Anyway

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be Kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

(A poem hung on a wall in a Calcutta orphanage founded by Mother Teresa)

St. Johnny & the Artist’s Pilgrimage

” …we have to awaken, to think thoughts beyond the thoughts we have already thought. To get back, we have to get this, to get now: to receive the present activity of God in our midst. To get this is to take all we can know of the past and hold it out in contrast to this moment. Then we can begin to sew together what is essential of who we have always been with what will connect in the present.”

This is a pull quote from an article I wrote for the September/October issue of Immerse Journal.   I developed some themes I have spoken about previously for the article around the idea of the cruciform journey of an artist.

Artist, broadly conceived, of course.  I pastor a church, but I learned most of what I know about being a pastor from being an artist first; and in a way I think pastors are the truest artists we have left in our culture.   In a larger sense, every human is an artist, a creative being made in the image of the Creator.   And if you begin to engage life, work, and relationships as art, you may soon learn what artists know, that there are forces at work in the process that will stifle, derail, and distract you from ever making great art.

I hope my article can provoke you (as it does me) to consider the process of recovering not only an artist’s approach to life, but a pathway for dwelling richly in the deep down things.

It was a pleasure and honor to write for Immerse Journal.  I urge you to subscribe.  I’m grateful to Mike King for the invitation to write.   And as usual, I learned more in the writing than you will in the reading.  So read my article, then write yours.

You can (for not much longer) still preview my article in full at the Immerse site.   There are also a couple great reflections to the article in the “culture” section of site.

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

- William Stafford

Letting Grow

“If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience or discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Goldtop

Bin Laden and Grace

Osama Bin Laden got what was coming to him.

There is hardly a way to argue that.  Mass-murderer.  Terrorist.  Destroyer of lives.  Disruptor of Shalom.  Perhaps he even got off easy.

I suppose I have the same sense of relief that anyone who loves life has: a relief provided by the reality that at least Bin Laden is done exacting his brand of hell upon the earth.

Yet as a Christian, I cannot revel in any human’s demise.  And as a human being I know that by God’s grace I have not ‘got what was coming’ to me.   I am grateful to be alive, and for the time I still have ahead of me to make amends, to grow up, to make a positive contribution, to choose more light and less darkness, more life and less death.

So I mourn the tragedy that any human being no longer has that time.  Perhaps Bin Laden forfeited his time long ago.  Perhaps there does come a time when the only human response to the horror of another’s continuing devastation is to send them to God who may yet have mercy.   I don’t know.    I do know that it is dangerous to pretend we are God in taking human life.  Yet it is easier than to pretend we are God in our capacity for mercy.   For there is a wideness in God’s mercy; and we are not God.

We are not God.  That is the posture of humility that should envelope all our actions (and reactions).   Anytime we have reached the end of our ability to wait upon God to set things right, anytime we can no longer bear suffering at the hands of our enemy, we may very well decide to take matters into our own hands.   But if we must, we should do so in sober humility, knowing that God’s scandalous grace is indiscriminately given to all evil-doers.  Each one of us.

Just Keep Going

Thanks to my friend Beth for this discovery:

 

We’ve been searching for our whole lives.
And we have traveled through unexplainable stories.
Swear to God I fought the good fight,
always waiting for the coming of morning.
And I heard the Captain say, I heard the Captain say,
“The more I know, the less I’m knowing.”
And I heard the Captain say, I heard the Captain say,
“Activate your force-fields and just keep going…”