Author: danefowlkes

“There is plenty of work to be done here, God knows. To struggle each day to walk paths of righteousness is no pushover, and struggle we must because just as we are fed like sheep in green pastures, we must also feed his sheep, which are each other. Jesus, our shepherd, tells us that. We must help bear each other’s burdens. We must pray for each other. We must nourish each other, weep with each other, rejoice with each other. In short, we must love each other. We must never forget that.”
~ Frederick Buechner

I reside as part of a small community and am a member of an even smaller community of faith. I live here because my wife lived here before me, and over the past eight years I’ve grown not only accustomed to these surroundings, but to care for the people who are fixtures in these surroundings. Two such residents who mean a great deal to me are our landlords and neighbors from down the simple country lane I now call home. This relationship led two years ago to my agreeing to preach at their small historic church, which stands near the geographical gateway to the modest region. The white clapboard church building wears the label ‘Methodist,’ but consists of parishioners who are primarily not Methodists — a denominational Heinz 57. In an oddly unpredictable way, I fit – in this church, in this community, in this home. I’ve been thinking lately that were you granted an opportunity like the one given Karen Blixen by Denys Finch Hatton in “Out of Africa” as he flies her in an open cockpit biplane over her beloved Ngong Hills, you would peer down over the side and notice a quilt-like pattern spread out below you, a fitting image for a quilting people. Like the land, we are pieced together here, somewhat akin to gingham patches in an antique quilt. In the overall scheme of things, not many have lived and died here over the past one hundred and sixty years. The cemetery reveals as much about this community as anything living. A relatively few familiar family names are etched in stone, scattered throughout Bosqueville cemetery like a circling of the wagons, a community’s last stand against the onslaught of life and death. In the end, Bosqueville cannot be understood by GPS coordinates or surveyor’s stakes; it is defined by its residents. The community persists along family lines, where neighbors know one another, attend each other’s funerals, and applaud one another’s children at school celebrations and athletic contests. This is not a place for strangers. It is a place for friends, a place for family, and, above all else, it is a place for being known. God intends his churches to be just that– places for knowing and being known. We were created for him and to live in relationship with him and each other, a community in the fullest sense of the word.

I enjoy waking early, but rarely do much more with the stillness than accompany morning coffee with prayerful meditation. These are not moments for doing so much as being; reflection fuels the later doing. This winter morning I shove aside the sermon that insists on intruding and allow myself to settle on daydreaming about heaven. It feels somehow natural to think about death while peering through glazed windows at weighted skies and naked trees. A grey and barren horizon makes it suddenly a strain to remember warmth and light and green and hope, as recent as yesterday. What complicates such mornings for me is that considering the endlessness of days causes honest turmoil initiated by a barbed question– will life end with death? Although years ago as a youthful pastor I meticulously recorded funerals officiated in a massive blank-lined volume printed for such a purpose (perhaps thinking that by writing names in a book I might grant them immortality), I’ve long since lost count of how many times I’ve stood behind podiums and near coffins pronouncing hope that we are presiding not over an ending but endless beginning. Reciting dog-eared scriptures for the comfort of those lagging behind in the run to see Jesus, I deliver discourses on the eternal sincerely but always with a twinge of wonder. Can such platinum hope prove true? Will I one day blink my eyes in darkest death only to find myself transfigured? Is it possible that my own grey horizon might yield to light grander than anything I’ve read about or imagined? Don’t consider me a skeptic. Instead, number me in the company of those who cannot honestly declare we have no questions but journey with confidence that we are embraced by the Answer.

Grace sees and refuses to blink. For one woman, grace happened as she knelt in the dirt before the feet of Jesus. More from shame than humility, her collapse was less intention than reflex. Not far away, angry stares inflicted greater pain than the threat of the rocks hefted in ruthless hands; it was not so much their vocabulary that wounded in that awful moment, it was the omission of human dignity. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but inhumanity will destroy me.

