Waiting For Sunday

Here’s an article of diet tips from Kyle Pott (his real name?) who lost 50 pounds in three months and has kept it off for more than a year.  Like a lot of good advice, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but the thing that makes it attractive to me is the realistic approach.  Potts dieted only five days a week and gave himself a break on the weekends.  Or, if he had a social event during the week that called for a little indulgence, he made it up Saturday.

His ten tips may not allow you to drop 50 pounds by May 1 - he’s got to have some good metabolism - but his approach seems solid and workable, including his ideas for keeping it off.

Found this through Lifehacker.com

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I recently discovered Carmine Gallo, a Business Week writer who focuses on the craft of public speaking and giving presentations. I’ve been slowly working through his articles, trying to learn as much as I can to apply to my own preaching and teaching. Gallo is practical and entertaining. Check him out before you face your next crowd.

Here’s a link to the RSS feed for his articles. You can search the Business Week site for older postings.

PS - I found Gallo’s feed on another blog. As soon as I remember where, I’ll give credit.

Update: Ah, here is is - a post from Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion about the Business Week feed builder which mentions Gallo as an example.

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Each day the Internet Movie Database posts the names and photos of four celebrities who were “born today”. I don’t know when I started doing this, but I always click through that list hoping that today all the stars listed will be older than me. There aren’t many such days anymore. Yesterday it almost happened. Only Teri Hatcher from Desperate Housewives was younger than me. (We were born in the same year. Too bad she isn’t holding up as well as I am).

Today, though, everyone IS older than me, thanks to Judi Dench (72), Kirk Douglas (90), John Malkovich (53) and Felicity Huffman (also a Desperate Housewife, 44).

Why do I care? I can’t say for sure. I guess I find comfort in knowing that there are people well ahead of me in the age race who are valued by society. The IMDb list gives balance to an interview I heard last night with two guys in their early-20s who just sold their internet start-up company, presumably for millions.

This particular neurosis hit me early. I remember, when I was 21, writing a letter to a girl I liked about how strange it felt that Dwight Gooden (then 20) was making a big splash pitching for the Mets. I think I was basically trying to sound deep to impress the girl, but Gooden’s early success did make me think about how quickly life passes. Doc Gooden’s recent life also makes me think - about how the full story of a life takes years to write. Gooden spent most of this year in prison.

In Searching For God Knows What, Donald Miller writes at length about this need we have to validate ourselves in contrast to others. He says that an alien visiting our world would see clearly that it drives nearly everything we do. Age makes a handy comparison. So does weight, looks, athletic ability, success and the accumulation of possessions. Miller traces this back to The Fall when Adam and Eve sinned and cut us off from the One who tells us that we are valuable.

Christ means to bridge this gap back to God, to reconnect us with the Source of our identity. The more I abide in Him, the less I need to compare.

And the less need I have to point out that Brad Pitt is older than me.

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Every once in awhile, NPR’s “This I Believe” series features a profound and moving piece. This morning I heard this one, I Always Have a Choice, on the way in to work. Catherine Royce was a dancer and an artist before she was stricken with ALS. Her perspective is worth hearing.

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I met a good friend for lunch today. As we finished up, he asked me what I had planned for the afternoon. Although I was a little embarrassed about it, I told him that I was taking a few hours off to go see a movie. I was embarrassed to tell a church member that I was taking a few hours off (but don’t worry, MHCCers - you got your money’s worth out of me today), and also because I was going to see a movie by myself, which I fear sounds odd. Turns out that he was also taking a few hours off to go play golf by himself.

Six years ago, Robert Putnam published a book called Bowling Alone, about how community ties in America are fraying and falling apart so that folks these days are just as likely to bowl alone as to take part in a league. He made it sound so sad.

The thing is, I love going to movies by myself. (Let me hasten to add that I love going with my wife too!) I also love traveling alone by plane, walking alone, working out alone. It energizes me almost to giddiness to be alone in a public place, alone in a crowd.

