I've been thinking about my Uncle Lou,
He's been good to me.
I've been staying a while with my Uncle Lou,
He's shown me his city.
Lou has taken me on the town,
His favorite nephew,
And sparing no expense,
Revealed the charm and the pretty.
I've gotten every advantage from Lou,
I've seen the place I want to be
Fill up with more like me,
All polishing up the worn and gritty.
Lou has provided a place for my children
Where there was none before.
I tell myself that everyone wins,
Even with so many outside the door.
I've started to question my Uncle Lou,
Past history and current secrets creep.
I see how he treats his own kids,
Blessing the stranger, cursing his own sheep.
I can't solve, but I can't ignore my Uncle Lou,
Can't take all the good,
With eyes shut to the bad.
I gotta do something more than knock on wood.
Sweet Uncle St. Lou,
Your sons and daughters are dying
And it's your fault.
And rage is building in ferocity.
None of us is blameless St. Lou,
The privileged, the looters and the crying.
We smiled while enduring hate,
We manicured the ruts of animosity.
I'm gonna say Jesus, Uncle Lou,
With hope fading, there is no more denying.
That great name is all we can claim.
Only Jesus saves those too guilty to pity.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Sunday, August 23, 2015
The Great Voice.
I think myself a good singer,
Not great but with a good voice.
Yet I am ever aware of my pitch and volume,
And careful about my song of choice.
Something happens when I hear a real talent,
I get intimidated and I shrink.
My volume and effort slowly fades,
I become a quiet drip in the sink.
Will I fade away completely?
Why do I crave to sing?
How will I handle my new position?
Outside of the inner ring?
Grace is the invitation in,
Grace is greatness inviting,
Grace is making the weak stronger,
Grace is unity in the igniting.
A great voice, The Great Voice,
invites us to sing when we can't carry a tune.
Christ takes our crackles and squeaks,
Takes our lifeless voice and makes it boom!
Unaware of our own selves, we find
Louder and louder our song goes soaring,
We become less and he becomes more,
We open our souls and he comes out roaring.
When my voice was my own, I was
Protected, Prideful and Afraid.
Now that my song has been accepted, I am
Accepted, Forever In Christ, never betrayed.
When Jesus found me,
I was self amplified and strained.
Now that I join the Great Choir of Heaven,
My heart sings his glory forever sustained.
Not great but with a good voice.
Yet I am ever aware of my pitch and volume,
And careful about my song of choice.
Something happens when I hear a real talent,
I get intimidated and I shrink.
My volume and effort slowly fades,
I become a quiet drip in the sink.
Will I fade away completely?
Why do I crave to sing?
How will I handle my new position?
Outside of the inner ring?
Grace is the invitation in,
Grace is greatness inviting,
Grace is making the weak stronger,
Grace is unity in the igniting.
A great voice, The Great Voice,
invites us to sing when we can't carry a tune.
Christ takes our crackles and squeaks,
Takes our lifeless voice and makes it boom!
Unaware of our own selves, we find
Louder and louder our song goes soaring,
We become less and he becomes more,
We open our souls and he comes out roaring.
When my voice was my own, I was
Protected, Prideful and Afraid.
Now that my song has been accepted, I am
Accepted, Forever In Christ, never betrayed.
When Jesus found me,
I was self amplified and strained.
Now that I join the Great Choir of Heaven,
My heart sings his glory forever sustained.
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Face Melting.
At the end of the glorious movie Raider's of the Lost Ark, our hero Indiana Jones and his lady friend are the only survivors of a supernatural devastation that occurs when the bad guy opens the Old Testament Ark, which is said to contain the very power of God's wrath. As I think about this movie, it seems clear that Indiana Jones did not have an appropriate reaction to what he experienced. Being a historian and an archeologist, and knowing the Old Testament stories of the Ark of the Covenant, he should have experienced a dramatic life change after being in the presence of the Ark in action. An army was laid waste before him. Jones and Marion were the only survivors as a regiment of the Nazi's finest were melted away. But at the end of the movie, we only have Indiana lamenting to Marion about the government bureaucracy.
