Baptism in Del Valle

Whenever I recall the scene this photo records, I think of the Randy Travis song, Pray for the Fish. The theology is all wrong, but I find it funny.

Pray for the fish
They won’t know what’s coming
When the sin starts rolling off the likes of him
Lord be with em, they ain’t done nothin’
Please won’t you leave them just a little bit ’a room to swim
Pray for the fish.

conservative

adjective

holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.

noun

a person who is averse to change and holds to traditional values and attitudes.

Christian

adjective

of, relating to, or professing Christianity or its teachings.

noun

a person who is a believer in Jesus Christ and his teachings.

oxymoron

noun

a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction.

I am a conservative. It is my nature. I am financially conservative. I do not spend money easily, although I am not miserly. My politics are conservative. I have voted Republican since my first presidential election, with one exception and that may have been a mistake.

My religious views are conservative. While not a strict literalist, for the most part I believe the Bible means precisely what it says.

I view unasked-for-change with apprehension.

Recently, I’ve discovered that there was a group of people fitting the above description around when Christ lived—they were called the Pharisees. Of course, I knew about the Pharisees, but have only recently made the correlation that they were in fact, conservatives. Jesus—He whose teachings I claim to follow—was not like the Pharisees.

Luke 15 relates a parable which Jesus told. Commonly referred to as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, it may seem a strange parable to apply to the subject of conservatism. I’ve almost always heard this parable focused entirely on the profligate younger son who receives forgiveness and restoration from his father when he comes to his senses, although perhaps in passing the teacher might mention that the older son is a jerk.

Timothy Keller has, I think, a more complete exposition of this parable in his book The Prodigal God. There were two groups of people gathered around Jesus when he told this parable, the tax collectors and sinners (corresponding to the younger brother in the parable), and the Pharisees and teachers of the law (corresponding to the older brother). Because the Pharisees were the ones muttering and accusing Jesus, he addresses them.

Remember, the Pharisees were the keepers of traditions, with a strict interpretation and obedience to the law. They were highly moral (outwardly anyway) and as political/religious leaders enforced the law strictly and in some cases severely. They dedicated themselves to knowing in detail the holy scriptures and following them. In short, they were the very definition of a conservative.

In the parable, Jesus skewers the Pharisees (clearly represented by the older brother). The older brother is angry about the younger goof-off son returning and being accepted by the father, upset about his younger brother getting a feast when he’d never been given one, and insulting to his father by refusing an invitation to the feast. Jesus tells the Pharisees they are refusing an invitation from God because they won’t modify their worldview to include the undesirables (tax collectors and sinners) in their faith community. They are too conservatively blind to accept this radical idea.

So I’m asking myself, would my conservative nature bring the same kind of lecture from Jesus as he gave the Pharisees in this parable? I think continually reviewing and applying the biblical “one another” imperatives is needed. Things like, live in peace with one another, accept one another, be devoted to one another in brotherly love, teach and admonish one another, stop passing judgment on one another, honor one another, love each other as I have loved you, to highlight just a few. If my conservative views run counter to these biblical imperatives then I’m too much like the Pharisees who Jesus warned in the parable mentioned above.

White crosses on Rattlesnake Ridge

Rattlesnake Fire Monument

I visited the site recently on a geocaching trip and was completely surprised by the involvement of New Tribes missionaries in this fire. A few years ago we knew a couple who volunteered with New Tribes, and supported their efforts in Thailand. The descriptive sign at the monument did a good job of explaining the tragedy, but I wanted to find more background information. A quick search on Amazon found Fire and Ashes: On the Front Lines Battling Wildfires.

I liked the book for two reasons: it explained how small oversights can combine and lead to fatal consequences, and it gave background on the people involved—the human interest side of the story. On the right side of the photograph above, there is a cluster of nine crosses. As John Maclean, the author, describes it, “Whatever the missionaries were thinking, they acted as though they had a message for one another. The nine men found at this place were heaped together… Perhaps they huddled together to take comfort from a human touch and a common faith… They appear in photographs to be straining upward, reaching for the high ground.” And perhaps, in one last act of commitment, they joined in prayer.

The geocache here (GC1TDNW) is one of the most moving caches I’ve found. I stayed for a while, just contemplating the sacrifices clearly displayed on the hillside.

At the local church level, I am convinced that the more you blind the people to their hypocrisy, the better off we will be in the long run. Make sure their temperaments run towards judgmentalism and not repentance. You can do this by keeping them focused on the sins of the increasingly decadent culture. As long as [they] focus on the actions of those in our territory, they are less apt to repent of the actions of those in their pews and pulpits.

So true it hurts!

Into this environment a Christian church was planted, led by Paul and twelve disciples he found in Ephesus (see Acts 19:1-10). In two years of daily discussions in a lecture hall, Paul’s teaching transformed the lives of so many people the cultural foundations of Ephesus were shaken. So great was the movement away from the worship of Artemis that the artisans who manufactured religious trinkets were losing significant business. The silversmith Demetrius organized the affected craftsmen into a protest that turned into a near riot (see Acts 19:23-41).

Dr. John Johnson lucidly comments on this situation in his blog Village Pastor:

Maybe there is a lesson here for us. All too many contemporary churches have substituted discipleship with fellowship and entertainment, leaving the church a mile wide, an inch deep, having little impact on culture… certainly not the kind that leads to riots.

Spring 1973

“Social scientists have found almost zero association between having children and happiness,” he said. “In a recent study of British adults for example we found that parents and non-parents reported the same levels of life satisfaction. Other studies from Europe and the USA found that parents report significantly lower levels of satisfaction than people who haven’t had children.”

