Today was the fourth Sunday in our new building.
It is pretty nice. It is comfortable, clean, very... nice.
I hear that there are a lot of new faces in the seats.
Somethings haven’t changed much. Many of us still sit in the same places, as if the chairs and the people in them hadn’t moved, while the building transformed itself around them.
My seat
My wife and I have been pretty focussed on our own lives (more about that later). But between those myopic moments when I see nothing beyond my own yard, I see signs of promise in our new church.
For example, I got this in an email from a friend:
Though the new construction has been an immense source of pain for you, many people are finding the new facility a blessing. Over 300 attended the concert Monday pm. People raved about the acoustics of the room, including the 2 musicians who were enthusiastically impressed (sounds better in here than it did at Carnegie Hall after they hauled in $30,000 worth of extra sound equipment for our concert!). For the 1st time in my 20+ years here I have an office big enough to hold groups of people for leadership meetings, staff meetings, Bible studies, etc. For the 1st time ever people stick their head in the door, look around & say “wow, nice office.” I NEVER heard that before. It’s cool to see the youth in their new youth center Sunday mornings & evenings – they are jazzed. I could go on & on. Oh yeah, this is a big one, the new office area, big enough to hold all of us so we have a sense of community, 1st time for that as well. If Satan meant to inspire Jeremiah to do something bad, God has certainly turned it around for good for CAC.
That last part is interesting... “turning it around for good”...
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. --Romans 8:28
The old building, with the ancient wiring and undiscovered termite shelter is gone. In its place is a clean, safe, welcoming place. It’s modern enough that young families sit in a space which connects to their own sense of architecture and style. Comfortable enough that old timers feel a sense of invigorating freshness.
There is a reminder of the old sanctuary in the cross hanging on the wall. Large laminate beams supported the vaulted ceiling in the old building. A friend of mine, a craftsman wood worker, reshaped a beam or two into this cross. He selected beams which had been partially charred by the fire that swept through. The burn marks are centered, fading out at the arms’ ends. The symbolism is unmistakable.
The cross bears our sins. All of our sins. The heat and destruction of our selfish acts chars the intersection between God and man. But it does not overwhelm. All our sins fit easily upon the great symbol of God’s love and sacrifice.
That fire burned a lot more than a building of course.
It set a fire in my own home that chewed its way through us all. It affected all of us, but it hurt Brenda the most. She struggled to love Jeremiah. She read passages of love in the Bible; she kept finding new ways to let him know he was loved, half to convince herself.
She turned to me at one point to ask for help in starting a new project to help him. She wanted us to be involved in Special Olympics. I put her off.
To her it was more of a refusal. Perhaps it was.
Since the fire I had been trying to deal with that destruction in my own way. We committed to pledges toward the rebuilding fund which went beyond what we could logically afford. I prayed with and over both boys each night. I spoke with them each night, checking on their fears and anxieties and concerns. Especially Jeremiah. I did everything I could to help around the church, though the sight of the ruined building made me want to weep.
Brenda tried also. But she found herself withdrawing her emotions, her affections, from her family, from me. Her anger grew.
It feels like everything is pretty messed up in my life. That isn’t true of course; there are many things that are going well. But there isn’t any doubt that the heart of a home is the relationship between a man and a woman, and that is very messed up in my home.
In some ways I can see that this whole mess might allow us to see each other in a clearer light, see who we really are. It might allow us to have a marriage that is more honest and real than we could have ever had otherwise.
But it may be that it won’t last at all.
Sitting in the new sanctuary, where everything is clean and fresh and intentionally designed to assist us in connecting our mortal messes to eternal perfection I am glad that the Lord has found a way to bring such good out of such a mess.
It tears at my heart when I think of how close so many of us, myself, Brenda, Norm, Mel, and Tim, came to being terribly injured or killed that day. The image of my friend thrown onto the driveway by the unseen forces of explosive gases, and I believe, an angel, him standing up in the horizontal column of smoke blasting through the door of the old building... holds sharp and clear.
This new building which makes odd little turns to follow apparently senseless wiggles of a foundation designed for different structures seems intentional in the whole, though quirky and capricious in its details.
Those of us who knew the old place well can still see the echoes of the board room, the pastor’s office, the old entrance, the library, the sanctuary. But the younger faces sitting with their younger children see a mothers’ nursing room perfectly designed, fiiting a whole, in the section that was once the board room. They see a beautiful window, its central frame creating another beautiful cross, where the pastor’s office once rested.
I see all these reflections of the old here and there... On Sunday morns when I pray with our pastors, I note the youth pastor is sitting in nearly the exact spot where Jeremiah knelt to coax a flame onto a sheet of paper from a candle.
