Faith Venture

Putting It All Together

February 17, 2025

I close my eyes for meditation. In the gray mist of sight behind closed lids, I see outlines of jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting together.

I close my eyes preparing for sleep. Yes, I see arrays of jigsaw puzzle pieces.

My wife and I have had a project for the past couple of weeks assembling a jigsaw puzzle. The exercise requires focus, observation, patience, mental clarity. This puzzle did not come with a photo showing the completed puzzle. It came with a short murder mystery story describing a scene. You are to figure out the scene and then conclude where the body is hidden, who did it, and how.

We finished it last night. I took a commemorative photo. It will rest on our table for a while until we take it apart and put it away.

There are many puzzles I’ve experienced.

Two colleagues and I joined to form a new magazine. We hashed out ideas, sometimes with considerable passion. The pieces came together. We built a top-rated magazine for the market we served.

Like many people, I puzzled over Paul’s letter to the Roman followers. Some theologians wrote huge works trying to tease out subtle meanings from each Greek word. Luther, Calvin, Wesley all saw pieces of the letter and built theologies.

I added some other study and thinking and the pieces fell into place. Don’t try to build grandiose theories. This letter is the ultimate spiritual development tract in the New Testament. Paul leads the reader from a state of being lost to a state of being in the state of God’s grace. Not stopping there, he continues with ideas on how we live in the state of grace.

I have been part of a team led by my wife for the better part of a year. Called Rise Above, the ministry hopes to reach out to people suffering from emotional hurt and support them on the return journey to wholeness. At our last meeting, the pieces came together. Just like after the pieces came together forming the magazine, I realized that now I had to get an actual magazine produced and into the mail. Now, we have to actually meet with those people.

When the jigsaw puzzle is done, it’s done. When we assemble the pieces of our project, that’s just the beginning.

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Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2025

February 14. A day set aside in many countries for couples to express their love—usually taken to mean romantic love.

It began, as many of our holidays, as an early Christian feast day for a Saint Valentine (it seems there was more than one of those in ancient times).

A chocolatier in 1868 brilliantly conceived packaging chocolates in a red, heart-shaped box.

Love takes many forms. Most of us really don’t need a 2-lb. box of chocolate candy while we deal with our health.

But it might be a good day to acknowledge someone special.

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Choose Not Doing In Order To Do Better

February 13, 2025

Did you know that you can choose what media fills your attention? And affects your emotional state?

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote philosophy mainly in the early 19^th Century. I’ve found much of his writing a chore to parse. This thought gets right to the point, “The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

Compare this observation of the 1820s to our plight today where thousands of very smart engineers and managers work extraordinary hours to capture our attention with emotion-laden messages. We choose an application on the internet. Something served to us by the anonymous “algorithm” provokes an emotional response. We read more becoming increasingly incensed as we read.

Finally breaking away, we struggle to concentrate on family, work, study, even relaxation.

Remember our first premise?

It was your choice.

The old Crusader told Indiana Jones (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) regarding the villain, “He chose poorly” as he died a hideous death. Then, “Choose wisely.”

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Mentors and Coaches

February 12, 2025

I am thinking about mentors and coaches today. News just arrived that one of my mentors had passed away over the weekend.

I had few mentors. Some of them I didn’t realize until later. There are a few who could have been if I had only known how to ask.

That asking is a key element. I failed to ask so many times. Not because I thought I knew it all. Mostly because I hate to bother people. Some because I just couldn’t formulate the right questions.

I have mentored a few people in my journey. Sometimes I didn’t realize it—it wasn’t intentional to any certain individual. I was just being helpful.

I was able to visit one of my mentors before he died. And another I sent a note being a considerable distance away. I hope he got it.

Think of people who have helped you along the way. Send a note (hand written is best) or make a call to those still with us.

If you see someone who could use some help, ask if you can answer a question. If you need some help, don’t be afraid to ask. I didn’t ask. And I have lived to regret it.

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Imagination and Inspiration

February 11, 2025

Some psychologists and philosophers have theorized that inspirations or visions during meditation are simply figments of our imagination.

While meditating the other day with an app (The Way by Henry Shukman, something I seldom do), this realization came to me:

You force imagination with intention; Inspiration visits you.

Letting imagination run free both liberates and enhances creativity.

Inspiration emanates from a synthesis of experiences and curiosity and thinking yielding the famous Ah Ha moment.

I love when those happen. I even step out from meditation in order to write them in my commonplace journal.

This keeps my brain from atrophying.

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Who Is Our Neighbor?

February 10, 2025

It seemed so simple. The local politicians/theologians asked Jesus for the most important commandment. They knew the answer. Jesus supplied it—you shall love the Lord your God.

But he was not finished. There was a second commandment equal to the first. They were companions. You couldn’t really do one without the other.

You shall love your neighbor.

Maybe there is an out, here, the politicians thought. So they asked a question assuming they knew the answer. Who is our neighbor?

They thought, we can draw a circle. There would be people like us inside the circle, and people like them outside the circle.

Who is our neighbor?

Jesus told a story. It is famous today even among people who have no thought of actually following Jesus. Even today knowing the end of the story, there are people who think they know the answer.