Marion: Hey, what happened? You don't look very happy.
Indiana: Fools. Bureaucratic fools!
Marion: What'd they say?
Indiana: They don't know what they've got there.
Marion: Well, I know what I've got here. Come on. I'll buy you a drink. You know, a drink?
The interesting thing is that while his reaction isn't what it should be: worship, awe and praise; it is a true human reaction. We are shown many signs and wonders in the course of our lives. The simplest things should amaze us. Consider that the very breath drawn into our lungs is somehow full of the very thing that gives life to our blood and that blood is pumped by a miraculous muscle into the nooks and crannies of our spectacular body and into the mind, even one that has all the necessary oxygen still doesn't take the time to contemplate what it would take for one small planet, alone in 14 billion years of unimaginable vastness to fall into the perfect temperate range x million miles from an appropriate sized star and amazingly achieve life with no explanation of why or how (at least not in scientific terms), not to mention the very playground of the Universe itself and where it may have come from. We experience the glory of the universe on a daily basis and then, somehow, move right along.
"Hey Marion, remember when we were captured by the Nazi's and they opened the Ark of the Covenant and the Angels of God came and removed the wicked from it's presence?"
"Yes, I remember that?"
"What was the name of the guy that opened it?"
"Beloc."
"Beloc, right. Wow, that was crazy huh?"
"So crazy. I still have nightmares."
"What time do you go in to work tomorrow?"
"Meeting Brody at 8am."
"Love you."
"Love you too, goodnight."
I spent my childhood praying for my own figurative opening of the Ark of the Covenant. Face-melting certainty was preferred over the gentle, lifelong mercy God had planned for me. Indeed, somewhere in my wiring is an irrational desire for destruction because of it's immediacy and undeniability. This is much preferred over the lengthy thoughtfulness and subtlety of patient accountability. But I really did want to believe. Numerous Sundays I went up, like many of my siblings, for alter call after alter call waiting for the bright light of Jesus to strike me blind. That would be something. That I couldn't ignore. But it never came and I processed my failure to receive revelation as a failure on my part. I think I held out that God loved me, but he didn't seem particularly interested in me. Maybe he was disappointed in how I was turning out. The divorce of my parents and the dissolution of my family played a big factor into how I perceived things.
So God still existed for me, out there somewhere. Maybe he was Jesus and Jesus was him, but I didn't spend too much time looking into it. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to poke holes in the validity of the Bible, Faith and certainly Organized Religion. I went on the offensive and tried not to have anything I needed to defend. Eventually, that approach wears on you. You have to believe in something, you just do. But even those who believe in nothing have to have a construct for which to believe in nothing, and then putting great faith in those constructs. Humans are built to believe, to worship. What we choose to worship varies greatly and indeed can be very destructive. If we worship that which is worthy of worship, we get joy. If we do not, we get depravity.
Proverbs 22:6 says, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." I heard some one suggest recently that the phrasing may actually be "It will not depart from him." This second phrasing feels right for me, because I had certainly departed from the countless hours of Sunday School teaching I had been given and fully abandoned my family's legacy of great faith. It appears, though, that it did not abandon me. The Hound of Heaven, Jesus Christ himself, was after me and over time I could no longer out run his presence.
Francis Thompson - Hound of Heaven
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me'.
Unlike when I was a boy, I no longer wanted to believe, I sensed the great burden it would be. Fundamentally I knew that belief meant surrendering my spot on the throne. I still craved truth and authenticity and sincerity, these things mattered regardless of the subject. In this context, I put a premium on my own brain and assumed that becoming a Christian mean that I would have to surrender my brain along with truth, authenticity and sincerity. Also, I had convinced myself that all Christians were idiots. While I dismissed Christians, I gave great credit and deference to Jews, Buddhists, Hindu, Muslims and all others. They didn't demand anything of me, but Christ did. Into my twenties, whenever Christ got closer, I lit up my own Ark and tried to self-destruct. I tried to burn away the goodness that was after me. I knew it would bring change. But there was an even more powerful force: worthless-ness. As more goodness surrounded me, the more I knew I didn't deserve it.
