The Phil Files

OK, so I saw the elimination deal on “American Idol” the other night. You know, the one with Carrie Underwood singing the new song with the crazy-weird wind tunnel effects. Not impressed — but I admit, I don’t watch “Idol” very carefully, usually doing something else and listening on a lousy sound system.

BUT, then I heard the song and listened to the words more carefully on headphones. Wow! Deeply moving, and it reminds me of the line in “Forest Gump” when Jenny has thrown rocks at the old house where she had been abused as she grew up and Forest said, “Sometimes, I guess, there just aren’t enough rocks.”

Eventually, Forest bulldozes down the house so all those memories can be bulldozed away.

“Blown Away” is a song that’s really a prayer by a daughter who has been abused by her drunken “father” — her mother is “an angel in the ground.” She’s praying that a tornado that’s coming on the storm will blow away the old sin-filled full-of-bad-whiskeyed-memories in that house, along with her dad asleep in a drunken stupor on the couch. The haunting lines that stick with me are these:

There’s not enough rain in Oklahoma to wash the sins out of that house.
There’s not enough wind in Oklahoma to lift the nails out of the past.

I contrast this to an old Amy Grant song, “If These Walls Could Speak.”

Such a difference, and all built on how we’ve experienced family and home so often tied to a place — a house, an apartment, a neighborhood, or a city.

So what are we doing to redeem this mess of a broken world? What am I doing to ensure that hurts of those bad houses are blown away and the blessings the latter help the walls of grace to speak of God’s love?

How is church, how are we personally and collectively, going to be more than buildings and programs and performances, and more a place for healing, redemption, and restored family?

You and me, well let’s be honest, we can’t change a lot, but we can redeem something … someone … kids and families, close and faraway. And isn’t that what’s all about? And if we join together, can’t the Holy Spirit do a whole lot to change a whole lot more than we can ask or imagine?

So here, God, take the rest of what my life has to offer and please use it to make a difference … to my own precious kids … to my foster grandchildren … to precious “daughters” in Asia … to Peruvian orphans … to Compassion kids … and more. Please make your House, your Family, your People, and me, places and people of blessing, healing, comfort, and hope so hurts can be blown away and grace can speak more clearly into the hearts of the broken, alone, and lost. I ask this humbly in the healing name of Jesus. Amen.

I love it when I stumble over a little phrase in my Bible reading and the Holy Spirit sort of thumps me on the head and says, “Hey Phil, notice this. It’s important for you!”

Tucked away in the book of Numbers, as Moses is apportioning the land of Promise to the twelve tribes of Israel is a little phrase that caught my attention — granted, I had to have the thump on the head, but after that I really noticed it.

You will not enter and occupy the land I swore to give you. The only exceptions will be Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun. … for they have wholeheartedly followed the LORD.”(Numbers 14:30; 32:12 nlt)

We all like to think we are exceptional at something. We all want special treatment and to be granted an exception to the normal rules. But God is talking about a different kind of exception in this case. All of one whole generation died in the wilderness because of their lack of faith. The only exceptions were Joshua and Caleb, who risked their lives because of their trust in the LORD and his great promises. They stood against ten other spies who didn’t feel God’s people could possess the land the LORD had promised to give them.

I want to be this kind of exception. Someone who believes God and stands against the flood of faithlessness and doubt. Someone who is strong enough in personal conviction to go God’s way even if everyone else goes the direction of culture and popular opinion. And amazingly, Joshua and Caleb managed to do this without totally alienating the people who went the other way — initially the people were ready to “string them up” but gradually accepted them and recognized their own faithlessness. For forty years, Joshua and Caleb walked beside their own generation of doubters, they did what God asked them to do as they wandered in the desert, they supported God’s leader Moses in every way possible, and they went God’s direction at God’s pace even though they had to wait for four decades to receive God’s promise because of everyone else’s doubt and faithlessness.

I pray that when the chapter of history for my generation is written, we leave behind a legacy of faith and a new generation ready to receive God’s promises. And for that to happen, more of us — and at this point the Holy Spirit is directly thumping my head and reminding me this means me — have to be willing to be one of only two exceptions!

So what’s the essence of leadership?

I’m sure I can get about as many answers to that question as people who respond. We all have our own ideas of what genuine leadership is all about. Yesterday, in a strange collision of outside reading, the Lord really challenged me to think through this whole idea of the essence of leadership.

Like many churches, our congregation and leadership is wrestling through some important ideas about worship, singing, and mission. My concern is that we not get ourselves into a tug-of-war over positions and miss the primary call of our mission — we can so easily forget why God put us where we are, with the people we have, with the community we touch, with the lost folks we are currently reaching while surrounded by the lost folks we are not currently reaching.

Earlier this week, I was researching tug-of-war. I wasn’t so concerned about the origin and the official rules of the game, but I wanted to know about outcomes. So here is what I have found.