The story goes that someone was desperately in need of a good neighbor. Jesus picked his characters with great intention. Two people that his questioners thought would be in the circle were not so neighborly in the story.

Which character in the story was a neighbor? Jesus picked a person from the most despised social group he could find—a Samaritan.

Jesus blasted all the circles away. There are no circles around groups inside our neighborhood and outside our neighborhood. Even the despised are our neighbors.

Let us consider—who is the despised outcast of today that Jesus would pick as the hero of his story?

Ironically, followers of Jesus were the despised outcasts in the Roman world for centuries. The movement grew because those despised followers of Jesus acted like the Samaritan—binding the wounds caused by upheavals such as the Antonine Plague of 165-66. People said, “I want what they have.”

The question for us today, right this minute, where do we fit in the story? Are we the religious people who were not neighbors? Do we identify with the Samaritan who was?

Answering this honestly can change your life—for the better.

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Start Perfect, Then Improve

February 7, 2025

We began entry level soccer referee classes with the joke, unfortunately true, that you will be expected to be perfect your first time on the pitch…and then improve.

What are some other examples?

Your company gets a new CEO.

You begin to study New Testament Greek.

Your church gets a new pastor.

You teach a class for the first time.

You get married.

You have kids. (Both the kids and you as parent)

You begin a meditation practice.

You take up golf.

You start a business.

You write your first book.

Or, maybe we recognize we and others are not perfect, just trying to get better every day.

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Seeing the Picture

February 6, 2025

The jigsaw puzzle contains 1,000 pieces. The photo on the box cover does not portray the actual completed puzzle. The box contains a story of a murder. The story describes the scene and action.

You dump the contents on your table, turn the pieces picture up, and proceed to find the border pieces.

So far, so good.

But now you begin assembling the pieces with no clear idea of the big picture.

Life imitates art someone said years ago.

You try to imagine the type of person you strive to be. You may imagine and list goals to achieve.

But you assemble your life without seeing the big picture. You can’t foresee the surprises lying in wait. You don’t understand at first how all the pieces fit.

Then slowly piece-by-piece the picture becomes clearer. This part fits with that part. Relationships form. Direction becomes clearer simply by living a day at a time and putting it together.

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Thinking Things Through

February 5, 2025

I thought I would lead an exercise in thinking. This works with whatever you read or hear (or see, if you are addicted to TV news).

While browsing my news feed, I saw the headline and lede of an article about various side effects from taking one of the popular weight-loss drugs. It was in The New York Times, a publication that years ago lost its way (no not liberal/conservative) into the morass of click bait and sensationalism in order to increase viewership.

This article found a couple. They always try to find what we call “anecdata”—extrapolating seemingly general data from one anecdote.

The “reporter” identifies a couple using only middle names to protect privacy (?) as being both 53 years old at the time of the interview. The wife decided to take a weight loss drug. The husband said OK more as a reaction than thinking about it.

The wife lost a lot of weight (unspecified). She had been carrying a lot of white adipose tissue (fat). It melted away.

The husband then moans about the changes. He liked cuddling with the body mass and didn’t like the slender body now sleeping next to him. She experienced much emotional drama over a couple of years leading to complete loss of sex drive.

He (and implicitly the writer) blamed the weight-loss drug.

As I contemplated the article, I remembered their ages.

She took that drug at the same time she was most likely going through menopause. That body change in females is, of course, experienced somewhat differently by individuals. There are generalities—often emotional swings, hormone changes, body reactions, and eventually for some (many?) loss of sexual drive.

Perhaps the problems were caused by menopause and not the weight loss drug?

I assume the writer was not a scientist. Most likely they held a BA in English or BS in Journalism. The training (and the job) involved writing interesting stories.

The entire article left me with questions rather than answers. It should not have even been researched (and I use the term generously), let alone published in a national media outlet. A social media influencer, sure. We don’t expect them to be anything other than pandering to our emotions in order to gain views.

I’ve experienced the same lack of thinking from some preachers and teachers of the Bible. It could happen to us that we read a passage and fail to take the time to think about the context and what the writer was trying to convey (or failing to convey).

When someone tells you something outlandish, pause and think. It’ll save you much grief.

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Finding Your Rhythm

February 4, 2025

[After some experimenting and searching for a good tool, I began writing to the web—blogging—in December 2003. I started this blog in 2012 initially as a church project. Between the two, I’ve now posted 7,000 articles.]

I was perhaps 7 or maybe 8 when dad took me in a car to the house of a guy who had been a percussionist with the Air Force Band. I became a percussionist.

With percussion, it’s all about rhythm.

Perhaps our lifestyle has a rhythm. Our body definitely has a rhythm. Can you feel when yours is out of rhythm? I certainly can.

Same with my daily life. Meditating, writing, working out, eating, reading, socializing. I created a rhythm and need that rhythm so that all remains in sync.

When life circumstances intervene, the best actions we can take is to grab hold of our rhythms and try to return to them.

Have you thought about the rhythms of your life? Daily, weekly, monthly? Do they need tweaking? Perhaps a total makeover?

Each stage of life has its own rhythm. Have you adjusted your rhythms to your new circumstances?

The beat goes on—Sonny and Cher.

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