Yet, in this stage of my life, I was still drawn to Christ. I would buy Jesus themed candles at the grocery store and line them up on the shelf, trying to be ironic I suppose. I was drawn to movies like The Last Temptation of Christ and Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. These were versions of Jesus I could deal with, these depictions contained a contained Jesus. They focused on the humanity of Jesus. I liked this very much. My growing family started to attend a Unitarian Church. I was sure my thirst for truth would be satiated there. They talked about things that mattered: truth, justice, compassion and a little bit of Jesus, what a great guy he was. But as we continued to attend there, and as I consumed more about the human Jesus, the divine Jesus began to reveal himself to me in a way I could receive. He became uncaged in my heart, and my heart began to ache as the human Jesus was touted and the divine Jesus was refuted. More and more it became clear that an only human Jesus was pointless. Many people claim to admire the human Jesus as a great teacher of Love, even as they dismiss his divinity. C.S. Lewis explores this contradiction best and I have quoted this many times.
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
This concept would eventually lead me to the heart of my faith, the moment when I could finally hear Christ's small still voice and it said, "Who do you say I am?"
So a human Jesus, what could a mere historical Jesus do for me? Nothing more than any historical figure, Ghandi or Hitler or Kennedy or Obama. I was getting close, but it would take disparity to drive me to the real, risen, divine Christ. If I wanted so badly to not believe, why then, did this emptiness of unbelief persist? The Divine Jesus, the Hound of Heaven, for reasons only he knows, would not let me be. There is so much more to this story, bears and car wrecks and broken necks and loss and treachery, and I will spare you that, but the point is NOT that I finally became worthy of God's love. The point is that Love is who God is. He just loves us and is relentless about it, pursuing his children, always. I am one of his children. I am a child of God. Realizing this is my Ark moment. It has taken a lifetime, but what is a lifetime to God? He could have opened up the heaven's and spoke to me when I was a boy, but much like the unphased Indiana Jones, I would have not allowed myself to be affected and changed but the power of God. That is the dilemma of Free Will. God's Glory is revealed at all times and for all times in the Word and in the World. He does not change, but it is our ability to receive and perceive that is what must change. For some it comes in a burst of light, for others it comes over the long haul of life. An open mind and a contrite heart are the requirements.
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught' (He said),
'And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited—Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!'
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'
As a Footnote, the following link is the author's note from the book, Out of Egypt by Anne Rice. It is a fictional account of the boyhood of Jesus. What she found in her research of the historical Jesus is a story I very much identify with.
Anne Rice Route to Jesus.
If one really seeks the truth, they will find Jesus there waiting and undeniable. But often, we do not really want the truth. As Pilate says to Jesus, "What is Truth?"
Marion: Hey, what happened? You don't look very happy.
Indiana: Fools. Bureaucratic fools!
Marion: What'd they say?
Indiana: They don't know what they've got there.
Marion: Well, I know what I've got here. Come on. I'll buy you a drink. You know, a drink?
The interesting thing is that while his reaction isn't what it should be: worship, awe and praise; it is a true human reaction. We are shown many signs and wonders in the course of our lives. The simplest things should amaze us. Consider that the very breath drawn into our lungs is somehow full of the very thing that gives life to our blood and that blood is pumped by a miraculous muscle into the nooks and crannies of our spectacular body and into the mind, even one that has all the necessary oxygen still doesn't take the time to contemplate what it would take for one small planet, alone in 14 billion years of unimaginable vastness to fall into the perfect temperate range x million miles from an appropriate sized star and amazingly achieve life with no explanation of why or how (at least not in scientific terms), not to mention the very playground of the Universe itself and where it may have come from. We experience the glory of the universe on a daily basis and then, somehow, move right along.
"Hey Marion, remember when we were captured by the Nazi's and they opened the Ark of the Covenant and the Angels of God came and removed the wicked from it's presence?"
"Yes, I remember that?"
