Problems are for Solving

Death is our enemy.

Death is the enemy of our savior.

Death brings pain and sorrow and tears into our lives.

Today two dear friends found out that their baby had died. The doctor calls it a blighted ovum, but there, in her womb, is a dead child. No heartbeat.

Children are full of life. They shine and glow and laugh and play.

There is nothing so dead as a dead child.

Today I weep with them. I shed tears right now because I love them and I love this child. And it will be a long time before we meet him in glory.

But this dead child isn’t dead. Death, here, has such a painful sting. He is where death has no sting. He plays and runs where sin cannot hurt him—where he is in the presence of Jesus.

Jesus will come one day to set all things right. When He comes there will be no more sorrow. No more pain. No more tears. No more death.

Bon voyage, baby. You have traveled home without us. We will meet you there soon.

A house of mourning is better than a house of feasting because our days are short. One day soon I will join this child and the seven that we have lost in the same way. I will join them when I die. And death will bring me into true life.

May our hearts be glad in Jesus as we mourn the loss of this precious child.

Another from the archives. I posted a modified version of this back in April, 2005.

From time to time it is my hope to write a bit on a topic related to Christian Community. There are many facets to it and I want to talk briefly about all of them.

One thing that is essential and that distinguishes and authentic community from a bunch of people who just happen to know each other is that people in a community spend time with one another. It seems terribly obvious to me–but it doesn’t seem like it is that obvious to everyone.

I have moved around a bit in my adult life and have finally settled in one place; hopefully for the rest of my life. In most of the churches in which I have been involved the church members are spread out and spend very little time with one another in between Sundays unless it is another programmed meeting of the Church.

As wonderful as the Lord’s Day is (and I’m sure I will write more about this at another time) it is not the productive time we need as a Church to build community. The Lord’s Day has been given to us for worship. The time we spend worshiping is not a time that we are building relationships with each other, but with God.

So when should these relationships be built? In time we spend together outside of the context of the worship service!

Think about it: Christians spending time with one another during the week for something other than a “small group.”? (I’m not dissing small groups here but saying that there must be something more than that. Frazee makes the same argument in his book that I posted a review of here on yesterday and Pantego Bible Church is centered around the small group.)

I’m going to write more on this as time goes on, and I have some specific ideas about ways we can “be with each other.”? I’m hoping that some of you do, too. Please leave a comment with your ideas about how and when and where Christians ought to be “with each other” in a way that fosters real, Biblical community.

The Connecting Church

by Randy Frazee

(Pastor of Pantego Bible Church in Ft. Worth, TX)

If you’re like me, you’ve been missing something in your life. It’s only recently that I realized what this is. Community. Authentic, biblical community. This is a hold in the lives of most of the church in the United States today.

American=Rugged Individual. All of us know this. We don’t have neighborhoods anymore but instead subdivisions. Even the name “subDIVISION” implies the separation we all feel from those we live near. America is called by many experts today including George Gallup, Jr. and George Barna the “loneliest nation on the earth.”? But is this individualism and isolationism that has become an integral part of our culture Biblical? Pastor Frazee says that it isn’t. In fact, he states that if the church is going to bring Jesus to the “me”? generation, it must do so by truly becoming what it was intended to be “the ultimate ‘we’? organization”.

Community is about serving something larger than oneself. As Church members we ought to understand community, but most of the time we don’t. We ought to depend upon one other, and we are called to be there for one other. Frazee wants to exhort the church to be a community once again. Our culture is marked by individualism, isolationism, and consumerism. These three marks of our culture present the three barriers to authentic biblical community.

Pastor Frazee writes, I wrote The Connecting Church in order to share the principles I am learning about authentic biblical community, principles gleaned both from my study of the Bible and from my conversations with other people”? Frazee doesn’t want these principles to be just in a book to be read, but to be lived out. He offers three Biblical solutions to the three barriers to community. To free us from individualism, he encourages the Church to find a shared purpose. This purpose needs to go beyond more people in the pews or even small groups, Frazee argues, to measuring our small groups and our church by the evidence of Spiritual growth that authentic community alone can feed. To free us from isolationism, he encourages us to live in a common place. This means that we have to totally rethink our lifestyle in order to find ourselves living near other members of the same Church. This means buying a neighborhood rather than just a house. Finally, to counter consumerism, Frazee encourages us to think as stewards of shared possessions. We need to think of all that we have as belonging to God so that we can use it for His purposes and the good of His Church.