This was certainly not the first time. Passed from one man to the other, she had never been held as sacred, only held in the process of being used. She’d grown accustomed to the shame, but refused to be comfortable with it. That’s when she heard of this healing teacher. Not just a teacher who healed, a man who restored even as he inspired; someone who returned all that had been taken. She fought back her fears and anxious tears. Would this be simply the newest version of something too good to be true? She had heard those lines before, the promises of love behind lying eyes. Or could this man be different? Was the healing teacher actually sent from God? Was it possible that he was God himself? She cast herself before him, not so much because she had nothing to lose, but that she was willing to gamble on this one chance to win. Her life had been a succession of losses: losing choices, losing relationships, losing moments; a life lost in quicksand of regret. So she rolled the dice on one opportunity to be real, her one chance to be herself rather than the object that others had recreated in their own image and for their own pleasure.

No one knows for sure what Jesus stopped to write in the dirt on that awful awesome day. Many speculate he scrawled a litany of sins that the accusers were forced to recognize as their own. Others propose that Jesus used a finger to indent Scripture in the sand. Perhaps he did something entirely different, something more meaningful to her than anyone could have imagined — he wrote her name, and in so doing, he restored her heart.

Here is one thing each of us can do for the outcast. Regardless of cause and effect, the one gift we hold at the ready for every human being is to ascribe worth, to acknowledge human value through eye contact or the spoken word, to call someone by name. Being Jesus in an anonymous world, more often than not, is simply to say with our eyes “I see you.”

“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
~ Annie Dillard

My wife and I are part of a small church (attendance was up Sunday, edging above 40 for the first time since Easter) that has been in our community since 1853. To be honest, I wonder at times if it makes a difference that I’m there at all (and I’m the preacher), but then I look around and remember why it’s important that I am and that anyone else would be there too. There’s a young man on one side of the sagging sanctuary holding a little girl who isn’t his child, but she clings to him like he belongs to her. There’s a man my age who was just released from jail, signaling me with a victory sign as he enters. In the vestibule stands an older woman who sees life differently since her stroke, waiting to hug me and give the same greeting from her sister she gives twice every Sunday morning. To my left is the older man who lost his wife a few years ago and finds his purpose in life these days by tending the climbing roses in the prayer garden. There’s the sweet rancher in the choir who silently mourns the fact every Sunday that she can do everything with her weathered husband except attend church. There’s the bent and largely hairless woman who has helped so many others through times of crisis, but now wages her own battle against the onslaught of cancer. We are all different, but each Sunday morning we celebrate what we hold in common.

The reason, I think, that so many find it hard to go to church is that we’ve largely lost the notion of what it means to be church. We confuse participles for the noun. Singing, praying, dancing, preaching, teaching, these are all but modifiers of the real thing. I enjoy a measure of pageantry and am a person of habit, so I like ritual in worship. Predictability need not stifle expression; it may, in fact, liberate it. I thrill to soul stirring music (unless we repeat the same line more than seven times). Good Preaching always moves me and bad preaching perturbs me (not to say I haven’t done more than my fair share of it). But all these may be experienced alone and in private, particularly with the advent of wireless and television. What makes church “church” is that I am present with other pilgrims, connected physically as well as spiritually, and it is relationship that morphs worship into life transformation. Absence does not make the heart grow fonder; it cools the heart and dulls the spirit. This is not a new problem. One particular church in the New Testament was having a dickens of a time getting folks to show up, hence the admonition: “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” Me loving you, and you loving me, liberates both of us to love and worship God.

“We must be careful with our lives, for Christ’s sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously”
~ Frederick Buechner

Grace is always present tense. I write from personal experience that heaven on earth is living in close proximity to whom and what one loves most. In that regards, I have found paradise; more accurately, paradise has found me. The most discerning, scintillating, jocular, and alluring woman I’ve ever known calls me “Darling”; precocious and precious grandchildren, daughters and sons-in-law call me “Papa,” and intriguing neighbors call me “friend.” I am blessed with residential space to breathe apart from urban interference; plank fencing marks our boundaries rather than cement sidewalks, and caliche replaces asphalt. The prominent sounds in our distance are not those of urban sprawl; instead, Barred Owls beckon to one another with sounds we call monkey chatter, a Kingfisher rattles back and forth over the surface of the pond, and an ever-present Phoebe wheezes on a nearby limb.

