Dave Ramsey's 20 Things Rich People Do...

Not that I care so much about being rich, but I thought this was a good list...

http://www.daveramsey.com/blog/20-things-the-rich-do-every-day

Actually, I'm going to start doing them right now.  See you poor suckers later.

"Ira Glass Rehearses The Christian Pitch"

I thought I had posted this before...
 

A longer (and more serious) than usual post about a trip to help with the tornado damage in Washington, IL

I’m at home after church on Sunday talking to my wife about how we handled the tornado warning that went off during the cup portion of the Lord’s Supper at our Milwaukee church.  The phone rings, and my buddy from Illinois says, “Are your in-laws okay?  I was watching the Bears game and they said that Washington, IL, was wiped out by a tornado.  Isn’t that your wife’s hometown?”.  Not that I have a lot of experience in this category, but these types of questions typically put a new spin on your day.

We make phone calls to my in-laws.  After a few no-answers, my wife gets through, and finds out everyone is okay.  The tornado barely missed the community center where her family meets for church.  It missed the community center, but, it had managed to create a path through the middle of town, through apartments, housing developments, ending in farmland.  Everything in this path was dismantled and then deposited in mangled forms all over the city.

We started looking at pictures on the internet.  The pictures could have been taken anywhere, all the landmarks were gone, everything was leveled and looked like your average pile of debris.  We eventually found out that among approximately 1,000 damaged homes, only one person had died.  For some reason this made the damage seem more bearable. 

We decided to head down to Washington to help with the clean-up over the weekend.  Friday night we arrived in Washington before the 6:00 PM curfew.  Saturday morning, myself, my wife, her Dad and brother, all went over to the Bethany Community Church to get our volunteer assignment.   However, the line for assignments was out the door, parking was backed up on the street.  Instead of waiting potentially hours in the cold to get an assignment, our crew decided to risk getting through the policed barricades and going into the affected area on our own. 

We waited in line outside of the affected area for about 30 minutes as cars were checked by the police, and, we finally entered to what looked like the aftermath of a bombed out village in a World War 2 movie.  Piles of debris were everywhere, homes gone, vehicles flipped over, walls missing, glass and splintered wood everywhere, insulation blowing around like snow flurries. 

We jumped in helping people with their homes.  And, there was a spectrum of damage.  Over the course of the weekend, we helped homes that had damage, but were still livable.  They must have felt blessed to have come so close to the tornado, but with minimal damage.  We helped people whose homes will likely need to be destroyed, but they weren’t hit hard enough that they lost all their belongings.  They must have felt blessed to have been in the path of the tornado, but still been able to have pictures, clothes, stuffed animals, memories.  And, for others the tornado made everything disappear.  I imagine they are thankful for their lives.

We attended a worship service on Sunday with a church family who had been spread out during the week.  Spread out all over Washington, but grateful to be serving, grateful for their lives, grateful that their community center is several 100 yards to the west, grateful for a higher hope, grateful for a church calendar that had been wiped clean with one thing now written on it “Help people – physically and spiritually”. We sang as a body of Christ.  We prayed as a body.  We opened God’s Word together. 

The world is a mix of happy and sad and in-between.  The world is complicated.  Some people lose their house.  Some people lose all the letters their deceased father wrote to his children for their eighteenth birthdays. Some people have their spouse die only to have their name infamously changed to “at least only one person died” and repeated 10,000 times every day all over the community.

We hear things like this and they sound unbearable.  And, in some ways they are, but over the course of my weekend in Washington, I kept noticing that the mixed feelings I was observing in myself seemed familiar.  

We, as Christians, know of a story of happiness and sadness.  In our church services, we sing about death.  We thank God for sending Jesus to die to pay the penalty for our sins.  We are told to rejoice in trials.  We’re an odd breed.  But, maybe it’s actually not odd at all, maybe it’s the only thing complicated enough to make sense of a complicated world.  A complicated world, where I hurt and rejoice at the same time.  A complicated world, where a savage tornado does something horrible and yet brings a community together in a nearly impossible way.  A world where a church can go from fearing for their lives in a hallway of a community center to having two packed services the following week and blessing the community with the spoken message of the gospel.

“We”.  That can be a beautiful word.  Knowing that it’s not all about you.  In an ultimate sense, the ultimate “we” occurs between a Heavenly Father and his children.  But, there’s a “we” in the body of Christ, the church.  And, part of the beauty of a body is that it is together.  It’s together all the time.  Sometime your hands are working fine, but you have a head ache.  Sometimes your hands feel arthritic, but there’s no headache.  Our bodies are a mix of pleasure and pain.  As a church body, we function this way. 

We know Jesus who has suffered more than anyone.  We know that God is sovereign in the ups and downs of life.   And, as we understand these things, I think we reach out to others.  We know about suffering, because our body suffers and our Head suffered.  Our faith family is full of people who are suffering while simultaneously experiencing joy and sustenance.  There’s something core to our faith that relates to your ups and downs.  It makes sense of them.  It gives them purpose. 

We can’t explain all the reasons for suffering.  But, observing life in Washington, IL, over the weekend, I feel convinced that suffering provides the home field advantage for faith of a believer.  

A couple poems - Adelia Prado & Maurice Manning

Here is a poem and an excerpt from a poem that I came across yesterday.  I think I like both of them...

Before Names 
by Adelia Prado
I don’t care about the word, that commonplace.
What I want is the grand chaos that spins out syntax,
the obscure birthplace of "of," "otherwise,"
"nevertheless," and "how," all those inscrutable
crutches I walk on.
Who understands language understands God,
Whose Son is the Word. It kills you to understand.
Words only hide something deeper, deaf and dumb,
something invented to be silenced.
In moments of grace, rare as they are,
you'll be able to snatch it out: a live fish
in your bare hand.
Pure terror.

----------
The Nature of Things
by Maurice Manning
...Do Lord, O, do you remember?
I've asked and asked again, and Yes
has always been the answer, Yes
unsaid, but even the unsaid says;
the answer needs the question...