i’ve got one of those miserable garzonguous headaches again and i’ve just woken up from a nap where i dreamed i was my friend david u getting back from arizona or maybe one of my other met-or-unmet friends getting back from abilene later this week or from winterfest in gatlinburg and i’m catching up on the blog entries i’ve missed while i’ve been gone and finding myself permanently three days behind in this nightmarish twilightzonish separation where there are people with ideas and heartaches and joys that i can’t share because i’m always going to be three days apart out-of-sync from them in this unreachacrossable great gulf of discontinuity and i wonder is this how god felt when he went for broke in the fullness of time and there was no alternative but to send his only son because he had lost it all every precious soul he had created and loved and cherished and wept over since the beginning of time and he’d promised them he’d get them back no matter what they did and he set the deadline and there was no getting around it and that son had to die so he could have just a few of his children back so he went for broke and rolled the dice and his son said please father now send me it can’t wait and he did and the entire universe came to a screeching squealing fishtailing halt when the nails went in and the veil of the temple tore and then he waited and waited and waited an eternity three days a glimmer of hope forty days and some words by peter and the rush of his spirit and then the results started trickling in like election returns here are some back! one, twelve, three thousand a tiny fraction a drop in the bucket and the days crept on while he watched and waited from the edge of his throne a few more turning their faces homeward here and there until years have past and decades and centuries and he still waits as if nothing else matters in the cosmos but reaching across that almost unbridgeable three day chasm to the ones he has loved and lost my head hurts my head hurts my heart hurts

Just a few moments ago, I was working on some materials for a class I’m planning to teach this summer on eschatology … thinking about how the resurrection of Jesus guarantees our own … about how that incorruptible body might be different from the corruptible … and reading John 20:19-20:

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

… and I wondered how He got through those doors (or passed through a wall) with a resurrected body that Dr. Luke (24:39) says had “flesh and bones …”

“Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”

… when the thought suddenly hit me: Maybe because Jesus was more real than a wall or a door.

A wall or a door – to Him – is only as “real” as smoke or fog seems to us. Insubstantial. Impermanent. Inconsequential. Walk right through it.

Remember how Paul said it in II Corinthians 4:18 – 5:3:

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.

Tent vs. mansion. Naked vs. clothed. Temporary vs. eternal. Seen vs. unseen.

Unreal vs. real.

Or maybe I just read too much C.S. Lewis.

(Is it possible to read too much C.S. Lewis?)

More wonderful faith cannot be
than the fact that God believes in me …
His plan is to reach
everyone that I teach
and the fact is, there is no “Plan B!”

It’s not a potion to cure colds. It’s a choice of the way to catch flies. According to the old saying, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

I’ve encountered a church here in my hometown that studied last summer the question of homosexuality, a topic I only touched on lightly in a recent blog post. Since I was off work all day yesterday with a migraine that wouldn’t let me think, work, or focus my eyes easily, I listened to the entire series of messages.

After my vision improved, I posted the links to them last night on Brandon Scott Thomas‘s blog, where a discussion with several folks – including a couple of gay Christians – took place in the Comments recently.

How can I say “gay Christians”? The same way I can say “divorced Christians” or “stumbling Christians” or “greedy Christians” or “exclusionary Christians.” I don’t mean it as a label, just a descriptor. We have in common a belief in Christ. We have different temptations.

The series followed by Little Rock Church – which has a “Church of Christ” heritage – was called “Full of Grace and Truth: A Christ-Like Response to Homosexuality.” Most are MP3s you can listen to; the last one is a page listing/linked to resources:

• Part 1: Attitude Adjustment
• Interlude: Parable of the Good Samaritan Revisited
• Part 2: What the Bible Says and Doesn’t Say About Homosexuality
• Part 3: Building Bridges to Homosexual Friends and Relatives
• Interlude: Story Changing Grace
• Part 4: A Christ-Like Response (Panel Discussion)
• List of Resources

I’d encourage you to listen to the messages in the order presented, and be blessed. I really appreciate the candor and spirit with which this church looked into the matter, with plenty of grace but without playing fast and loose with the truth.

They’ve chosen honey, because they want to catch more (souls, not flies). But the whole of the message is not sweet. As the saying implies, there are some that can be caught with vinegar. So there is a taste of it in these messages, because homosexuality is sin.

Just a taste for a person crucified by the perpendicular beams of his/her passion for Christ and attraction to the same sex.

Just enough.

You get all kinds of comments on an open blog – and this one is. Today I received this comment to an archived post:

“I think you misunderstand the Scriptures, the Restoration Movement, and the Church of Christ.”

That was almost all it said.

Not specific, to be sure. But gentle, tempered by the words “I think” and “misunderstand.” Just the kind of rebuke I would want to receive, and rebuke is a scriptural concept too frequently abused and infrequently done well.

I would have to agree that I often do not understand the Scriptures, the Restoration Movement, or the Church of Christ.

I don’t claim to have answers – possible answers, maybe – but I have a lot of questions.

I respect mystery as a key aspect of God’s nature, and therefore His Word.

I think everyone should study and come up with his/her own answers and possible answers, because the struggle with some issues is sometimes more important than the answers we perceive.

My initial reaction has been tempered by a recent post by fellow blogger David U. Though I share the skepticism of another fellow blogger, Fred Peatross, that “that blogs will ever become a link/connection to those Jesus misses most”, my commenter is making an honest effort at it.

