12-Step Thanksgiving Program

An old newsletter offers a great 12-step program of Thanksgiving.

Then Pastor at St Joe, MI, my friend Jim asked “Have you ever tried to imagine what it would be like to live in the belt of poverty, illiteracy, and hunger?” He offered this illuminating but frightening exercise:

1. Take out all the furniture from your home, except a few old blankets, a kitchen table, and one chair.
2. Take away all the clothing, except for the oldest dress or suit for each member of the family, and a shirt or blouse. Leave one pair of shoes for the head of the family.
3. Empty the pantry and refrigerator, except for a small bag of flour, some sugar and salt, a few moldy potatoes for tonight’s supper, a handful of onions, and a dish of dried beans or rice.
4. Dismantle the bathroom, shut off the water, remove the electric wiring.
5. Take away the house itself and move the family into the tool shed.
6. Remove all the other houses in the neighborhood and set up a shantytown.
7. Cancel all subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, and book clubs because you are now illiterate.
8. Leave one small radio for the whole shantytown.
9. Move the nearest clinic or hospital ten miles away and put a midwife in charge.
10. Throw out the bankbooks, stock certificates, pension plans, and insurance policies; leave the family a cash hoard of ten dollars.
11. Give the head of the family three tenant acres to cultivate. On this he can raise $300 in cash crops, of which one-third will go to the landlord and one-tenth to the local money lender.
12. Lop off 25 to 30 years of life expectancy.

Now in the twilight years of our retirement, my wife and I live rather existentially. She has spent most of her lifetime struggling with fragile health, compounded with aging. We now live from month to month, thanks to unseen events that eroded our best planning. The current depression further compounds our insecurity, but these do not rob us of our joy, our peace, or our sense of charity.

When I look at this 12-step program of Thanksgiving, I can only ask what Jim asked when he first wrote: “Now do you still think you are poor?”

One of the better writings in contemporary literature is the Bible. Consider what the Apostle Paul wrote to his struggling Philippian friends (4:4-7, NASV):

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! Let your forbearing spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Make the best of your days by sharing something with someone; then give thanks. As Dr. Keith Huttonlocker once reminded us If we are thankful, it is not because we have a reason to be. It is because we have a mind to be. If reason were enough everyone would be thankful.

Times are tough, true enough; but tough times call for fortitude. Now is the time for all of us to express our attitude of gratitude (bold print for emphasis).
Wayne

The Translator

Meet “The Translator“. How does one encounter genocide face to face?

Native of Darfur, western Sudan, young Daoud (David) Hari spent his childhood learning the ways of his Zaghawa tribesmen, where he and his camel did all the things normal to life in the Sudan .

The children herded small goats and cattle in the wadis and small mountains outside the village. At night they played outside games together–too hot during the day. Anashel was a game where you search for a bone that someone has thrown into the air when your eyes are closed.

Daoud had a camel called Kelgi, that he loved like family. He describes his life like growing up anywhere, “except our families had camels instead of SUVs and the children rode donkeys instead of bicycles. Otherwise, it was chores and games and worrying about growing up and being respected, as it is everywhere.”

When helicopter gunships appeared over the villages in 2003, followed by attacking horsemen, raping and murdering citizens, and sacking villages, Daoud‘s family escaped. Sent north, he completed high school and eventually volunteered as a translator, guiding journalists in and out of enemy territory, rather than take up a gun and the violence of war.

Caught and imprisoned while assisting Paul, an American journalist, he thought he would most surely die. “I did not care too much,” he writes, “because I felt mostly dead anyway after the attack on my village and the death of many friends and family. But I felt responsible for Paul and Ali and I did not know what would happen to them.

“I had been in prisons before and I felt that if I died, it would be because I was doing something to help my people, and that was ok. But even in the prisons, I made friends with the guards because I know that everyone has some good in them and sometimes you just have help them get it out. I learned that, even in such places, people are people and there are opportunities for kindness and understanding.”

Imprisonment finally ended through negotiations by American Cabinet Member, Bill Richardson (now Gov. of N.M.)

Daoud, currently in America, writes in simple, straight forward language, eloquently human. He details his childhood, his imprisonments, his work with journalists, as well as experiences guiding, protecting, interviewing, even burying, the most vulnerable.

Parts of the book were grueling to read--the inhumanity, suffering and vulnerability. One father he interviewed had to watch his young daughter lifted up on the blade of a bayonet, crying “Abba! Abba! Then he lifted up his gun, with my daughter on it, with blood from her body pouring down all over him. He danced around with her in the air and shouted to his friends, ‘Look, see how fierce I am,‘ and the chanted back to him . . .

