Waiting For Sunday

I just finished listening to a sermon called “Conviction vs. Preference” by Andy Stanley. Some of his themes lead perfectly into my upcoming series on Hot Issues (things like gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, war). These issues are being debated and decided in terms of personal preference rather than conviction. Stanley says:

We have preferences. We have very few convictions. We know what is right and what we’re taught. We look around at society, and we’re sure we can tell the difference between right and wrong. But we develop few real convictions, and consequently our walk does not match our talk. Many of us are people of preference. Not enough of us are men and women of conviction.

In the book of Daniel, thousands of Hebrews are captured by the Babylonians. Among them are Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. These men make up their minds that they will not disobey God and betray their convictions no matter what the consequences.

Stanley points out something that should be obvious to us, but which may be obscured by our familiarity with the stories - namely that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego obeyed not knowing how their story would end. WE know that all will work out well. Daniel won’t be eaten by the lions and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego will not burn in the fiery furnace. But THEY don’t know that. They only know that it is better to obey God. Shadrach and friends make that memorable statement of faith in Daniel 3:16-18:

“O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”

In every area of life - money, dating, entertainment, sex, business - we need to obey God out of Biblically-informed conviction rather than follow our personal preference. Like the four young men in Daniel, we don’t know exactly how it will turn out if we do. What we DO know is that, from the perspective of eternity, it will always be worth it.

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Several people pledged to start living by a budget after our recent study on escaping the debt trap. Pear Budget is an easy, free tool that can help. It works inside a spreadsheet but you don’t have to know how to use a spreadsheet to use it because the programmers have done all the work. You just fill in the blanks with your own numbers. The makers say it takes 20 minutes to set up and 10 minutes a week to maintain.

This downloadable version of Pear Budget works easily in Excel. They say that it works with “almost any spreadsheet program” but I wasn’t able to get it loaded in Quattro Pro when I tried it this morning. A web-based version is coming soon, and you can sign up to beta-test it at their site.

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Have you ever heard of Vernon Grounds? Probably not, but you owe him more than you realize. Grounds, now 90, was the president of Denver Seminary, a pioneer in Christian counseling and education. He’s a beloved man of prayer, faith, and especially love. Grounds played a large part in healing the rifts of evangelical Christianity two generations ago.

Philip Yancey has a good article about Vernon Grounds at Christianity Today, but it’s too short. I’d like to read (or better, listen) to a couple hours of this man talking. David Osborn, who now serves on staff at Denver Seminary and is a regular prayer partner of Dr. Grounds (and who happens to be my father-in-law) says that Vernon Grounds has a photographic memory, that he essentially reads books not a word at a time but a page at a time, practically photographing the book and being able to recall years later on what page a given topic is found.

I met Vernon Grounds in 1987 (he was the Prayer Chairman of the Denver Billy Graham Crusade that summer). A friend took me to his office at Denver Seminary and introduced me to him. He was gracious and kind and showed me his library of 18,000 books. I wonder if he remembers me? With a mind like his, who knows?

Read Yancey’s article, based on a recent interview, and learn about this giant upon whose shoulders we all stand.

P. S. His comments about marital love and faith are needed in this passion-addicted age.

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I have a stack of cassette tapes sitting next to my home computer that (someday) I mean to convert to MP3 so they’ll last “forever”. I have a shelf full of video tapes languishing into obsolescence too. That’s why I enjoyed this article so much. Formats come and go so quickly now that it only takes a handful of years to expose as fruitless our efforts to preserve our work for posterity.

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Last year I found a recommendation at Christianity Today Movies for a documentary called Stevie. It was praised so highly that I knew I had to rent it. I finally did and after watching it last night, I haven’t thought about much else since. Stevie is a study of a young man who has lived in a kind of hell all of his life, and he bears the scars. The consequences are heartbreaking. Yet the film is not without hope. In the middle of this human wreckage, we see glimpses of the grace that might make a difference for people like Stevie.

“Stevie” is Stephen Fielding, a man from southern Illinois who is 23 when the film begins. The movie’s director is Steve James (Hoop Dreams) who served as a volunteer “big brother” to Stephen Fielding in the early 80s when James was in college and Fielding was a child. After college, James moved to Chicago and on to a career and family, while Stevie lived through years of sexual abuse, foster homes, and juvenile detention centers. Steve James decided to reconnect with Stevie after ten years, thinking he might produce a thirty-minute update on Stevie’s progress. Instead Stevie is a 140 minute foray into a torpedoed soul.

Shortly after the film begins, Stevie is accused of an appalling crime. The backdrop of the movie becomes Stevie’s slow walk through the justice system. But in the foreground is Stevie’s family, nearly all of whom have failed him in every way, and continue to do so, on camera. You get the sense that Stevie’s present pain is just an ugly repetition of his mother’s and grandmother’s before him. Both women appear in the film in all their wounded bitterness.

Why watch a movie like this? Because of the window it gives us into the damaged souls of many around us. This film pulls the viewer to within understanding distance of Stevie, but it doesn’t ask you to take his side. I thought about the painful ending for a long time and finally decided that there was no other way to deal with Stevie.

But more than this, watch Stevie for the grace. There is true grace in the way his fiancee Tonya loves him with a simple, unconditional love. She’s an angel in this story, almost untouched by the repulsive world surrounding her. (There is a startling five-minute sequence where Tonya sits by the bedside of her best friend Patricia and listens while Patricia speaks through her cerebral palsy a message of amazing courage, truth and love). There is grace in the way Stevie is received and loved unconditionally by a former foster couple. One wonders how different his life might have been had he been raised in their home. And there is grace in the way Stevie is treated by the director himself. Steve James comes to the sad conclusion that he can’t fix Stevie or his problems, yet James decides that he can at least continue to be Stevie’s friend.

