Wounds of a Friend

Yesterday I had a minor surgery to remove a rather large cyst from my back. I was sent home with instructions for care of my back until time to have the stitches removed. The instructions covered things like bathing, what to do if I should experience heavy bleeding, and care of "the wound".

That is what the sheet called the place where the doctor made an incision, removed the problematic cyst and sewed me back together - a wound. I immediately thought of a proverb, Proverb 27:6 to be exact. The first part of the verse says, "Faithful are the wounds of a friend . . ." (NKJV). The NIV translates it, "Wounds from a friend can be trusted . . ." Sometimes, in an earnest effort to help someone, we must hurt them. We can even say we wounded them as the doctor did about his minor surgery. It is a wound to be dressed and properly cared for. It is certainly not a wound as I typically think of wounds.

I think of a wound being something that happened either by an accident or at the hands of an adversary. Dr. Monks was no adversary and neither was his action accidental. On purpose, he wounded me. He wounded me to heal me.

Now, he did his best to minimize the pain of his service. He deadened the area before he started cutting me open. He suggested I take Extra-strength Tylenol for pain and discomfort after the initial anesthetic wore off. Last night I took a couple of the Tylenol tablets because of substantial discomfort. Today I have felt the discomfort but am being a tough guy and not taking anything for it. I'm fine.

This situation is a great illustration of the proverb. Friends sometimes have to wound us to help us. We sometimes have to wound our friends to help them. Such wounds are not meant to harm but to help. May we have the sanity to see the help through the hurt when we are wounded by a friend. May we have the good fortune and the sanity to only wound as a friend.

Invitation to the Eldership

This morning at church I was approached by one of the leaders. He asked for a couple of minutes of my time; I granted his wish. He wanted to talk to me about the elder selection process in our church.

Each year the current leaders solicit input from the members via a form in the Sunday morning bulletins. These forms are included for a few weeks to give everyone the opportunity to provide input. The form gives room for a member to recommend several people to the eldership whom they view as qualified for this honorable position of leadership.

The man told me that my name had been submitted by several people. He wanted to know if I would prayerfully consider accepting this position of responsibility. I told him that I was honored to have been viewed with such respect by the various people who submitted my name and by the eldership who affirmed that view by approaching me. I also told him that I had already pre-decided this years ago. I would turn down the invitation.

I have served as an elder in two other churches. I won't go into all the reasons for my decision, but basically I don't feel called to that kind of leadership. I serve in various capacities of leadership and feel comfortable that God wants me in all of these roles, at this time. Until God changes my mind, I will turn down any such invitations.

As I sat in the worship assembly a little over an hour after I had turned down that invitation, this thought came to me: "Live in such a way that men might see you as worthy of an invitation to serve as an elder. That invitation, however, does not mean you need to accept." I believe that local churches should be populated with many men who are qualified to be elders, yet feel no personal calling to that particular service.

Something is wrong with the concept of discipleship when you find a church with a bunch of Christian men, who have been "Christian men" for 20 years or more, and are not close to biblically qualified for the eldership. Furthermore, it is an error to think that the qualifications for an elder are just qualifications of an elder. They are marks of Christian maturity that should be the goal of every man who comes to follow Jesus.

I fear that many churches focus on salvation too much. How can that be? Well, if you focus on salvation to the exclusion of maturation, I think you have too much focus there. If a person wants to come to Jesus "just as I am" but intends to stay as they are, they have missed the mark of Christ's mission, in humble understanding. I have been in many evangelistic meetings where, at decision time, we were all instructed to bow our heads and close our eyes. Then, with every head bowed and every eye closed, the one who felt a need to respond to Christ was to "slip a hand up in the air". The evangelist would then, announce to all of us, "I see those hands; I see that hand up in the balcony." For years, I have thought that some substantial number of those "converts" are waiting for all of us to bow our heads and close their eyes before they are ready to really live for God.

