Here I Am To Worship

I've been thinking this week about worship. What it is and what it isn’t.

I've been reading Romans 12:1 and remembering that worship is bigger than the hour set aside to pray and sing and share communion. Worship isn’t simply giving praise to God, but a giving of our whole selves as sacrifices to God.

So, if that's true, then why take the hour a week?

When I was a kid, my buddy Mark's dad would drop into town once every couple of weeks, take him out to lunch and a movie and get some "quality time" into a couple of hours. And that was their relationship. A couple of hours every few weeks. And I can tell you, because he told me, it never felt like enough to Mark.

When I was a kid, my family had one night a week that we set aside as family night. We were together all the time, living life together in the same house, but that hour enhanced what was already an amazing family experience. It helped us reorient ourselves, in case we had gotten off track.

I think the hour of worship is meant for us to reorient and rethink, to renew and revere and remember. To put things back into their proper place. Because it takes about a week for me to put myself front and center, my hopes, my dreams, my plans, my problems, my job, my money, my house, my family. In the process, Christ gets off center, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot.

If that hour is the only hour I spend with my Father and my Christian family, it will never be enough. Because we're meant to do life together, not just an hour of praise.

But even though worship is an ongoing process of giving myself over to God, that hour of worship is a necessary time for us to remember those things that we too quickly forget. That God is good. That Jesus is Lord. That the loss of a parking space or a job or even a loved one doesn’t change that fact. We don’t come to forget the world outside, but to put it in its place. To be put in our place. And to remember Christ’s place as the center of our lives.

Don't Quit Your Day Job

So, for awhile now, I have been working on the makings of a book whose working title is "Don't Quit Your Day Job: How Tent-Making Saved My Ministry."

While I don't mean to insist that the only way to do effective ministry is bi-vocationally, I do think that one of the most unChristian thing about a lot of church people is that their only meaningful contact is with other church people.

Thoughts?

One In Every Family

I have a confession to make. I've always been really embarrassed by my great-grandfather.

His name was Harold Smith, and he might have had his pleasant attributes, but I never got to see them. From the time I first knew him, he was an angry and unpleasant old man, constantly complaining and arguing.

But the thing that bothered me most was his unapologetic racism. My family has story after story of his ignorant and hateful comments, none worse than those directed at my older brother, Scott.

So, there have been times when I have wished I could have some other history, some other heritage, some other person to claim as mine.

Today I made a great discovery. Harold's wife Bea had a great-grandmother named Laura Smith Haviland. She is my great-great-great-great grandmother. And this is her story.

I could not be prouder of my history and heritage.

Trust and Obey

Had an interesting interaction with Harry today. Was portioning out his lunch and he asked that I let him have all the fruit we have in the fridge. I said no. He asked why. I said that it was too much. He said it wasn't. I said it was and that he'd just have to trust me. He said, "I trust you, dad, I just disagree."

This struck me as how we often come before God. We declare trust in God, but we "disagree" on the specifics. We say that God is all powerful, all knowing, that all that He does and says is right and good.

Then He says, "Love your enemies." Then He says, "Turn the other cheek." Then He says, "Bless those who persecute you." Then He says, "Do not return evil for evil, but overcome evil with good." Then He says, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth."

And we disagree. We trust, but we don't obey.

Which really means that we don't trust at all.

What The Gospel Is Meant To Offer

Christians preach the gospel of a new King and a new Kingdom, but it can often just be words we use as our lives play out according to old kingdom rules. I'm reading a book titled Child 44 in which the two main characters choose to defy the state while living in Stalin's Soviet Union. I was struck by a particular passage that gets to the heart of our old life in the State (as much for capitalist Americans as communist Russians) vs. our new life in the Kingdom.

It went against her governing principle - survival. She was accepting an immeasurable risk when an alternative presented itself to her. What had changed? Energized, excited, she didn't want to return to her former subsistence existence, wondering how much of her soul she'd have to slice off and sell in order to survive.