"What was the name of the guy that opened it?"
"Beloc."
"Beloc, right. Wow, that was crazy huh?"
"So crazy. I still have nightmares."
"What time do you go in to work tomorrow?"
"Meeting Brody at 8am."
"Love you."
"Love you too, goodnight."
I spent my childhood praying for my own figurative opening of the Ark of the Covenant. Face-melting certainty was preferred over the gentle, lifelong mercy God had planned for me. Indeed, somewhere in my wiring is an irrational desire for destruction because of it's immediacy and undeniability. This is much preferred over the lengthy thoughtfulness and subtlety of patient accountability. But I really did want to believe. Numerous Sundays I went up, like many of my siblings, for alter call after alter call waiting for the bright light of Jesus to strike me blind. That would be something. That I couldn't ignore. But it never came and I processed my failure to receive revelation as a failure on my part. I think I held out that God loved me, but he didn't seem particularly interested in me. Maybe he was disappointed in how I was turning out. The divorce of my parents and the dissolution of my family played a big factor into how I perceived things.
So God still existed for me, out there somewhere. Maybe he was Jesus and Jesus was him, but I didn't spend too much time looking into it. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to poke holes in the validity of the Bible, Faith and certainly Organized Religion. I went on the offensive and tried not to have anything I needed to defend. Eventually, that approach wears on you. You have to believe in something, you just do. But even those who believe in nothing have to have a construct for which to believe in nothing, and then putting great faith in those constructs. Humans are built to believe, to worship. What we choose to worship varies greatly and indeed can be very destructive. If we worship that which is worthy of worship, we get joy. If we do not, we get depravity.
Proverbs 22:6 says, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." I heard some one suggest recently that the phrasing may actually be "It will not depart from him." This second phrasing feels right for me, because I had certainly departed from the countless hours of Sunday School teaching I had been given and fully abandoned my family's legacy of great faith. It appears, though, that it did not abandon me. The Hound of Heaven, Jesus Christ himself, was after me and over time I could no longer out run his presence.
Francis Thompson - Hound of Heaven
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me'.
Unlike when I was a boy, I no longer wanted to believe, I sensed the great burden it would be. Fundamentally I knew that belief meant surrendering my spot on the throne. I still craved truth and authenticity and sincerity, these things mattered regardless of the subject. In this context, I put a premium on my own brain and assumed that becoming a Christian mean that I would have to surrender my brain along with truth, authenticity and sincerity. Also, I had convinced myself that all Christians were idiots. While I dismissed Christians, I gave great credit and deference to Jews, Buddhists, Hindu, Muslims and all others. They didn't demand anything of me, but Christ did. Into my twenties, whenever Christ got closer, I lit up my own Ark and tried to self-destruct. I tried to burn away the goodness that was after me. I knew it would bring change. But there was an even more powerful force: worthless-ness. As more goodness surrounded me, the more I knew I didn't deserve it.
Yet, in this stage of my life, I was still drawn to Christ. I would buy Jesus themed candles at the grocery store and line them up on the shelf, trying to be ironic I suppose. I was drawn to movies like The Last Temptation of Christ and Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. These were versions of Jesus I could deal with, these depictions contained a contained Jesus. They focused on the humanity of Jesus. I liked this very much. My growing family started to attend a Unitarian Church. I was sure my thirst for truth would be satiated there. They talked about things that mattered: truth, justice, compassion and a little bit of Jesus, what a great guy he was. But as we continued to attend there, and as I consumed more about the human Jesus, the divine Jesus began to reveal himself to me in a way I could receive. He became uncaged in my heart, and my heart began to ache as the human Jesus was touted and the divine Jesus was refuted. More and more it became clear that an only human Jesus was pointless. Many people claim to admire the human Jesus as a great teacher of Love, even as they dismiss his divinity. C.S. Lewis explores this contradiction best and I have quoted this many times.
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
This concept would eventually lead me to the heart of my faith, the moment when I could finally hear Christ's small still voice and it said, "Who do you say I am?"