If you have been avoiding the process of spiritual maturation, I have this to say: Get off your saved butt, in Jesus name. Get with the program. He didn't ask us to say we will follow; He asked us to really follow Him. Following Him leads to maturity. If the way you have been on hasn't honestly led to maturity, you have not been on His Way. I can't say it any clearer or kinder.

Doing Funeral Services

In almost 33 years of ministry as an ordained minister, I have officiated at more funerals, memorials, and graveside services than I can count (or at least remember). Most were services for elderly people whose deaths were not shocking to the family. I've done some funerals for people whose death was untimely, unexpected, shocking. For instance, I served two families who had adult sons who committed suicide. I performed a graveside service once for an elderly man I had never known. A funeral home contacted me for the three of four elderly survivors who could attend a service. It was a very brief ceremony and one of the least rewarding services I have ever performed. Individuals who die are all unique, their families are all different from one another, the ages and circumstances of the death differ which makes each funeral in ways unique. This weekend I performed one that shall forever be in a category of its own.

On Saturday afternoon, April 28th, I performed a graveside service for my mother and led a memorial gathering of family and friends afterward. My mother's expressed wish was that I would do her graveside service. That was all she wanted done, just a graveside service - no funeral. She restricted viewing of her in the casket to one hour before the graveside service. She didn't like the idea of people fussing over her, looking at her or talking about her when she wasn't there. So, she controlled as much of that as she could. With due respect for what Mom wanted, her other children and I, our spouses and our children controlled what was important to us.

We planned a memorial gathering at Mom's church after the graveside service. There we could have a little more relaxed setting to share thoughts and memories about our loved one with others who knew her and loved her, too. Would Mom have approved? Doubtful, but then we didn't ask. In fact, we weren't consulted about what we wanted in this time. (Word to the wise: You can only control so much stuff after you are dead and gone.)

At the grave site, I shared some of the significant bio information that was printed in her obituary. She was the second born of 11 children. As such, she had responsibilities in the home to help care for the younger siblings. She was a responsible child, hard-working, reliable and trustworthy. I knew that Mom had grown up in the Great Depression, but I hadn't done the math until I prepared for her service. She was 9 1/2 when the stock market crashed in 1929. Like many of her peers, she was a frugal lady. I told at the graveside how she would go from grocery to grocer to get the food to feed her family, shopping the sales at each store. She watched sales like a hawk. And she watched the store clerks at the cash registers even closer. They made mistakes, but few if any that my Mom didn't catch. If she didn't catch the mistake at the time, she would go over her receipt at home; and when she found a mistake, it would mean a trip back to the store (even for a nickle or a dime).

Now, when I was a kid gas was 15 to 20 cents a gallon. Mom would spend the gas money to get her dime back from the store. If it were today, with gas at over $3.50 per gallon, she would still want to go back and get her nickle or dime. The injustice of being overcharged trumped all mathematics.

Mom did have a strong sense of justice. She wanted things to be right and fair. This world in not always right or fair. And my Mom knew this experientially. She experienced a lot of wrong and unfair treatment. I was a witness to some of it - from my own father. Couple with Mom's passion for justice was difficulty forgiving people who had had treated her unjustly, especially if it were a repeated offense.

Mom was a saint, in the true sense of the word. In the New Testament, a saint was not some exceptional version of a Christian - a Super-Christian; saint was the term used for Christians in general. Those who believed in Jesus, who chose to follow Him in faith were known as saints. And that was my Mom.

She knew she had a sin-debt with God. She believed that Jesus settled that debt on the Cross. She believed that Jesus was coming back for her. In fact, she - not so secretly - hoped that He would come back before she would have to face death. She believed that He went to prepare a place for her - a WONDERFUL place. She believed that He would give her a new body - one with no weakness or limitations, no pains or sickness. She believed in a place where He "would wipe every tear from [her] eyes", where there would be "no more death or mourning or crying or pain".

