Or not.

I’ve been a bit too busy to tend to it as it deserves, so I’ve taken a bit of a sabbatical while furiously trying to transfer the information from my church’ family’s current site to its new site. The current site may or may not be transferred to new servers, and our contract with the current provider officially expires tomorrow, June 1.

I have tried to keep up with a post each morning at the Daily Life of Worship blog.

And I’m holding things together at home with duct tape while our upstairs air conditioning is out, and Angi is teaching out of town for a week, and Matt and I are taking Laura and her friend to Camp Tahkodah tomorrow for the week.

So blogging, and a lot of other things have gone un-done.

As the actors who portrayed the fictional Bartles and Jaymes in wine-cooler commercials twenty-some years ago used to say: “Thank you for your support.”

Someday, they will.

And we will, too.

In the meantime, we mourn them. We miss them. We yearn for the day when we will be with them again, and even more, with the One for whom His armies ride and march and engage the enemy.

In the meantime, we let their mortality remind us of our own – and of the fact that ultimately, death is swallowed up in victory.

In the meantime, we wait … and put our armor on.

While traveling through tornado-devastated swaths of the Arkansas cities Clinton and Damascus this weekend, my family and I were mind-boggled to see the effects of cyclonic wind on land and property and people: a gargantuan steel construct – possibly a grain elevator – brought to its I-beam knees amidst a sea of rubble … a house which had once hosted a unique art gallery while shaded by great trees, sitting relatively undamaged on a bare knoll with only one denuded tree left standing beside it … and a sign, hand-painted on a plank and planted by Highway 65 in Damascus that simply said:

2 Corin. 4:7-11

Since my son was driving, I could pull out my PDA and key the scripture into its NIV Bible Reader and read:

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.

Not long ago, Wade Hodges posted about good readings and right readings of scripture. The scripture that this sign cites is almost certainly taken out of context. It’s not the right reading.

But it is a good one.

The Stephen Curtis Chapman family, who lost their 5-year-old girl, Maria Sue, in an accident at home yesterday.

The John Dobbs family, who lost an 18-year-old son, John Robert, yesterday in a motor vehicle accident.

The family of Eric Noah-Wilson, executive director of the ZOE Group, whose 33-year-old sister Kristi Blank left this life last night after an intentional overdose of ordinary pharmaceuticals Saturday.

My blogging friend John Mark Hicks, who has been mourning dearly loved ones this week on the anniversary of his son Joshua’s death May 21, 2001. These new losses in God’s family must be especially trying to him.

I just have no words. No wisdom. No solace. No comfort to offer. Only grief shared, and prayer, and love for these who hurt too deeply for words or wisdom or solace or comfort.

A break from the “innovation” series is needed, at least by me.

I’ve read some interesting tomes the last few weeks, among them unChristian and Pagan Christianity.

I’ve been writing a morning devotional pretty much every day at the ZOE Group / New Wineskins Daily Life of Worship blog.

(For the moment, our main ZOE Group and New Wineskins sites are down. Yet, through messages on a separate e-mail subscription system and the New Wineskins blog, we’ve been able to get out the message about the tragedy that has befallen our Executive Director Eric Noah-Wilson’s family, and hundreds have already responded with e-mail messages of prayer and hope to him.)

All of these things in my life -for very different reasons – have formed a question in my mind and heart that I think has been nudging at many others within our faith for a long time now:

Could we do better for the cause of Christ if we saw Christianity less as a religion and more as an identity?

As we cautiously adapt popular Christian music for our hymnody in churches, may I offer this as an option to some of our most cautious brethren …?

Our god is a “gotcha” god
he feigns his heavenly love
then smites you from up above
our god is a “gotcha” god

When he rolls up his sleeves
he’s preparin’ you a blitz
(our god is a “gotcha” god)
roll you under with his footsteps
zap with lightning from His fist
(our god is a “gotcha” god)
Well, he really isn’t joking
’bout his mind you should be readin’
if you do something unauthorized
you’ll be dead; you’re best believin’
that our god is a “gotcha” god

Our god is a “gotcha” god
he feigns his heavenly love
then smites you from up above
our god is a “gotcha” god

And if you worship some way that you think is right
(our god is a “gotcha” god)
he’ll blast you into darkness in his holy spite
(our god is a “gotcha” god)
judgment and wrath he’ll pour out on ya
mercy and grace aren’t options for such loss
don’t you know that all your innovation’s misbegotten and
our god is a “gotcha” god

Our god is a “gotcha” god
he feigns his heavenly love
then smites you from up above
our god is a “gotcha” god

our god is a “gotcha” god

our god is a “gotcha” god

(with sincerest apologies to Michael W. Smith the late Rich Mullins)

I just can’t bring myself to capitalize the “g,” though … I’m not sure the deity pictured in these verses is well-rounded enough in justice and mercy, righteousness and love to be the genuine article.

