Photo for the Week - Tundra Swan in Migration

In order to make a regular schedule for my blog, I'm going to follow up my Monday "Quote of the Week" with one of my own nature photos every Tuesday, along with a Scripture verse for reflection. I hope you enjoy it.

You are worthy, our Lord and God,
To receive glory and honor and power,
For you created all things,
And by your will they were created
And have their being.
              (Revelation 4:11, NIV)

(Photo of a Tundra Swan taken during the spring migration at Middle Creek, Pennsylvania)

Quote of the Week: Isaac of Nineveh

"As a handful of sand in the boundless ocean, so are the sins of the flesh in comparison with God's providence and mercy. As a copious spring could not be stopped up with a handful of dust, so the Creator's compassion cannot be conquered by the wickedness of creatures."

How to Be Twice Struck, and Still to Love

One of the most challenging parts of doing ministry where I am, in an area where there are few social services reaching out to the poor, is that we happen to be one of the only churches who offer emergency assistance for the homeless and the needy. And part of the difficulty is in learning to continue loving even when the occasional person goes out of their way to take advantage of your generosity. Here's a poem/prayer I wrote after a particularly difficult interaction.


How to Be Twice Struck, and Still to Love


Lord, I have need of Thy compassion,
A heart to serve the poor.
But they, like all of us,
Are deceitful and unjust,
And my callused heart can't see beyond
Their bare mendacity of soul.
Let me see, as You do,
That vice like this is cause
For compassion, not offence,
The symptom of a brokenness
That calls for pity unchagrined.
Teach me, Lord,
How to be twice struck,
And still to love.

Fatherhood (or, What It's Like to Be God)

(Below is a devotional column I recently wrote for my hometown newspaper, the Calais Advertiser.)

My children are infuriating. They are also, quite possibly, the three most adorable people on the entire planet. (I have three kids, at 5 years old, 3, and 1). Every parent, I suspect, knows this dynamic. Our children become the center of outpourings of love that we didn’t even know we had within us. Not only do they change our lives, they change us. Before I had kids, I was a pretty stolid guy—I never let down my guard in public to dance, make silly faces, or act out impromptu scenes. Now that I’m a parent, I do all those things. My love for my kids draws me out and makes me join in their games, because they shimmer with delight when I chase them, or dance with them, or pretend I’m a dinosaur.

But, at the same time, our kids still drive us crazy. They’re experts at running our emotional reserves down to empty while maintaining just enough spectacular cuteness to keep us from throwing in the towel. Our kids have no emotional boundaries and a tremendously forgetful grasp of the house rules. They find it perfectly rational to draw on the walls or splash their hands in the toilet or stand on the table and spin the light fixtures as fast as they can go. And they can’t understand why we don’t see the appeal of those delightful activities.

I suspect that our relationship with God is something like this. Those of us who have accepted Christ as Lord have been adopted into God’s family. But many of us may have grown up with an idea of God that saw him as a glowering judge, keeping meticulous track of our every transgression. Or, even if we knew that he was a “Father,” he was at least a stern sort of father, the kind of father that expected perfection, was never impressed with our efforts, and was always disappointed at our failings. A lot of Christians have lived a lot of their lives with a guilt complex, because they have this view of God.

But that’s not actually what God is like. If we could see our faith-relationship the way God sees it, it would look a lot like what we feel about our own children. Just like my kids, you and I do a lot of things that go against God’s “house rules”—rules put in place not to keep us from having fun, but simply to keep us safe. Just like my kids, you and I have trouble putting into practice the good lessons we’ve learned a hundred times over, and instead keep repeating our old mistakes. If God were a human father, no doubt we would drive him crazy. But, thankfully for us, God is infinite, and his emotional reserves can never be depleted. He cannot be worn out by our sins, because no amount of sin can even come close to matching the endless supply of his love. Even when my kids have worn me out by the end of a day, I have never ceased to love them, not for a moment. Even in my occasional disappointment at their errors, I know that they are young and prone to such mistakes—indeed, it would be impossible to expect perfection of them. And each day, even on the tough days, I never question my love for them. That’s how God sees us. He understands that we are weak and fallible and prone to selfish sins. He understands that it would be impossible for us in our present condition to be completely without sin. And so, despite our errors and failings, God loves us. In Christ, his love has even absolved our sins. His love is as far beyond my simple fatherly love as the universe is bigger than the earth. There is nothing that we could possibly do that would make God stop loving us, or even to detract one small mark from the measure of his love for us. As the songwriter Michael Card put it, “He cannot love more, and He will not love less.”