I stood with the few family members and friends, who gathered there at Fall Cemetery under a tent at her grave site on that chilly April day, and proclaimed what I believe. She now has that for which she hoped. I even believe she has more than she hoped for. I think heaven offers us more than we can imagine. Whatever she had in mind about life on the other side, while she contemplated it from here, fell woefully short of the reality there. I am sure that every faculty she ever possessed is more than restored; it is hers in upgraded form. She can see like she never saw in her life. She can see God's hand at work in her life in ways she never realized.

Before we committed her body back to the earth, I shared how in my last eight years at home we lived at 1270 Pike Street in Wabash. Since then, we had all moved away from 1270 Pike Street. It used to be our home, but it no longer is our home. Likewise, the body in the casket used to be Mom's home, but it no longer is. So, it was fitting that we store away that home in Falls Cemetery. And we did.

My Mom Died

This morning I received a call from my brother, Terry. It is not usual that I get a call from him, especially in the morning. When I saw his name on the caller ID, I thought I was in for news about Mom. I thought she might have died; I thought something might have happened and she had been taken to the hospital. I was right.

The nursing center had just called him to say that our mother had passed from this life. She had been declining substantially in her mental functions in recent weeks. So I was not surprised.

I called my sister to inform her. She had the same experience as I; seeing my name on the caller ID, she was braced for what I had to tell her.

We both took the news well, at least initially. I shed some tears an hour or so later, after talking with Mom's nurse. She assured me that Mom had had a pleasant morning, ate a nice breakfast and slipped away peacefully between 10:30 and 11:00 after finishing her mid-morning snack. It was just exactly what I have prayed for, that she would go quickly and peacefully.

Thank you Jesus for my Mom and the hope I have of seeing her again - but in perfect health next time. I hold onto this hope, not just a hope of seeing my mother again, but seeing her fully healthy and fully satisfied.

My mom had a decent life in America, but a life of struggle. My dad was not a good husband, to say the least. After divorcing him, she never remarried. Though she loved her children dearly, we were busy with our own family lives in adulthood. I'm sure she battled a lot of loneliness. She struggled with health issues of various kinds. At least a couple of decades ago, she had a viral infection that destroyed her sense of smell. This largely impaired her enjoyment of food. Her brain had been deteriorating in recent years - short-term memory almost non-existent for the past two years. Thankfully, she knew us kids to the end, though she could hardly communicate in recent weeks. So, my hope is that Mom is in that place where she is whole and there is no distraction from the joy of Life.

My Sister Died

A week ago I received a call from a brother that Myrna was in the hospital and not expected to live long, a few days at best. She had had a heart attack and doctors were not able to help her beyond keeping her comfortable. Myrna was my half-sister, my dad’s only daughter by his first wife. She was his firstborn, born in 1934. She didn’t quite make it to her 78th birthday, later this month.

My sister’s death is a strange experience for me, hard for others to understand, hard for me to explain. I am saddened by the loss. Whenever I make a trip to California again, I won’t get to see her. Because we have both trusted Jesus as our Savior, I will get to see her again. This second truth is the more important truth, of course; but it does not eliminate that first truth.

In Dad’s first marriage, he had Myrna and four sons. I’m not really sure how long that marriage lasted – at least long enough to have five children. Dad’s drinking and abusive ways had to have been strong contributors to the demise of that marriage.

My mom was a young single-parent, raising her son without the help of his father. Mom was a very attractive woman. Dad was a handsome man who could be as charming as he was abusive. I doubt Dad was single very long before he and Mom got hitched.

There were already six children between them. I’m sure Dad was not interested in begetting more kids – but he did. Two of us. Me and then my little sister, three years later.

Dad was not a good husband to either of these wives. Neither was he a good dad to any of the seven children who knew him as Dad.

Divorce back in the early ‘40’s was not like it is today. There was considerable shame attached. It was a family secret. Family secrets are sometimes hard to keep with children. So this secret was kept in my family by not providing me information that I might pass along to neighborhood friends.