I hear echoes of the past which hurt my family, hurt me, and I see wonderfully good things.
Brenda thinks that God is capricious, perhaps cruel. That our desire for children was turned against us so that our first child would die, that our subsequent children would be so challenging. I see good. I see children who have had the evil of their homeland stripped away and the best possible lives given to them against the most improbable of odds.
There are many examples of being able to see the bad or the good in so many things which have happened in our lives.
I believe that passage in Romans. I don’t believe God caused the bad things, but I believe He works for good through all things, good and bad, for those who love Him.
I love Him.
Perhaps that is all that really matters.
Perhaps I don’t even need to be overly concerned to see the good in the things that hurt.
Perhaps praying and worshipping and reading scripture and pondering Him through my writing is enough.
I love Him.
Perhaps that is enough.
It’s Halloween. I’m not feeling well, so I am in bed early, watching Young Frankenstein.
It is one of the funniest movies ever made. I might make watching it a Halloween tradition.
Today I went to a large electronics store to buy supplies for my tech program. It is a little odd speaking to a Hillbilly zombie about the advantages of one memory card reader over another.
Jeremiah had a costume party at school. He went as Darth Maul. His only real costume, but one he fixates on too much. I don’t like his fascination with powerful figures of evil. We let him hand out candy to kids who came to the door.
I let my misgivings about his costume slide and crawled into bed with this laptop and the funniest movie Mel Brooks ever made.
I tend to let things slide a bit in parenting. A sort of “Don’t sweat the little stuff” attitude. It probably comes from the nearly hands off approach my parents had in raising me.
Parenting styles are a natural source of conflict in a marriage.
Brenda tends to be firmer, stricter. I tend to be more laid back, more accepting of the ol’ “boys will be boys” philosophy.
She wanted me to become stricter. I wanted her to lighten up a little. We didn’t find a compromise. Instead she got stricter, angrier. I tried to lighten things up, joke her out of her mood.
I called her the Ogress of Greenleaf Manor.
You know, that didn’t amuse her as much as you might think.
When she was extremely upset I would back her up in silent tacit acquiescence, but not explicitly.
But, I worked on it. Became stricter.
As I tried to meet Brenda halfway she relaxed a little more.
I’m feeling pretty achy. The cough is deep enough, hurts enough, I wonder if I haven’t contracted a touch of pneumonia, an infection in the lungs. Brenda brought me hot chicken soup. Very hot. Hot enough to defend a castle. Sweet of her.
(I’m sorry about the ogress crack, Brenda.)
Discounting the vagaries of the modern calendar, Halloween marks an ancient cross-quarter day (half way between an equinox and a solstice; so does Ground Hog’s day). Perhaps my life is also at some sort of cross-quarter. My wife is still in my home. I’m lying here trying to eat scalding soup, and she is doing what she can to be kind and loving.
“You are talking about the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind,” Gene Wilder shouts at his visitor.
Sounds like one of my posts...
Happy All Hallow’s Eve.
This Sunday our church is holding its first service in the new building.
Two and a half years ago my son found himself alone in our church. Other kids have trouble relating to a teen with an IQ of 46.
He heard voices.
He turned on the ovens and stoves in the kitchen.
He found a candle. He found a lighter. He went to a stairwell and played with fire.
We were in a meeting at the church. Our church elders were talking with folks about our youth program.
My youth was burning down the church.
Jeremiah was born in Haiti.
There are indicators he was abused.
Physically (there are scars on his head).
Psychologically (he thought we would withhold food from him).
Sexually (odd reactions when he was bathed).
Spiritually (he witnessed Voodoo rites).
Now we are moving into the $2 million building.
There is a beautiful cross going up in the new building. It is made of laminated beams from the old building, charred by the fire. The seared burns on the wood are centered, fading toward the ends, symbolic of the sins our Lord sacrificed Himself for two millennia ago.
There are a lot of mixed feelings about this new building which provides a superior place for worship, for our youth, for offering a resource to our community.
But it is just a building.
Though our family has a unique perspective on this I recognize how others see it. It is a wonderful improvement. It is an asset to our community. It is a place where people can more easily meet with our Lord.
This building will host concerts, and weddings, and baptisms, and services which will draw people together.
Still, it is only a building.
The real purpose of church isn’t a building. It is the relationship which springs between human beings (an odd little species on the edge of a rather ordinary spiral galaxy) and the Creator of the Universe.
That is a real mystery.
There was an interesting image recently on Astronomical Picture of the Day.
A survey of the galaxies which lie south of the axis of our galaxy of 100 billion stars shows 2 million other galaxies.
I’ll let that sink in a bit.
One direction from our galaxy we can easily count 2 million galaxies, which might comprise as many as 100 billion stars each.