Frazee’s book is a whole new look at what the Church should be. Despite the fact that Frazee is writing from the perspective of a Willow Creek model megachurch–this book can be immensely helpful in calling the church back to a simple, separate, deliberate community. This may just be the best thing to ever come out of Willow Creek.

Whether you’re in a big church or a small one—the principles in The Connecting Church are ones that the Church has lost in the last few generations and one we need to embrace once again. No matter your background, you will find it refreshing, and hopefully God will use this Biblical teaching to renew our sense of need for community in the modern Church.

You can find The Connecting Church at Amazon.com.

You may also want to check out the Connecting Church Association website.

Another from the archives, 6/25/05.

Yesterday we put a new front door on our house. By “we� I mean that a good friend and his two teenage sons put a new front door on my house and I tried not to get in their way while still trying to feel like I was being helpful.

Our front door was falling off its hinges and was old and scratched up and we decided to replace it. Now some household jobs I’ll try myself but I faced the front door with a quite a bit of trepidation. If you don’t fix the dryer in one try, you need to go to the Laundromat. Mess up the front door—well you can’t leave any more and that A/C starts sucking out the door like a vacuum and you die of heat exhaustion.

So needless to say we didn’t try to tackle this one on our own.

My friend worked in construction for a number of years and has experience and tools that I will only dream of. His boys already are handier than I may one day be (I hope to send Samuel out with them when they start doing jobs on their own as an apprentice/gopher). I asked him how long it would take to hang a door and he started out by telling me what could go wrong—and then said about four hours if none of that happened.

My eyes glazed over as he told me the things that could go wrong. It was like listening to a computer programmer talk about the intricacies of a SQL database—I just don’t get the terms. I try to learn a bit as I go—but my friend has forgotten more about construction than I’ll ever learn.

In amongst all of this (and this is the point of the blog) I asked what I could do to serve his family in way of repayment. He said he couldn’t think of anything—and that it was his pleasure to serve us this way.

It made me feel bad that he didn’t need anything from me—thought I’m pretty sure it was mostly pride. A bit later in the conversation we talked about timing and the weekend of July 4^th wouldn’t work because I’m donating some consulting to a ministry near Cincinnati and won’t be here.

My friend reminded me that this is how the church is supposed to work. He can hang a door—and loves to help other people that way. He can’t go help a ministry through a transition stage when they can’t afford to hire a consultant. And there are things that ministry is doing that neither of us can. We do what we can do—and we help others with those things—and then we accept the help of others in what we cannot do.

That’s part of the essence of community—serving one another faithfully and laying down our pride and allowing ourselves to be served. This same friend helped me install a dishwasher a while back so I could use the cash I saved not paying an installer to give to a friend who had a big need in his family. A circle of service that honors God rather than us. And when we see our need, we allow others to serve us as Jesus did.

The Beatles wrote a song a while back:

Help, I need somebody,

Help, not just anybody,

Help, you know I need someone, help.

When I was younger, so much younger than today,

I never needed anybody’s help in any way.

But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured,

Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors.

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down

And I do appreciate you being round.

Help me, get my feet back on the ground,

Won’t you please, please help me.

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways,

My independence seems to vanish in the haze.

But every now and then I feel so insecure,

I know that I just need you like I’ve never done before.

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down

And I do appreciate you being round.

Help me, get my feet back on the ground,

Won’t you please, please help me.

What they called help and what we might call help are not the same thing. But one thing where the song hits me is this: our pride (sinful pride) makes us feel self-assured, when God has given us needs that He has put other people around us to meet. And likewise, He has put us around others who need us as well—those particular gifts that He gives.

Community requires that we give to and take from one another. Not in a socialistic way—but in a way that we give in order to honor Jesus and we receive help because we recognize our weakness and need of it—just as we came to Jesus recognizing that we need Him.

I am sure that I will be writing more about this as time goes on, but I am very thankful today for the door on my home. I am thankful because of the love my friend has for me in serving my family in this way, and I am thankful that God has taught me to lay down my pride enough to receive the service my friend has offered me.

May we lay down our pride and serve one another and be served—all to the glory of the Humble Servant who has saved us from that pride.