We abide best in our Heavenly Father when we extoll his grace that benefits this breath, and when we embrace the exhilaration of not living in the wake of what we once were. What happened or didn’t happen yesterday pales in significance with what I do right now; life does count, and this very moment matters enormously. Mercy is at hand in abundance when I allow myself to detect the weight of God in the mundane and ordinary. Grace in present tense means release from remorse over the past, and freedom from fear of failing to have tomorrow.

“Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.”
~ Frederick Buechner.

I like a party as much as the next guy, but confess that I wasn’t able to generate much enthusiasm for our staff Christmas party this year. No reflection on my colleagues nor an indictment on myself, everything about it seemed out of sync for some reason. Perhaps I felt that way because my wife couldn’t come, or it may have been the seventy degree temperatures with high humidity, which only feels like Christmas in that it reminds me of childhood Decembers in Port Arthur. Irregardless, I sat outside last night among several couples, alone with my thoughts, paper plate full of lasagna and french bread balanced on my legs, a cup of coffee at hand, situated near a propane heater that quietly effused warmth to the outdoor deck.

In an effort to be polite, I addressed the young man seated across from me. Intending to engage in nothing more than small talk, I asked about his work and family. What he said in response arrested me from my party funk, and I sat spellbound for the next fifteen minutes as he narrated how life had changed for him since they almost lost their two year old son when he fell into a rural pond last year. His voice broke slightly as he ended the story by saying that the whole experience was a wound that held him nearer to the heart of God, and that he never wanted it to completely heal. He had tears in his eyes. I had a lump in my throat. We sat in silence; a simple candle lit patio had been transformed into sacred space by the reminder that we will never be like Christ without a wound.

God never gets the blues. For him to be moody would imply that he is better at one moment than he is at another, and that would be heresy. “God, the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Yet, I wrestle regularly with a self-imposed inclination to gauge God’s goodness (or its opposite) according to the unreliable emotion (my own) of the moment, as if his character fluctuated like the Dow Jones. For lack of any better explanation as to why I insist on attempting to recreate God in my own image, I’m forced to admit that I do so when feeling powerless because I want a God who knows and is intimately involved, but when life unfolds the way I want, I prefer his mood to shift toward indifference. I seem to prefer a god who is little more than the elongated reflection of myself.

Father, break through my self-orientation and bend me to the wholly Other. Radically impose your heart and superimpose real faces on your will, but do not allow them to be my own. Open my eyes to recognize you at work in the man down the lane paralyzed by undefined fear, in my landlord who is overcoming lung cancer, in the man that I privately distrust at church, in our daughter’s foster child who is capturing my heart even though I swore not to allow it to happen, in the family members I desperately long to influence toward the Cross, in my wife who I pray detects in me something that resembles Jesus. Reproduce yourself in me so fully that I embody the hope of glory.

“to whom God was pleased to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27 RV1885)

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”– Leo Tolstoy

I was thoroughly convinced as a younger man that I would change the world. Much older now, I confess I haven’t made a dent, except perhaps within me. I began preaching at the age of sixteen and was pastor of a part-time church by age twenty. The Midyett Baptist Church of DeBerry doubled in attendance from four to eight during my eleven month tenure; convinced of my pastoral prowess, I moved on to greener pastures where I intended to serve God and make a name for myself. I landed in Nacogdoches, where some called me preacher boy, a few white haired widows lauded me the next Billy Graham, and several seniors, covered in calluses and scars from battles with previous preachers, called me names I prefer not to repeat. By God, I was a preacher, and spent the decade of my twenties intent on changing the Church.

In my early thirties, providence and ambition conspired to take me to the mission field. True to my previous mindset, I went to Africa fully intent on changing the face of missions. I was, in my mind, the great white hope for the Dark Continent. By God, I was a missionary, and spent my third decade intent on changing the world. Upon returning to the United States, my alma mater extended an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I went to work for the school I loved but from which I’d been estranged due to living overseas. As alumni director and then Chaplain of the University, I observed ways that we could improve on carrying out our mission, and so I embarked on a plan to bring about those enhancements. By God, I was a Christian educator, and spent my fourth decade intent on changing Christian higher education. That crusade has now extended into my fifth.

