"How Would God Know?"

Monday, April 11, 2011

 

“How Would God Know?”

 

It is so easy to miss God.  I don’t mean miss God like God has been gone a long time and I really missed God and hope God will come back.  I mean just plain miss him like, did I just miss my plane?  I believe in the immanence of God.  Immanence is a word that means that God is within God’s creation but distinct from it.  I believe in that.  I have experienced it more times than I could ever recall or remember.  And since remembering and recalling is not becoming one of my greater strengths the older I get, maybe I should start writing more of this stuff down so I won’t forget it!  I think about the lives of my children, Michael and Brittney.  They are the best I have ever done in my life.  I am so proud of both of them even with the faults I know all too well.  I can’t imagine not being in their lives, sharing life with them, being there when they need me, celebrating their victories and their joys, suffering with them in their defeats and their sorrows.  To be disconnected from them would be awful.  So awful I don’t even want to think about such a possibility.  Many of the greatest moments in my life have been as a result of being involved with my children in the living and sharing of life!

 

I can’t help but believe God is the same way about us.  He made us and we are God’s always.  He has claimed us.  I am reminded of that each time I baptize one of our babies.  As I place my hand, covered and dripping with the water, over their small and fragile head and call their names and proclaim that sacred phrase “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,”  I just sense God all in them and all among us as their family.  I feel sorry for people that don’t believe and live with such faith.  When I stop to consider how many times God’s being present and within my life and space has  led me and overwhelmed me, and saved me, I can’t imagine my life without such reality.  I think God loves being a part of us as much as most of us love being a part of our kids lives.  Such a relationship brings such joy, such meaning, such purpose, such beauty.  I like to believe that God is there every time we laugh, every time we love, every time we fall, every time we fail, every time we, well you get the picture!  Like you and me I believe God can’t imagine life and creation without us!  That is how much God loves us and all of this!  Anytime I begin to doubt that or let some life event convince me otherwise, or allow someone to begin to talk me out of it I just look at the cross of God’s own son.  That’s when I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, yea its true, God does love me more than I could ever know or understand.

 

I hope my kids love their old man.  I think they do.  They have been there for me more times than I would probably ever want to admit.  I remember in my divorce how much more they came home just too, well you know, check up on me.  Even as I write this tears fill my eyes as I think about how lucky I am to have two such wonderful children.  I do love them so!  As I make this journey to the cross I do hope that God knows that I love God with all my heart.  I know that I have a funny way of showing it sometimes, but nevertheless I do love God!  I hope God knows it because there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of God.  I can’t begin to imagine my life without God in it.  My prayer this Lenten season is that I hope I am loving God in a way that honors God and all that God has given me.  I pray that God knows how much I love God because all I ever want to be is the person God has made me to be, no more, no one else, no one less. 

 

How about you this Lent?  How is it going as we are on the final stretch?  Does God know you love God?  How would God know that?  I was just wondering.

 

I will see you on the road my friend,

 

Travis

 

 

"Suffering With Purpose"

Sunday, April 03, 2011

 

“Suffering With Purpose”

 

As I reflect upon the worse times in my life I must come to admit that some of the greatest lessons I have learned have happened to me through suffering.  Suffering is not a real pleasant nor hot topic of conversation in our culture today.  You want to kill a conversation quick down at the water cooler than share with those gathered there something that happened to you where you really suffered!  We have become masters at disguising and institutionalizing our suffering.  There are processes that we have developed now that take care of all of that.  Out of sight, out of mind so to speak.   For example I don’t have many funerals anymore where there is a casket at the front of the church.  It is just an illustration of how our culture attempts to suffer in private and hide the inevitable.  Suffering is as much a part of life as joy is.  You really can’t know the difference between either of them without the other.  They live in an interdependent relationship one helping to define the difference in the other.  How can I know what it is to be joyful if I do not know what it is to suffer? 

 

Suffering is not bad in and of itself.  Suffering comes with the territory.  It is a part of living just like breathing.  I believe we live much freer and more content when we just accept the undeniable reality that we are going to suffer.  How we respond to suffering is the key.  That is where our faith in God plays such a huge role.  Trusting God in the midst of and through the suffering helps us to learn and bring great meaning to the suffering.  Our experience of suffering and what  we learn from it becomes a part of us forever.  It shapes and forms the rest of the journey.  It teaches us to savor and enjoy all of life whatever our experience.  It helps makes the good days sweeter and more enjoyable.  Their purpose to our suffering in that it helps to round out our life experience so that we learn to take nothing for granted.  It reminds us of how sacred it all it is.  It brings out character and reveals the courage we have hiding deep inside of us.  It offers us the opportunity to appreciate life maybe more than we do without it!

