Putting Our Shadow Where it Belongs...

My family has a tradition of watching National Lampoons Christmas Vacation around Christmas time, and if you haven't seen it I recommend checking it out at least once.  Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't, all depends on your personal tastes.  This isn't a review, I have another blog for that.  This is more about what occurred to me as I viewed the film.

The central character is Clark Griswald, a loving father and husband who works very hard to provide for his family, and in general a very kind man.  While some of his kindness is begruding, its still there amid the complaining.  He could easily give into his own selfishness on multiple occasions but he pushes through because at his core he's a good person.

His major character flaw is a sense of entitlement he has.  He wants the best for his family, and a major plot point revolves around his expected Christmas bonus.  He feels entitled to this extra money at the end of the calender year and has, in fact, already spent it.  This character flaw actually bothered me when I first viewed the film, this weird sense of entitlement, that he deserves something he didn't earn.  It took me a while to figure out why it hit me son close to home and why it was so terribly irritating.  Its because it reminded me of...me.

I know a lot of my generation, myself included, struggles with that sense of entitlement, and most psychologist will tell you that you get irritated with negative traits people posses that remind you of yourself, because deep down we don't like facing our own faults, our personal darkness.

However facing our flaws is essential to our spiritual growth.  Our flaws don't define us, but because we spend time dwelling on them we think they do.  Our flaws, rather, are a road map to get closer to God.

Things like entitlement are very childish.  In the film Griswald throws a temper tantrum and in our weaker moments we do to.  Our selfishness leads to anger and disappointment when we don't get what we want and when we let that dictate our moods we become as children, without control of our emotions.  Look at 1st Corinthians 11-13 "11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known."

A mirror darkly.  That selfish child we have lying inside us, that is our dark, sinful self.  We have to examine ourselves, not to wallow in self effacing guilt but to overcome the part of us that holds us back from God.  Turn away from that sinful you, turn to the light of God.  When you know your darkness and push it behind you, not within you but behind you, you face the light of God.

Let us help each other to make this a year of renewal, and show that through is this world can know the love of Jesus.

Thank you for reading, and God bless you.

Beginning the Journey: Part 1-The Prodigial Son

Going over what I've shared up until now, I realized that I'd never told you how all of this got started in the first place.  This is not an easy story for me to tell, but if it helps to share, then share I shall.

Whenever I speak to folks about God’s plan in life, I always tell them “God doesn’t take you where you want to go, but sends you where you need to be.”  Those words come not just from years of studying, but from my own personal experience.  In the summer of 2008 I was living in Corpus Christi, Texas, a delicate gem of a city on the gulf coast, and I was at an all-time low, both professionally and personally.  After seven years of law enforcement, I was not handling the strain very well, and I had just broken up with a woman I thought I was going to be with for the rest of my life.  Through all of this I felt myself drifting away from God, and that September, I followed the advice of some friends of mine and joined them in Bellingham, Washington, 2000 miles away from everything that reminded me of my troubles.  I gave my two weeks’ notice, cashing in all the money I had saved up, sold my truck, packed up my bags and headed to the Pacific Northwest.  At the time I didn’t know what God wanted out of me, and I frankly did not care.  I didn’t care about anything.

Arriving in Washington, it was a nice change of pace.  Things were slower; I had far fewer personal or professional responsibilities.  Granted the fact that I had no social life and no job had a lot to do with that, but it gave me time to walk and to think about what I really wanted out of life.  I tried going back to church.  Being raised Missouri Synod Lutheran; it had always been reinforced in my life how important a church family is, so I tried out the local Missouri Synod church up there.  I didn’t care for it.  I went in there a complete stranger, and felt like I left exactly the same way.  So I went to the local Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCA) and found it a lot more welcoming, but there was something just not right, not clicking for me.  It didn’t help that I found myself in a job I did not like at all, flipping burgers at a local restaurant.  All of my high and mighty law enforcement experience hadn’t paid off like I thought it would.  I could not, for the life of me, shake the funk I was in.

So I prayed.  I prayed for guidance, for some kind of message that would tell me what I needed to do.  In praying, I realized how far off of God’s path I had wandered, because when I was younger I could talk to God like he was an old friend.  Now it was like I didn’t know him at all.  But he came to me in the form of friends.  The few friends I had made when I was up there, would point out “You talk about Texas all the time, why not go back.  We like you, but we know you’re not happy here.  We love you, go home.”

It became very clear to me that this was, in fact, the direction God wanted me on now.  Almost as soon as I booked my plane ticket, I received a phone call from a friend still living in Texas stating that he had a car lined up for me.  It wasn’t anything fancy but it would get me around town.  I stopped at my aunt’s house, who lived in Seattle, to visit before my flight left and, that night I got a message from a friend of my family’s stating that she had a job lined up for me at the daycare attached to the church my parents went to.  Already my life was shaping up to be at least 60% better just by turning myself around and following the direction God wanted me on.

When I arrived in Texas, I once again found myself conflicted.  Here was the only real home I’d known for the majority of my life, but here too were all the problems I’d left behind.  I didn’t know how to feel about my return.  I was thankful and grateful to have a job and a car, but nagging doubt told me that I had just came back right where I started from, that I hadn’t made any progress at all.

