The .Plan

Online registration for the 2008 course is officially open!

(top to bottom = east to west)

At my old church, there were a lot of talented musicians and artists. One Sunday morning, Nate taught us a very simple melody he had composed.

Sometimes, when I pray, I just sing to myself Nate’s arrangement of the first two lines of Psalm 103.

Bless the LORD,
O my soul,
All that is in me bless His name.
Bless the LORD,
and forget not all His benefits.
Bless, the LORD, O my soul.

Bless the LORD,
O my soul,
Bless His name, bless His holy name.
Bless the LORD,
O my soul,
Bless His name, bless His holy name.

The Dallas Morning News posts an amazing story about grace and reconciliation in the life of Joshua Hamilton, who in 1999 was the first high schooler to be picked #1 in the baseball draft since Alex Rodriguez:

He started hanging out with the guys from the [tattoo] place, too. He joined them one night at a strip joint. That, Hamilton says, is when he took his first drink and snorted his first line of cocaine.

“It was just a familiar place to go,” Hamilton says. “They weren’t bad people. They just did bad things. But I chose to do it.”…

It began a cycle: There were failed drug tests, suspensions, short rehab trips, stretches of sobriety, reinstatement and, inevitably, relapse…

He married Katie during a sober stretch in 2004, but within six months the marriage was strained. On the day that Katie returned from the hospital following the birth of their daughter, Sierra, she sent Hamilton to pick up prescriptions. A 10-minute errand stretched into something much longer. Katie called a local bar. Josh was there.
–Evan Grant, “Faith brings Texas Rangers’ Hamilton back from the brink”, Dallas Morning News, January 27, 2008

I hear stories like this all the time from my patients. Sometimes their stories of suffering and social isolation can be too much to bear. Most of the time it is hard not to be moved. There are commonalities between their lives, and my life, and perhaps the lives of some of my friends, and sometimes it just seems like a matter of degree and consequence rather than an unbridgeable gulf between me and them.

The stories are often tragic. But every now and then, there is grace:

Hamilton cites a day in the summer of 2005 as his lowest moment. He awoke from a crack binge in a stiflingly hot trailer surrounded by a half-dozen unfamiliar stoned faces. His reaction: He loaned his truck to a dealer to get more crack. When the dealer didn’t return, Hamilton took off on foot, found a pay phone and called his temporarily estranged wife. She picked him up.

He showed up shortly afterwards at his grandmother’s home, gaunt and disheveled. Mary Holt couldn’t turn him away. But it wasn’t until after he used in his grandmother’s home and she confronted him about it that something changed.

“I’m tired of you killing yourself,” she told him in October 2005. “I’m tired of watching you hurt all of these people who care about you.”

I am currently working my way through a book by David Garland and Diana Garland, Flawed Families of the Bible: How God’s Grace Works through Imperfect Relationships. As I read it, I reflect on the ways in which I fail to acknowledge the Christ as the Son of God. Yet sometimes I also cannot help but harbor a deep and abiding hope, knowing that, despite our failures, the Christ makes Himself known to us anyway.

He truly is the author of my life and the editor of my mistakes.

Faith, he regularly testifies, has put him back in baseball after four years of addiction problems so ugly you can’t blame his family for not wanting to relive them. But because of faith, they do — to churches, youth groups and halfway houses.

“God told me he was going to give Josh baseball back, but it wasn’t going to be for baseball,” Katie says. “It was going to be for something much bigger. He was going to give Josh a platform to help others. He is the most beautiful choreographer. It’s not by accident that all the things that have happened in our lives have happened.”

Judging by the cover, I’m going to hazard a guess that the blonde isn’t as wholesome as Elizabeth Shue was in the original Karate Kid. And I have a hard time imagining Djimon Hounsou adjusting to an acting role where he doesn’t play the wildly screaming African (”give us FREE!” “he is my SON!”).

I’m in the way of fallin’ down
I won’t let you go that far now
I’m in the way of fallin’ down
I won’t let you got that far now
–Jars of Clay, “I’m in the Way”

As I drove over Twin Peaks, Alison Krauss was plaintively crooning over the speakers, and the sun was peeking out over San Francisco Bay in the distance. The rain had momentarily washed away the clouds, and there were only hazy shades of orange, pink, and yellow for as far as the eye could see. I passed by weary joggers punishing their lungs and coaxing their bodies up 17th Street — men walking hand in hand with their poodles in the Castro — sleepy-eyed twentysomethings stumbling to Maxfield’s House of Caffeine for their daily dose. The typically bustling Mission was quiet.

San Francisco. Two and a half years remaining.

In West Hollywood there is an Italian restaurant, Al Gelato, where you can eat the world’s best large meatball for $5.95.

Making meatballs, or making a large meatball, is not an exact science. You take ground chuck and Italian sausage, 2:1 or 3:1, and mix it with basil, parsley, oregano, salt, ground pepper, stale bread crumbs, and a few eggs. To help the meatball absorb water, minced zucchini is also an option.

It never looks pretty when you start out:

I think that’s why cooking can be therapeutic. Only in the kitchen do you see the rawness at the beginning, the beauty at the end, and the messy process in the middle.

Maggi Dawn has written, “Repeated, habitual prayer gradually tests and sifts what you believe is really important and what is of ephemeral value. If something doesn’t matter that much, the momentum for prayer will diminish. But if it does matter, an unanswered prayer becomes like grit in an oyster — something that worries and annoys you until you are determined not to take no for an answer.”

Parker Palmer drops the word on spiritual formation:

Another myth tells us that community equals utopia, that in easy access to one another and the comfortably supportive relationships which will result, we will quickly find ourselves brothers and sisters again. But community is not like this; it is more like a crucible or a refiner’s fire. Community means the collision of egos, and while there is the pain of not getting our way, there is the promise of finding the Way…

The great danger in our utopian dreams of community is that they lead us to want association with people just like ourselves. Here we confront the third myth of community — that it will be an extension and expansion of our own egos, a confirmation of our own partial view of reality. But in true community we do not choose our companions. Instead, they are given to us by grace… In true community there will be enough diversity and conflict to shake loose our need to make the world in our own image. True community will lead us to risk the prayer that God’s will, not our own, be done… will constantly remind us that our grip on truth is fragile and incomplete, that we need many ears to hear, the fullness of God’s word. And the disappointments of community life can be transformed by our discovery that the only dependable power for life lies beyond all human structures and relationships.
–Parker Palmer, “A Place Called Community”, The Christian Century, March 16, 1977

If being enfolded into Christian community is truly a “translation of a person into the house of God”, or oikos tou theou, as Miroslav Volf compellingly writes in his commentary on the first letter of Peter, then it seems appropriate that the process of the walk would include training and habituation into an ecclesial way of being that manifests a certain social difference from the world at large.

Sometimes that process can be difficult.