 

Suffering teaches us, informs us, shapes us, and leads us to a deeper understanding of living and God.  Jesus’ journey reveals to us the power of what suffering with purpose is and what transformation God can bring about as a result of it.  The suffering of the cross made possible the glory of the resurrection!  You can’t have one without the other.  They both form and shape God’s work in Christ.  So…….as we travel the road of Lent let us be honest about the fact that suffering is a part of life.  Let us learn from it.  Let us meet it where it is in all of its reality and may we, like Christ, trust it to God and stand back and watch what God can do with what we offer.  I guarantee  you we will not be disappointed.  From the cross who could have ever imagined or dreamed of resurrection?

 

I will see you on the road,

 

Travis

 

 

"Someday"

March 28, 2011

 

“Someday”

 

I was making a hospital call the other day in the intensive care unit of Scott and White Hospital.  If  you have ever visited there you know that the access is controlled.  In order for you to get through the doors you must push an intercom and communicate with the nurses desk in ICU and they must allow you entry.  I made my way to the door as I have hundreds of times and pushed the button.  The nurse answered and I told her who I was and who I was there to visit.  She told me she would check on the status of the person I was wanting to visit and that she would let me know if it was a good time.  So…..I stood there in front of the locked ICU doors on the second floor in waiting.  As I stood there the strangest thought came to me.  A realization came to me that someday someone would be standing at a door to an ICU somewhere, maybe even at this one, waiting to see me.  It was an eerie feeling and experience as I faced my mortality and fragileness of being human.  Someday I would be sick or hurt or needing care of some kind related to my vulnerable body.  The Lenten journey is about taking an honest look at who we are as human beings in light of the love of God in Christ.  We watch and observe with awe and wonder the humanity of Jesus as he makes his way to the cross and the empty tomb.  Like us he too had to face the vulnerability of what it was like to be a human being.

 

There are those around us who would want us to believe that we are bullet proof and strong enough to handle anything that comes our way on our own.  The culture continues to create sleek, new devices that amaze us with their capability, speed, and convenience.  On the surface they appear to really connect us with the all of those we care about, manage our lives so efficiently and quickly, and put us in touch with the latest and most up to date information on whatever it is we need or want.  We spend our money and lose ourselves in mastering the use of such things.  And for just a moment we begin to believe that we are the masters of our domain and that we humans can do anything.  Then an earthquake hits and we stand vulnerable and naked not knowing quite what to do and all of a sudden all of the things we have made and created lose their significance and life is reduced to the bare essentials.  Someday will come for me as it will for you.  Someday will level the playing field and it will remind us that when it is all said and done we are what we are, human beings, vulnerable, fragile, breakable human beings. 

 

My prayer this Lent is that we can be honest enough with ourselves and God just to go ahead and admit it is true.  My prayer this Lent is that we can confess how we sometimes have allowed it all to go to our heads at the expense of our very souls.  My prayer this Lent is that we can open ourselves to the God that created us, redeems us, and loves us to see what God might have to say to us about our living, right now, in this day!  My prayer is that we will find wholeness as we make the journey to the cross and the empty tomb with Jesus.  My prayer is that we will share out of our sense of wholeness the love of God with others.

 

My fervent prayer is that we will live this day hand in hand, heart and heart with God so that when our someday comes we will be ready. 

 

I will see you on the road,

Travis

 

 

"How Well Are We Listening?"

March 22, 2011

 

“How Well Are We Listening?”

 

Henri Nouwen says that, “the seeds of loss and love are at work in us, but love is stronger than loss and death.  Your death and mine is our final passage, our exodus to the full realization of our identity as God’s beloved children and to full communion with the God of love.  Jesus walked the path ahead of us and invites us to choose the same path during our lifetime.”  Lent is about an honest reflection about where we are related to the path Jesus invites us to take.  Life offers us many opportunities to take many different paths all leading to different destinations of all kinds.  Life is all about a continual choosing of the path we are to travel all along our lifetime.  There will be many crossroads all along the path.  In any given moment new opportunities related to our journey open up before us.  Knowing which one to take all depends on how adept and sensitive we have become related to listening to and sensing where God is directing us to go.  Using the disciplines of prayer, meditation, fasting, worship, study, reflection, we interpret where the Holy Spirit of God is leading us next in response to all that life brings.  The issue for most of us related to knowing which path to take is that we just don’t listen or sense God’s leading very well or very clearly.  The problem is not that God is not speaking or directing.  The problem is that we just don’t listen!