“It took a long time for her to die,“ he continued, “ her blood coming down so fresh and red on this--what was he? A man? A devil? He was painted red with my little girl’s blood and he was dancing. What was he?“

Daoud concludes, “This man had seen evil and didn’t know what to do with the sight of it. He was looking for an answer to what it was, and why his little daughter deserved this. Then, after taking some time to cry without talking, he told me he no longer knew who he was.. . .“

With Daoud’s village gone, 2.5 million people displaced from Darfur, more than 240,000 are in refugee camps in Chad, many areas have been cleared of Darfuris. This young man has seen humanity at its finest and its worst. He risked his life to do in Chad and in Darfur what he could to share his tragedy with the world. “One day,” he says, “I hope to go home to Darfur and to help my people rebuild our communities once there is peace.”

May we all work toward peace in our war-torn, grief-stricken world. I did finish reading the book and found the reading quite worthwhile. Reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Appendix 2 is worth the price of the book. I do recommend it.
Wayne

The Exception to the Rule

Hollywood’s Cynthia Nixon takes comfort in having two children by a man she did not marry. Currently, she awaits “marrying” her same-sex friend. Since her procreating children did not motivate marriage, I find her current behavior highly curious. So, what difference does marriage make?

I am a left-wing liberal conservative. I am far enough out into left field that I agreeably defend the civil rights of same-sex individuals. I am so far to the right that I FAIL to miss the fact that same-sex marriage is the exception to the rule, whatever you call it.

The fact is, same-sex cohabitation does not a marriage make, by whatever name you give it. It merely gives a license to lust without any accountability for the destroyed families, damaged children, and diseased lives.

Media people are currently enjoying huge listener response, as they frame questions regarding the civil rights of same-sex and hosting panels they cannot give equal response time to, like Joy Behar of CNN. They take no responsibility for fomenting further anarchy, although the church representatives put her ill at ease as she turned the same-sex defender loose -- as in loose cannon.

Whatever you think of it, it is an interesting conversation and I want to note some observations that remain hard to debate.

1. Same-sex marriage remains the exception to the rule. Our universe operates by law and order, rather than exception.

Whatever one thinks about God; e.g., take the story of Noah and the Ark. The narrative alleges that Noah took every living creature into the Ark 2x2, goats, ducks, pigs, domestic and wild animals, including the humans that went on board. The simple truth was, and is, that procreation requires 1 male sperm and 1 female ovary. Man and woman offer no exception - until the 20th century.

Heterosexual marriage has produced 6,000 years of antiquity, give or take a few years, depending on your system of dating. Same-sex marriage could not have produced the 2nd generation whereas heterosexual marriage produced a society that allowed scientific discovery to short-circuit the natural process and produce the exception to the rule - procreation via synthetic means of science.

Now the exception to the rule demands equal civil rights (marriage) but they have to depend upon science, or a heterosexual marriage, to produce their child for them. Talk about incivility and unfairness, everyone should have a constitutional right to bear his or her own child; why should women have the privilege of bearing all the children?

That voids the issue of religion! Procreation remains a universal issue of biological law, pure and simple. As for religionists and others depriving same-sex individuals of their civil rights, I insist that these biological anarchists are thieves (an issue of morality).

By attempting to restructure the focus, they attempt to PLUNDER ANTIQUITY AND STEAL FROM SOCIETY what has been the bedrock of our civilization, the cornerstone of our society, and the very epitomy of human relationships for most of us--our homes.

2. As an exception to the rule, they substitute a cheap glandular gorge for love. They cheapen human relationships to the level of body functions, living like alley cats, all the while demanding the right to re-write the laws.

3. As an exception to the rule, they seek privileges they are unwilling to earn: they want children they neither procreate nor protect.

*Same-sex marriage offers no protection to the child who is dependent on both a father and a mother to “parent” it with all the mental-emotional-psychological issues involved in “maleness” and “femaleness.”

*IF anyone has a civil right due to them, it is the child who has an “inherent human right” to have both a father and a mother, with all that entails. Sociologists like David Popenoe know that dad and mother are the source of much of their child’s learning about being a male and female, and the evidence has mounted in recent years.

We already have a world crisis with our children: preemies, victims of sexual abuse, divorce, poverty, war, genocide. All of these play a serious role and I see no reason to further exaccerbate the problem by creating further relational identities for the children than they already have.