On Monday I was reading in J.C. Ryle’s book Holiness (which I am not finishing as quickly as I’d like—but it is wonderful reading) and I came across the following:

. . . men try to cheat themselves into the belief that sin is not quite so sinful as God says it is, and that they are not so bad as they really are . . . . I fear we do not sufficiently realize the extreme subtlety of our soul’s disease. . . . Sin comes to us like Judas, with a kiss . . .

This is in a section where Ryle is talking about the deceitfulness of our own sin. Jeremiah 17:9 tells us that our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked. We deceive ourselves into thinking our sin isn’t sin and then we don’t need to repent.

Ryle’s book is a wonderful ‘gut check’ for me as I see my own lack of holiness and my need to constantly cry out to God like the Publican, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner!�

This is from the archives, 4/25/05, reposted here today.

Yesterday afternoon my family and I went to see my great-aunt Esther. Aunt Esther is the widow of one of an older brother to my mom’s mother. She’s in her 90’s, and was extremely lucid for her age.

As we visited, she told story after story from her younger days—stories about her parents, her in-laws and her children. Listening to her stories was very exciting for me not because they were old, but because I am connected through my family to her life. My oldest daughter sat at the feet of aunt Esther and ate up the stories, listening to her talk about her life.

It caused me to think quite a bit about something that we’ve lost in recent years—we’ve lost touch with our generations.

In America very few people live where they grew up. Even fewer people live within easy driving distance of all of their siblings and their parents. We have become a very transient society and have little real touch with those who have gone before us.

Six years ago my wife, my three oldest children and I moved from South Carolina to Illinois to take the job I have. I love my job and am very thankful for it, but one of the few drawbacks to my job is that it is in Illinois and will remain in Illinois. None of my siblings nor my parents live in the same time zone as I do, let alone the same town. The same is true for my wife—save my wife’s sister who lives with us.

I am not sure that this is universal, but this factor of our society doesn’t seem to bother most of the people I know. It didn’t use to bother me. As recently as 10 years ago I can remember thinking that it was a sign of weakness that some people lived so close to their parents. Maybe there is something in my educational past or some unwritten “rule� of our society. If a job asks you to move—you move. If there is a better paying job in another state, we move. It doesn’t matter what our goals were—we follow the job where we have the best advantages, the most money, etc. This ties in with what I wrote earlier week regarding corporations. Which demands more loyalty from us—our community (including our family) or our vocation?

When I moved to Illinois, though, I found people with roots. It seemed strange to me at first to meet someone who was living in a home that had been in his family for four generations. It doesn’t seem strange to me anymore—it is sad that it is not more common.

My children see their grandparents once a year on the average, sometimes twice. The time they get with their grandparents is rushed, filled with seeing wherever we are, rarely punctuated by long chats on the front porch hearing about the childhood of their grandparents while sipping lemonade or iced tea.

I am more and more convinced that we have lost a great deal in not having our grandparents around us more often. I personally know very little of the younger lives of my parents and grandparents and that saddens me. I want to be able to pass down a heritage to my children and my grandchildren from my parents and grandparents.

I know that I have contributed to the lack of stories that I have because I did not, when I was younger, seek out a depth of relationship with the prior generations. So much of this is due to my sin—and some due to my ignorance as to the value of what has gone before. I know that some of this is due to our societal push for everything new, everything different. The wheel must be reinvented—it must be done again by our generation. What our parents did, is by default to be avoided at all costs.

There are times for putting off the patterns of the previous generation. I did not grow up with the respect for God’s Sabbath that I have now, for example. But shaking off the generation before us has marked us as a society without history. We don’t want to know what has gone before and so we don’t. And so we don’t know what was good and what was bad—only that we must be different.

My wife and I have decided that we don’t want to move again. Not to a new area at least. And should God be pleased to let us stay in Central Illinois we hope to encourage our children to put down roots there with us. To pass up on a “better� job that requires them to move away from their heritage. My children may be called to be foreign missionaries and if so we will miss them. Even so I hope that they will take with them a sense of community that includes a touch with the generations before.

The fifth commandment is the first one with a promise. Honoring our parents (and our grandparents!) involves embracing and knowing our heritage and showing no disdain for those who have gone before us because they are old or tired or whatever. May the generation which we are now raising honor us and our parents in this way!

I’m still out of shape.

