Interrupted

Apparently, Jesus was interrupted a lot during His ministry. He’d try to take His disciples off to rest, and a crowd would come running after. They talked while He prayed and woke Him up when He slept. The Pharisees threw an adulteress in front of Him while He was preaching. Imagine if that happened today! A man coming down through the ceiling cut in on a sermon. A woman with an incurable disease cut in on a healing mission. A blind man with a really loud voice sitting by the side of the road cut in on a walk. They yelled His name, they mobbed Him, they burst into tears, they dumped perfume on His feet. In the synagogue, on the mountainside, in boats, in houses, on the street. Nowhere was safe. And what does Jesus do? Does He get annoyed, short-tempered, curt, upset? Does He say, “Sorry, I’m busy,” and go back to His real work?

No.

In fact, reading the stories, you get the idea that the interruptions were His real work. You see a Jesus who faces head-on every new face that pops up in front of Him, never pushing them aside to follow a plan. Why? How did Jesus manage not to lose His temper? Why did He treat interruptions not like burdens but like opportunities?

Because they were people. Jesus had a job to do, and that job was people. Not carpentry, not fishing, not money, not even synagogues. It wasn’t a vocation, it wasn’t a schedule, it wasn’t a sermon. His purpose was people. Plain and simple. And when they came His way, He saw them for what they were. Not interruptions, not irritations, but empty vessels with the potential of being filled with the love of God. He was never too busy to be interrupted because those very interruptions were His business. What about me?

The Gingerbread Project

It was going to be amazing. Just like the jewelry beads, the scarecrow family, and the Oreo turkeys, only Christmas oriented instead. I had the frosting out, the pre-shaped pieces for the little gingerbread houses, the gumdrops for the windows - everything! We just had to cut them out and put them together. And decorate them, of course.

So I started asking around. Gingerbread house, anyone? “Sure . . . maybe. After I do my homework. I’ve got a lot of homework tonight.” “Um, can I talk to my mom first online?” “Well, maybe later. I was kinda thinking I might take a nap.” Student after student listened, smiled, and declined. In fact, the only one who was enthusiastic was McKenzie, and she’s seven.

I walked into the computer room after a round of useless asking and found a fair number of them, staring at their computer screens, oblivious to the world.

That’s when it hit me.

These girls didn’t care about sitting down and doing something with me. It’s not that they don’t like me. They simply weren’t interested. There were two and a half hours between school getting out and the dinner bell ringing, and they wanted to spend that time the way they chose. Which meant sitting in front of the computer. Alone. There was no time for spending quality time with me. It wasn’t about getting to know each other better. Having good talks. Creating memories. They’d actually prefer to stare at the computer for a couple hours, thank you very much.

I wonder if we do the same thing to God.

There He is, sitting at the kitchen table with the gingerbread and gumdrops spread out before Him. Waiting for us to walk through the door and spend some quality time with Him. Have a good talk. Create a memory. Instead, we get on the Internet. Or flip on the television. Or take a nap. It’s not that we don’t like Him. We’re just not interested.

Twilight vs. Christianity

I heard the general plot line of the Twilight series for the first time today. A Christian teenage girl told me. It didn’t leave me shocked. There’s not much they write about now that hasn’t been written about before. What it did do is make me think a little bit.

Why is our Christian teen/young adult culture wrapped up in these stories just as much as the world? Why would they sooner sit down and read a chapter of Eclipse than a chapter out of Job? Why are they more entranced with the narration of Hollywood than the narration of the Man from Galilee? Why will they wait till the movie’s over before rushing to the bathroom when they can hardly keep their eyes open during church?

For that matter, why will we?

What is it that’s got a hold of our hearts?

We’ve lost the practice of guarding ourselves. We don’t guard our eyes; we don’t guard our ears; we don’t guard our stomachs. The only thing we do a decent job of guarding is our pocket books, but even that’s out on Black Friday. We’ve forgotten how to guard our hearts.

“Guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” So, you lose your heart, you lose life. The scent of the winter snow doesn’t cut it anymore; you need an actual taste. Simple, honest words won’t satisfy; you want poetry a little more like Shakespeare. The God who loves you isn’t tangible enough; you look for romance that’s a little more spicy. You’re not being blatantly rebellious. You’re just looking for life. Who wants to be bored all the time?

I’m not ranting about the evils of stories like Twilight. What I am trying to say is this: We’ve got a lot of kids out there - good, church-going, Christian kids - who know the story of Bella and Edward a whole lot better than they know their Bibles. And they find it a lot more fascinating too. Why are they being captivated by vampires and not by Jesus? Is it really possible to be captivated by both? What do they see when they look at you? Are you showing them a God of big sticks and straight-backed pews? Or a Man who lived and died and rose again and knows a whole lot more about love than Edward ever will?

Faces from Haiti

I just realized I've talked quite a bit and haven't done a thing about pictures yet. Which I've no excuse for as our team managed to snap approximately 4,000 photos in the space of those seven days in Haiti. So, here's a bit of what we saw at least. It's actually in the form a music video, only without the music. The words are the English translation to the Creole song I wrote and sang for the Haitian people while in their country. I'm afraid you'll have to imagine the rest. Here's the English version:



Here's the kids at the orphanage listening to the Creole version of the song.

A Very Staid, Unenthusiastic Report on Dengue Fever (Sort of)

Well, we seem to be through the worst of it. The fire’s smoldering, the jump is landed, the bell has rung, and you can all go home. Which is precisely where we are. Home. Mom. Josh. Kent. Alnetta. Michelle. And all the rest who never went to the hospital in the first place. We’ve all survived, there will be no tolling of the bells or lowering of the great big somber boxes. You’ll have to save your dirt to throw for another day. We are in our perspective houses and are very much inclined never to set foot in a hospital again. Or at least not for a very long time.

But we’ve learned some amazing things. We’ve learned that the mission’s trip doesn’t have to end once you step off the airplane and back onto home turf. We’ve learned that there is power and community in the children of God coming together to pray. In Haiti and in good, old Nebraska. We’ve learned how to serve one another. We’ve learned the importance of bathing in Deet (*note to next year’s trip). I am also proud to say that our group is now able to give a very distinguished, comprehensive lecture on the causes, signs, and effects of dengue fever. We also ought to be able to give a very comprehensive lecture on grace. We’ve seen a lot of it.

Twenty-five healthy, robust (more or less) Americans grabbed our passports and sat down on a plane which was meeting another plane which was meeting another plane which was flying to Haiti. All 25 of us made it back. No broken bones. Ten of us got sick after making it back. All ten had dengue fever. Which is not contagious. Which is mild the first time around and worse the second. Did you know there’s actually four forms of dengue fever, and all ten of us got the weakest form? Did you know none of us had any internal bleeding? And of the random ten chosen, no two were from the same family. We had husbands taking care of their wives, wives taking care of their husbands, and mothers scurrying around everywhere.

Dengue fever isn’t that awful. (Eh-hem. Perhaps you ought to qualify that statement. It is made by a healthy, non-dengue-fever survivor.) But this statement is not qualified: God is gracious. It could have been worse. A lot worse.

But we serve a God who even instructs the feverish, irritating mosquitos which missionary to bite and which one to leave alone. Who says He didn’t know what He was doing? Who says it was just random chance? I know differently. We all do. The way it happened, we get to brag on what God has done. This way we couldn’t forget, even if we wanted to. This way the adventure that we thought was going to last a week got tripled in time. (We get our money’s worth, see?) This way we get cool T-shirts: “We went to Haiti and brought back the FEVER!”