Thank You Thursday (#1)

 

 by woodleywonderworks

   OK, so I'm a day late, but I got the idea on a Thursday.
     Last night, Amy and Joe Jamrock invited Sarah and I to attend a fundraising/celebration dinner for Frontline Foundations - a fantastic Christian substance abuse treatment center based here in Chesterton, IN.  The keynote speaker was Tim Sanders - former Yahoo executive and author of Love Is the Killer App.   
     One of Tim's key points was the amazing positive power of gratitude.  Study after study shows that being grateful tremendously boosts our own attitudes, energy, and even health.  However, recent studies are also proving that expressing our thanks to others also acts as a huge boost to those around us.  That just makes sense.  We all like to get thanked, and we feel a little better when someone tells us that our hard work or little kindnesses are actually making a difference in the world.  Tim encouraged all of us to write one thank you letter a week to someone who has helped us.
     I love that idea so much that I'm creating a new thing (at least for me) - Thank you Thursdays.  Every Thursday, I plan to write and to post a short but specific blog or facebook post thanking someone for a specific way they have helped me or improved the world around me within the past seven days.

    So consider this my first Thank you Thursday note for Joe and Amy for inviting me to an awesome night with the Frontline crew.  It was great to hear their stories, to be encouraged by Tim, and to spend some time with you.  Thanks guys.

     Feel free to make this viral and start a storm of thank you letters on Thursdays.  Really, if thanksgiving is so good for us and everyone around us, why should we limit it to one Thursday a year?

"Help, Thanks, Wow" by Anne Lammot - Book Review

Anne Lammot's quirky, self-effacing humor makes spirituality fun, feasible, and ordinary.  Her approach is so clear of religiosity and Christianese.  Her simple words on topics of depth and pain invite us to pray more honestly and more often.
In this book, Anne lays out the three basic human prayers: what we say when in need, in gratitude, and in wonder.  It's short, but that's a good thing for a book like this.  Anne reminds me that prayer is more a part of my life than I even recognize, and this in turn allows me to be more intentional about praying and recognizing my helps, thanks, and wows.
This is a great book for a friend for whom prayer has grown stale, or for whom church and the whole religious world seems intimidating, or who simply delights in a fresh take on spirituality.  Personally, I look forward to a book on what Anne calls the fourth great prayer, "Lord, help me not to be such an ass."  I find myself praying that a lot.

100 Things I Love About Korea: #82 - Our Advisory Council

At KNU International English Church, our church board is called the Advisory Council.  Down through the years, this rotating group of leaders has joined hands with me in leading our church.  Together, we have put our ears to the wind to see how God is leading us.
This year, God has blessed us with our strongest Advisory Council ever.  75% of this group has served on the Advisory Council in previous years, and they are well equipped to guide our church through this time of transition.
This past Sunday, I delivered my official letter of resignation to the Advisory Council.  I hope it will help you see why I love them.

Dear Advisory Council,

Now, with a heart full of both sadness and anticipation, the time has come for me to submit my official resignation as lead pastor of KNU International English Church, effective February 28.  I have spent 25% of my life in Korea, 75% of my adult working life, and 100% of my full-time ministry as a pastor.

This is my last opportunity to address you as the elected leaders of our church, so I want to leave with a few parting words of advice and some well earned thank-you’s.  Let’s start with the advice.

Social-Spiritual Covenant of Leadership (2 Samuel 5:1-12)

The idea of the social contract is one of the most influential ideas in the history of government.  From the beginning of time, societies have formal or informal agreements between leaders and followers.  Socrates and Plato said that we have a moral obligation to obey the laws of our land as long as we choose to remain in the land.  Epicurus argued that justice is essentially the mutual agreement not to hurt each other.  

However, the social contract theory took giant steps forward among philosophers of the 17th century.  Hugo Grotius suggested that individuals have certain natural rights which enable us to live together.  Then, Thomas Hobbes argued that we choose to surrender some rights to a king or to a government to protect us from the loss of all rights in anarchy.  Next, John Locke took this theory a step further, saying that government only holds its power through the “consent of the governed.”  In other words, we all agree to keep our governments in power because that is essentially in our best interests.  Locke’s most radical stance was the right to reform the government to make it more effective in serving those governed.

  

This “consent of the governed” is a really important concept still today.  There are two types of consent - overt and tacit.  Overt consent is when the people choose their leader and submit to his or her leadership.  Tacit consent is when there is neither a formal choice nor a formal rejection of the leader.  Therefore, the people under the leader tacitly (or passively) accept the leader’s authority over them.

