What are you going to do with your life?

We have a will, given by God, and we can follow whatever we will in life. We direct our lives by an act of will to pursue our passions – our philosophy. Some folks follow their favorite sport, some a community, some a profession, some a religion, and some a relationship or relationships. Even relationships with our spouse and kids should fall behind that of our self to God. My point cooks down to is, “Thou shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:3, Deuteronomy 5:7, Judges 6:10, Hosea 13:4. (You know it is important if it is repeated twice – this one is stated once and then repeated three times. Maybe where we direct our will matters…)

This is not a commandment with an explicit resultant blessing, but paying attention to it pays off great dividends in our relationships. If we make our relationship our god, and follow humanity (boyfriend or girlfriend, spouse, or even our self) more intently than– or to the exclusion of The Lord, we are bound to be let down. In a military spouse context, we can just get beaten down by the separation, the not knowing, and the horrific lies and other disingenuous acts of those around us. Focusing on God helps us rise above all that.

We can, by our will, direct our lives right at another person or persons. Even if the object of our desire reciprocates, we are bound for an intense collision, but what happens after that? We cannot stay in one place, any more than the object of our desires can. We continue on a trajectory that will bring us apart. If they do not reciprocate or even if they only partly do, we are in for a lifetime of pursuit of a human being that will change and let us down. What if one falls in love with one’s-self? I was a young man when I realized I consistently fail to live up to my own standards, let alone God’s; and I was left trying to explain myself to me.

Our children learn from watching us, not so much from what we tell them. If we despise our situation, our spouse, our relationship with God, our self, or even the kids; they’ll know it and that is what they’ll grow into. On the contrary, showing them we are more in love with them than we are with God, our self, or our spouse is detrimental to their development as young believers and young people learning to have a balanced life. We need, wherever our spouses are, to let our kids know we are more committed to God and the spouse than we are to the kids. They need to know God values us more than they do. We are God’s favorite child, not our children’s doormat. We are here to serve, but not to suffer their abuse. They are wired to usurp any and all of our other relationships so that we can serve them. Being made in the image of God, our kids are jealous of our love and will move heaven and earth to co-opt it from wherever else we direct it. I think of my then two-year-old Eliana, who learned to grab my chin and pull my face around to look at her so she knew she had my attention when she wanted to talk to me. It was endearing and delightful, but when I was in prayer or conversation with Cassie, she had to learn to wait for my attention. This is a small metaphor for a concept parents know well about the little tyrants that are their sweet bundles of joy. Could it be that the evil one would even use our beautiful children to rip us from the two other most important relationships we have? How much easier would he use a life of service to the country involving deployments and separation?

God values us much more than even we can. My self-concept and self estimation is much lower than God’s knowledge of what I am and can be. The world sees us as how much we can contribute to a household’s bottom financial line. God sees us as favorite children and agents for redemption of the world through His Son. A well-to-do household cannot redeem a soul. A parent raising a child/children in the way of The Lord is answering their highest calling. (Required reading: “Family Driven Faith” by Voddie Baucham) How important is it to demonstrate to our children that we are as valuable as God sees us?

Only when we focus our lives on an immovable object can we truly focus and go through the winds, waves, rocks, and shoals on any kind of even keel. Ships have the North Star or Southern Cross. We have Jesus. He gives us the momentum and structural integrity to go through whatever life throws at us. Like Peter stepping out of the boat, as long as our eyes are on Him, we can walk on the water and not founder in the storms of life. When I learned that Cassie was committed to a life growing nearer to God, it assured me that we were compatible. For all the differences in our lives, we were both heading in the same direction. It is a geometry lesson like a triangle where the two bottom angles are moving nearer to the top. We would necessarily get closer to each other as we grew nearer to our common goal.

