Friday, May 25, 2012

Cracker barrel: The Title Bout

The bell rings and the title bout is on...

Round 1
I take the breakfast menu in hand and scroll through the items.  My eyes stop momentarily on the low calorie, low fat healthy choices to show that there might be a chance I will order one of them, but everyone knows that will never happen.  This is a heavyweight fight with the reigning champ: Momma's Pancake Breakfast.  I throw the first punch and order the three pancakes, two eggs over easy and two turkey sausage patties.

Round 2
I quickly season the eggs with salt and pepper before pounding them down.  They never stood a chance.  I take a few exploratory bites of the sausage to see how much of a fight it will give me.  I'm pacing myself and feel good about my odds of winning.

Round 3
Pancake time.  The one hundred percent maple syrup is my weakness because I need a lot of it.  But I know that going in and am mentally prepared.  The first pancake goes down swinging but never even lands a single punch.  I'm positive going into pancake number two.

Round 4
Somewhere in between pancake two and three, Momma landed a loaded punch to the gut.  It feels like I ate a bag of concrete with a whole milk chaser.  I'm punch drunk and can barely get the fork up to my mouth.  The waitress keeps refilling my coffee. Doesn't she know that I perfectly balanced the cream/sweetener/coffee ratio already!  I'm in a downward spiral.

Round 5
Momma takes a swift uppercut swing to my mouth with one of the last syrup soaked bites and the lights go out.  It's over...a total knock out.  I may leave the ring but Momma's delicious breakfast treats will be punishing me for the next few hours.

Post Fight Wrap-up
My eyes were bigger than my stomach, which put up a noble fight.  I am already thinking ahead to next time, but there is a nagging thought that keeps ringing in my ears like the bell that ended the bout:
It's not good to eat too much honey, and it's not good to seek honors for yourself.
Proverbs 25:27
I walk out of the locker room knowing two things - there is such a thing as too many pancakes, and picking fights for the glory of victory will only leave you disgraced with a stomach ache.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

After the Funeral

The wooden pew creaked loudly and often every time I shifted in my seat.  The church was old and had that smell that all old churches have - polished wood and ancient paper.  We were there for the funeral of a friend's father to show our love and support.  My friend got up to speak, reading a brief autobiography his dad wrote for a fifty year high school reunion and sharing his thoughts afterward.  As he spoke I was no longer in a rigid pew, but in his place up on the platform talking about my dad.  Instead of observing I imagined myself memorializing my father and ended up sending him a text on the spot to tell him how much I love him.

I have been to more funerals in the past six months than I have in the past six years combined, and it has begun to have a cumulative effect on me.  Over the last days, I have been lost in thoughts of mortality.  It's a hard and unchangeable fact of life that we will die.  For some people it is lights out, the end to the biological accident that is life.  For others, it is the doorway we will all walk through taking us from this life to the next.  For me, it is graduation.

As a student in elementary school and Jr. High I couldn't even imagine the idea of not being in school anymore.  Graduating was an incomprehensible event that had no shape or form at all.  In High School it became more of a reality, a goal even, but it wasn't until the final weeks of my senior year that the reality of graduation settled in.  I am going to take one last test and never sit through another class here again.  I will never put my jacket in my locker, eat a cafeteria lunch or put on my P.E. uniform again.  I will walk an aisle wearing a robe and cap, and that's it.  I was anxious and emotional.  I knew what was coming next for me, but leaving behind so much of what my life had been was both a little scary and sad.

But I walked the aisle.  I went to college.  I got married.  I played in a band.  I got a real job (for those of you who think playing in a band isn't a real job).  I had kids.  I lived that new, post-school life to the fullest, and it has been so much better than I could have imagined.  Even though I may still look back on my school days with nostalgia (braided leather belts, tight-rolled jeans, 90210 hair and sideburns), I would never give up what I have now to go back...ever.

When it comes to death, Jesus tells us this:
Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me.  There is more than enough room in my Father’s home.  If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?  When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am.John 14:1-3
Jesus is getting a place ready for those of us who know him.  It's a home that is tailored and custom made for us.  My place will have an incredible entertainment center with a beautiful flat screen TV that has great movies (The Avengers?), shows (River Monsters!) and events (NFL football) on at all times.  It will have a hot tub, a big fenced in back yard (fences make good neighbors), a beachfront ocean view (Hawaii, not Maine), a FULLY stocked kitchen (Golden Oreos) and a landing pad on the roof because in heaven I will have the power of flight.  The place that Jesus is preparing for you in heaven is designed just for you, for no other reason than that he loves you and wants to shower his kindness on you.

The best thing about the home that God is preparing for me is that it has the exact same floor plan as my wife's.  God knows that the only way my eternal home would ever be complete is if Terri is there with me.  But that's cool too, because that way we will get twice the home!

Thinking intensely about mortality, mine and that of the people I love, has been exhausting and eye-opening all at the same time.  The grief of loss is a physical, tangible thing, but when we know Jesus we don't grieve as people who have no hope.  We grieve with our feet planted in the present, stretching toward eternity knowing that, through Jesus, one day we will look back on our graduation from this world with nostalgia, not regret.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Praying With a Pen

A few days ago a friend of mine sent me a Facebook message.  She was responding to an online conversation we had about praying out loud, and she commented on how she has taken that a step further, saying:
It's so easy to respond to a facebook request for prayer with "I'll pray". Recently I've taken the verbal prayer a step further, and type it while I'm praying. It really seems to center my thoughts on the request and the person I'm praying for. Surprisingly, I can do it with my eyes closed!
In 1 Samuel chapter 2, a woman named Hannah prays a ten verse prayer thanking God for moving on her behalf.  It's a great prayer in a great story, but the question that bothers me is how do we know exactly what she prayed?  Was there a dude standing there in the Jewish Tabernacle documenting people's prayers?  When someone sat down to write the book of 1 Samuel, did they know the gist of what was said and just attempt to recreate this prayer in writing?

The obvious answer the to question of how do we have some of the long prayers that are in the bible is that somebody wrote them down.  They wrote down what was on their hearts, what they were worried about and what they were celebrating.  They wrote down their deepest fear and darkest anger.  In print, they lifted these prayers to God asking him to move on their behalf. I have grabbed a pen and notebook and prayed in writing many times.  Sometimes it helps me to really clarify what I want to say to God.  Other times it's like barfing up the things that I just need to get out of my head onto a sheet of paper where I can deal with them.

I love going through the boxes of my kids' school stuff that I have saved over the years.  My favorite thing to look at is their school journal.  I love inspecting the crooked handwriting and crazy spelling and imagining them hunched over their desks writing away.   I love seeing what they value enough to write about.  Whether it's Super Mario, their favorite food or going to Disney World, seeing the things that are on their hearts expressed in print is moving.  But the best part is seeing what changes - their handwriting, the things they write about, the length of their entries.  It's remarkable to go back and see where they started and how much they have grown.

Writing down our prayers is very much the same, because one thing that never changes when I write down my prayers to God is that I can always look back at what I've written and see how God moved.  I can't tell you how many times I have looked at old journal entries addressed to God and immediately realized that he answered that prayer - he moved on my behalf.  How often to we ask God for something and lose track of the fact that he responded?

This week, whether it's a pen and paper or a note on your computer, pray in print.  Write down the prayer that you want God to answer most in your life.  Then look back on it several months from now and see what God can do.