When we would go visit Dad’s kids or they would visit us, I didn’t know – until I was at least 10 – that they were my siblings. These visits only happened when the oldest two siblings, Myrna and Burel were young married adults. Perhaps we visited them earlier, but I have no memory of that. My guess is that Dad visited them without us present until this point.

When these visits happened, I had no sense that these were my siblings. I don’t know what I thought the relationships were.

Because there was substantial age difference between me and them, I wound up pretty uninvolved. I would just play with my younger sister while the adults visited. I remembered liking Myrna and Burel. I don’t remember much about Myrna’s first husband (the only one I knew). I remember thinking how beautiful Myrna and Burel’s wife were. Well, I was a boy. And I remember arguments that would almost always erupt between my Dad and Burel.

Through my young adult life I had no contact with my half-siblings. We had no effective bonding that drew us to want to connect. That was the way it was for me until 1986, the year our Dad died. In the wake of his passing, Burel reached out to me via mail. He wrote me a lengthy letter, telling me about his life and family and requested that I reciprocate. I did. Then he encouraged me to come for a visit the next time I returned to Indiana. Another brother, Arlis, lived in the area. So we made that happen a year or two after Dad died. Myrna had moved to California as had my sister, Diane.

It is impossible to explain what happened inside me at that time. I found myself drawn to Burel and his family. I wanted to get to know them. We shared blood. We had all been hurt by the same man. Our times together were not about those hurts – it was about discovering gifts, each other.

I have not had the opportunity to build relationship with the two younger brothers. They moved off to other states, too. Myrna and I have corresponded in those years since Dad’s passing. I have kept up with her through Burel and Diane, too.

I talked about my two sisters in California. That is a fascinating story. Both of them moved to San Diego without the other’s knowledge. They went to work at the very same company. One day, my sister saw Myrna’s name on a time card in the rack. She intended to meet the lady, just to tell her that she has a sister by the very same name. Major surprise for both when they did meet!

For the past 40 years or so they have lived in the same area and have had more contact and bonding as a result.

Myrna’s passing has been very hard on Diane. She will naturally feel the loss more intensely than I. Some of what I feel is the sadness for her and for Burel and for Arlis. I know Burel and Arlis must be feeling what I would feel if Diane had died. I would want no one to think that I don’t have my own feelings of loss; I do. They are just mixed in with feeling sympathy for those who feel this loss even more intensely than I.

I look forward to the great family reunion we shall have on the other side.

Lin-sanity and Insanity

If you are not a pro-basketball fan, you may not be aware of who Jeremy Lin is. Well, maybe you would have to not be a sports fan at all. Jeremy Lin is the shooting star of the New York Knicks, whose rise to stardom happened just this month.

Lin is a six-foot, three inch pro-basketball player who has an Asian heritage. Though he was born in America, his parents emigrated here from Taiwan in the 1970’s. His facial features quite readily reveal his ancestry; his height does not. Both of his parents are only five-foot, six inches tall.

Though he has been a talented basketball player, he has not been viewed as a great basketball player. He has spent most of his professional basketball career in the development league. Even when being acquired by the Knicks, he was not considered a starter, but a good addition to the depth of their bench. But then, in a series of games where he played quite impressively, he gained and has maintained a starting slot with the Knicks. After putting up a game-winning, three-pointer against the Toronto Raptors on Valentine’s Day, another pro-basketball player began running around shouting “Lin-sanity!”. The term has stuck. It’s official. Court battles over the ownership of the term now rage.

That is Lin-sanity. Now I want to talk about the Insanity attached to this. The Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream company put out an ice cream flavor they named Lin-sanity. One of the ingredients was broken up pieces of fortune cookies. A few people complained to the company that this was racially insensitive, so they removed the fortune cookies and have given broken up waffle cone pieces on the side to appease the complainers.

