Author: danefowlkes

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)

The world clamors for my attention with ever-expanding volume, and the same could be said for each of us. Jay Walker-Smith, President of the Marketing Firm Yankelovich, says that in this country we have gone from being exposed to about 500 ads a day back in the 1970’s, to as many as 5,000 a day. Without focus, it is easy to have our morality and spirituality swept away into thought patterns that do not align with godly thinking or a holy lifestyle. Along with the swelling voices competing for our attention, there are even greater demands placed on our time. I was in the office last week of an attorney in a large law firm and he told me that he is required to account for every six minutes of his time because every minute of his work day is worth $17 dollars to the firm. How much are the minutes of your life worth? Probably more than you could imagine.

In many ways, life is more complex than ever before, but in the most important arena things remain profoundly simple. “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8, KJV). “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment” (Mark 12:30, KJV).

The one thing I do that trumps all else and silences background distortion is when I prefer Christ over myself and to everything else. Nothing uncomplicates life like compelling love. The finest example of this simple obsession that I’ve known personally is Phillip Ingida D’ima. When I met him many years ago in the Kaisut Desert, he was stumbling from hut to hut in Kenya’s northern frontier district, sharing the message of Christ’s liberating love among the largely unreached Borana of Olla D’aba, a village near the town of Marsabit. Philip walks with a limp because of a leg deformed by childhood polio. I’ll never forget Phillip’s response when I asked him one day why he pushed through enormous pain so that he could tell his testimony of God’s grace. He said simply, “Because I love Jesus. What other reason is there to live?” There you have it–the remedy for confusion and the pathway to profound peace–single-minded love for Jesus Christ. “Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus” (F. Buechner).

“As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.”(Psalm 17:15, KJV)

The Church has taken a black eye over the years, but she’s given out more than a few of her own. Since no human being is perfect, no group of them will be either; but as the song says, “We were made for so much more.” We take a hit on our intended identity when we pay greater attention to how many attend our services than to how well we love before and after them. I feel sorry for those believers who’ve never known anything other than the anonymous church. It’s hard to experience and express God’s love to strangers sitting next to you. Sunday after Sunday in what amounts to the ecclesiastical equivalent of a concert hall, many tread spiritual water midst a sea of strangers–unknown quantities, mutual anonymity. These are they who resemble you, right down to the plaid and khakis, but remain to you a nameless entity.

We’ve been suckered in by the fallacy of attracting. Jesus actually repelled more than he ever attracted, but for all the right reasons. With our seeker sensitive mumbo jumbo, we have sold our birth rite for a bowl of cheap chili; church has become big business in the effort to lure large crowds to assemble, as if attendance is her raison d’être. Concert Christianity trumps discipleship and we aren’t even aware that we’re skating on thin ice. If church is no different than a convention center, why should anyone bother? Disaster results when we reject all that’s right about Christ and replace it with all that’s wrong in the world.

“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” (‭2 Chronicles‬ ‭7‬:‭14‬ KJV)