The Phil Files

It is very late on Friday night and I received a call from the hospital. A father called about his grown daughter (with two kids near the teenage years) who is having emergency surgery as I write this. We prayed over the phone, but I can’t get his concern off of my heart.

I share his concern because I care about him and his daughter, who has battled Crohn’s disease for much of her adult life. We are brothers and sisters in Christ — so when we pray, it is “our” shared concern and so we pray to “our Father” as fathers who care about their kids.

I share his concern because I am a father, too. My kids are always on my heart, but they are especially on my heart right now as they face interesting challenges and great opportunities. So as a father, I pray for our family’s shared concerns and joys by beginning “our Father.”

I pray “our Father” because Jesus emphasized the importance of community and that we are children of God. The Only True and Living God, the Holy and Righteous One, God Almighty, invites us to come and call Him “abba Father” as we pray and the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words (Romans 8).

So why not join me tonight, as I pray the Lord’s Prayer, remembering my friend and his daughter, feeling a burden for a close couple friend who wrestle with their grief as they miss their son, loving my own children wanting what is best for them, and knowing that some of you who read this carry burdens that only the Heavenly Father can help you carry.

“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.”

Let’s help each other remember that we are not alone, and by praying “our Father” we remind ourselves of God’s constant and abiding presence (Romans 8:32-39) and our shared family of faith.

“Our Father” please hear our hearts, restore our spirits, and fire our imaginations as we seek to honor You.

For or yours is the kingdom and the power
and the glory forever. Amen.’”

In my Heartlight.org post this week, Welcome One Another, I reflect on Romans 15:5-7. There the focus is on how important it is to welcome one another into our lives and into the life of the church family. I hope you will take a look at the article and reflect on it. But in the blog today, I want us to focus more on things that we allow to be barriers to our welcoming folks into our church families. Let’s get honest and identify these barriers and then find ways to break through them. Here are some questions that might help “prime the pump” on this issue. I’d love to get your response and feedback on this.

What keeps us from having “the same mind” and being of “one heart” and glorifying God together with “one voice” Romans 15:5-7)?

Paul describes how we were welcomed by Christ (Romans 5:5-11). What does that mean for the ways we are to welcome others (Romans 15:5-11)?

Paul speaks strongly to his Christian friends in Philippi about “the same mind” and points us to having the “mind of Christ” (Philippians 2:1-11). What is “the mind of Christ”? How is it displayed in our lives?

What do you need to do to more deeply value and welcome brothers and sisters in Christ who are different from you?

What keeps you from reaching and welcoming others into the body of believers?

What barriers do we often let get in our way that keep us from more openly welcoming those who are different from us?

As we have been discussing the homebound, community, and experiencing Jesus, Sharon White sent this poem to me. I appreciate very much her tracking down the author and getting permission for us to share it with you. I believe it’s worth a good look (or listen) since it fits our ongoing discussion so well!

Please Hear What I Am Not Saying
Charles C. Finn

Don’t be fooled by me.
Don’t be fooled by the face I wear
for I wear a mask, a thousand masks,
masks that I’m afraid to take off,
and none of them is me.

Pretending is an art that’s second nature with me,
but don’t be fooled,
for God’s sake don’t be fooled.
I give you the impression that I’m secure,
that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without,
that confidence is my name and coolness my game,
that the water’s calm and I’m in command
and that I need no one,
but don’t believe me.
My surface may seem smooth but my surface is my mask,
ever-varying and ever-concealing.
Beneath lies no complacence.
Beneath lies confusion, and fear, and aloneness.
But I hide this. I don’t want anybody to know it.
I panic at the thought of my weakness exposed.
That’s why I frantically create a mask to hide behind,
a nonchalant sophisticated facade,
to help me pretend,
to shield me from the glance that knows.

But such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only hope,
and I know it.
That is, if it’s followed by acceptance,
if it’s followed by love.
It’s the only thing that can liberate me from myself,
from my own self-built prison walls,
from the barriers I so painstakingly erect.
It’s the only thing that will assure me
of what I can’t assure myself,
that I’m really worth something.
But I don’t tell you this. I don’t dare to, I’m afraid to.
I’m afraid your glance will not be followed by acceptance,
will not be followed by love.
I’m afraid you’ll think less of me,
that you’ll laugh, and your laugh would kill me.
I’m afraid that deep-down I’m nothing
and that you will see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate pretending game,
with a facade of assurance without
and a trembling child within.
So begins the glittering but empty parade of masks,
and my life becomes a front.
I tell you everything that’s really nothing,
and nothing of what’s everything,
of what’s crying within me.
So when I’m going through my routine
do not be fooled by what I’m saying.
Please listen carefully and try to hear what I’m not saying,
what I’d like to be able to say,
what for survival I need to say,
but what I can’t say.

