Faith Venture

Radio commentator and writer Earl Nightengale once told the story of a little boy in elementary school. He sat staring out the window. He was so lost in thought that he did not notice the teacher stopped lecturing and stared at him. The entire class stared at him. A few giggles were heard. Then the little boy realized something was up. “What were you doing?” the teacher asked. “Thinking,” the boy answered. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to think in school,” the teacher responded.

Happens to me–a lot. Thinking, that is. Yesterday in church we had an infant baptism. It’s a United Methodist church, which is an offshoot from the Anglican tradition. We have the traditional infant baptism service which brings the new person into the community of faith. We all pledge to bring this child up in the ways of Jesus. (We also do believer’s baptism. Methodists want to make sure they cover all the bases, I guess.)

I started to think about the process. Are we a community enough that we care about each of the little people and consciously try to bring them up  in the Lord? Do we work with each one? Do we teach them about spiritual practices such as study, prayer, celebration and the like during their formative years? Or do we turn them off like we’ve done to so many with mindless committee meetings, badgering for money, rules on top of rules?

Children are trained more by watching us than by listening to us. Makes me wonder if I’m doing what I say. All the time. What’s the use of knowing a lot, if I don’t change the way I live? And then model for these young people so they grow up enjoying the fruits of the spirit rather than the bitterness of sin.

Do you ever want to do something, but you wind up doing the opposite? Say, for example, you want to lose weight by not eating certain foods (in my case potato chips), but you eat them anyway. Paul, writing in the middle of his letter to the Roman church (chapter 7) discusses that inner conflict where you want to do good, but you wind up doing the very things you don’t want to do.

Some people don’t wade through the logic and get confused by Paul’s writing. But he’s simply stating something we all experience. So, how did Paul get out of the dilemma? What is he trying to teach us?

“We become what we think about.” Earl Nightengale summarized the accumulated knowledge of many thinkers on a successful life with those words. Paul said (chapter 8), “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”

It’s our choice. We choose where to set our minds. If we set our minds on being healthy, we will live a healthy lifestyle. If we set our minds on the Spirit, we receive life and peace. And the inner turmoil Paul describes in chapter 7 gradually fades away. And that describes the with-God life.

I don’t know how many times in life I’ve looked at myself and wondered what I was doing? How in the world did I ever get there? I don’t know when I first decided to try new things. Go to new places. Have new experiences. Maybe get in over my head.

Some of that attitude works its way out in being open to new ideas. New ways of looking at things. I was discussing Romans yesterday and how I was trying to explain the logic of spiritual development that Paul was using when someone wanted to jump in and fixate on his favorite link of the chain. It was as though he thought his link was the entire chain. This was the time for a pause. To recognize what was happening and to ask God for a teaching moment.

We’ve all the the experience of reading a familiar passage as if for the first time–“I didn’t realize that was in there!” We have to approach reading–and life–with that openness. With the child’s expectation of being surprised by learning something new.

Go ahead. Try something new. Open yourself up to learn something today.

It was just a billboard picture. Enticing travelers to stop in for a sandwich. But the picture had nothing to do with eating. Two young adults were caught in a snapshot in a moment of fun.

The marketer wants our brain to assemble this formula:

fun = McDonalds

But I contemplated the picture and wondered, Is life like a still photo? Do I have a picture in my mind of what a relationship is? Holding hands on the beach, for instance? Or what church is? A laughing group of people with hands raised in joy?

What comes before and after that picture? That is where life is.

Or, as Shakespeare said, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

I usually write meditations on the Bible or on the Disciplines and try to avoid Protestant denominational politics. However, in today’s newspaper I saw a story about a proposal before the Southern Baptist Church that it change its name to the Great Commission Churches (or something like that). It seems that many people remember that the “southern” part of the name came from the pre-Civil War split in the Baptist movement between those who were opposed to slavery (the Northern Baptists who long ago were renamed the American Baptists) and those who supported slavery (the Southern Baptists). Thus the name could be a stumbling block to growth.

The SBC, like every organization in America, is concerned with growth. Darwinism at its finest–if you’re not growing, you’re dying. The article even quoted proponents as discussing “branding” as if they were at a marketing professionals’ conference.

Perhaps it would behoove these leaders to re-read the early chapters of Acts. The early church attracted people in great numbers. It didn’t have a brand, or probably even a name. They were evidently known as followers of the Way. They didn’t need branding. They had passion. And they lived differently from their neighbors. And the way the lived was attractive to their neighbors. It’s like the line from the movie Harry Met Sally, “I want what she’s having.”

So they can re-brand themselves all they want. What matters is the experience when someone walks in the door. Or when someone meets a member on the street and says, “I want what she has.”

We keep worrying about grandiose programs and slogans when all that matters is that we live like we talk–and that life is attractive to our neighbors. And that life we live leads to life with God.