That is abuse of the worst degree, immoral and unconscionable, socially unacceptable! It simply makes same-sex adoption socially unacceptable. We are still reaping the benefits of the dissolution of two-parent families as written about by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in Atlantic Monthly (4-93). It benefited the selfish needs of many adults but helped few children, which is precisely the case the dear Bishop tried to make with Joy Behar on CNN 11-14-08.

The Powers of the Universe, whomever or whatever that may be, could have prevented all of this by creating--whatever your method of creation or evolving)--a same-sex union. However, until that happens, I am happy to leave things the way they are and leave same-sex liasons as exceptions to the Ruler of the Ages.
Wayne

Easy Living

Some people are easy to live with. Others are just as easy to live without. Dr. Leslie Parrot suggested the real test of maturity is “the ability to make ourselves easy to live with.”

Parrot further observed that many people will never reach this goal: “They will be hard to live with until the day they die.” In other words, heaven will require radical surgery if they are going to be people to enjoy forever.

A minister visited a lawyer friend. The lawyer told the preacher of a conversation he had with his grandchild not long before. As Grandpa prepared to leave, the little one looked up at Grandpa and said he wished Grandpa wouldn’t leave. When asked why, the child answered, “Because when you’re here, Daddy and Mommy are more patient with me.“

This is a common affliction, even among us church folk. Consider the observation Dr. Paul Rees offered in a sermon. My dear friends, declared the preacher, “we have had at times a kind of eloquence in a camp meeting or a holiness convention that seemed seraphic--Oh, how heavenly it was!----but there was nothing that corresponded to it in the patience that was demonstrated by the preacher, let us say with his own wife and children in the home.”

Someone else adds that “swifter than the speed of an arrow from an Indian’s bow comes the all-too-justified accusation that some holiness people simply are not holy.” Most of us have seen local churches that just as well close their doors because everybody knows that group of people can’t get along together, so why go there? The rest of us find life hard enough without joining ourselves to a group of people who are hard to live with.

However, I have been around enough churches to know that not all churches are that difficult and not all Christians are at odds with each other. It is true, I have run into my share of people that are hard to live with; they are in Sunday school classes, on Trustee boards, on the job, and even in the community.

You do not have to be a compromiser to be easy to live with, claims Glenn Black. Superintendent of the Kentucky Wesleyan Church, Black suggests you are not a weak-kneed or spineless Christian if you are easy to live with at church (I would add at home and elsewhere).

Rather, it is a mark of emotional, mental, and spiritual maturity to be easy to live with (God’s Revivalist and Bible Advocate, 3-08 “Easy to Live With,” p.8.). It is a mark of wholeness, that level of living without which no man shall see God. Did not St. Paul remind us, “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men” (Romans 12:18).

As often as not, the crisis of getting along peaceably with others lies with us--not others. Therefore, let us not be so myopic and stubborn that we refuse to explore all possible means of living peaceably with others.

For my part, I do not want God to need to do radical surgery on me to make me easy to live with, either here or on life’s other side--forever.
Wayne

MACU Update

Steve, our neighborhood Mailman, delivered an interesting package yesterday. It brought personal greeting from President Fozard of Mid-America Christian University. It provided an update from MACU’s Trustee’s, and it included two recent publications: MINUTE MOTIVATORS FOR STUDENTS (Toler) and MAKING SENSE OUT OF SPIRITUALITY (Sanders).

I learned that MACU hired Worden Associates for marketing purposes. Dennis Worden, John Maxwell’s former Director of Marketing, helped expand Injoy Ministries and the “Million Prayer Partners of Pastors” initiative.

Worden will now lead the charge in increasing MACU enrollment and advancing both the Toler Leadership Center and the Thomas School of International Studies. While general enrollments are down in Oklahoma, MACU experiences a 5% increase in headcount--909 total students.

Of personal interest was confirmation on a rumor floating about. Helen, the widow of Dr. James H. Curtis--friends over the past 50 years-- will be honored with a Doctor of Divinity honorary degree.

I’ve never placed a lot of value on honorary degrees, for academic reasons. However, I applaud this action. Helen represents a host of women that have served the church so faithfully; Helen and Jim ministered to the church, and on behalf of MACU for many decades. We need ways of saying “Well done thou good and faithful servant!” to some of our extraordinary leaders.

I rejoice with the progress of the Thomas School of International Studies, named after Donna and Chuck Thomas and directed by Henry Cepeda. I remember when Cepeda became a student and how he went on to distinguish himself in Hispanic Evangelism.