It was here that God gave me something else to ponder, a different struggle to face off with.  The pastor at our church, a man not far off from me in age, one who had helped me as much as he could during my turbulent times, was called to another church.  This calling offered him enormous opportunity to spread the word and he accepted it graciously.  Thus we were left in a church that had no pastor, which is as functional as a ship with no captain.  The crew knows what to do to keep the ship running, but that’s not much use when you don’t know where to go.  To compound the matter, we couldn’t afford a new pastor, our previous one made ends meet by working as a DJ for a local radio station.  Pastors from other churches stepped forward to lend a hand and a voice, but they could not truly lead our congregation.

This isn’t the challenge God laid before me though.  I believe firmly that he did not want me to suddenly jump up and go to seminary, but He did want me to teach His word, to have an open dialog with others about God’s grace and the power of faith.  One Sunday morning, we were expecting a pastor from San Antonio to come and preach, but he suffered a car accident on the way and would not be in attendance.  I was on the elder’s committee and we discussed what to do next.  I said, “I’ll take today’s sermon.”  I still have no idea what I was thinking.  I’ve spoken before groups approximately one time prior in my entire life, and certainly hadn’t prepared anything.  I had an hour to figure out what I was going to say, an hour to prepare a sermon from scratch and deliver it before a group of people who knew me literally my whole life.  Some of them were at my baptism when I was an infant.  So to say there was some pressure there would be a gross understatement.

So I sat in the pastor’s vacant office with a yellow legal pad while the rest attended Bible study and I prayed.  “What, God, do you want me to say today?  What do you need them to hear?”

I had two words written on the page by the time my hour was up, “Prodigal Son.”  A Bible story that I’d heard my whole life, but had taken on new meaning for me over the course of the last year.  So I stood at the pulpit, hands wet with sweat, looking out at a small sea of faces.  I could feel my heart thumping in my chest.  I took a deep breath, channeled everything I’d learned in high school about public speaking, and I could feel a presence, something that felt like it was beside me and around me, like a comforting hand on my shoulder.  It propelled me forward, and I started to speak.  I spoke about my own personal journey, about the perspective that it had given me to our relationship with God when we go astray, and how no matter how far we go from Him, all we have to do is turn around and He’ll be there, waiting with a smile and open arms, because every day, in our own very special ways, we are that prodigal son.  This was not a polished sermon by any stretch of the imagination, but it was unfiltered and honest, and it resonated with the congregation.  For the first time in my living memory people actually talked about what was said on Sunday morning well into the next week.

That led me to a new ministry within the church.  We called it “Mobile Ministry”, where I would write up weekly Bible studies and e-mail them to anyone who was interested so they had something to carry through the week, to learn from and discuss with others.  I changed careers, got back into law enforcement and as I talked with my co-workers I learned of their various personal struggles and we addressed that in Mobile Ministry.  During this time I also spoke a few more times, only with better prepared sermons in hand.  I will never really know how much those listening to me took with them as they left and I suppose it is better that way in the long run.  The church is gone, the Ministry has faded away into a dusty, unused blog somewhere on the internet, but those lessons I still carry and I pass on as much as I can as I look to the next road God wants me to take.

Next time…Part 2: Finding a Home.

Its a LOT more complicated than that...

By faith, we live in the world but don't have to be of the world.  We exist living in a place that is fallen and tired, and sinful, but we are called by Christ to come out of that place, and that's not always easy.  Not everyone makes it out.

Obviously this blog is about my journey into becoming a member of the Catholic Church and, it was inevitable that I would have to talk about the various scandals that have loomed over the organization for the years.  The chief among them is, without about, the accusations leveled against various priests concerning the sexual abuse of young children.

A friend of mine, Brian Sweeny, recently shared on his Facebook page a clip from an interview with Billy Connolly, a popular actor and comedian.  In the clip he is asked about his relationship with the Catholic Church.  He naturally addressed the child sex abuse scandal and he stated that he does not have a relationship with the Catholic Church anymore for that and various other reasons.  I’m going to refer to Billy Connolly again in a little bit so stay tuned.

Now, I cannot and will not belittle the sex scandal, the actions, the events, or the victims.  That’s not what this is about.  I won’t justify the actions of the church other than to say that before they could take action it was their duty and responsibility to investigate each allegation for what it was.  This is actually where my criminal law background comes into play because that is the lens I have to look at it through.  I have no choice, I’m in too deep (in criminal law).

I cannot take any accusation at face value.  I have to wait for the investigation to prove, disprove, or remain inconclusive.  If the investigation proves inconclusive, then the law has no choice but to side with the defendant, because you are considered innocent UNTIL PROVEN guilty.  They are an organization over 2000 years old, so they are accustomed to handling problems behind closed doors.  Its just that these incidents were reported in an era that the church, I think, was not prepared for.  The era of the internet where every opinion was taken as absolute regardless of what actual facts said.  That, I think more than anything, colored the views of those who cried foul on the church.