Tonight I spent 25 minutes on a recumbent bike—which wasn’t as hard as 20 minutes was just a few weeks ago. Saturday, though, I did the rowing machine thing for 20 minutes and felt like I was about to die. Must be something with the diaphragm or my abs. Anyway, things are improving and I’m getting into a good routine. I’m glad for the time I can spend with my wife exercising—and I’m glad that it is bearing fruit in my body being slightly less overweight and slightly less out of shape.

More later on this of course.

I’m no Chef Kevin, but I still eat out on occasion. Today I ate out twice (a rare occurrence), once with my wife (lunch) and once with my whole family (dinner).

Both meals were eaten at restaurants Chef Kevin recently reviewed, Grandpa John’s Rib Shack and CiCi’s Pizza.

Grandpa John’s was everything I expected and more. I ate the Pulled Pork dinner and TC had the Ribs. Both were great. I know Chef Kevin wasn’t impressed with the pork but I prefer it not smoked. And I just loved the BBQ sauce—just the right blend of sweet and spicy.

The big surprise for me was that the choice of sides included sweet potato fries. Both TC and I love sweet potatoes and get excited when it’s a choice instead of regular potatoes. The fries were wonderful and the Cajun baked beans as the second side worked great. I loved it. TC said the cole slaw was just like here mama used to make.

We will definitely be back—I won’t miss Famous Dave’s at all now—Grandpa John’s was better and local.

As for CiCi’s—TC and I used to eat there when we lived in South Carolina and always loved it. A bargain for a pizza buffet, and the customer service there was always top notch.

Nothing different here. A small hiccup was that they don’t take credit cards. Not a bad business move when you consider they have an ATM right there with a $.99 fee (much cheaper than most ATMs) and instead of taking a hit on the CC % they’ll make money on the cash.

The pizza was just like I remembered and they had one of my favorite video games in the game room for the kids and I to play after dinner. They’ll make whatever you want—whether it’s out or not—and always do it with a smile. I’m glad we finally got one here in Peoria. Like Chef Kevin I don’t like to eat at chains, but this is an exception to that rule.

Two fine meals today but I’m glad to be back to my wife’s cooking tomorrow.

A possible solution.

I recently commented this on a friend’s blog post. I’ve posted it here below with some alteration since the context is missing. Chad was mentioning that health care costs for the Amish are rising. Part of the reason for this is because the Amish do not take part in the insurance system and do not always get the dicounts that insurance compaines get. And according to a recent 60 minutes story, cash patients are paying two to three times what patients with insurance or government entitlement programs pay for the same service. Thus cash patients who pay their bills pay more for the same health care services than those who have some sort of third party paying the bill.

Let’s just imagine we would do something like an Amish community contracting with a doctor. Let’s forget about the Amish for a minute and say we’ll do it in a normal Christian community.

First, I think this system as outlined is generally a good idea. Right now there are Christian families paying between $700 and $1200 per month for medical insurance. A large part of that cost goes to pay for the primary care of insurance policy holders. For the purpose of our example let’s say one fourth.

So on average $200 per month for a family goes to primary care, or the general doctor that sees families.

That’s $2400 per year. That means for a doctor to take a practice making that $100,000 he’d need fewer than 100 families to contract with him at that rate, and that assumes he has over 50% overhead (nurses, rent, etc.). If this was done in a community of Christians he wouldn’t need malpractice insurance (1Corinthians 6) so 50% is probably high as an overhead estimate. And because the doctor is being paid an agreed upon salary for serving all the families there’s no reason pre-existing conditions need to be taken into account at all.

Only 100 families. And part of the contract could be a charity care outreach of accepting 10 families who can’t afford the $200/month. They can barter or work for their service (lowering overhead even further). This means for every ten families involved in this type of system one family could get services they could afford, regardless of income and without government tax monies.

With only 100 families to make $100,000 in salary the doctor now has time that he wouldn’t ordinarily have. He can focus his ministry (and I believe that that practice of medicine ought to be looked at as a ministry or service) on prevention and healthy living and not just after-the-fact treatment.

I’m still flushing out how this should work, but this kind of contract arrangement (with mercy ministry built in) seems to be a part of the picture of breaking the cycle. And it puts the doctor in a position where his personal best interests are in keeping people healthy whereas the current system thrives off of misfortune. I don’t want my doctor to need sick people to survive. It seems to me that he ought to get paid more (meaning same pay with less time he has to work) when his patients are well than when they are sick.