Waiting For Sunday

My Grandpa Mullen died last Saturday morning, after 91 great, positive, optimistic years. He was a Christian and he was also blessed with good health up until the last two years, and even these last two were fairly good considering his age. Cindy and I went to Ohio in the early part of this week where I had the honor of doing his funeral.

I was close to my Grandpa and I feel like I knew him pretty well, but I found out this week that I didn’t know him outside the circle of our immediate family. But I found out that Grandpa had a wide-ranging and positive influence on a large group of people that I had either never met or didn’t know very well. Both at the funeral service and in the newspaper’s online guest book, people wrote moving tributes about my Grandpa and his optimism, positive spirit, and the encouragement he gave them. These tributes came from his nieces and nephews, people who lived next door to Grandma and Grandpa, people he worked with, people he worked ON (as a masseur) and other friends he met through the course of his long life.

In my own tribute to Grandpa, I said that he was absolutely the most positive person I had ever met, prone to excessive bragging on his grandkids and kids. Whenever I would see him, even during the last couple of years, a typical exchange would be: “Grandpa, how are you doing?” “Man, I’m doing so well, I don’t know how to handle it!” Or: “I am more blessed than anyone has a right to be.”

The Thanksgiving season seemed like the perfect time of year to pay tribute to a guy like my Grandpa. After all, Christians ought to be much more like him than we are. I should be much more like him than I am. So with all our blessings and faith, why is it easier sometimes to see the negative things about life? Why do optimism and thanksgiving come so hard, at least for some folks like me?

This will be my topic for Sunday, so your comments are welcome (and they MAY appear in the sermon!)

Read my Dad’s tribute here.

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“Why does God take some home who still have so much to offer…
when there are so many others he leaves behind who could more easily be spared?”

I’m paraphrasing that quote from Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary. I believe that baseball commissioner Landis said it at the death of Christy Matthewson at age 45. The press called Matthewson “the Christian gentleman” because of his integrity at a time when the game was dominated by morally questionable men like Ruth, Cobb, gamblers, bootleggers, and even Landis himself.

I’ve thought about that quote a lot since Saturday evening when our MHCC friend A. L. Woody died of cancer at age 37, one day after his wedding anniversary, leaving behind a wife, Barbara, and twin daughters Casey and Sarah, age 10. Why would God take someone like A. L., who still had so much left to do when God knows there are others who could more easily be spared?!

The thing is, A. L. didn’t think like that. John Pryor, in his funeral talk yesterday, said: “His attitude was not ‘Why me?’ but ‘Why NOT me’? He firmly believed that he would remain alive as long as God wanted him to - and that God always knows best. In his struggle against cancer, A. L. remained unflinchingly brave and regularly encouraged those around him. He fought hard to live because he wanted as much time as possible with his family, but he never feared death or doubted his salvation.”

In the end, I have to admit that A. L. was right and I am wrong. It’s true that A. L. had to leave undone his work as a father (work that only he could do) while others (myself included) seem to have less pressing tasks. But the world hasn’t operated with fairness and equity since Eden, and it won’t again until God’s Kingdom fully comes. To choose faith over despair is to make a commitment to trust God when it doesn’t all add up and wait for the end of the story to be written.

Thanks, A. L., for doing that. Wish you were still here though.

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Most of you know that my wife Cindy and I have no children of our own. I have no regrets about that because I think it’s important to live the life God gives you and to live it faithfully, and we have many wonderful blessings for which to be grateful – my greatest blessing being her. But occasionally I get to look through the window at what might have been…

This past Saturday, for reasons you can read about in an earlier post, I found it necessary to go to a mall in Chattanooga with Mallory and Jessica, the college students who have been working at MHCC this summer. Both of them are twenty-year-old college juniors, Jessica at Wheaton College near Chicago, and Mallory at Vanguard University in Southern California. Now most of my friends my age (42) have children who are in early high school and younger. But it wouldn’t be unusual at my age to have a twenty-year-old child. My parents did when they were 42.