That’s not to say that the church did everything right in regards to the scandal, but the actions of these priests, and those that actually made an effort to cover it up, these were not the actions of the church but of individuals.  I cannot hold the body of faith responsible for the actions of men.  Let me give you an example from my life.

While attending the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, we had a pastor that, frankly was questionable.  Our church oversaw a day care and it was later discovered that he had child pornography on his computer, in his office, at the church.  Well, question answered.  I personally never trusted the man, but that was my gut instinct, not based on any facts that I had.  He was removed from his office at the church, I don’t know if there were any criminal charges filed, and he’s no longer endorse by the Lutheran Church, but he’s still a pastor.  He may not have a congregation, but officially he’s still a pastor.

So, was justice served?  I don’t personally think so, but I also don’t know what was found during the investigation.  I also don’t hold God responsible for the actions of this man.  I’m very big on personal responsibility.  The priests who conducted these terrible acts on children, I hold them personally responsible for their actions.  The people who covered it up, I hold them personally responsible for their actions.  You know who also holds these people personally responsible for their actions?  God.  They sooner or later, are going to have to square up with God on their actions, and abuse of office is not limited to the Catholic Church, as my personal story illustrates.  It can happen anywhere because people are, at their core, just people.  Their actions do not invalidate the faith or the teachings of the church.

One thing that is very important to remember is that yes, you can be mad at the church, you can question it’s teachings, and ultimately you should evaluate how they apply to your specific life.  Billy Connolly did.  After the loss of his sister and of his friend, Robin Williams, Connolly did ultimately return to the church.  Whether or not he participates in mass itself is his choice, but he makes it a point to pray and light a candle for his lost loved ones.  I think that, more than anything expresses the point of the whole sordid affair.  You can be mad at representatives of the church, but remember that God exists above all of them, and God, regardless of your actions, will always be there for you.

Love Does not Judge, Love Forgives.

Hey folks, it’s been a while since I last posted because we were traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday.  Now that I’m back I wanted to address something that, as we spend time with others in the close quarters of the holiday gatherings we may all want to remember: be tolerant.

All too often we find ourselves in the mixed company of people who have lives or have made choices that we actively disagree with.  Perhaps they’ve made relationship choices that prove consistently destructive, perhaps they’ve turned to substance abuse, and perhaps they’ve resorted to a kind of “Peter Pan syndrome” where they refuse to advance their life beyond a certain point, they won’t (from our perspective, grow up).

Judging other people is very easy to do, because we judge based on our perspective of the situation, based on our choices, our lives, and our responses, but that’s also dangerous for our hearts.

I’ve used this example in conversations in the past, but I think it takes precedence here: working in law enforcement whether you’ve done it one day or done it a decade, you run into people who are not happy to see you.  I’ve had multiple co-workers voice the same complaint, that people they contact have a bad attitude.  I have to remind them that, before they contact police something bad has to happen to them.  I’ve never had a situation where someone pops their head into my office just to say “Everything’s fine, having a great day!”  No, we meet people on their bad days, sometimes the worst day of their life.

When we sit in judgement of other people’s choices, are we taking into account what they themselves are going through?  Think back to your last really bad day, did you show grace under fire?  Did you fail to be charming when life, the universe, and everything seemed to turn on you at once?  Were you a Job or a Jonah when things didn’t go your way?

I want us take a quick jaunt to John 8:2-12.  This is where the Pharisees drag a woman caught in adultery to Jesus.  They cite that Mosaic law, the law passed down to the Israelites by Moses, states that this woman should be stoned unto death.  This was a set up for Jesus, either he would rebuke Moses’ law (which was the word of God) or he would condone the death of this woman.  Jesus handled the situation like he normally does, by spinning it back onto the Pharisees asking them if their slates are clean.  He points out that only one without sin can truly sit in judgement of another person.

Let’s go to the woman right quick, because rarely is she talked about in the scenario and that’s a shame because in many ways she’s the stand in for us.  She’s us with our problems, she’s us with our faults and our lapses in judgement and our self-destructive behavior, and our substance abuse and our Peter Pan syndromes.  She was forcibly dragged from wherever she was and brought before the Son of God with the very real possibility of being bludgeoned to death with large rocks looming over her by a crowd that clearly did not care for her welfare, who only wanted to prove a point at her expense.

If you are starting to feel empathy towards this woman, good.  That means you are a good hearted person, that on some level you understand.

If we can extend that empathy to a woman who lived 2000+ years ago, can’t we extend it to the person sitting less than ten feet from us whom we might have known two minutes or all our lives?

Part of the problem we have when it comes to dealing with people who we view as needing to get their lives together is that we, as a society, have lost the meanings of two very important words: tolerate and accept.

To tolerate is to “allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference.”

To accept is to “believe or come to recognize (an opinion, explanation, etc.) as valid or correct.”

See there is a difference in the two concepts.  When we tolerate someone else’s life choice, we don’t have to accept them, we don’t have to view them as correct, but we still shouldn’t judge because we don’t know what’s going on with them.

So what do we do then?  We can’t accept the choices others have made, but we can’t judge them because we don’t know what’s going on with them.  Let’s flip back to “why are you judging?”