I know, because the rest of the comment I received from him yesterday was a name, and a URL to a blog. In fairness to the points of view expressed there – whether I agree with all of them as crucial items in a relationship with God through Christ is immaterial – I’d like to post a link to it:

http://clearcutbiblestudies.blogspot.com/

It may help someone passing through this blog to come up with answers that draw him or her to Christ – or closer to Him – and I am all for that!

The last one, I promise. If you missed the first and second ones, no big deal.

This one comes from movie # VI: The Undiscovered Country. The fans are ahead of me, already anticipating that the moment takes place in Cap’n Spock’s quarters as he and fellow (mostly) Vulcan Lt. Valeris discuss the very impressionistic-looking painting hanging there: The Expulsion from Eden. It’s Spock’s reminder to himself that “All things end.” (Which is sort of appropriate, since this is the last film to feature the original cast.)

But the moment comes a few lines later:

Spock: “History is replete with turning points, Lieutenant. We must have faith.”

Valeris: “Faith?” (Well, this would be an unusual concept to the all-logical Vulcan mind.)

Spock (apparently paraphrasing Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata): “That the universe will unfold as it should.”

Valeris: “But is that logical? Surely we must ….?”

Spock (apparently quoting his human mother, who once expressed being “sick to death” of logic): “Logic, logic, logic. Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris – not the end.”

Okay, that’s pretty close to Proverbs 1:7. Sort of. The fear of the Lord is logical. Right?

But my real question is whether we can, in a faith as profound as Ehrmann’s (or the legendary Spock’s), believe that the universe will unfold as it should.

I believe in prophecy. I believe that Old Testament prophecy proved true in the New Testament. I believe that New Testament prophecy proves to be true as well. I believe that it says, in very few words of summary, that the universe unfolds as it should.

God wins. Satan loses.

Our faith in that truth – though tested by accident, natural disaster, crime, war, evil, even political assassination of presidents or prime ministers – will not be in vain.

That’s logical too. Isn’t it?

Visit Val’s blog today, read When The Music Fades and be blessed.

Just the insight of “the first ten kisses” would have been enough to enrich your whole day.

There’s enough there, in the fading moments of his sister’s life, to bless all of yours.

A couple of nights ago while not sleeping late into the night, I had this odd idea to start a New Wineskins BLOG here on Blogger.com/Blogspot.com and turn it over to Greg Taylor, the online magazine’s managing editor. Little did I know that he’d been wanting to do one for a long time.

After a good night’s sleep (so I could handle HTML coding again), I put one together, and Greg seems really excited about it. He wants to use it to post some free-access articles so that non-subscribers will be able to get a taste for the good stuff behind the firewall.

There is some really good stuff there.

And it will be a place where folks can comment on articles they’ve read in both areas, hopefully.

I think he’ll be inviting the other NW editors, publisher, and several other writers to be authors on the site and I’ll stick around as a co-administrator to help tweak that Blogspot template as needed.

I pray that the good Lord will bless it, and bless many through it.

“We do not ask that they give up their opinions, for they can hold their opinions as private property; we only ask that they not impose their opinions upon others as tests of fellowship.” – Alexander Campbell, from his article in the Millennial Harbinger, 1830, p. 145.

Folks who really know me and who read this blog must be wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. If they’ve read my posts The One Where I Lose Friends, The One Where I Lose More Friends, and The One Where I Just Lose, they know that my life makes me practically a poster child for opposing abortion and gay marriage.

In college, I contracted epidydimitis, a kind of mumps gone south, which later led to a small, non-spreading cancerous tumor of the Lance Armstrong kind. In short, I could no longer father children with my own genes; adoption was my only option; and abortion really cuts down on the number of babies that are available to adopt.

My first wife left and, from all accounts I’ve been able to gather, lived with her girlfriend.

There is no reason for me to favor abortion for the sake of convenience or gay relationships made conveniently legal. And, to speak very plainly, I don’t.

But as a divorced person, I have also experienced being on the outside. I’ve shouldered my share of guilt. I’ve gone through the agony of trying to find a church home at a time, in the mid 1980’s, when it was still a little tricky for a divorced person to do so.

I was very blessed to find one.

At the same time, I found myself at that church yesterday morning with the shoe on the other foot: my lovely and loving wife and two beautiful adopted children on the pew beside me. I had just listened to a sermon explaining Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s planned Covenant Marriage event planned for Valentine’s Day and I was blissfully singing “God Give Us Christian Homes” when my eye caught a young, black single mom and her two kids a few pews in front of me. A lump caught in my throat. How did she feel about me singing about homes with a God-given father?

I could sing no more.

Then there was a verse about a godly mother’s “queenly quest” and all I could think about was a friend sitting a few rows over whose marriage is coming apart at the seams.

Then there was the verse about children, and I remembered how I felt when I found out I could not father my “own.”

It was never the intention of the song, I don’t believe, to pray just for the Dan Quayle vision of only perfect families. But suddenly that prayer-song went hollow and cheap for me.

And I thought about years before hearing a sermon condemning abortion – without making any distinction between the simply convenient and the medically-advised; without closing on a note of forgiveness or redemption or freedom from guilt – and wondering what the effect would have been on yet another friend who had endured an abortion because her fetus had become cancerous.

I don’t have a clever way to end this post. No witty way to express what I feel. No wrap-it-up conclusion or solution or prayer. Sorry.

Today I just hurt. For some of my friends who are hurting. For others I don’t even know. For the person that I forget I once was … and the one I too often become.