Again and again this has played itself out in our marriage as we let one another down (OK, mostly it is I who lets her down…) and pick up the pieces to get on to the next day together. In our individual commitments to Him, God has carried us over rocky ground and bridges we didn’t think we wanted to cross to the path we now walk together. We have a lovely growing brood of children and anticipate growing closer together yet as we get younger and younger at heart, and longer and longer of tooth. She is more beautiful today than when we met, and much a more delightful conversationalist and companion. I cannot wait to spend each day with her in my arms. That day will come, by the grace of God…

PILATE'S QUESTION - Your opinion, please???

"What is truth?" (John 18:38 - part)

Was Pilate scornfully mocking Jesus, or was he asking a genuine question for which he hoped to find an answer?

HOW DO YOU TAKE YOURS?

I was turning over the maintenance organization I'd built at the Navy airfield in Rota, Spain. My relief was a gentleman who had married a beautiful local girl, transferred to Italy for a few years, and come back to be near her family. She had dragged him back to Rota, but apparently he was glad it was time for work this Monday because she'd had a rough weekend getting re-acquainted. We chuckled at how difficult it could be dealing with a wife who got what she wanted.

After an hour of file locations, weekly routines, maintenance plans, work project histories and forecasts, and colloquial procedures; he rose at eight and headed for the break room, asking, "How do you take your coffee?"

"Oh, like my little bride," I said, nodding to the picture of my All-American sweetie above the desk, "blonde and sweet." He grinned, winked, and headed off around the corner while I answered an email.

The cup was good, but the next hour was long, and I got up for a stretch and a nine O'clock heater for our cups. On my way out, I asked, "How do you take yours?"

I should have seen his reply coming... "Oh, like MY little bride, dark and bitter!"

CHURCH PAINTING

I was a young man in Clearwater, MN in the late 1970’s. Dad was a welding instructor nine months a year and did well drilling, steel construction, and odd jobs over the summers to augment his income. A teacher’s salary was hardly sufficient for a family with five kids – one in college and four adolescents. We lived pretty much hand-to-mouth most of the time, as did many of our neighbors. Competition was pretty strong for those odd jobs. It was August, and we needed school supplies and clothes and the house payment was due, so I know Dad was stressed.

The local church was in disrepair, and its building was in pretty rough shape as well. That is to say, the congregation was not so large as it once had been, and the remaining faithful had more faith than gold. They did agree finally to spend some trust fund money on a face-lift for the church building. It had been built in the 1920s and painted once since, the last time in the 1950s. The whitewash was wearing mighty thin.

The preacher got the go-ahead from the board and received a very tight budget for the project. Considering that the remaining congregation consisted mostly of octogenarians, using parishioner labor was out of the question, so he let out a request for bids. Unfortunately, they wanted to pay wages similar to what they’d paid the last time this was done. Dad won the contract by banking on my being able to work for little of nothing, and figuring materials very carefully.

We hauled in our gear in Dad’s old dilapidated Dodge pickup, laid ground cloths over the shrubbery and taped off the beautiful stained glass windows with old newspapers. I mixed the white paint carefully so as not to waste a drop. Dad confided in me that we would use thicker paint around the ground to get a good coverage, and we could thin it as we got up high on the peaks and more as we went up the steeple.

I didn’t care for the scheme, but he was my dad, and had a pretty good sense about finishing a job with quality to ensure we would get called back or referred to more work elsewhere, so I trusted him.

The weather called for sunshine all week, so we began painting on the structure, starting at the peaks with a somewhat thin whitewash and mixing it stronger as we reached the ground. We were saving the steeple for the end of the job, and would finish it about Saturday noon, leaving the rest of the day to clean up for church on Sunday.

Friday we set scaffolding around the steeple, fully 70 feet in the sky over the Mississippi River Valley. We felt good about our progress so far and breathed easily for being on track. It was a beautiful evening, but as I began mixing the paint for the next day’s work on the steeple, a cloud came as if out of nowhere. I decided to make all preparations for morning so we could get right to painting and have a chance to get it dried in case that cloud meant a storm.