We are clinging to a tiny ball of soil which dances about a rather ordinary star on an outer edge of a rather ordinary galaxy floating amid perhaps 500 billion galaxies.
I believe that our universe is is held together at the quantum level by an intelligent force. A force that appears to work in groupings of three. A force I have come to know... and love.
That is the real church.
This being, a being who works through trinities of the quarks within the depths of the fabric of atoms, is the Church.
I don’t understand the details of the strange dance my spirit has waltzed these past few years, but I know that the rebuilding of this church has at its core the growth of the Church.
Strange mystery.
The Creator of the Universe is interested enough in a soul among 6.8 billion to use his family to change the intersection of the souls in the community and Himself.
I haven't forgotten this blog.
I have been busy with the usual stuff... work and family... and have had some added stress in my life.
I have been focusing on the latter.
In that pursuit I have been blogging quite a bit. Almost a post a day. Those are on another blog where a few have gathered around me to pray and follow how I am processing new challenges.
But I love this little blog, Job's Tale, which chronicles my weird life, and I need to give it a little attention now and then.
Lately I have been thinking about character.
My character, God's character, the character of those in my life.
I have been trying to be true to what I know is right, but that lends itself to narcissism, the idea that I can attain anything exemplary on my own.
It isn't true.
I, like every other human who has ever lived except one, am self-centered first.
It is not in our nature to readily accept our own failings, deny our own desires, and live the perfect life, following the example of our Lord.
We are born with the intrinsic belief that we are the center of the universe, demanding to be fed, demanding to be held, demanding the world conform.
I suppose that tends to reach its peak about age two when the world starts to put its foot down and say: "Wait your turn!"
However, there is something about being intentional.
There are folks who float along, their faith casual, their actions flow along the path of least resistance. Lately I have found that nearly every decision I make comes at a price.
It gets old.
Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. --Romans 5:3-5
Interesting progression...
Perseverance
Character
Hope
According to this passage character develops out of perseverance. It means that holding true develops its own reward, character.
I've hit some hard spots of late.
But out of those hard spots I emerge better able to... hit further hard spots.
And...
From that I develop hope.
That doesn't mean I will gain the rewards I want. It means that I will gain the inner space where I see possibilities of success when others may not.
That is good enough.
For without hope there isn't much point in riding this ball of dirt around and around as it dances circles about the sun for the three score and ten years of a human life.
It was just a dream. Bits of flotsam and jetsam. Or is it jetsam and flotsam since that is the order they would happen? At any rate, dreams are often weird metaphors for what is going on in our lives, a way for the heart and spirit and mind and even the body to work together to keep us sane.
Still, I am going through my day with the emotional residue left by a strange dream.
I think the emotions of a dream are often stronger than their content. When we relate a dream it seems to carry no emotional impact to our listeners. They may find it odd, but they miss what the dream left behind in our hearts and minds.
I wrote a post last night, and I posted it this morning feeling the emotional residue of a dream crystalized in the post I had written.
The post was about the strange series of mechanical breakdowns in our home. How it laid stress on my fragile marriage and offered the fodder for theological debate between my wife and I on the goodness or even existence, of God.
Drifting off to a prescription drug aided sleep I found myself wading in deep dark water, a common dream metaphor for feeling overwhlemed.
There were things floating in the water.
Some were right on the surface, much of it floated at varying depths in strings and clumps.
They were fish hooks.
They were brightly colored bits of rubber and plastic imitating edible tidbits fish might enjoy, and each had hooks on them, some single, some triple, all brass.
I was moving to get people out of the water, my wife, my children. I could feel the hooks biting into my arms, legs, back, chest, sides.
When I emerged from the water the weight of those hooks, some of them clinging to dozens of others, pulled at my skin.
I got my family out. I pulled out a pair of wire cutters and clipped the barbs off the hooks that most hampered my movements and started going around, removing the brass snares from the flesh of my family.
A sense of horror rose in my heart. I snipped the tiny gaffs from my wife’s flesh, backing the curved metal pieces out of her skin.
Now and then I paused to remove a few from myself.
Snip. Off came the barbs. Then I’d tug at the bits of metal and nonsensical, nearly Dr. Seussical type rubber creatures with their impotent hooks stabbing out of their bellies, tossing them to lay beside the lapping water.
As the sun rose in my dream it rose outside my window. The alarm went off. I rolled out of bed.
I began my day with emotional gossamer threads of the strange dream clinging to my heart... Six hours later I still feel wrapped by tiny spider threads of emotional horror and pain and damaged flesh, it is clinging to the emotional reality of this new day.
At work I can accomplish clear goals. I almost wish I didn’t have to go home.
My seat
