Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Darcy's Birthday

Twenty-nine years ago, she was a 5-pound, 13-ounce preemie. Today, Darcy is a creative, sensitive and loving young woman.

"Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised." -Proverbs 31:30

Darcy is and always has been a beauty, and I think there have been times when she, like most girls, dreamed of being a model . She could be one, but she heard a different and stronger call. "This life is transient" she told me just yesterday. Darcy has often chosen to ignore the temporal and focus on the eternal. Though the two are often intertwined for all of us and the temporal plays a louder song, Darcy has listened for the drumbeat of Heaven.

As her mother, I'm very pleased that Darcy has traveled to many countries to tell others about Jesus. She has looked for opportunities near and far to further the cause of Christ. She writes and sings deep and meaningful song lyrics to communicate the Christian journey to others. She is an encourager.

Happy birthday, Darcy. I'm so blessed to be your mother.

Monday, July 03, 2006

Style Over Substance

People in general and especially Americans seem to prefer style over substance. I hope my stream-of-consciousness blather on the subject won't come across as too negative. I like to be entertained as much as anyone. Perhaps my favorite form of "entertainment" - Christian music - comes from an "industry" that is the worst offender in the style-over-substance problem.

One time when our family went on vacation to Orlando, we took our kids to two different theme venues on a Sunday. In the morning we went to the House of Blues for their Gospel Brunch. It was very entertaining and my family loved it. The singers were talented and they really put on a show. There was just one thing I found disturbing. As we were sitting there eating and being entertained with gospel songs (they even mentioned Jesus by name) I looked up high above the stage to see symbols from all the religions of the world surrounding the phrase, "All are one." A feeling of dread came over me. It seemed as though the whole program was designed to mimic a church worship service but the Holy Spirit was missing. Something else was substituted. Maybe the substitute ingredient was human talent - lots of it. It's difficult to verbalize exactly what I felt and still feel about that experience.

Later that day, we visited the Holy Land Experience. It is sort of a theme park in Orlando built around the idea of experiencing the Bible in a live, hands-on setting. We went into one of the auditoriums where a musical group was singing Christian songs. It wasn't very entertaining and didn't have the wow-factor talent that we had seen that morning at the House of Blues. I knew, though, that the people on the stage genuinely had the Spirit in their hearts. In a way, it made me sad that it's so hard to find style AND substance. As we sat there listening (and nearly falling asleep from the long day), I looked up above the stage. There were no religious symbols, only a verse, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me."

Somehow, true spirituality is found in some sort of Bizarro world. The first will be last; the last will be first. To be the greatest, you must be a servant. Love your enemies... It is a world of opposites.

How could I express my thoughts any better than Paul, who wrote this in 1 Corinthians 1:17-31 speaking of the irony of God's wisdom? (as translated in The Message)

"God didn't send me out to collect a following for myself, but to preach the Message of what he has done, collecting a following for him. And he didn't send me to do it with a lot of fancy rhetoric of my own, lest the powerful action at the center—Christ on the Cross—be trivialized into mere words.

"The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction, but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense. This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. It's written,

I'll turn conventional wisdom on its head,
I'll expose so-called experts as crackpots.

"So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn't God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.

"While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle—and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself—both Jews and Greeks—Christ is God's ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can't begin to compete with God's 'weakness.'

"Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the 'somebodies'? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That's why we have the saying, 'If you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.'"

Another favorite passage on the subject is 1 Kings 19:11-12:

"Then [Elijah] was told, 'Go, stand on the mountain at attention before God. God will pass by.'

"A hurricane wind ripped through the mountains and shattered the rocks before God, but God wasn't to be found in the wind; after the wind an earthquake, but God wasn't in the earthquake; and after the earthquake fire, but God wasn't in the fire; and after the fire a gentle and quiet whisper."

For the small audience reading my blog, I hope your takeaway from this is that you'll start exercising your spiritual radar. Learn to ignore the hurricanes, earthquakes and fires when God is trying to whisper something in your ear. Given a choice between style and substance, choose substance.

2 Corinthians 4:3-4 "If our Message is obscure to anyone, it's not because we're holding back in any way. No, it's because these other people are looking or going the wrong way and refuse to give it serious attention. All they have eyes for is the fashionable god of darkness. They think he can give them what they want, and that they won't have to bother believing a Truth they can't see. They're stone-blind to the dayspring brightness of the Message that shines with Christ, who gives us the best picture of God we'll ever get. "