Back to Blogging!

I think I'm going to try to resurrect "The Peace and the Passion" after several years of neglect (which were preceded by several years of obscurity and irrelevancy). I can't promise my followers (whom I can count on one hand) that this will become a blog of titanic popularity and life-revolutionizing insights, but I'll at least try to be thoughtful and occasionally witty. Probably the most likely outcome is that I could raise some eyebrows for writing down theological thoughts that may be unfamiliar to most evangelicals, so stay tuned for those. But, since I'm already here making this earth-shattering announcement, I'm going to offer a few thoughts on the topic of the Internet while I'm at it.


The truth is, I don't much like the Internet. Of course, I would miss it if it were gone, but I think I would actually be a better person if I had come of age in a time without the lure of online connectivity. Think of how many more books I could have read! Or written! For me, who has dragged my feet in joining the digital age, the Internet has not yet entirely subsumed my consciousness, and so I can still imagine a happy and industrious life without it. My relationship with the Internet is rather like my relationship with Doritos. I would be a better person without them. But still, they're just so darn tasty! On days when my willpower is low, it's easy to crunch through a few handfuls of synthetic orange cheese crisps. And it's just as easy to spend a thoughtless hour surfing the Internet and reading a few dozen unconnected articles and blogs. I feel about the same afterwards as if I'd just cruised through a bag of Doritos--sort of mindless and numb, and too eviscerated by unsated boredom to do much of any value afterwards. Maybe it would be better if I was one of those people who actually follow particular blogs and forward them on, who interact (in a manner of speaking) with other people on social media, or who find some joy in manipulating digital pixels in a pointless game. But I'm not--the only blog I regularly check in on is the Celebrated Magazine of H. Albertus Boli, which is not so much a blog as a running satire on the whole digital age. I do occasionally find something interesting to think about from the Internet, but usually it's in such rapid-consumption nugget form that it isn't easy to find a way to make it the sort of idea that one can savor, percolate, and infuse into the pattern of one's life.


So, if that's how I feel about the Internet's blogosphere, why on earth would I want to bring back my old blog? Well, I'm humble enough to recognize that not everyone out there is a crotchety Luddite, and so some hypothetical person living in some possible world may actually enjoy and benefit from a little bit of winsome theologizing. And it would probably be good for me to remake my relationship with the Internet into something a bit more creative and a bit less consumptive. So, with that in mind, I'm ready to join the millions of opinionated ideologues shouting out lines of unread text into the recesses of the world's computer servers!


(Now stop reading the Internet, and go read a book.)

Poem for my Grandpa

Early this past Thursday morning, my grandpa, Almon McDougal, passed away at the age of 89. I want to post a poem in his memory, one that I had written nearly ten years ago. I was in my college season of life at the time, back home for the summer, and I had attended my church's Wednesday night prayer meeting, where my grandparents were faithful attenders. That night he was reflecting on his advancing age during the discussion time, and I recall him saying, with a smile and a twinkle in his eye, that he never expected to get this far. "I always thought I'd be gone at 65!" he laughed. And then he told us, in his simple but expressive way, how he regarded each new day as an unexpected gift of God, above and beyond what he thought he would receive. I went home that night and wrote a poem about his words. Here it is:

“Every day is a treasure,”

So he told us with a twinkle in his eye,

Raising an instructive finger

Now covered in the calluses of years gone by,

Of his tireless working of the land.