I see great promise in the Toler Leadership Center, directed by our respected friend Stan Toler. We have family involved in Stan’s local church and my wife loves to visit at Trinity. Toler’s goal of training 100,000 church and community leaders by 2014 is noteworthy; to date they have trained 55,000.

Especially exciting to me is the vision for MACU Press and the hope of republishing some of the great out of print Holiness Classics. I would certainly hope one of those will be Asbury Lowrey’s POSSIBILITIES OF GRACE, of which I have an original from 1884.

Although an alumnus of Warner Pacific, I have been privileged in several ways to enjoy a close relationship with MACU from its beginnings. It has overcome earlier stigmas and become a dominant player in training leaders for the Church of God, and I would wish for it a greatly expanded ministry - especially in the context of the Wesleyan Holiness traditions.

Toler’s book, MINUTE MOTIVATORS, is Stan at his best. Published as a promotional piece for student recruitment, it offers quips, quotes, and stories that will not fail to motivate every reader toward a more excellent life.

MAKING SENSE OUT OF SPIRITUALITY, by Dr. Cliff Sanders, cuts through our mistaken, muddled thinking and reveals a worthwhile relationship with God. I acknowledge “Dr.” Cliff remembering him more as a young whippersnapper, one of those “preacher’s kids”, you know the kind I mean J .

I crossed paths with the Sanders family years ago in West Texas. Cliff‘s Grandmother would have been deliriously proud of him. She knew little of theology and doctrine, but she was a woman of prayer. We shared some hard days together and I loved to hear her pray. When she prayed, we felt God’s presence.

Dr. Sanders may well have spiritual roots far beyond the academic regurgitation we often endure--even beyond his understanding. Madge’s sons, Paul and Marvin, are longtime friends and Cliff is Marvin’s son. We owe gratitude to Spirit-filled people like Madge Sanders.

I rejoice in the successes of President Fozard at MACU. While we rejoice in their progress, let us give thanks for the sturdy contributions added by each of our several educational institutions. They contribute heavily to the well being of our local churches.
Wayne

Yes We Can!

There are those special times when the soul of a slumbering nation awakens and arouses itself to some decisive act. Millions of us watched last night as the American public rallied to act in a way that will hopefully change the course of this great nation. Martin Luther King, in giving his Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Peace Prize he accepted December 11, 1964, described it this way: “Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.”

I have long been an advocate for racial reconciliation, a multi-racial church, a nation no longer divided by skin coloration. I felt that I understood the fundamentals of black society, but I never saw the heart of black America as I saw it last night as Barack Obama accepted his election as President-elect.

I applauded when the Governor of Illinois handed down a moratorium on death-penalty sentences until justice could be reconciled in cases sending innocent men to the death chamber. I was never offended by Dr. Jeremiah Wright because I heard him in the context of the Southern Confederacy I met as a young Pastor. I was never put off by Oprah’s attempts to reach out in conciliatory ways that offended some Christians that thought she was anything but Christian in her attempts to mediate and bring inclusiveness.

I was not offended by the so-called liberalism of Jesse Jackson that prompted him to advocate as he did for the rights of the working class. I was not afraid of Obama because his Muslim father gave him the name of Barack Hussein. But, although I have mingled with black people all my life, I never saw the soul of black America as I did last night, with the announcement that the Obama Family will be our new First Family.

It went far beyond the glib demonstrating I expected. Far from destructive demonstrating as sometimes happens, I saw a new civility, a sober, somber side of a new responsibility; I saw aspirations never before thought possible pushing to the surface of the soul. It expressed itself in smiling faces, copious weeping, unashamed tears, people simply too overcome with emotion to utter words.

I call on President-elect Barack Obama, his administration, and all who influence the halls of government, to return to an inclusive, rather than exclusive, non-partisan governing by, for, and of the people. On the global front, I join those who support engagement in a new foreign policy based on the following five core principles, as outlined by American Friends Service Commission.

They remind us
1. Our nation should invest in peace. Our country should invest in diplomacy, development, and conflict prevention — cost-effective ways to improve national and global security.
2. Strengthen the civilian agencies that work on peace and development issues. The military is not an effective relief agency. The government needs a strong civilian foreign assistance and crisis response team.
3. Give diplomacy a chance. With a highly skilled diplomatic corps, the United States can prevent conflict and restore its international reputation.
4. Be a part of global peacebuilding efforts. We must work with renewed commitment in international institutions and partners to address major global conflicts and challenges, such as nonproliferation, climate change, migration, public health, and poverty.
5. Create justice through good development and trade policies.