In the end, all of this grace is too little or too late to save Stevie (at least for now). But it is clear in this film that this persistent, unrelenting grace is the only hope for Stevie or for any of us.

One scene rises above the others for me. Judy James, the director’s wife and a counselor, looks Stevie straight in the eye and tells him that she knows him for who he is and what he has done, and that she bears no illusions that everything is OK with him - yet she says that she cares about him anyway and is willing to help him find the power to change. That’s the gospel.

Stevie is rated R for rough language and descriptions of abuse.

Roger Ebert on Stevie

Interview with director Steve James

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This article from Christianity Today illustrates the mixed bag of statistical information that I have discovered while preaching on debt. Take credit-card debt, for example. Some anti-debt prophets seem to say that nearly everyone is in trouble. Others suggest that the averages are high because a few (and only a few) are in serious trouble. Of course, as I’ve said in my sermons, what really matters is where you are and where you’re heading.

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United 93 is a film I knew I should see, but probably wouldn’t have, except that my Thursday Bible Study group decided that we would. I’m glad I did.

The film begins with four young men in their hotel rooms, praying, shaving, preparing. We see passengers arriving at the airport, checking in, chatting on cell phones - things we’ve all seen many times at airports. Then United 93 immerses us into the events of 9/11 in real-time, beginning around 8:15 am when Air Traffic Controller Ben Sliney (who plays himself) walks into the National Air Traffic Command Center in Herndon, VA, and ending with the crash at 10:03 am of United Airlines Flight 93 into a field near Shanksville, PA. In between is a grim, gut-wrenching journey where ordinary people courageously respond the best way they can to a world that has shifted off its axis. On the film’s official web site, Director Paul Greengrass says that the 40 passengers and crew “were the first to inhabit our new and terrifying post 9/11 world.”

“The terrible dilemma those passengers faced is the same one we have been struggling with ever since. Do we sit passively and hope this all turns out okay? Or do we fight back and strike at them before they strike at us? And what will be the consequences if we do?”

The genius of United 93 is perspective. The film makes no judgments, no political statements. There is no explanation of why the terrorists do what they do - no Osama bin Laden, Al Qaida, or the Taliban. We get no background information on the passengers (their names aren’t even mentioned). The effect is to place the viewer on the plane with a group of strangers to experience what they experience.

It is the group that is heroic in this tragedy. In about 20 minutes’ time, they learn through phone calls with family about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they make the decision to act, and they fight back.

United 93 is based on the two dozen phone calls the passengers made to loved ones, as well as about 20 minutes of cockpit recordings recovered from the plane. Though the details of much of what took place must be speculated, those phone calls are heartbreaking because we know they are real. But Greengrass doesn’t exploit our emotions or the passengers themselves. We overhear these conversations almost in the background, as if we were listening from a seat across the aisle.

United 93 is not only an important film, it is excellent and even beautiful. The intro screen on the web site contains two words: “Never forget.” That is, in essence, the purpose of United 93.

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Two men were killed in south Roane County last night. One was Roane County Sheriff’s Deputy Bill Jones; the other was the deputy’s friend Mike Brown (a civilian) who was riding with him on patrol. Roane County News editor Terri Likens has the best story about this tragedy with lots of background information. The deputy and one of the alleged killers had this in common: Both have daughters who are supposed to graduate from high school tonight.

Correction (posted 5.13): Deputy Jones had a stepson who graduated from high school Friday night.

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Since I’ll be preaching this month on escaping debt, this post at 43 Folders caught my eye (I came across it through Lifehacker, one of my very favorite blogs.) The idea is to satisfy your desire to acquire by making lists of stuff you think you want to buy, and then just park the list somewhere. Your list might be a simple .txt file or it might be a wish-list at Amazon. Hopefully just making the list will satisfy the urge and you won’t need to buy. In fact, in a few months you might be surprised at the silly stuff you listed. As the post says, it wouldn’t cost anything to try it.

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Here’s a Reuters story by Claudia Parsons about how Hollywood has reassessed religious movies in light of the success of The Passion and Narnia. The article reminds me that people thought Gibson’s foreign-language Jesus film was going to be the least commercial movie ever made until a month or two before it opened. I also remember that people said he had lost his mind, spending thrity million of his own money on his project. When it made more than ten times that amount, people said he just did it for the money.

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While on a trip to Ohio this week (by myself) I listened to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which occupied about ten of my 16 hours of drive time. The novel was very entertaining, the quality of the recording was top-notch - and best of all, it was FREE (and legal too). Like most classic literature, the text of Huck Finn is in the public domain. Loudlit.org is a non-profit effort that is working to record such texts and make them available. I ran across Loudlit via ITunes, where you can also find other educational content (such as foreign-language courses) for your commute.

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My brother recently reminded me that the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive may contain some old MHCC web pages. This link will take you to the list of pages at our old domain, morrisonhill.faithweb.com, which we abandoned in late 2001 or early 2002.

MHCC had other sites before 2001, including a Roane County Christian School site. I administered those sites, but can’t remember the addresses. Since search capability on the Wayback Machine seems to be weak, I wonder if any of you old-timers could help me remember and look. They were probably hosted by AOL and Compuserve.

P. S. Shortly after I posted the above, I stumbled across the old RCCS site. You can follow a link in it to the first MHCC site. Unfortunately, Bill Gunter’s cool woodgrain design is diluted in the archive.

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Here’s a five-minute audio program from National Public Radio that shows how legalizing gay marriage empowers (and eventually forces) schools to teach second-graders to accept homosexuality - before they understand much about sexuality itself. At issue is the well-known gay fairy tale called “King and King”.

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