You judge because you don’t agree with it.  In the vast majority of cases we are prone to judge because we love that person, because we feel that person can be better than the situation that they are in.  Let’s face it, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking and feeling about a topic that you don’t care about, so if you are so wrapped up in what this person is doing, then it’s because you feel you have a vested interest in their life.  You have a vested interest but approaching with a judgmental attitude can cause that person to withdraw into the very lifestyle you are trying to get them out of.

What did Christ do?  Christ understood.  By law, yes the woman could have been judged and sentenced to immediate and painful death, but that’s not what he lets happen.  He gets the accusors to leave her alone first, then he waits, he loves, and he forgives.  Christ is the Son of God, there is nothing in this woman’s life that he doesn’t know.  He looks at her and sees every step that led her into her situation, and knows every wrong things she’s ever done, and he forgives her.  These are some of the same sins He’s later going to die on the cross for, but he forgives her.

That is love, my friends.  That is forgiveness.  Our brothers and sisters in humanity have to deal with a lot.  Hearts are broken, lives are torn apart, and sometimes at the end of the day, when they are sitting there glaring at the mirror they can’t forgive themselves for all that they think they’ve done.  Forgive them.  Forgive them in your own heart, and approach them as you should, as a fellow human being, and give them compassion.  You can tolerate their decisions without accepting them, but by showing them compassion and love you offer them hope and grace.  Through this, you shine a little bit of God’s love into their world, and that little bit can go a very long way.

 

Thanks for reading and happy holidays.

Faith Tested, Science Approved

“Sometimes the only pay off to having any faith is that it's tested again and again every day."

Fall Out Boy: Immortals

                Right now we are at a phenomenal crossroads.  Never before in my entire life have I seen a response to an election like this.  While half the population is elated, the other half is morose, looking up to the skies as if the anti-Christ has begun to walk among us.

Needless to say it’s been a pretty heavy week, and its only Wednesday.  With that in mind, I want to take a few minutes today to talk about some things that validate faith.  A lot of the time people of faith, especially right now, feel like their faith is being tested by the world.  Make no mistake, it is.  The stronger you grow in faith, the harder the devil is going to work on you.  That’s an accepted fact.  But as you go about your battle and you sit there, knees in the mud, staring at your hands just wondering if there is any point to it all, keep in mind a few things.

First, let’s start in the beginning.  Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.”  This passage directly correlates to a being, existing outside of time and space, creating the reality around us that we call the universe.  Early scientists postulated that the universe was eternal, having no beginning and no end, however later it was discovered by followers of those same disciplines that the universe was, and is, expanding.  Obviously if something is expanding, then at one point it had to be smaller, and has to have a reason for expanding.  Try this experiment at home, take a balloon and, with a marker, draw a bunch of dots on it while it’s still deflated.  Then blow that bad boy up.  You will see the dots expand and get further and further away from each other.  That is what scientists have found is going on with the universe.  Something is pushing those dots, in this case galaxies, further away from each other, which means at one point, all space and matter was condensed into some finite point, commonly referred to as singularity.  Something had to have kicked off this expansion process, called the Big Bang, something that had to exist outside our reality, beyond time and space.  That something is God.

 

Next there was “God created the universe in 6 days…” Genesis 1, 2:2.  Most would say that’s balderdash, you couldn’t create all reality in six days.  Well, I’m going to try and paraphrase Dr. Gerald Schroder on this one, but I’ll put a link to his full articles below.  Go back to your balloon model of the universe and pick a point anywhere on it.  Lets say that our galaxy, simply because now you have a visual for where we are at.  If you calculated to the center of the universe and parked yourself there and shot a message at light speed, you would find that it would arrive at our planet about the time the planet started to cool from the fires of creation.  “…and the earth…” from Genesis.  Next day you shoot another message from that point, and it travels billions and billions of miles and so forth.  When you do that, say seven times, it plays out to not only the age of the universe, but also how long man has been floating around the planet writing down his history.

http://www.geraldschroeder.com/AgeUniverse.aspx

Genesis 2:7 “And then the Lord God formed man from the clay of the earth…” God fashioned us from the same matter that he formed the world.  Of the 59 elements that make up the human body, all 59 can be found in the earth’s crust.  We are of this earth.

https://esoriano.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/from-dust-to-man-a-scientific-proof/

God set us apart from the animals.  Many in the scientific community would have you believe that humans are nothing more than really fancy apes, however there is a decided difference, and if you can’t see that then you probably need to re-evaluate your personal standards.  Mankind stands apart from animals because have a bit of God in us.  He breathed life into us directly, giving us a soul, giving us something that sets us spiritually and intellectually above the animals.  Now what we choose to do with that, that’s a different matter altogether.  We’re actually going to come back to that in a bit.

God created a massive flood.  Genesis Chapter 6 pretty well covers this, but you probably know the basics: Noah, rain, ark, animals, massive flood etc.  Most scholars would push this story aside as an allegorical tale, a myth, but there’s more to this story.  You see, all across the globe people have stories about a massive flood, one that wiped out or massively altered life as they know it.  All…across…the globe.  Now again, this could be passed off as “Floods are a big deal, of course they’re myths of it…” but all these stories date back to about the same time.  They all came into records a little less than 2000 years before Christ.  Additionally there is physical evidence showing these floods happened.  Well, you say “floods”…I say “FLOOD”.