I do need my friends. I’m human (and sometimes insecure) after all. But I am also an introvert, so I need more time by myself than most of you. Still I wonder how many of you feel the same way. Maybe you live in a house full of beloved people, or you’re surrounded all day at school or work by not-so-beloved-people. Isn’t alone-time one of our most precious commodities, one that’s in awfully short supply?

P. S. It so happened that I REALLY got some alone-time at the movie. I was THE only person in the theater! When there was a delay in starting the movie, I was SURE that they were going to come tell me to leave! This was at Downtown West, an older, smaller eight-screen multiplex, but I saw NO ONE there except two employees! Cindy and I saw the second Matrix movie with one other couple, but I’ve never had the place to myself before. Have you?

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When I was young, adults I cared about lied to me. These adults weren’t my enemies. They were friends, teachers, church folks, relatives, people who cared.

The lie they told me: “You can be anything you want to be.”

It wasn’t true. I wanted to play shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, or quarterback for the Browns. I couldn’t do it, and no amount of positive thinking or even practice could have made it so (although with the Browns’ record, what difference would it make?)

The fact is, I was made for certain things and not for others. So were you. Your natural abilities, your temperament, and the spiritual gifts God gives you make you unique - different than me, different than your sister, different than your Dad’s expectations of you, different maybe than your own dreams and desires.

This point was driven home to me recently by Parker Palmer’s book, Let Your Life Speak. Palmer, an educator and a teacher of teachers, reminds me to “listen to my life” to hear God’s calling on me. He says: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.” (p. 3)

And: “Engineering involves more than telling materials what they must do. If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his failure will go beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life at peril…The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the materials you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you.” (p. 16)

This may sound like advice suited best for young people who are choosing a trade or a college major. But Palmer speaks and writes to teaching professionals who have been at their life’s work for some time, whether they entered it for good reasons or poor. He helps them learn to teach in ways that grow out of who they are. That’s encouraging to me, because at this stage in my life, I’m probably not going to head off into nuclear physics, diesel mechanics or stand-up comedy no matter what my life tries to tell me (well maybe stand-up comedy). What I CAN learn is how to live, minister, preach, write, visit and care about people in ways that are true to how God has made me.

One of the themes we’re stressing at church this month is discovering how God equipped you to serve. “We have different gifts, according to the grace given us”, Romans 12:6 says. And in Christ’s Body, the church, “God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be” (1 Corinthians 12:18).

So let your life speak. Or, more accurately, let God speak through your life. Maybe it won’t change what you do for a living. But it could change the life that flows out of you.

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A. W. Tozer said that every Christian must learn to bear one of two pains; either the pain of double-mindedness, or the pain of the crucified self. The pain of double-mindedness is the pain of a tooth-ache that lasts a lifetime. The pain is always there, filling you with resentment, anger, and envy. The pain of the crucified self, on the other hand, is a deep, terrible, surgical pain. But once it’s over, it’s over.I’ve had this quote from Tozer laying around on my hard drive for many years, and I’ve used it in sermons before (and I used it this Sunday). In all honesty, though, I haven’t been able to trace it down via Google, and I’m starting to wonder if he really said it. Like I said Sunday, I agree with all of this quote except the last line: “Once it’s over…” Surgical pain fades away, but I think I was the reason Jesus told us to take up the cross DAILY in Luke 9:23.

Yet I can’t quibble with the underlying truthfulness of Tozer’s words about double-mindedness. I find myself seeking God in the morning, and looking out for myself by lunch. I pray and I count my money; I worship and I assess the honors people give me; I call myself a servant and then get angry when people treat me like one.

And it’s an awful way to live. O wretched man that I am!

How many Christians do you know who REALLY practice dying to self? I DO know a few. I work with at least two. I know a few others in church, and most of them are older. Is it their life-and faith-experience that makes them as they are? Or is it that my generation and the younger ones are failing to produce that kind of Christian?

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“Human beings are explanation generators.”