I sat there with my Grandpa

In the quiet of the old church vestry,

Ready to go to prayer with him,

To learn once again from the humble faith

Of this simple, grateful saint.

He is old, and nearer the end,

And I am young, still only beginning,

And his words, wise from all the years

Of weathering the harsh Maine winters,

Ring true in my heart.

Whether we find that truth in the peaceful joys

Of a journey of eighty years

Or in the thrilling rush of adventurous dreams

That stir a younger heart,

We must learn to greet the dawn each day

And in the fire of the ever-rising sun,

To breathe that grateful prayer

And commit to the gift of the time that is ours,

That this day, each day,

Will be the best day we can make of it;

For it is in the journey of every moment

That we return the heavenly gift

In a dance of wondrous praise.

Finding God in the Smell of Mud

(Note: this is a piece that was written for the devotional column in our local newspaper, to be published next week.)

I grew up here in Maine, but my wife Rachel is a Pennsylvanian. For those who are “from away,” our version of springtime here in Maine is a difficult one to appreciate. Rachel rhapsodizes about springtime in Pennsylvania as a season of green on every side, of dogwoods blooming, of warm sunshine streaming through forests that have come alive in a concert of birdsong. With such a picture of spring in mind, our version of spring—a couple months of mud and chilly rain, followed immediately by blackflies, does not seem appealing at first glance. But, having grown up in Maine, there is something about springtime here that speaks to me in no uncertain terms about the vibrancy of life. And for me, spring is not so much about the colors of green leaves or blue skies, but about smells—the rich, heavy scent of the frozen earth slowly coming back to life. Even if deprived of the main sense I rely on—sight—I could still tell you it was springtime in Maine simply by breathing in the air, by catching the scent of the ground thawing out.

Faith is a little bit like this. Many of us rely on our rational impulses and gut instincts to make sense of the world—these, like our sense of sight, are our primary way of understanding life. But in certain seasons of our life, seasons of doubt or skepticism, these senses don’t have much to offer us. Like looking for greenery at the beginning of a Maine springtime, looking for clear signs of God’s activity using only our gut instincts and a veneer of rationality might not bring a lot of results. So if you’re in that place where it seems like evidence of God is hard to find, I would encourage you to listen to your other senses. All human beings have certain intuitions placed deep within them, intuitions which we take for granted, but which provide clear signposts of God’s gracious presence in the world. We are all wired to desire justice, for instance—everyone objects when treated unfairly. We are also wired to appreciate beauty—in the natural world around us, in works of art, in the sound of a song: something in our hearts responds to beauty in a way that we wouldn’t expect to find if this were a meaningless world. Intuitions like this—our nature to be predisposed towards justice, goodness, beauty, joy—these are things  which stand as signposts in our own nature that we are created for more than merely ourselves. God is there to be found, but sometimes, like finding springtime in Maine, we find him most clearly when we close our eyes for a moment and breathe deep.

Let me draw one more parallel between springtime and the life of faith. Some people try to grudgingly keep God at a distance, as if opening our eyes to his truth would primarily mean having to buckle down to the hard and bitter work of trying to be good. This attitude entirely misses the point. It would be as if we Mainers, having sat through a long, bleak winter, said to ourselves, “I really don’t want spring to come, because springtime brings a lot of work—raking, planting, mowing, cleaning—I’d rather just sit inside and let it keep snowing.” Rather, most of us are joyfully ready for the simple and soul-cleansing work of spring when it arrives. It’s the same way with coming to faith in God through Jesus Christ—yes, it will mean a change in some of our habits and ways of living—but just like springtime, it will be a change ushered in by incredible joy and energy and new life. The call to come to faith in God is not a subpoena that forces us into a life of gray drudgery; it is an invitation to leave behind our old, closed-up homes, step out into the spring rain, and dance.