 

Lent is all about taking the time to listen, to sense, to feel for God’s movement and direction in our life.  Jesus provides us with such a clear and definitive process related to how we travel the journey.  As Hebrews says so poetically he is the “pioneer and perfector” of our faith.  As we make the journey of Lent with Jesus as our traveling companion we learn from him and how he made the journey as to how we will make ours!  For most of us the only way God usually gets our attention is when life throws us an obstacle on the path we are on and we realize that we are in trouble related to the path we are taking.  The Lenten journey is an intentional one.  Like anything else in our life and faith we choose to make this journey!  Jesus has so much to teach us.  As Nouwen says so beautifully Jesus has already finished his journey and now he invites us along the same path he took.  Jesus not only is the way, he knows the way in which we should go.  How well are we listening?  Listening well will make all the difference!

 

I will see you on the road,

Travis

 

 

Creating A Soulful Life

Soul is a word we don’t hear much about anymore. With the advent of psychology soul somehow just got lost in the shuffle of a new way of looking at human beings and what makes us tick. The Bible seeks to offer a somewhat different view of who we are related to our identity. Genesis boldly proclaims we are living souls pure and simple. Souls given life by the very breath of God! So….if we are souls then it seems to follow that a big part of what we are to do is to cultivate living a soulful life. Soulful is our word of the week for our church as we begin this season of Lent. Soulful is a word that means the expression of deep longing and deep feeling. Understood as such it only logically follows then that soulful living begins with the inside of who we are. Soulfulness is an inside out expression of living. Therefore if we are to cultivate such a life it only stands to reason that we do the work on the inside of who we are. As we do so we enter into the realm of being.

Plato used the expression, techne tou biou, which means “the craft of life.” Have you ever thought about the work of crafting life? We are not that familiar anymore much with the idea of a craft. I am not talking here about craft in terms of making pot holders, or needle pointing a shag rug. I am talking about the work that craftsman do when they go to create something unique and of great quality. When we were in Belize I met a fella by the name of Daniel Simi. Now Daniel was a craftsman. He crafted mahogany into furniture and ornate décor for homes. I saw pictures of some of his work and it was exquisite stuff all done by hand. At one time Daniel crafted and created furniture for an entire home. It took him one year to finish the work. Before I left Belize he presented me with a hand crafted piece of mahogany of the emblem of the Methodist Church of the Caribbean. It is beautiful and now has a place in my office. Such crafting takes time. Such work is very intentional. Such beauty is created by allowing the unique gift of art to find expression freely in the shaping and forming of the piece you are seeking to work. There is a symbiotic relationship between the one doing the crafting and the object being crafted. Soul is what we are seeking to allow God to craft in us. It is who we are and there is only one craftsman who can craft us in the beauty of who we are to become. All we must do in order to cultivate such a soulful life is to make ourselves available to the craftsman! Thomas Moore says, “the act of entering into the mysteries of the soul, without sentimentality or pessimism, encourages life to blossom forth according to its own designs and with its own unpredictable beauty.” Cultivating soulful living is a choice we make in how we live as we open ourselves completely, honestly, vulnerably to God in such a way that God begins the work of crafting us into the shape and form that only God can see and vision.

As we journey this lent together just make yourself available to the craftsman. Set aside the time, join in our community, listen to the movement of God’s spirit, surrender to the work God longs to do with you and me, let go of the unnecessary stuff that would get in the way of God working deeply in us. So……get out of the way and let God have you body and soul and just enjoy the wonder of what God is seeking to do with you, in you, through you! It is the only way to live!!!