In a tug of war there are these notable outcomes:

1. One side wins and the other side loses.
2. The contest goes on so long with no clear winner, they call it a draw and both feel like losers.
3. The rope breaks and numerous injuries occur — this was more common that I thought possible.
4. No matter the official outcome, many injuries, some of them quite serious, are inflicted on “winners” and “losers” in the contest

In a family of faith (church, small group, cell church, house church, faith community, fellowship or whatever tag you want to apply), do you see any options in this list that are desirable?

So the nagging question that has been haunting me is this one: How do we go from WON to ONE? Yeah, I almost didn’t use that image because it’s almost too cute, but after thinking about it, this question seemed to capture my heart. In fact, I think I would chart it this way using Jesus’ prayer of John 17:

Moving from WON to One so that we can be ONE to Win others.

Isn’t that the issue? Are we trying to get everyone on the same page without winners and losers? Don’t we want to avoid injuries, serious and non-serious, that are unnecessary? Don’t we want to keep our focus on our mission to the lost and broken world and not on our own preferences, comfortabilities, and personal dogmas?

Timothy Archer put out a blog post on approaches to Scripture — Normative and Regulative — that was thought provoking. One of our Shepherds, Steve Ridgell, had pointed us to this post. I thought it was instructive and helpful. One of Tim’s first commenters shared these remarks, that I personally found quite insightful:

I especially appreciated the specificity of this line:

“… doing what God commands in Scripture, not doing what God forbids in Scripture …”

We spend so much time on the comma symbolized in the sentence.

As good friend, Grady King, once said, “I have never met a church person whose knowledge of Scripture did not exceed his obedience of Scripture.” Yes, we often spend more time and get more upset on the “comma” than we do the two very important calls to obedience on either side. This is especially true of HOW we behave and treat each other in the processes of deciding an issue as an a group.

My daily reading in The Chronological Bible had me reading about Moses not entering the promised land. In the give and take of the previous discussion, the Holy Spirit seemed to be giving me more than a gentle nudge to pay attention to these words of judgement against Moses by God:

“When the people of Israel rebelled, you failed to demonstrate my holiness to them …” (Numbers 27:14 nlt emphasis added).

Somewhere in the challenges of leading, leaders must demonstrate the holiness of God to the people they lead. That’s pretty hard in the mayhem of a tug-of-war! So shouldn’t we worry less about outcomes (“my outcome” or “their outcome”) and focus on process.

How are we going to demonstrate the holiness of God in this process of deciding? How are we going to demonstrate the holiness of God in …

… how we decide it?
… how we treat each other in the deciding of it?
… how we honor Scripture in trying to decide it?
… how we honor the people we lead as we decide it?
… how we honor the folks who don’t know Jesus around us as we decide it?

I guess the longer I’m around and the more church tug-of-wars I’ve witnessed, the more I’m convinced that the essence of leadership is to help God’s people avoid war, declared wars or tug-of-wars, where there are winners and losers and lots of injuries. Even more, I am convicted that the process of deciding has to be a time where God’s leaders demonstrate the holiness of God in the way they lead, decide, nurture, instruct, and reach out.

For me, the Holy Spirit nailed it in Hebrews 13:7-8:

Remember your leaders who taught you the word of God. Think of all the good that has come from their lives, and follow the example of their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Let’s not fail to demonstrate the holiness of God in what we do, decide, and how we treat each other as we seek God’s will for those we lead and those we need to reach with the grace of heaven!

I got up very early this Saturday morning to fly to Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico, to spend a week getting acquainted with and working with our church planting mission there. Lazaro is a beautiful place on the southwest coast of Mexico and across the bay from Ixtappa. It is an important seaport full of working class people while Ixtappa is the tourist resort.

It was a short night after an exhausting week filled with anguish and loving concern. God’s redemptive love showed up in the words and actions of brothers and sisters who helped carry another family through a time of unspeakable grief … again — it has been a hard journey for our faith family the last four months.

The first flight went perfectly without a hitch, plus my friend and church shepherd, Steve Ridgell, was on board. After arriving early to DFW, we prayed before going in different directions to answer God’s shared but different calls on our lives.

I found a quiet spot and worked on heartlight.org piece for tomorrow and watched the Korean jetliner land coming in from Seoul, South Korea. I had been on that flight three weeks earlier returning from an incredible follow up visit to Chiang Mai, Thailand. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but I do know that I hope this trip is equally blessed and effective.

After working on the article for a couple of hours, I rushed to the gate to board the plane and found a plane full of folks with no airplane! Ugh, this is going to get interesting and everyone knew it. Those with little children had that deer in the headlights look and we hadn’t even started the “fun” stuff yet. My AA flight alert went off very 30 minutes promising we would take off in 30 more minutes — which, of course, none of us believed because the plane wasn’t even at the gate yet. We boarded 2 hours after we were supposed to be in the air and all the small kids were now at the end of their patience and their parents had that knowing look of the “wonderful” moments to come. They weren’t disappointed … unfortunately.