  

Now, hold all of this social contract theory in mind as we turn to our text.  What we will see today is a form of overt consent to leadership.  The people of Israel unite in their commitment to make David their king.  They form a covenant with David, which is a formal social contract.

Read 2 Samuel 5:1-12.

Gracias! - Review

Last week I took a spiritual retreat up to the mountains of northeastern South Korea (just below the border).  While there, I picked up a Nouwen book out of the monastery library.  Nouwen has been my most common spiritual director on retreats down through the years.
Gracias! did not disappoint.  It was full of profound cultural and spiritual insights which I needed to hear.
Gracias! tells the story of Nouwen's six month sojourn in Bolivia and Peru in the early 1980s while he was attempting to discern whether he was called to serve in Latin America.  If you think back about your world history, Latin America was a mess in the 70s and 80s.  For hundreds of years Latin America was ruled by European colonialists and their grandchildren.  Native Americans and people of mixed ethnicity were poor, uneducated, and deeply oppressed.  The fair skinned ruling class wanted to keep them that way, but around mid-century, the poor slowly decided that they didn't want to stay poor.
The Catholic Church - by far the largest religious group in Latin America - took a "preferential option for the poor" and assisted them in developing their lives through education, health care, better farming, better saving, social organization, healthier diets, etc.  Gustavo Guiterrez was developing and teaching his now famous - Liberation Theology - at this time.  As the poor gained knowledge of their human rights and hope that enabled them to shed fatalism, they began to push for reforms.  As the reformers were first ignored, then punished, then brutally persecuted, reform slowly merged into revolution.
And - given the power dynamics of wealthy nations, USA vs USSR, democracy vs communism - all of these issues in Latin America were set in the light of communism versus everything else.  80-90% of Latin America was poor at that time, and anyone who sided with them or helped them risked being labeled as communist, leftist, destabilizing, disruptive problem-makers.  The result was mass persecution of the Catholic Church whenever and wherever it openly assisted the poor.  People began to disappear.  The martyrs began to be counted by the dozens, then hundreds, then thousands and tens of thousands.
It is in this milieu, Nouwen was considering a life among the poor in Latin America.  A brave question and a brave sojourn.
I learned or relearned three important lessons through Nouwen's reflections.  Some of the most meaningful parts of the book came in his reflections of Gustavo Guitierrez's lectures which Nouwen attended several times.
1. Reform takes time.  I consider myself a reformer, a progressive, someone who is participating in the larger reform of the Church of our time.  I deeply want us to return to our Biblical and Christlike roots as a church, which will - yes - include much more service to the poor, but also much more love for all our neighbors and much more intense commitment to understanding and following Jesus in every possible way and reform in our structures and styles of doing church.  I have struggled with others' resistance, apathy, and lip-service to this reform.  However, observing the Latin American struggle from the distance of space and time encouraged me - oddly.  Their struggle - far more painful than ours - persevered as was largely successful, though it is still incomplete and ongoing.  If they can persevere in the face of persecution and death, I can persevere in the face of complaints or walk-outs.  Also, some of the people in the liberation theology group advised Nouwen that this all takes a great deal of time, that progress is slow, and that it must be done at the pace of the people not the pace of the reformers.  I felt a strong call to perseverance and patience.
2. True reform is deeply spiritual.  Gutierrez lectured on the spirituality of liberation and explained that without maintaining a deep connection with God, we lose the both the heart of love and the will to persevere.  Gutierrez advocated spending time in the "useless" work of prayer and meditation.   Nouwen observed that many of the reformers around him were hostile, angry, and militaristic (at least in words and mindset if not in action).  But the "old fighters" called these young bucks to peace, to patience, to connecting deeply with the Spirit of God, and to working patiently with the people even if that means suffering with the people as the people develop their own desire to further the reformation.  I felt a call to go deeper in my own spiritual life - even if that means less time for "tasks" and "productive" things.
3. Gratitude is central.  Nouwen was deeply struck by the inherent gratitude of the Latin American people.  They view everything as the gift that it is.  Life is a gift.  Food is a gift.  Work is a gift.  Home and family are gifts.  Every good thing we have is a gift from a gracious God.  As a reformer, as someone who deeply wants our world to be better, often I can focus on what is lacking the good that we need but is not yet.  Often I can look at our world as one large bundled collection of problems and deficiencies.  This is an extremely distorted view.  Yes, our world is broken and needs healing.  But even amid our brokenness, God is at work, and God has blessed us with innumerable good gifts.  Despite the dents and the dust, these gifts retain their glorious goodness, and I am - we are - called to celebrate these many gifts at all times and in all places.

The Josh rating: JJJJ.