So says Daniel Taylor in his book The Myth of Certainty (p. 22). He says that we generate explanations about what life means to give us security, and that (and this is the interesting and scary part) all explanations for life are self-verifying. That means that they all seem to be true, that we can find “evidence” to back them up.

Our house is currently under the attack of fruit flies. There used to be a theory that said that fruit spontaneously generated fruit flies. It isn’t true, but if I hadn’t been taught otherwise, I would THINK it was true. It’s an explanation that works. All I have to do is leave an apple out and I’ve got fruit flies.

People used to think that the universe revolved around the earth. It seems to do just that. If you picture the night sky as a black globe enclosing the earth with the stars painted on it, that works as an explanation for most of the universe. Only a few objects mess up that theory by moving against that black globe, including the sun, moon and planets (which is why they’re called “planets” or “wanderers”).

Explanations of all kinds “work” to explain life, and everybody has one - from staunch young-earth creationists to strict Darwinists, from radical Islamic clerics to shouting fundamentalist Christian preachers to left-leaning atheists, from the Amish in Lancaster who stoically mourn the recent school shooting (and put it in God’s hands) to the baffled worldly reporters who sip Starbucks Chai Tea Lattes in front of their farmhouses…we all know how to explain the world and we all have a group of friends around us who will affirm our explanation.

Doesn’t make it true, though.

I see these life-explanations at work in Christians around me:

• Money doesn’t buy happiness. Money and Christ buy happiness.
• Pursuit of pleasure is empty…unless you go to church every other Sunday. Then pursuit of pleasure is quite admirable.
• The greatest commands of the faith? Learn to love yourself so you can love your neighbor and give ten percent of a tithe to God’s work.

Daniel Taylor: “Once in operation, a belief system processes all information, all evidence in its own terms, appropriating that which verifies its outlook and defusing or ignoring anything else” (p.23).

Remember, friends…there are many people who will affirm your version of the truth, for now anyway.

And then there is One who is Truth Himself.

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HP is promoting a new slimming feature on their digital cameras. The before-after pictures are impressive, but when you watch the demo at HP’s site, you can see the distortion take place. CBS took flak in late August for slimming down Katie Couric in a publicity photo.

I learned of the HP camera feature at Church Marketing, er, Stinks, a site devoted to evaluating and improving the way we promote churches. This is a good, short article on how dumb advertising campaigns may generate buzz but they hurt more than they help.

BTW, HP has been in the tech and business news lately for an unethical and probably illegal leak probe conducted against journalists, employees and HP directors.

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Mike Zukowski sent me this link to a Philip Yancey story called “Postcard from Africa” in Christianity Today. In Africa, AIDS, death, poverty and strong Christianity live with one another. My persistent thought while reading this story: African Christians will certainly lead us in the Kingdom of Heaven.

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Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 1 Corinthians 13:12

To me, this is one of the best promises of heaven that there is. Not just to know God fully, but to KNOW that he knows me fully, that he has all along. My heart’s greatest longing is for someone who KNOWS me as I am, not as I appear to be, not by the political or religious or cultural mold someone has chosen for me, not as a pastor or a white man or an American or a small town hick (though I am all of these things, without regret). I need that Someone who knows me in my sin, which is uglier than I can ever admit, and yet who calls me higher, “further up and further in”*, someone who sees the stained and rotten clothing I have left behind and no longer defines me by it.

There is, of course, no one one earth who can do this for us completely. In the best marriages and friendships, we sometimes come close. But then we see in the other that which threatens us, and we attack it and run.

That’s why I always return from my fruitless searches to the One who promises in Revelation 2:17 that one day (if I overcome) he will give me “a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.” Ah, to be NAMED by Him is to be known by Him, to receive His blessing, and to be granted a new destiny.

AMEN! Come (and name me) Lord Jesus!

*(A Narnia reference from The Last Battle(?))

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Since my previous post was about finding community and the one before that dealt with finding a life-long passion, I want to offer you this link to an 8-minute NPR story that pulls both together.

Shari Caudron, who is about my age, confesses that she has been serially passionate about a succession of things - ru