So a human Jesus, what could a mere historical Jesus do for me? Nothing more than any historical figure, Ghandi or Hitler or Kennedy or Obama. I was getting close, but it would take disparity to drive me to the real, risen, divine Christ. If I wanted so badly to not believe, why then, did this emptiness of unbelief persist? The Divine Jesus, the Hound of Heaven, for reasons only he knows, would not let me be. There is so much more to this story, bears and car wrecks and broken necks and loss and treachery, and I will spare you that, but the point is NOT that I finally became worthy of God's love. The point is that Love is who God is. He just loves us and is relentless about it, pursuing his children, always. I am one of his children. I am a child of God. Realizing this is my Ark moment. It has taken a lifetime, but what is a lifetime to God? He could have opened up the heaven's and spoke to me when I was a boy, but much like the unphased Indiana Jones, I would have not allowed myself to be affected and changed but the power of God. That is the dilemma of Free Will. God's Glory is revealed at all times and for all times in the Word and in the World. He does not change, but it is our ability to receive and perceive that is what must change. For some it comes in a burst of light, for others it comes over the long haul of life. An open mind and a contrite heart are the requirements.
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught' (He said),
'And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited—Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!'
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'
As a Footnote, the following link is the author's note from the book, Out of Egypt by Anne Rice. It is a fictional account of the boyhood of Jesus. What she found in her research of the historical Jesus is a story I very much identify with.
Anne Rice Route to Jesus.
If one really seeks the truth, they will find Jesus there waiting and undeniable. But often, we do not really want the truth. As Pilate says to Jesus, "What is Truth?"
Monday, August 3, 2015
Brothers and Sisters.
It was a significant moment, the six of us standing alone in a room with our Mom. The realization of the rarity of the event hit each of us. In our 41 year history as a six sibling family, it has only been a handful of times that it was only the six of us. To have our Mother there, as we were celebrating her 75th, made it all the more powerful. We've been together lots of times with our glorious and growing tree of progeny and spouses, but only rarer than a Blue Moon (wink) have we found a poignant moment alone. We looked at each other, proud, humbled, joyful, grateful, taking a moment to crack wise and wipe away some tears. We basked in the wondrous love of our Mother and she beamed with pride for her children. She did have a significant, private message, but for me the moment was something even greater. As the youngest of six, I have had a unique and privileged view of this family. I grew up in awe of my siblings. They have provided me with so much more than I could ever repay: courage, encouragement, play mates, laughter, financial assistance, ethics, competition, parental lessons, parenting, wisdom, joy...so much joy and pride. As I have grown into an, ahem, adult I have quietly become an equal part in this great group of my personal heroes. I feel like I have crashed a party for VIP's I wasn't invited to and they decided to let me stay.
Standing there in that moment, those feelings of awe became even bigger. More than being in awe of my individual siblings, I was now in awe of the group we are. We are close, indescribably so. Each of us brings something different to group and the interpersonal individual relationships are fascinatingly varied and complicated. Three of us together yields something cohesive, no matter what the line-up or dynamic is. Two of us together, no matter the two, is something significant as well. Five of us together is really hard. Fun will be had, but there is a powerful longing for the absent sibling. Six, Six is glorious. And last night I got a glimpse of why it works.
The reason it works, is not surprisingly because of our parents. Now kids will always find a reason to resent their parents, that's just the way it works. And, well, our parents gave us plenty of opportunities in this category as well. But it is the environment of love and forgiveness my parents have fostered that makes it possible for us all to work through our own mistakes and their's and move these missteps into the category of comedic material. Whatever our parents have done, they have never failed to provide Love in ridiculous amounts. For that, we and everyone in our lives are blessed. I have now realized that I have given my Mother insufficient credit for how much I love my brother and sisters. It is her love that makes that love possible. And it is her patient and unwavering love that has always pointed to Christ. That's amazing. What sits underneath it all, at the foundation is Linda Jean's Grateful spirit. She is always proclaiming her blessings, no matter what is happening in her life. She can get overwhelmed by life, but never ceases to be thankful. It's no wonder that I always think of her when I hear the lyrics, "Count your blessings, count them one by one. Count your blessing, see what God has done."