 

Jesus is real. I mean, historically speaking there is evidence that “Jesus, who is called Christ” is in the historical record.  1^st Century Romano-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who is a scholarly credible source, makes repeated references to the actions and activity of Christ in his historical record.

 

Finally…you have a soul and it transcends what you are going through.  According to Dr. Robert Lanza, voted 3^rd most influential scientist alive by the New York Times, quantum theory proves consciousness moves to another universe after death.  What we interpret as the universe is our senses informing our brains of what reality is.  Naturally we are locked into thinking this is all there is because this is all the input we receive.  In interpreting the data Lanza states that the body receives consciousness from an outer source, a source that defies the conventions of space/time, and that when the body dies, the consciousness moves on to a different concept of reality.  His theory is a bit involved, but it points out that the universe was fine tuned for life, something that cannot happen randomly, and therefore must have an intelligence driving that material creation.

http://truththeory.com/2015/12/05/quantum-theory-proves-that-consciousness-moves-to-another-universe-after-death/

This is a highly respected scientist reaffirming that you have a soul that transcends your body, and the universe was purposefully created by intelligence beyond our understanding.

Take from this what you will, sometimes having an outside source reaffirm your faith helps, sometimes it just feels like a life jacket while you float in the middle of the ocean, you’re not drowning, but you don’t feel like you’re in a better place.  God has a plan and a purpose for everything, and we sometimes just have to ride out the storm under a better understanding comes along.

Thanks for reading.

Looking for Lost Books...

This week I want to address something that has weighed on my mind for a long time.  When Martin Luther kick started the Reformation, what became the Protestant church (which included those that followed Luther, called Lutherans) removed 9 books from biblical cannon, because they claimed they weren’t cannon.  Well, 7 or 9, depending on who you’re asking.

So the books that came under question were Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Baruch, the Wisdom of Solomon, Maccabees 1 and 2, the Prayer of Manasseh, and some chapters of Esther and Daniel.

Incidentally the confused numbering is “Do you count Maccabees 1 AND 2 or just Maccabees all together, and can you really count editing Esther and Daniel as a “book”?”

My answer is, 1 and 2 are separate books for a reason, and yes, Esther and Daniel count.

The question that bothers me and what brings about today’s discussion is “Why?”

I’m not particularly a fan of historical censorship of any kind, I personally believe we need to have access to it all no matter how good, bad, or ugly it is.  However, as it turns out, these books weren’t censored because of content, but rather timing and a lack of historical data.  When Jesus came to Earth, the tome of scriptures included the books I just listed.  They were cannon at that time.  Then 70 AD came along and the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple due to the large number of Christians popping up.  The Jews then decided to get their house in order and part of that was to determine what was scripture and what wasn’t.  They…THEY were the first ones to edit out the big 9 (or seven if you want) because they questioned whether these specific books were ever written in Hebrew.  When the Catholic Church put together their Bible based on a lot of criteria, they included the books again.

Then Luther came along and since he felt there was no historical data to support these books in the first place, he put them basically as “extra reading, but not required”.

Then this happened:

The Dead Sea scrolls were found and over the last fifty or so years have been translated, validating the existence of several Old Testament books in their original Hebrew…including parts of Tobit and other Sirach.  Over the last few decades, these books have been surfacing in historical data supporting that they were valid the whole time.

So are they pertinent?  Are Protestants and Lutherans really missing anything?

Well yes, and I could go on and on about that, but I’d rather you find out yourself by checking out these lost books.

Now what about the books that were almost lost?

Martin Luther had a very low opinion of the Paul’s letter to Hebrews, the books of James, Jude, and Revelation, all of which he wanted removed but eventually relented to placing in the back of the Bible, placing more focus on what he considered the core text.

So why does this matter to me?  Well, I was born and raised Lutheran, and I know there are those of you reading this who will say “You weren’t born Lutheran, you may have been raised, but you weren’t born Lutheran.”  Which I respond with: The point is I am a cradle Lutheran so I never questioned the Bible as it was presented to me.  There is a big thing in the Protestant church and its practically a battle cry for Lutherans “Sola Scriptura” or “scripture alone”.  That means that you base your faith solely on the Bible and what it says and not based on anyone’s interpretation of that scripture.  I was okay with that for the longest time.  “Bible says it, I believe it, that’s it.”  You’ll hear that in any Bible study, but now I have this problem: How can you talk about what scripture says if you can’t question what scripture says?

Further, how can you believe in “sola scriptura” if you have “inabsolutus scriptura”, incomplete scripture?  That’s the equivalent of saying “I believe you are a person, except for your hand.  Your hand is a chair, or at worst doesn’t exist at all.”

Just something to think about.

 

Thanks for reading.

Deconstruction of the Godly Family by Television, or Time to Step Up Dads!