Dr. Powdthavee says we suffer from a “focusing illusion,” in that we tend to think only about the good things of being a parent, and less about the bad things. This is mainly because we believe that the rare but meaningful experiences like a child’s first smile or seeing them get married will give us a big boost of long-lasting happiness.

However, we rarely think about these big experiences on a daily basis, simply because they do not occur to us every day. Instead, we spend much of our time attending to the nitty-grittys of child care—problems at school, cooking, diaper changing, laundry—which are much more frequent but a lot less important events. And it is these small but frequent negative experiences that are more likely to impact on our day-to-day levels of happiness and life satisfaction.

It seems to me Powdthavee is clearly identifying the world-view that “it’s all about me.” Apparently, anything that doesn’t focus on me is a negative, thus the core processes of child care, like cooking and laundry, are negative events that impact our day-to-day level of happiness and life satisfaction.

Taken to a logical conclusion, this self-centered world view leads to mistreatment and abandonment of children when the “nuisance” value becomes too high. One can argue that abortion is simply a pre-emptive abandonment of a child before birth.

A Christ-centered world view is quite different. Psalms 127:3-5 says:

“Sons are a heritage from the LORD, 
       children a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior 
       are sons born in one’s youth.
Blessed is the man 
       whose quiver is full of them. 
       They will not be put to shame 
       when they contend with their enemies in the gate.”

In response to our inclination to be completely self-centered, Jesus said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34).

How did Jesus love? His love wasn’t just a feeling, it was marked with sacrificial action for others. And his command is that we love one another (through sacrificial action). This must be practiced first with our spouse and children.

Still, we do encounter far more mundane activities than high-points in life. To counter the tendency toward negativity, Paul gave the Thessalonians some final instructions: “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). These three things help keep us focused, not on the illusory, but on the “Truth.”

By holding to this world view and practicing these principles, I believe that the most significant accomplishment of my life has been the raising of my children. Of course it wasn’t easy; it was often a challenge, but I never equated happiness with an easy life and lack of challenge.

Let go of injustice—all the unfair things you’ve endured. Ever since childhood, injustice (real and perceived) that I’ve endured makes me pretty angry. The key to letting it go, said Pastor John, is coming to terms with the fact that God is sovereign. Do we trust Him to take care of the injustice, or do we carry it around and let the anger consume us?

Let go of old, unresolved guilt. Confession gets me forgiveness, but my conscience doesn’t always let go of the guilt. As David requested in Psalm 51:12, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” It struck me as Pastor John was dealing with this point that the recovery movement (especially Celebrate Recovery) has a very systematic way to work through this and achieve a renewed conscience.

In this article, Dr. Tony Beam comments on the survey, and offers some reasons why this is happening.

1. Agressive athesists.
2. The abandonment by the local church of apologetics as a major part of Christian discipline.
3. The combination of traditional religious teaching with the new age concept of spirituality.
4. The negative portrayal of Christianity in the culture by the media and the proliferation of scandals within the Church.
5. A lack of emphasis in the Church on evangelism as defined by personal conversion and a reluctance by the Church to embrace new methods of communication for the purpose of evangelism.

In other words, he blames others (atheists and the media) and the local church leadership. This may be part of the reason, but I think he misses an important point. The broad population doesn’t find Christianity attractive because it’s self-proclaimed adherents aren’t attractive.

In surveys conducted by The Barna Group and reported in David Kinnamon’s book “unChristian” Christians are perceived as antihomosexual, judgmental, hypocritical, and too involved in politics, especially by the young 16 to 29 year-old generation. The perception is, in fact, true. Christians have become known for what they oppose, rather than who they are for.

Quoting a non-Christian, Kinnamon writes, “Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, antigay, antichoice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe.”

The teaching of Romans 12:9–21 has been ignored (vs 17-18 “…Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”

Those who ignore the principles of love, modeled by Christ, may find themselves Christian in name only and would do well to contemplate 1 John 2:3–6: “We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.”

Merrill Hall, Asilomar

I knew of Ron back in the ’70’s when Karen and I would occasionally attend the Body Life evening service at Peninsula Bible Church. He was usually the leader of those meetings. Although I never attended Sunday morning services there, PBC (mainly through the books and sermons of Ray Stedman) had an enormous impact on my Christian life formation, and I eventually met and talked with Ray Stedman and Bob Smith. I regret not having bumped into him earlier. There’s more about Ron on his website at Free at Last!

In between the rain, my friend Gary and I slipped away during some free time for a beautiful bike ride along the Pacific Grove coast, through Cannery Row in Monterey, and out along the bike path to Marina. Very nice—and a bit of challenge. The step up from my normal 10 mile ride to nearly 30 was noticeable, but welcome. I’m beginning to love bicycling again.

Of course, the title begs the question: why is it a wonderful life? In the midst of all of life’s distress, financial problems, health issues, arguments, mistrust, the answer is the same today as it was for lead character George Bailey. It’s the relationships of friends and family that make life wonderful.

And yet, who can think how wonderful life is when everything in that life seems to turn against you.

“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” So was Paul’s commendation in 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18. Thankfulness, contemplation, joy: these three things are linked. It’s no surprise that psychological research confirms that a practice of gratitude leads to happier moods and less depression.

Try this simple exercise. Every day take a couple of minutes to list three things you’re grateful for: that benefit you and without which your life would be poorer. Consider the reasons for these good things. This won’t make the bad go away, but you will find that you’ll do a lot better at recognizing that it really is a wonderful life.