Each of my siblings and I have a slightly different approach to our Faith, expressing it differently and with slight variations in our beliefs. However, I believe all of us put Jesus Christ at the center of our lives and we know that God is Good and has provided us with all we need. We are all likely to say that we are blessed in extraordinary ways. I hope this means I have been as grateful as my Mother has modeled to me. Her diligence and hard work have been multiplied because, more than anything, she is thankful and gives due Glory to God.
That moment was a powerful one. We stood, the Seven of us, in that hotel room while an impatient throng of Grandkids, Great Grandkids, Spouses, etc. waited for us to come back. We lingered, soaking up our special bond just a bit longer than we should have. I wish I could explain what it's like to be in this family, with these amazing people, but then again I'm kind of glad that I can't. It's a thing meant for just 6 to understand completely. But hopefully that also means that everyone around us gets to enjoy the bond as well, contributing and making stronger as each soul gets added to the party, by birth or by grace. It's not perfect, not by a long shot. We have all failed each other in one way or another, but perfection is not the point or the goal. Love, love is what it is all about. I pray our love for each other reflects God's perfect Love. In his perfect love is not only forgiveness, but salvation.
1 John 4
Standing there in that moment, those feelings of awe became even bigger. More than being in awe of my individual siblings, I was now in awe of the group we are. We are close, indescribably so. Each of us brings something different to group and the interpersonal individual relationships are fascinatingly varied and complicated. Three of us together yields something cohesive, no matter what the line-up or dynamic is. Two of us together, no matter the two, is something significant as well. Five of us together is really hard. Fun will be had, but there is a powerful longing for the absent sibling. Six, Six is glorious. And last night I got a glimpse of why it works.
The reason it works, is not surprisingly because of our parents. Now kids will always find a reason to resent their parents, that's just the way it works. And, well, our parents gave us plenty of opportunities in this category as well. But it is the environment of love and forgiveness my parents have fostered that makes it possible for us all to work through our own mistakes and their's and move these missteps into the category of comedic material. Whatever our parents have done, they have never failed to provide Love in ridiculous amounts. For that, we and everyone in our lives are blessed. I have now realized that I have given my Mother insufficient credit for how much I love my brother and sisters. It is her love that makes that love possible. And it is her patient and unwavering love that has always pointed to Christ. That's amazing. What sits underneath it all, at the foundation is Linda Jean's Grateful spirit. She is always proclaiming her blessings, no matter what is happening in her life. She can get overwhelmed by life, but never ceases to be thankful. It's no wonder that I always think of her when I hear the lyrics, "Count your blessings, count them one by one. Count your blessing, see what God has done."
Each of my siblings and I have a slightly different approach to our Faith, expressing it differently and with slight variations in our beliefs. However, I believe all of us put Jesus Christ at the center of our lives and we know that God is Good and has provided us with all we need. We are all likely to say that we are blessed in extraordinary ways. I hope this means I have been as grateful as my Mother has modeled to me. Her diligence and hard work have been multiplied because, more than anything, she is thankful and gives due Glory to God.
That moment was a powerful one. We stood, the Seven of us, in that hotel room while an impatient throng of Grandkids, Great Grandkids, Spouses, etc. waited for us to come back. We lingered, soaking up our special bond just a bit longer than we should have. I wish I could explain what it's like to be in this family, with these amazing people, but then again I'm kind of glad that I can't. It's a thing meant for just 6 to understand completely. But hopefully that also means that everyone around us gets to enjoy the bond as well, contributing and making stronger as each soul gets added to the party, by birth or by grace. It's not perfect, not by a long shot. We have all failed each other in one way or another, but perfection is not the point or the goal. Love, love is what it is all about. I pray our love for each other reflects God's perfect Love. In his perfect love is not only forgiveness, but salvation.
1 John 4
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
13 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God,God lives in them and they in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. 17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. 18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
19 We love because he first loved us. 20 Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21 And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.
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