If you had asked me, say five years ago, if I thought there was anything detrimental to the American family on network television I would have responded “Probably not.”  Unfortunately I had, at that time, the luxury of ignorance.  Now, as a husband and a father, I can tell you first-hand that there is a lot wrong with the way both groups are portrayed, and it has a direct effect on our culture.

You don’t have to wander far down the channel listings to find the problem.  Just tune into regularly aired reruns of “Married with Children”, “Everybody Loves Raymond”, “Home Improvement”, “King of Queens”, “Family Guy”, “South Park”, and a slew of commercials depicting the same thing: The stupid, doofus man-child father and the smart, savvy, always practical wife waiting to clean up the mess.

Few and far between do we see the smart man, the dad actively participating in his children’s lives, and the attentive husbands.  Even the best of shows like “Blackish” always draw the husband back into the “man child” role making him learn a moral lesson by the end of the episode.

If we’re lucky they learn a moral by the end of the episode.

So why are these problems?  Isn’t it just an entertaining story trope, the funny man to the wife’s “straight guy.”  The problem is that this flies in the face of God’s plan for the family, and delivers a gift wrapped message of irresponsibility to generations of young men.

If you polled a group of teenagers to determine who among them baby sat non family children, you’d find by an overwhelming margin that girls are the baby sitters.  Young men are expected to be out mowing lawns, doing yard work, and helping out with heavy duty projects.  Girls are instructed to stay inside and watch the children or learn to cook.  You’d like to believe that since we are far away from the nuclear family of the fifties that we’d have pushed aside these tropes, but all we really did was dumb down the men.

Statistically speaking fewer and fewer young men know basic domestic skills like laundry, cooking, and home upkeep.  This places those men at a social disadvantage because when they get married they depend on their spouse to take on these roles, which places an unfair burden on her making her a servant in her own home, and placing an unnecessary strain on the marriage in general.  Television, such as the shows I listed above, tells us this is ok.

Husbands and especially fathers need to have these skills, and not just use them, but teach them to their families.  They need to have the savvy to lead their families in all manners of life.  If the husband doesn’t know something that the wife does, it behooves him to learn that skill or that ability so that she is not the sole person responsible for this task.

 

As it was designed in marriage and in the book of Genesis, and is brilliantly illustrated in “God’s Umbrella of Protection”, seen below.

As you can see, God protects and cares for the family with direct instruction to the husband to protect and care for the family starting with the wife.  The wife protects and cares for the children.  When we upset this dynamic we upset the foundation of the family.  When you place the wife in a leadership role over the husband, you have made him weak.  When the husband places the wife between him and God, he has placed the burden of leadership onto her.

The husband and wife share the responsibility for the household, but the leadership, per the church, rests on the husband’s head and altering this dynamic can lead to laziness on the husband’s part, an unjustified sense of entitlement, and indirect instruction to the children that the husband is subordinate to the wife.

                This is the dynamic that is intended, however it still also has to be maintained and sometimes earned.  If you look at the dynamic on the diagram, the husband is over the wife, the wife over the children, and God over all.  Any basic business class will tell you that whoever is in charge needs to be able to do the functions of all those they oversee.  God, obviously can do anything.  He’s God.  But the husband cannot rely entirely on the wife for the care and upkeep of the household; he needs to be able to perform these functions as well.  It’s called “Leading from the front”, and it goes along with “lead by example.”  I used this example a few posts back but it bears repeating: the dirty kitchen.  If the husband wants the kitchen cleaned, he shouldn’t demand his wife do it, he should do it himself.  It’s not the husband’s job to sit on a throne and order the family around, he needs to be in the “trenches” as it were, with them, performing the same tasks as they are, no matter how menial.

Sons will follow the paths blazed by their fathers, sometimes to the same detrimental results.  Working in law enforcement I witnessed a father and his son come into jail at the same time.  The father was subdued, ready to receive the outcome of his choices.  The son, on the other hand, was boisterous, verbally combative and disrespectful of the staff.  As I was fingerprinting the father, I recalled the report and asked if that was his son.  With a great deal of regret he said “yes.”  Too late the father realized that his son had followed his path.

Fathers, both current and hopeful, what path do you want to blaze for your children?  This is where we lead by example, by taking on the chores and responsibilities as they need taking on, and in doing so leading.  Then as your children come to an age appropriate to handle these task, you teach them how to do it so they can then carry on that life skill and that mindset that fathers are the first, and sometimes most important, teachers their children will ever have.

Yes you will be tired.  Yes it will be a long process.  But that is where prayer for patience and strength come in, and pray those prayers with your children, not in spite of them, because as you are struggling to teach, they are struggling to learn.

Going back around to television, again what we see on the screen in many American sit coms is not what God intended, and while it’s played for laughs it actually shows the beginning of relationships that will tear themselves apart.  Our benchmarks should not be “Well at least I’m better than Peter Griffin.” They should be “At least I’m better than I was, and with God’s grace I’ll be better than that tomorrow.”

 

Thank you for reading.

Tending Your Spritual Garden or "Retraining Your Jerk Brain"...

I know! It’s been…well it’s been a heck of a week.  Yes yes I missed my “Monday” schedule…and Tuesday…and Wednesday however it’s not for the same reasons.  This time it’s been completely work related.