Thirty five years removed from my initial vision, I understand that my biggest challenge is not to change the world, but to change myself. The most difficult problems to solve are internal; there are depths to plumb because they determine what shows. Daily I’m confronted with the demands of growing in likeness to Christ, gaining the mind of Christ, and in granting others a clear view of Jesus in me. By God, I am a Christ-follower and my most difficult frontier lies within.

We sat across from one another, with not much in common except a question. I wasn’t exactly sure how he had found me, but here we were, sipping coffee, exchanging pleasantries, edging closer to the reason we had agreed to meet in the first place. I asked what I could do for him and heard him say that he was spiritually dry as toast, and looking for someone to help revive what was left of his Christian experience. The crux of the matter was that he was more disillusioned with himself than with God, but the Almighty ran a close second. Years of Christian ministry had obscured the reason for that service, leaving him in a downward spiral of guilt and dissatisfaction. When I asked the bottom line of his apparent misery he replied, “I’m not sure if any of this is real, and I don’t see how I can play the game any longer. I have more questions than I do answers.” The silence was tangible between us, his downward stare reflecting a defeated heart, but he raised eyebrows and his gaze when I finally spoke and said, “We honor God most by the questions we ask. It’s when we begin to question that we draw closest to the heart of God.”

“We worship God through our questions” (Abraham Joshua Heschel). God speaks more clearly to us through our questions than is possible when we’re convinced that we have all the answers; when we question our mind remains open. When we focus on answers our mind is made up, which is actually a curious phrase. Saying I have my mind made up sounds on par with making my bed or having poached eggs for breakfast. Faith is not that neat, simple, or bland. Questioning is not doubting because it anticipates an answer, making it great faith and even greater hope. Questions are not the enemy of faith; arrogance is.

“But from there you will seek the LORD your God, and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul. When you are in distress and all these things have come upon you, in the latter days you will return to the LORD your God and listen to His voice. For the LORD your God is a compassionate God; He will not fail you nor destroy you nor forget the covenant with your fathers which He swore to them. (Deuteronomy 4:29-31)

Depression emerges from somewhere down deep that’s hard to define and even harder to resolve. It’s a feeling that spreads slowly like a sunset that begins with changes in light and ends in the absence of any. We’ve all felt its effect to one degree or another, but for the person engulfed by its shadow, despair is a weight that drags toward an unseen bottom, pain that pummels like a subterranean river hollowing out solid rock along its course.

The World Health Organization estimates that 121 million people worldwide suffer from depression. So commonplace is it these days that melancholy may overtake love as the most common of all human emotion; yet, it is such a complex issue that entire professions and elaborate institutions have been created to study and treat it. Christians are not immune, and depression is a larger problem among Christians than the Church lets on. “To be in a state of depression…. is to be unable to occupy yourself with anything much except your state of depression. Even the most marvelous thing is like music to the deaf. Even the greatest thing is like a shower of stars to the blind. You do not raise either your heart or your eyes to the heights, because to do so only reminds you that you are yourself in the depths. Even if, like the Psalmist, you are inclined to cry out ‘O Lord,’ it is a cry like Jonah’s from the belly of a whale” (Buechner).

Depression is typically defined as a mental condition characterized by feelings of severe despondency and dejection, and is usually accompanied by feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and lack of energy. It acts like culture shock in that it may best be understood as distance between expectation and reality; the wider the gap, the more intense will be our battle with despair. Believers are not exempt from false views of reality and unrealistic expectations of themselves and others; in fact, the Church fosters just such a dichotomy when we make it unacceptable to admit our struggles before the very ones most qualified to form our base of support. Acute misery is never resolved by blushing and turning away in embarrassment. “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there” (Will Rogers). Those suffering from misery’s tightening grip feel like they’re alone in the world, and that is exactly the reason they cannot climb out of the pit without someone ready to offer a hand up. As necessary as confession is to repentance, honesty is essential to recovery; acknowledge your struggle to someone you trust and admit your inability to resolve it alone. It’s not a sin to be depressed, but it’s a shame to keep it to yourself.

“Anyone who is among the living has hope.” (‭Ecclesiastes‬ ‭9‬:‭4‬, NIV)