We can make a difference and by the grace of God and we can do it gracefully. I pray that we do; yes we can…
wayne

Race

I am not a biologist, or much of a scientist of anykind. However, I find today today's election interesting with so much being put upon the historicness of this election. I recognize that Sarah Palin would be the first female VP, if elected. But, to make so much of Barack Obama being the first African American to become president is, to say the least interesting.

Obama was birthed by a young white girl, in a white family, whose father happened to be Kenyan. It seems to me our thinkiing is somewhat skewed. Barack Obama, having a mostly white ancestry, with the characteristics of his African American father, is as much a white man as he is a black man.

Does a little "black" blood make a white person black? Are we overplaying the race card in our mixture of races? What do you think?

Wayne

Checks and Balances

A man I love and appreciate recently emailed me admitting he had already voted with his absentee ballot. This man is a strong evangelical Christian. He was strong enough in his personal faith that he once considered entering church ministry. Later, he determined that God called him to the teaching profession, which he served as a divine calling. Now retired, after serving competently and admirably as an educator, he continues to serve through Christian counseling.

I know him well enough to know he is anything but an atheist, a socialist, or less than a thoughtful thinker. He came up the hard way. He got his education without many of the benefits many enjoy today. His life models personal commitment, impeccable integrity, and a devout faith in God. Still, he dares break with those narrow thinkers of the Christian Right, who devote legalistic attention to a narrow niche of hot button ethical issues with which they politically divide people, but overlook many other social practices condemned in the bible.

Maybe, he told me, “our country will do the right thing and elect Obama for President, and "redistribute" the wealth! Of course, I understood what he was saying. He was repeating (tongue in cheek) something that Barack Obama said, something that Sarah Palin and John McCain have consistently warped and twisted into anything but what Obama really meant.

He obviously did not mean Russian Communism/socialism. That‘s where equality means throwing the lion and the lamb both into the same cage to coexist. He knew that in such circumstances the lion comes out the [only] survivor 100% of the time. Thoughtful people, that are not out to intentionally slash and burn, understand that without referees, regulations, and game rules like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Wall Street Bear comes out of his cage of citizenship the winner every time.

The bible does talk about redistributing the wealth. In using the term you can mock and demean it, or you can understand my friend when he says “That is what is needed now.”

Commenting further, he talked about how others respond to him when he says “My Bible says we should be concerned about the poor and the down trodden.” He finds it puzzling and “amazing how when I say that, many of my Christian friends only hear, "take from me as a hard worker, and give to some lazy person".

I find such answers inexcusably lazy thinking and unconscionable behavior, at least for Christ followers. From the prophets of old, to the coming of Jesus, clear declarations of social accountability have guided people of faith. Amos long ago wrote, Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land, saying, When will the New Moon be over that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath be ended that we may market wheat?” -- skimping the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales, buying the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, selling even the sweepings with the wheat.

Concludes the Prophet, The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: “I will never forget anything they have done . . . they will fall, never to rise again” (Amos 8:4-7, 14). What has that to do with America and the Presidential Election this Tuesday?

If you think it does not correlate, then consider this recently revealed bit of statistic that reports this current year “2008 is the second 'gilded age' in 100 years.” That term “gilded age is defined simply as a time “where the top 5% own more money than all the other 95% put together.” That was what we had “in our country back in 1928” a year after my birth.

Those were the years of the Great Depression and Hoover Beef, when the Barons of Wall Street owned America, they thought, and arrogant financers controlled the market place, buying and selling unprotected laborers for the least possible amount, when men like my father--lifelong Republican that he was--humbly accepted employment under the New Deal of FDR.

Those were extreme times. I hope we never face them again. Still, in view of the social devastation in which we find ourselves, I am not surprised when I learn that I now live in the second gilded age. When 5% own more money than all the other 95%, it is time to reestablish the checks and balances, or else go back to pre-colonial days and once more submit to the monarchial whims of wealthy King George.

I’m not interested in accumulating any great fortune on Wall Street. I am investing heavily in the Kingdom of God. And, I find it a great misfortune for the wealthiest nation in the world to have so many vulnerable people in America being ignored while the rich get richer and the poor struggle even to exist.

I need some hope. Some checks and balances would help. I believe Jesus would be pleased with that, whatever one’s political party may be.
Wayne