him with her whole heart and singing uncool stained-glass style songs from her heart to God. I have never known her to care one bit about appearing “cool” to man, and I think she understands way better most of us what the REAL Jesus meant in John 17:14. Shame on you, Todd. Your cool Christianity disrespects this past generation of believers.

Cool Christianity confuses the message of the gospel with new and unnecessary jargon. Cool Christianity is a contradiction. We should stop trying to be cool and instead hold out grace and truth as our Lord did.