Closing Time

One of my favorite films this time of year is nearly any version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. But today I am thinking of the Muppet one. Early in the film, after Scrooge has gone home on Christmas Eve, the shop staff and Bob Cratchet have a brief celebration of closing time before the impending holiday.

That is exactly how I feel tonight having crammed 40 hours of Engineering into this 3 day week and having kept the hounds at bay at the Financial Planning office to boot. I am brain weary for sure... but very aware that many would like to have a job let alone one with flexible hours as I have. Many would also like a family to go home to and a home to which to go. I am a man greatly blessed of God.

Some of those blessings are structural, like the freedoms and the general and disproportionate prosperity with which the West and most notably the US live by comparison to the rest of the world. Others are relational, deriving from the people I have known and to whom I am related and the many benefits they have showered on me, knowingly or not. But even so, there are some that cannot be satisfactorily explained to me any other way than the direct intervention of Almighty God into the fabric of time and space for my benefit.

The most noteworthy of these is that I am even aware that there is a God Who passionately desires a relationship with every individual that has ever lived on the face of this terrestrial ball for so much as a second, bar none. And the second is that He has wooed me into an eternal relationship with Him

If you are reading this, YOU are very likely one of the people I am grateful for. I cannot always tell how, but somehow, you have been used as the very fingertip of God to touch my life with blessing. And I pray I'll have opportunity to tell you face to face just exactly how I've seen God bless my family and me through you.

Happy Thanksgiving!

(Mother always told us not to eat food that talked)

Fences

My men's accountability group meets each Thursday morning for breakfast at a nearby restaurant. We're reading and discussing Jerry Bridges Transforming Grace subtitled Living Confidently in God's Unfailing Love. It has been a great book thus far with about a 50-50 balance of encouragement and correction for me personally.

We were to have read Chapter 9 for last week titled "Called to be Free" in which Bridges lays out essentially the Christian's Magna Charta of basic freedoms from legalism and many of the common strictures of organized religion. It is not freedom from God, but rather freedom to worship God without first having to check a list of "do's and don't's" (Curiously, I knew very little about the Magna Charta until I read this and did some research -- interesting stuff)

To illustrate, he cites an example from his own life of a family vacation to the beach. Long story short, there were too many revealing bathing suits for him to really enjoy his time there. He knew that if he stayed, he would eventually look with lust, so he informed the family that he was going to the car. By so doing, he maintained a standard of visual purity for himself without imposing it on his family. Perhaps even more importantly, though, he resisted the naturally human temptation to say, "going to the beach will always lead to sin, therefore the beach is evil and we're not going there ever again."

I am certain that there are places for that kind of statement, mainly when God has made such a statement and we make it to obey Him. But he gained a credible teaching moment for his kids because he chose holiness to the Lord over the path of least resistance. Part of this is born out of Bridges own upbringing in which he was told "Don't go to pool halls." His parents could have initiated conversations to warn him about drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, carousing, unwise use of money, or gambling. Instead they simply equated Billiards with Sin in his mind. The comedy of which is that he had a mental struggle as an adult upon finding a pool table at a Christian conference center. Pool is not evil and the beach is not evil any more than the church or the christian conference center is all good. There are obedient and disobedient people at both places and they can influence you both places for good or ill.

An attractive girl in my growing up church who had parents in positions of respect and leadership is an example of the latter. On a youth retreat with her parents present, she organized a "long walk" that turned out to be a short walk and a long pot smoking (the parent's weren't present on the walk). That could easily have influenced me to go that way. Thank God it didn't... last I knew her life is a mess. Oh Father, please continue to draw her toward yourself.

Fences applied as Jerry Bridges describes here are the modern equivalent of eating meat offered to idols: not clearly right or wrong in itself, but a precipitous place to walk because: applied heavy-handedly we risk treading on someone else's tender conscience yet applied imprudently, too little, too late or not at all, we risk destroying our credibility as a witness for our Lord.

So am I saying build a fence? I don't know. Do you need one? ...then build it. Talk about it with others? Yes, with tenderness of heart so that they can be built up and encouraged in much the same way as our conversations encourage me.

THANK YOU! I am sorry it has been so long since my last post and that there hasn't been much human interest here recently. I'll upload some pictures and write you some balance, Daniel-san!