I will see you on the road,

Travis

The Journey

Paul says in Philippians 4:11, “I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.” Now that is one incredibly powerful statement to be made about one’s ability to live life. So oftentimes our circumstance of life dictates most of how we feel about living in any given moment. If things do not go our way, or we end up in a disagreement, or we get bad news, or the day is cloudy and rainy, or someone cuts us off in traffic, or the kids just won’t be quiet, or our spouse forgot our anniversary, circumstances more oftentimes than not determine who we are, how we respond, and certainly how we feel in any given moment of our lives. Given the over-stimulated culture we live in and if we are not careful we can feel like a billiard ball bouncing from one stimulated experience in life to another with our feelings all over the place. In such living we surrender our power to respond to life very easily and life begins to control us in ways that are anything but faithful or healthy. We then decide to cope in such experience by taking the edge off just a little in a variety of addictive behaviors that only make matters worse. We overeat, drink too much and too often, take another pain killer, watch television for hours, surf the net, check our email, face-book, twitter accounts, text, talk on the phone, buy something else we don’t really need, or you name it, we have access to it. And the merry go round just keeps on circling and our behavior numbs us to life and the moments become lost in the vastness of stimuli all around us.

Now based on what Paul is saying in Philippians he offers another way of living related to the one described above. Paul’s statement offers us great hope because the behavior he describes related to contentment in all circumstances is a learned behavior. The life of faith is one that must be practiced in order to have much value or use related to our daily experience and living. I continue to be amazed at persons who are members of the church and profess to be Christian and yet relegate their practice of Christianity to an average attendance at a principle worship service twice a month. It seems to me to miss the whole point of what the Christian faith boldly seeks to bring to our lives. Faith must be practiced and be willing to be examined related to its growth and affect in our living. So many people are just no longer interested in such a life because they just don’t have the time or really see the significance to such a practice. Paul practiced his faith daily. Paul depended upon his relationship with God to inform, empower, and lead him in who he was and how he responded to whatever life brought his way. Such living becomes freed from the circumstances of life because the perspective is so much bigger and grander. Jesus came that we might live abundantly! Part of living abundantly means that a person’s life is no longer measured by its circumstances! Now that is really living!

This coming Wednesday evening at 6:00 pm in the Chapel we will be given the opportunity to learn about such living. Ash Wednesday will seek to remind us that we are mortal and that there is a deadline to all of this. It really is not a bad place to start our growing because it is the truth of our lives. The nature of the practice of Christian living is not afraid to confront such truths and call them for what they are. It is one of my favorite truths of Christian living. Once you have death out of the way it then opens us to the prospect of the possibility then of living! I hope you will join me Wednesday as we begin the journey with Jesus to the cross and the empty tomb. We all will be quite surprised as to what God will teach us all along the way. I am sure before we begin that the whole experience will be full of surprises for us all! And that is how it should be as we travel the mystery!

I will see you on the road!

Travis

A Lenten Journey

"Is There Anything Else?"

Why am I here? Why at this time in the history of the world am I a part of it all? My answer to that question is discovered in the events of this week. As I observe the passion narrative in the gospel I see unfolding in those sacred events the purpose of God. The gospel writers share the story of Christ's passion as an unfolding drama of God's will and God's love being expressed in a decisive and declarative way in the history of the world. The statement they boldy want to make is these events are not happening by mistake. They are the response of human beings to God's love fleshed out in the person of Jesus Christ. The amazing theme woven throughout the rich tapestry of these events is that God's will and God's love will be done regardless of the response of people. From the cross and an empty tomb God dares to say I love you all no matter what!!

Why am I here? I am here because I am created in the image of such a God! It is by no mistake that in God's time and in God's way I am here because God wants me here. As I think about it I become somewhat intimidated until I realize God wants me here because God loves me and God wants me to love Him. When my two children were born they were created intentionally because Laurie and Travis Franklin loved them into being. Michael and Brittney are here in response to the purposeful love of their parents. They, too, are also here because God loved them into being for this time and for this place! How amazing is the love of such a God!!

As I journey to the upper room tomorrow and to the cross on Friday and finally to the empty tomb on Sunday I sense the purpose of a God who loves with passion, creativity, and for a reason. We are here because God wants us here!! The passion story is all about a man who knew that, who gave his life to that reality, and who surrendered everything to such will. This is part of why Jesus came. He came to show us this way of living and loving. He came to remind us that we, like him, are not here by mistake. We are here connected to the will and love of a God who creates and moves and works with a purpose in mind. Isn't it refreshing and powerful to trust and know such purpose. Is there anything else?

I will see you on the road,

Travis