I realized we were shorter on paint than we’d planned, and told Dad I’d give up my wages to pay for another bucket of paint. He said it was too late on a Friday to get to town for another bucket that evening, and if we went in the morning we’d lose too much of the day to finish the job. He said we’d make it on the paint we had, thinning progressively as we went up the steeple where it would be very hard to see the lack of coverage from the ground.

I protested. Was this not God’s house, after all? And here he was, up high, talking about getting one over on God! I think he was feeling some pressure, because Dad was abnormally curt with me, telling me to mix three pails of paint in graduated thickness. “Now!”

The resounding thunder clap that punctuated the end of his last statement convinced us that we’d best hurry and finish the job before a rain shower came and really messed us up.

At dawn, that cloud was overhead with a menacing dark color that led to a brilliant silver lining as the sun climbed behind it. The painting went well through the first bucket, but coverage was sparse and we had to double- and triple-coat some areas to avoid see-through paint where it was low enough to be noticed. I didn’t say much, but tried to make it as good as possible with the materials I was given.

I had (ingeniously, I though) tied each of the three buckets off to pull up in order. As I raised the second bucket, lightening flashed and thunder pealed loudly overhead. Maybe it was a wind gust, or maybe I flinched, I don’t know, but the bucket caught on a scaffold plank, tipped, and banged on a pole; and half of the paint spilled out. To make matters worse, a big blob of the paint landed smack in the center of the bare metal spot where the pickup’s paint had given up years ago, leaving a large circle of white surrounded by the dark rusted ring on the top of the cab.

Mortified, I clambered down. As I cleaned up the spill on the sidewalk, Dad showed up beside me. I told him he had to let me buy more paint now, but he poured water in the bucket and said we couldn’t waste the time or money, so we’d have to make it work before that cloud thinned all of our work.

As we mixed the bucket-and-a-half we had left into something the consistency of milk, I brooded. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, but I felt like I was between a rock and a hard place, and I told Dad I didn’t think God would take this well.
Grudgingly, I re-mounted the scaffold and began rolling on the watery whitewash. It took too many coats to get any coverage at all, and we were going through it just too fast.

We had finished about 20 feet of the wide base of the steeple, with the skinny 20 feet to go, and we were about to run out of paint. I felt ready to come to blows with Dad as he told me to take what was left back down for yet another dose of water. I protested that this was not a proper way to treat a church. Dad told me he was calling the shots, and this was the way it was going to be. As he told me to “Get down there,” he teasingly cuffed me on the back of the head and knocked my beat up old black beret into the breeze.

That cloud roiled behind me and wind stiffened blowing past, and I knew I had to comply with my father’s wishes. Dejected, I climbed down, noticing my hat flopping downward on the air, landing upside-down in the center of the paint spot on top of the pickup. The black spot in the center of the circle of white surrounded by the darker pickup roof looked like a WWI Allied Forces airplane fuselage badge. It was a good day for hitting that pickup.

I reached the ground and stared at that bucket of whitewash, feeling for all the world that mixing it down again would be a very, very bad thing. I decided to go recover my hat and try again in a moment. I had almost reached the truck when Dad reached me. He grabbed me by the arm, spun me around, and sent me reeling toward the paint, saying to get the water and get the job done. He was speaking to me, so as I stumbled, I looked back to watch him as he took one step toward me and barked he didn’t care what God thought.

The lightening flash was blinding, leaving an impression on my corneas of Dad’s silhouette with his hair on end and the beam of light from the cloud focused on the cab of the pickup behind him. My hat flipped through the air one direction and the hood of the truck the other way like Tiddley Winks. The deafening crack of thunder and the simultaneous popping of the four truck tires were followed by the crash of the truck’s hood and then a resounding silence.

A very clear, distinct, and deep booming voice came from the cloud, saying, “Repaint, and thin no more!”