So let’s talk about gardens.  Now last week I quoted Father Mark from OLMC and his veritable catch phrase “If we’re a jerk at home, we’re a jerk.”  I followed that up with stating “So stop being a jerk.”

I realize that’s a very blanket response to a problem that’s probably deeply rooted which is why I wanted to talk about gardens.  See what I did there?  My wife did and she’ll probably throw something at me for the pun.  Totally worth it.

Our souls, our personalities, our lives, our little nuggets of the world are, basically gardens.  They grow what we let grow there.  What we plant in our lives take root and become something larger.  So how do we fix this “jerk” garden?  First we have to take out all the garbage, all the weeds, all the detrimental bugs and so forth.  We’re going to need a new planting area, new dirt.  So what’s causing us to be jerks, what are the weeds?

They are probably our focus on the wrong things, addictions if you will.  People have addictive personalities, whether we like to admit it or not.  Addictions aren’t limited to drugs or alcohol; they are anything that pulls us away from the important things in life.  Food can be an addiction, sex, pornography, even collecting specific items or even just the act of spending money can be an addiction.  Basically addiction is anything that sets off pleasure centers in our brains, giving us fleeting moments of pleasure without offering sustainable joy.

Those are our weeds and they need to be pulled.  The first step in pulling them is acknowledging that they are in fact there, that we have these problems and that we need to address them.  We pull them by talking to our priests, our counselors, our families and friends, whoever can help us.  It’s going to be a long, dirty, unpleasant process but the end result will give us something we haven’t had in a while.

A place to plant the good things, the things that will offer us sustainable joy.  We start by laying down new soil through prayer.  We turn our attention to the things we want in our lives,  the things that are actually important, family, children, life goals, and we pray about them.  If we have trouble with prayer, we should reach out to our fellow Christians, those we think have it all together.  They will be happy to help us learn how to talk to God about our new goals, our new focuses.

Then we take action.  Reading the Bible, we use Christ’s love for us as a guideline for our love for each other.  This is the hardest part, from what I can tell, because it’s so intangible.  We, as human beings, like tangible things, things we can see, that we can hold and we can look back on.  But this is retraining our brain, our hearts, and our souls, things we can’t physically touch.  Here is what I would recommend, a journal.  No, wait for it, just hear me out.

Keep a written journal, you can usually find them in the stationary aisle at your local “something” mart.  As you go through your day to day routines, and you find yourself in situations where you are struggling, write that moment down, and pray on it.  Then, you kick it up a notch.  We all have problems, and I promise you the people in your little circle, your nugget of the world, are dealing with personal issues that you probably know about.  Write them down in your journal, and pray for them.  Even if someone isn’t having a problem, maybe they’re having a great deal of success, write it down and thank God for their good fortune.  When you become cognizant of the problems of others, when you thank God for the blessings of others, you start retraining your brain from the egocentric person that you used to be, egocentric meaning “self-centered” and you start becoming the exocentric person God wants you to be, meaning you place others as a central priority.

Then you start to understand the nature of Christ.

Ephesians 6:4, or Stop Being a Jerk...

So yesterday was kind of a pill.  You’ll note that I didn’t post anything yesterday, despite my defacto “Monday” schedule.  Well, as one would expect, life kind of got in the way.  It was hard getting out the door to work with my oldest son, and work as more than a little hectic.  It was just a very frustrating morning/early afternoon.  Sometimes I think rough times get you so God can send you a message along with it.  Now I know the old adage is “Why can’t God be clearer with his messages?”  It’s not like we get a burning bush or a pillar of fire or a talking cloud, no we have to, a lot of times, look for God’s words in our daily lives.

Then some days he just sends it straight to you.  So I downloaded a Catholic Bible app for my phone, and it does this thing where you get a “verse for the day” kind of thing.  Remember how I said a big stressor yesterday was my son?  Well, today’s verse was Ephesians 6:4 “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

Sometimes when we get God’s word directly in our lives, it’s something that lifts us out of a funk, something that reminds us that no matter how hard it is, He’s there.

Sometimes it’s a stark reminder that we need to toe the line more.  So the verse got me thinking about yesterday morning with my son and how I could have actually handled it a lot better.  I think if we all look back to our more frustrated moments, we might find that we all could be handling it a lot better.

Kids can be frustrating, adults can be frustrating, work can be frustrating, chores can be frustrating, and life in general is, well, frustrating.  Sometimes we don’t have time to process our frustration and channel that energy into a more constructive way to deal with the problem, but most of the time we do.  We just don’t TAKE the time to channel that energy.  Yes, our kids can be frustrating, but that doesn’t mean we should allow ourselves to get frustrated with them.  What does that teach them?  That if you find yourself in a tough situation that you should just get mad?

“…do not provoke your children to anger…”  If I allow myself to be frustrated I will probably provoke the child to anger, and that will greatly exacerbate the situation.

I think Father Mark, our priest at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, says it best when he says “If you are a jerk at home, you’re a jerk.”

Let’s say, for example, I got frustrated with my son and I said things to him that made him feel less than excellent.  Then I go to work and I say encouraging and uplifting things to my clerks.  I would be a jerk.  Period.  That is a jerk thing to do.  I may be charming as all get out at work, but if I cannot lift up my own child, then I am nothing.