Of course, the company denies that the complaints were the reason for the recipe change. They said that the fortune cookies got soggy in the ice cream. Well, MAYBE. I am betting that they caved to political correctness gone wild. To be sure, our insane world contains many racially prejudiced, racially insensitive people, but it most certainly has as many who are racially overly-sensitive.

On MLK Day, I had a personal experience with this. That day I posted on Facebook what was supposed to be a bit of dry humor. I predicted that there would be no bank robberies in Tulsa that day. All that was in my mind was, there would be no bank robberies because no banks were open on the holiday. This innocent post, however, turned into a firestorm of controversy in which it was stated or implied that I was racially insensitive at best and perhaps a real racist at worst for making such a post. I suppose I should have waited to make the post on President’s Day, but I am so un-racist as to even imagine someone would make the illogical leap that my post was racial in any way.

Since the dismaying conflict of that day, the man who originally wrongly interpreted my post and attacked me, apologized. Sincerely apologized. I have forgiven all that, yet it stands as a very personal reminder that racism is quite alive in my world and it is a quite complex issue. It is absolutely not a concept restricted to white people holding bad attitudes toward white people.

I think, if I had been in charge of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Company, I would have been even more determined to keep the fortune cookies in the recipe. If the fortune cookies becoming "soggy" was a real issue, I would have told my workers to figure out how to solve that problem. And to anyone who called or wrote in protest of the fortune cookies, I would have this simple message: Get a freakin’ life!

Tongue Control and Finger Control

In his little letter to the Christians in the 1st Century, the Apostle James had some potent things to say about “tongue control”. What James said then was probably sufficient for the most part. Though written communication had existed for a very long time then, it was much more of a laborious task to write than we think of in our modern day. Back then, most communication between people was verbal. But, times have been changing ever since. And in my lifetime, things have changed drastically.

In the middle of the 15th Century, moveable type printing machines were created for use with western languages. This multiplied the potential to mass-produce written messages for distribution. A mechanical typewriter was first marketed in the 1870’s. In the 1930’s, IBM marketed an electric typewriter, mostly used in business settings. In the mid 1960’s, IBM marketed a new innovation, the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter, which provided a memory of the typing so that corrections could be made without having to re-type an entire document. In the early ’70’s, word processors began to be created to utilize the power of computers. Today, we have very powerful and very fast computers with very powerful word processing programs. Beyond this, cell phones and other portable devices allow us to communicate with others verbally and in print at exceptional speeds.

It seems we are able to communicate faster than we can think in this modern world. At least, a lot of stuff I see posted online (Facebook, etc.) doesn’t seem to have been very well thought out before being blurted out.

Before I go on, let’s look at what James had to say about the tongue.

“We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check. When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

"All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be.” (James 3:2-10)

I suggest that we all think about this. Perhaps finger control is needed today as much as tongue control ever was. Let us think about what we are communicating, the appropriateness of our words – not only when we speak, but when we tweet, text, email, post comments on Facebook, etc. Personally, I see so much stuff posted on Facebook that it inappropriate, out-of-line, and damaging.

Recently, an offended dad posted a video online in response to his daughter’s disrespectful Facebook post about her family. The father’s video has been viewed more than 20 million times on Youtube. He talked to his daughter in a very stern manner about her disrespect and ingratitude. He had recently invested $130 in upgrading her laptop computer, and he was incensed that she would publicly complain about her life. He was also justly repulsed that several of her "friends" had clicked “like” to her grossly disrespectful comment. He ended his powerful rebuke by pulling out his 45 cal pistol and shooting nine rounds into her laptop. (This was filmed outside, of course.)

Though I wouldn’t recommend the Dad’s approach, I must admit I enjoyed it and hoped that a lot of young people would be inspired to think about what they post before they post it. When I was growing up, I probably complained about my home-life to a friend or two here and there. What would have been a pretty private conversation out in my yard or on the playground back in my day, winds up being a notification to literally hundreds of “friends” via a Facebook post today. So, I would encourage all of us to cautiously control our tongues, but just as cautiously control our fingers.