Now an two hours into the flight, Bose headphones on, all the kids settled down and asleep, and the flight smooth as silk, I am reminded of something precious. One of my favorite Jesus events in the gospels is the healing of the man with leprosy in Mark 1. Jesus touches the may with leprosy before he heals him. So much is said with that one touch.

Jesus shares in the unclean-ness of this isolated and alone man when he blesses him with a moment of connection and heaven’s grace with the touch of a hand. We are alerted to look for Jesus’ touch in so many events that follow in his ministry — taking mud and spit to touch the blind man’s eyes, holding little children in his arms as he blesses them, taking the little dead girl’s hand and raising her from the dead, taking the simple loaves and fishes from the little boy and making a meal for a multitude, touching the dirt with his finger as he writes in the sand while facing down the mob who caught the woman in adultery, and offering Thomas his nail-scarred hands as proof of the resurrection, and as he stretches out his arms in love to offer those hands that shaped creation to be pierced by the very men who he formed in the wombs of their mothers.

The power of skin-on-skin touch is so much a part of our humanity whether it is the soft touch of a lover and lifetime spouse or the simple powdering of a baby’s freshly cleaned bottom or the tickle of a daddy on the ribs of his beloved child or the wrinkled hand of reassurance gripping tightly the hand of a friend who is slowly slipping away to walk with Jesus down better roads. No wonder heaven’s pre-existent and divine Word had to become flesh and walk among us.

I was reminded of this power afresh as a young mom wrestled with her 3 or 4 month old child trying to get her to take her bottle. The mom’s efforts were futile and the little girl was on a mighty crescendo until the mom discreetly lifted part of her blouse and laid her little girl against her skin and let her quietly nurse herself to sleep. As one baby grew quiet, the other little ones settled down, peace descended, and the atmosphere among our long-delayed band of travelers changed — one mother offering herself in such a sweet and simple way changed everything.

I am not sure how long this peace will continue, but long enough to let me finish my ramblings here. The point is very simple. There is great power in the human touch, especially from someone who loves us and genuinely cares about us. So in a week when grief and separation have hung in the air of every breath many of us have breathed, I would urge that you take this as a reminder to touch — hug, hold the hand, stroke the hair, rub the shoulders, or kiss the cheek of someone dear and remind them in both word and touch that they are precious to you.

So till we are reunited, my precious ones, your touch is in my mind and my love for you fills my heart as your faces fill my dreams.

Love you. God bless you. And may Jesus be real to your heart and your touch.

Everyday gifts come my way and I miss them because my eyes are focused on what is limited, shallow, temporary, or frustrating.

Open my eyes, Lord! Forgive me for not being in Your holy moments when they come and for not seeing that they are so frequent. Each moment passes so quickly. Each person you bring into my life is so precious. Each touch of kindness is so rewarding. Open my eyes to Your adventure, Your mystery, and the hidden paths of Your grace. Amen.

Sometimes things turn out great — better than you can hope and bigger than you can imagine. Such is the story of Jeremy Lin and the New York Knicks. Everyone has been waiting for bubble to burst, and it may burst, but for at least one week, the NBA, New York, and much of Asia are awash in Jeremy Lin Mania.

I want to share an angle that may be new to most folks. Shortly after Karen, a young Chinese woman I study with over Skype, began to contemplate giving her life to Christ, God sent a volunteer to her school in Thailand. This volunteer was a recent Harvard graduate. She wanted Karen to reassure me that she was a conservative Christian from Harvard — in other words, she believed the Bible and trusted passionately in Jesus. She was just what Karen needed as she confessed Christ and was baptized. These two have worked together in a nearby church where they live in small town in Thailand.

The odds on someone who was a Christian landing in Karen’s life at just the right time are staggering — unless you count on the prayers of those who love Karen and her sister. The interesting twist to this story was that as I was talking with Karen this morning, reminding her that God was at work in her life even when she couldn’t see it, she started talking about Jeremy Lin. She was excited that someone from Asia (his grandparents are from mainland China and Taiwan), was so vocal about speaking about God and his faith in Jesus. That this was opening eyes to folks who would not have ever even given it a second thought. What’s more, the friend that God sent into Karen’s life has a close connection to him.

I don’t know what will come of Jeremy — if his faith holds out in the face of the wilting pressure and temptation of the NBA (I sure hope and will pray that it does shine brightly and it sure seems genuine) — but I know for at least this moment, his hard work, perseverance, faith, and humility have opened doors in places that no one else could. And for that, I’m thankful.