This little road trip opened me to a new world, one which is commonplace for many of you. I pray that you don’t take it for granted. First, the drive itself – I listened to their music (Coldplay, Pedro the Lion, Ben Folds) and I made them listen to some of mine (I had to pronounce the name “John Mellencamp” a couple of times before they said it sounded familiar). Then when we walked into the mall, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t been in a mall for maybe three years. Not exactly my kind of place, you know. But more than that, watching these two young women shop and make wise and mature buying choices was fascinating to me and made me proud on behalf of their parents.

What an awesome responsibility and privilege to raise daughters these days! The best parents teach their girls to be strong, independent, and smart, to respect themselves because they are beloved daughters of God and to expect nothing less than respect from others. Most of you have seen these two young women at church and you know that they are both beautiful. But what I have seen over these last seven weeks (and what I pray their parents see) is that each is, in her own way, wise, confident, steel-strong, excellent in leadership, compassionate and gracious.

Here’s my advice to those of you who are working hard to teach your daughters the same qualities, and feeling the pressure, the strain, and maybe even the heartache of raising your girls: Don’t miss it for anything.

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When I suggested to Mallory and Jessica (from Group Workcamps) that we should go fishing this coming week, I knew I should do some boat maintenance and fish-scouting in order to have a successful trip. Through various circumstances, Jessica (a Junior at Wheaton College) and Cindy (my wife, natch) came along on what was supposed to be the scouting and boat-shakedown trip.

It would be an understatement to say that things didn’t go exactly as planned. I made my first mistake when, after the boat motor didn’t start right away, I hooked up the electric trolling motor and pointed us away from shore. I figured that I’d get it started soon, and I didn’t want us drifting back onto land in the meantime.

My second mistake happened when, as I saw a really ominous black cloud heading in, I didn’t turn us back immediately. After all, it hadn’t rained around here for weeks!

So what happened? I never got the motor started, and we were overtaken by an ugly storm (with lightning) that blew us to a point midway between the launching ramp at the city park and the one at the Highway 58 landing. Along about the time that Jessica and I were swimming and pushing/pulling the boat along the shore, she laughingly reminded me that her mother had sent me an email thanking me for taking good care of her. Ouch!

There is a Latin phrase, in absentia parentis, that used to describe the responsibility of colleges and universities (no longer, unfortunately), and should still fit the church. In absentia parentis means that we look out for the children of other people even as we look out for our own. Even though I had offered to Jessica the chance to let Cindy take her back to the church and leave me to fix my mess, I really felt rotten later for letting her family down and getting her into this “adventure” just because I didn’t want to give up.

Well we did get the boat back home, Cindy and I had a brief fight about my poor judgement (it’s all better now), I ended up replacing Jessica’s rain-damaged cell phone (glad to do it, Jess), and the inside of my truck smells like a kennel (from water, not from any specific passenger).

Despite all of this, I had a really great time. Jess is such a great girl that she had me laughing most of the time instead of insanely clubbing my boat motor with the paddle, Chevy Chase-like. Still…

The bad decisions we make don’t usually affect us alone. My desire is to live and lead responsibly out of respect for those who work (and “fish”) with me and those who care about them.

P. S. - Tonight, after a little tinkering, the motor started on the second pull!

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Jared Keller at Exultate Justi has a great post detailing his opposition to “Christian pacifism” in Iraq. Keller uses the recent rescue (by non-pacifists, naturally) of three Christian aid workers in Iraq to delve into the issue of pacifism, and he pulls in some excellent sources including C. S. Lewis and George Orwell. I invite you to read Keller’s post and maybe consider starting a thread on this topic at our discussion board.

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Exultate Justi is a well-written blog that is sometimes political, sometimes personal and always thought-provoking. It contains some great out-of-the-way evangelical links too. Blogger Jared Keller is a family friend (he’s my wife’s brother’s wife’s brother - got it?).

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