Twenty-four hours ago Angi and I finished our second and last day at the Pepperdine Lectureship, sitting in the courtyard of the little 1960s motel on the beach that she loves and has wanted to share with me, and we listened to the waves crash a few yards from our feet and reflected on the blessings of the previous forty-eight hours:

Safe arrival. Beautiful weather. Our kids’ safety at home while thunderstorms and tornados passed to the north and the south of them. Two wonderful surrogate houseparents for them, freeing us to travel alone together for the first time in a decade.

Listening to Randy Harris before about 5,000 assembled Christians in the fieldhouse, admitting that he could not preach his assigned topic from the Sermon on the Mount about loving one’s enemies; he was still learning it from his students at ACU.

Hearing Rick Atchley, the embattled minister of North Richland Hills Church, describing his need to change his message to an audience of 400 in Africa because, odds were, more than a quarter of them would be dead from AIDS within a few years, and all of them were hungry to the point of starvation. The passion in his voice when he quietly said, “I’m done with arguing about the things that rich Americans can or can’t do for one hour a week on Sunday. If you folks want to go home and do that, that’s fine; you go ahead. But I’m through with it.”

Sitting on the stage a few feet behind Mike Cope, our minister during our three-year sojourn in Abilene, as he declared the soteriology of Paul to Galatia: that Jesus was enough; that Jesus plus anything else – circumcision, law, acts of righteousness, anything – was powerless to save.

Accepting the solo singing of “Redeemer” by Sheryl Thomas for the first time in person as a priceless blessing with our shameless, grateful tears – while we were still on the platform behind the ZOE Group and Mike; right in front of everyone else in that auditorium of 700-800 souls. Longing to share that blessing with our church family in a gathered worship setting even as a recording – yet knowing that some, like the spiritual hatchlings of Jerusalem that Jesus would have gathered under His wings – some simply would not.

So we do not.

After a silence there by the sea, I confessed to Angi: “It’s taken me a long time to realize that I grew up in a church that really was liberal; it wasn’t just called that by the other churches who wrote us up in their bulletins. It was truly liberal; liberal in love. I grew up hearing sermons about Jesus and about grace and how our own righteous acts are powerless to save us but are powerful to lead others to salvation; and when I hear messages and share in songs that are all about Jesus and all about His grace … I’m home.” And I found myself in quiet tears again.

And the waves went on crashing on the sand.

As a second-grader, I thrilled to be able to actually see, close-up, a genuine U.S. Navy fighter jet parked on the tarmac of a base visitor’s center while we were on vacation to the east coast. So, a few weeks later, I was overwhelmed when my dad brought home my first Renwal plastic model kit – “AUTHENTIC IN EVERY DETAIL” – of that fighter jet, and I couldn’t wait to rip off the cellophane and open the cardboard box and peer inside.

It was almost as advertised on the box, down to the last rivet, except for one major detail: the nose cone. While the prototype jet had a sharp, pointed, air-piercing nose; the model kit had a blunt bulb of misshapen plastic and an instruction sheet which advised the modeler to soften the bulb chemically or with heat and shape by hand to conform to the original.

Clearly, this required powers and abilities far beyond those of a seven-year-old child and a father who had never before assembled a plastic model kit.

So we put it together as it was and mounted it on its clear styrene stand. But with its Jimmy Durante schnozz, it was pretty hard for me to imagine it soaring in the stratosphere at supersonic speed.

The U.S. Navy fighter jet I saw was genuine – the real thing.

The model kit was not quite authentic – like the real thing; only smaller. (And with a pug nose.)

Genuine, Authentic. These words, as here compared, have reference to historical documents. We call a document genuine when it can be traced back ultimately to the author or authors from whom it professes to emanate. Hence, the word has the meaning, “not changed from the original, uncorrupted, unadulterated:” as, a genuine text. We call a document authentic when, on the ground of its being thus traced back, it may be relied on as true and authoritative (from the primary sense of “having an author, vouched for”); hence its extended signification, in general literature, of trustworthy, as resting on unquestionable authority or evidence; as, an authentic history; an authentic report of facts.

A genuine book is that which was written by the person whose name it bears, as the author of it. An authentic book is that which relates matters of fact as they really happened. A book may be genuine without being, authentic, and a book may be authentic without being genuine. –Bp. Watson.

– Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary

I’ll leave this thought with you while I’m winging to California on a decidedly subsonic passenger jet with a nose cone somewhere between the two described above:

I wonder if too many Christians aspire to – and are satisfied with – an authentic faith, an authentic worship experience, an authentic church,- all just like the real thing IN EVERY DETAIL ….

… rather than the genuine article, the real thing, the faith that comes from the heart, the worship that is in Spirit and in truth, the church that the Lord established through the water and His blood.

It’s a fine distinction.

But an important one.