Saturday, July 23, 2011

The Problem With Hindsight

July 22, 2011
One of the things I remember from my early days of serving as a local church pastor is the sticker shock I experienced when I saw the price tag of the group health insurance for the ministers in my state. The plans would often change year to year as some new insurer took over. It turns out ministers are a high-risk group! That may seem surprising to some of you, but the reasons are not that hard to understand. Ministers often work long hours, answer phone calls at all hours of the night, walk with families through heartbreak, put a lot of themselves into their work…and often don’t take care of themselves very well. It is the last part that is the killer, literally.

In 1944 at Yale University, standing before young ministers on the cusp of their careers, Paul Scherer warned them to take care of themselves. It is an odd thing that ministers, called to be stewards of the Scripture and of the congregations they serve, are often not good stewards of themselves.
“My word to you is that you regard and treat this aspect of your ministry as fundamental. The training of the body may be of small service, as Paul says, when you compare it with training for the religious life (I Timothy 4:8); but squanderers of health are quite as culpable as any other squanderers and profligates. They will answer for it. The plain fact is that you cannot serve God as you might with an instrument that you have abused; whether from ignorance or with full knowledge, whether by harmful habits or by careless inattention makes no difference. And Life and God will some day render their account and want to know why.” (Scherer, For We Have This Treasure p. 33, 34)

I suspect ministers are not the only guilty parties here. Recently, my wife and I joined the fitness center run by the hospital. If you work here and you take a few steps, you can join it for free. FOR FREE! She has been going almost every day. I went with her to a Zumba class for the first time the other night. I don’t know if the ache in my gut afterward was from trying to copy the instructor’s moves or from laughing so hard at myself as I tried to keep up. It was a lot of fun and a great work out too.

He spoke from the hospital bed, aided by the oxygen flowing through the tubing that hung over his ears and under his nose. “If I had known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” he said, half smiling and totally serious. His story was as clear an example of 20/20 hindsight as I have ever heard. But that is the problem with hindsight. It yields wisdom, to be sure, but the consequences of the lessons learned are sometimes irreversible.

Life and God will indeed render their account.

I’d rather learn from forewarning any day. You?

Blessings to you all,
Jerald

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Buried Treasure

July 11, 2011

I found the treasure buried in plain sight on my office bookcase. I have had it in my possession for over twenty years. I don’t recall when or where I purchased it. It must have caught my eye as being something of possible value as a young preacher learning his craft. I remember reading it with the cursory kind of attention the young often give to the wisdom of the aged and experienced and was not then particularly impressed.

Now as I read it, what riches I find! Paul E. Scherer’s book For We Have This Treasure is a truly a gold mine. It dates back to 1944, to dark days in American history. The Great Depression had given way to the Great Madness of WWII and it seemed as if there was no end to the evils a human could perpetrate on another and the world was all but overwhelmed with a purposeless dread. At that moment, Paul Scherer stepped into a lecture hall at Yale University to address young ministers on the importance of their calling. Some of what he said applies uniquely to ministry, of course. But, whether you believe it or not, preachers are people too and much of what he said applies to all of us.

One of the temptations common to ministers and everyone else I suspect, is the temptation to think that somehow God left something out or made a mistake with us. We compare ourselves to someone else who we may think looks better or sings better or speaks better and wish we were anyone else but the person that God made us to be. If that speaks to you as it does me, then listen to this: In preaching, he says, the one thing that is unique that you bring to the table is yourself. “The human heart is not new, the need is not new, the truth is not new, the method is not new. You are new. You are a bit of God’s unrepeated handiwork; and what he means to accomplish by you, he must accomplish through you.” (Scherer, p. 38)

Sure, we ought to be good stewards of our bodies and our minds and be the best us that we can be. But to strive so hard and to be filled with such frustration that we are not like someone else we think is better in some way is to belittle ourselves and God.

You have your unique fingerprints, your unique iris pattern, and your unique self ..."a bit of God's unrepeated handiwork" to offer to God and the world for a reason. It would be a sad thing to go through life and only offer an imitation, even a good imitation, of a somebody that has already been tried.

Blessings to you all,
Jerald

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Starship Atlantis

Glimmers

July 8, 2011; the final voyage of the starship Atlantis.
Imagine that line being read by William Shatner. Imagine a truck with a cramped cab and a massive cargo trailer attached to three huge, powerful rockets and you have our beloved Space Shuttle. And today was the last one. The very last one. It is hard to imagine that.

When the first Shuttle went up on April 12, 1981, I was newly married and working as associate pastor of a church in Sanford, FL. Officially dubbed STS 1, I watched from the church parking lot as Columbia hurtled toward space. Even from that distance, it was quite impressive.

The Challenger disaster is one of those "I remember where I was when it happened" moments, like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11. We were living in Selmer, TN at the time. I was the pastor of a small church and was working as a substitute teacher at the middle school that day. All school work stopped. People sat stunned in their seats. Here in Central Florida, the grief was deeper, I’m told. The atmosphere turned from celebration to horror, and then to mourning in a matter of seconds. Here monuments to the crew remain to remind us. There are schools named after crew members McNair and McAuliffe and for the vehicle itself. Here we live surrounded by the history of Space.

I know people who were charged with going to Texas to search for pieces of Columbia in the aftermath of its breakup during re-entry in on October 15, 2003. For some the impact was akin to the PTSD that soldiers experience after combat. And yet the program endured.

With the exception of those two missions, the Shuttle has been remarkably successful. Because of the Shuttle program, we have the international space station and the Hubble telescope. And we also have microchips and MRI machines, artificial hearts and smoke detectors, LED lights and digital mammography, Mylar balloons and Kevlar vests, microwave ovens and cell phones, sports domes and football helmets. These are a few of the thousands of inventions and advancements that owe their existence to the program.

Atlantis is STS 135. 134 times we have witnessed this marvel climb into the skies, clouded in steamy vapor and shaking the earth as the sound reverberated outward from the launch pad. 132 times twin sonic booms have announced the successful completion of the assigned mission. And now we wait for it just once more.

We will miss you indeed.

Jerald