So, if you are a jerk at home, you’re a jerk.  But this isn’t an absolute.  This isn’t a fixed point in the universe.  This is a warning sign.  The flip side of that is to stop being a jerk at home.  Stop letting frustration and negative feelings get the better of you.

“…bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”  Stop being a jerk.  You know when you’re slipping into that role.  You know it when you start deflecting and defending.  You start blaming outside stressors for the problem.  “Well, if he would just do what I said, and she would just do this, and the dog would just stop barking, and…”  All of the sudden we’ve blamed our mood on other people, like they control a knob on our backs that switch us from happy to sad to angry.  Now, I’ve checked all over my back and I have no such switch.  I’m also 100% sure my kids don’t hold a remote control that changes my mood the way we flip through channels on the TV.

No, the only one in control of your mood is you.  You choose to feel this way or that way, you choose to let this outside stimuli dictate what kind of mood you are going to be in.  But that’s just us dumping responsibility for ourselves onto others.  So how do we deal?  Well, in “Armchair Quarterbacking” the issue, the easiest solution would be to think “If someone came in right now offering to help, what would you ask them to do?”  Then you do that.  Because doing that teaches your family how these kinds of situations should be handled.

My wife gave me a perfect metaphor years ago, when I was having difficult times at work with multiple responsibilities rearing their heads all at once.  She said that when you are doing a spin, the way to keep from getting dizzy (ie letting all your negative emotions overwhelm you) is you find something to focus on.  Everything else will fall into place, as long as you keep your focus on one goal.

Being a parent, being a father, means teaching your children the best way possible to do things.  Sometimes it’s the best way possible on how to hammer a nail; sometimes it’s how to deal with their frustrations in a healthy manner.  So when your world, as a parent starts to spin, focus on Ephesians 6:4.

To Be Better than we Are

I may not be good, but I’m better than I was.  That’s what we tell ourselves, but are we that much better, or are we messaging the truth a little?

I think it’s important to for us, not just as people, but specifically as followers of Christ, to reflect on ourselves and determine just what kind of follower we’ve been.

We all struggle with sin, it’s a fact of our world, and nobody is above it.  A lot of times we find ourselves in exactly the same predictiment over and over again, committing the same thing over and over again, to the point where our priest can probably accurately guess what we’re going to confession for before we even open our mouths.  We are humans and humans are creatures of habit, even if those habits are hindering our own progress.

Now there is this thing in the professional world called a “Performance Evaluation”.  It breaks down into about 12 or so categories and asks a specific question, asking for a numeric evaluation and a written response from the evaluator.  Basically low numbers indicate you are doing poorly in that specific areas while high numbers mean you are excelling.  Nine times out of ten the evaluator is your instructor or your supervisor.  I was thinking about this and I recalled an episode of the show “Scrubs” called “My Fifteen Minutes”.  In it, Dr. Cox is set to evaluate the young doctor and defacto narrator of the show J.D.  J.D. gets upset when Dr. Cox tells him to fill out his own evaluation and stands up to him.  Dr. Cox points out that he wanted J.D. to do his own evaluation so HE could see where he stands, HE could ask HIMSELF these hard questions and come face to face with his own answers.

That, I think is probably the best analogy for how we Christians need to evaluate our own lives.  Those around us should know we are Christians not because we tell them, but because we show them in our lives, our actions, and our interactions.

So, I worked a little something up. It has 10 categories: Have I been charitable, have I been forgiving, have I been a good listener, slow to anger, slow to judge, kind with my words, generous with my praise, faithful in my prayer, a humble servant, and finally have I defended God.

The last one in particular I want to make special note of, because that’s one we tend to overlook.  He’s God, he doesn’t NEED us to defend him, but on the other hand there are those that attack God on a regular basis.  They demean our faith, and often we just sit there and say nothing.  They basically trash talk God, much in the same way they did in Jesus time by turning the temple into a shopping mall.  Jesus got MAD and drove off those that would defile the house of God.  He was 100% right to do so, and if anything, anyone who called themselves faithful should not have just been beside him in doing this, they should have led the charge. 

I’m sure we all know someone like that, or we’ve seen it in the media, where Christians are played as fools and treated as idiots.  But what does that say when we say nothing in response?  We aren’t witnessing, we aren’t defending, and by not doing either of those things, we are saying that faith in God doesn’t really matter to us.  We give lip service and do the bare minimum and that’s it.

So please, take some time, whether you do it strictly on your own or you use the form I attached, it does not matter to me, but please take some time and reflect on the kind of Christian you are, because knowing where you are at will help you focus on where you want to be.

Here is the evaluation:

My Personal Evaluation

Have I been Charitable?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Have I been forgiving?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Have I been a good Listener?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Have I been slow to anger?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Have I been slow to Judge?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Have I been kind with my words?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Have I been generous with my praise?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Have I been faithful in my prayer?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Have I been a humble servant?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Have I defended God?

1              2              3             4             5             6             7             8             9             10

What can I do to improve?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________