I don’t like hiding.
I don’t like playing superficial phony games.
I want to stop playing them.
I want to be genuine and spontaneous and me
but you’ve got to help me.
You’ve got to hold out your hand
even when that’s the last thing I seem to want.
Only you can wipe away from my eyes
the blank stare of the breathing dead.
Only you can call me into aliveness.
Each time you’re kind, and gentle, and encouraging,
each time you try to understand because you really care,
my heart begins to grow wings–
very small wings,
very feeble wings,
but wings!

With your power to touch me into feeling
you can breathe life into me.
I want you to know that.
I want you to know how important you are to me,
how you can be a creator–an honest-to-God creator–
of the person that is me
if you choose to.
You alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble,
you alone can remove my mask,
you alone can release me from my shadow-world of panic,
from my lonely prison,
if you choose to.
Please choose to.

Do not pass me by.
It will not be easy for you.
A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls.
The nearer you approach to me
the blinder I may strike back.
It’s irrational, but despite what the books say about man
often I am irrational.
I fight against the very thing I cry out for.
But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls
and in this lies my hope.
Please try to beat down those walls
with firm hands but with gentle hands
for a child is very sensitive.

Who am I, you may wonder?
I am someone you know very well.
For I am every man you meet
and I am every woman you meet.

Charles C. Finn
September 1966
http://www.poetrybycharlescfinn.com

Tomorrow I will share a kind of summary on our community and the homebound discussion. Some great ideas. Today, however, I wanted to share a great video done by Stephen Corbett and some of our Groups team at Southern Hills — Stephen is now famous for the video he did with Rob Marcelain that is now well over 2 million views, called Stethoscope. This video really defines what groups are in what we are trying to do in our church family, and what I believe we are trying to say in our discussion on community and the homebound. Take a look and see what you think!

Special thanks to Stephen Corbett who shot and produced this video! Other videos from Corbett and Crew can be found on the church website.

In my Heartlight.org post this week, I talk about Radical community, the kind of community Jesus calls His followers to practice in Matthew 18. This is one of the most frank, in-you-face sections of Jesus’ teaching — mentioning millstones around our necks (Matthew 18:6-7 NAS), eternal fire and the fire of hell (Matthew 18:8-9), and being tortured by the jailer (Matthew 18:34-35). It is clearly about life in church — he addresses us as disciples in (Matthew 18:1) and even uses the word “church” twice (Matthew 18:17).

Jesus uses incredibly strong language to warn what is stake in this matter of living radical community. I believe this is because we so desperately need genuine community, because the stakes of our living faithfully are so high, and because God values each of us as precious “little ones.” So the Lord gives us four principles or values that He wants us to live as God’s “little ones” as we live in community:

1. Be accountable for our actions and influence (Matthew 18:6-9)
2. Reach out and rescue those in trouble or who are caught in sin (Matthew 18:10-14)
3. Confront those who sin and work to redeem them (Matthew 18:15-20)
4. Generously forgive those who sin against you (Matthew 18:21-35)

(To listen to the mp3 of this full message, click here.)

Wow! This is strong and direct teaching from Jesus. How do you feel about all of this?

Do you believe we practice these four principles of community very well?

Why are they important for genuine community?

How would living these out help bless the family of God all around the world, but especially in our home congregations?

I’d love to get your reaction to this as we continue to talk about genuine community.

I was totally unprepared for the volume and depth of response to the questions of yesterday about community to the homebound. I will try to get to every response next week, and also collect a set of ideas that we can share together. Of course, I am delighted to say that our little exercise was an example of how we can share as a community even if we can’t get out of the house — after all, this started as some questions from those who faced those challenges.

Over the years, I’ve been humbled by the very emotional and open testimony of folks who talked about the role that Heartlight.org played in their lives as they faced difficult challenges. A couple came back to Christ after a wreck through friends who served them, made sure they had access to the web, and introduced them to Heartlight. A sweet sister in Christ, dying of bone cancer, wrote about how precious the devotionals and articles and emails were as she faced the growing limitations of her failing body before she went to be with Jesus. A note from a wife whose husband had been baptized one year around Christmas because he read of the devotionals focused on Jesus’ birth and and what that really meant. Three native Hawaiian young adults that had subscribed to Today’s Verse as part of their spiritual quest and ended up baptizing each other in the Pacific off Ohuau. African Christian schools using the content of Today’s Verse or What Jesus Did! to teach their young students the practice of daily devotionals. A Philipinno businessman using Heartlight articles and an Internet Cafe to share his faith with his friends. And many, many, who face the challenges of age or mobility and depend on our resources and community to connect with them.

But it sure seems to me that we need to take that community to the next level and make sure we do what real communities do: encourage each other, care for each other, include each other, and bring each other to Jesus. We’ll be working on ways to do that and hope you will stay in the discussion!

Thanks for all the feedback!