Prayer, which means being with God, requires a willingness to “be still and know” (Psalm 46:10). God intentionally marks our lives with a Sabbath (Lord’s Day) rest each week to remind us that our lives are meant for more than activity, particularly for relationship with God, self, and neighbor, and that takes intentionality, time, and the willingness to be still before another.

My mom was much better at praying than I was. I have her red Amplified Bible (it was a thing in the 70s!) on a shelf in my home. Since her death, I’ve returned to it occasionally and looked at all the slips of paper she left inside its pages—page after page of names of people that she would pray for every morning. As a kid, I didn’t know about her secret getaway time with God, but I figured it out as I aged! Every morning very early (around 6:00 am-ish), she would take her bible and her Upper Room devotional (it was a Methodist thing) and spend time with God in prayer. Usually, alongside her Bible, was her coffee with cream and sugar and a piece of toast or, on special occasions, her coffee cake. (Those who know about this know about this!)

Most slips of paper in my mom’s Bible had my name on them, sometimes highlighted and bolded. My brother Neil’s name was on her lists, but he was far more angelic than I was! Seeing our names is an anchoring reality for me. I know that we stand on the shoulders of people who pray and, thus, take their relationship with God seriously.

One aspect of my prayer life that has developed over the years is making peace with the gift of routine. My spastic nature always seems to think routine is a straitjacket limiting creativity and freedom rather than its opposite, an aid for creativity and freedom. There is a rich Christian tradition of a way to understand and practice a way of routined and/or repeated prayer, often called contemplative prayer. Praying contemplatively is praying deep, not rushing, and going slow. The emphasis is on being with God, not talking to Him, but listening to God, and letting Him and His Word set the agenda, not you. Like everything good, contemplative prayer can be perverted into something akin to Buddhist mindlessness or “being at one with the god within” mumbo-jumbo. For a Christian, prayer is fully mindful and rooted in reality and facts, particularly in God’s self-revelation of His character and will for our lives, in the words of Scripture.

The most known in the Church’s history of a repeated and contemplative form of Christian prayer is the Jesus Prayer, where one uses words echoing the words of the tax collector to Jesus from Luke 18:13 while praying, “Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” The Jesus Prayer is most commonly associated with Christian piety in the Eastern Church. (All Christian denominations emanate from the West - Roman Catholic or the East - Orthodoxy.)

A way to pray contemplatively is by praying repeatedly any Scripture text, like the Jesus Prayer. Another contemplative way is by repeating helpful biblically-based truths. I have a repeated prayer that helps me with my personality peculiarities. It goes like this, “Lord Jesus, your presence is my center, and thus (or because of that) I live today with contentment and joy.” Sometimes, I change out the words contentment or joy if there’s something else rising in importance, like the need for wisdom, confidence, or peace. Contemplative and repeating prayers (or even written prayers, like the Lord’s Prayer or a prayer penned by a saint) can be challenging for some who are used to envisioning prayer as primarily what you do or what you say to God rather than being with and listening to God.

Learning to be still and knowing that God is God is an invitation from His heart to all of us. I pray that you will take God up on His offer.

Thinking about this image, a stick shift to frame my experience as a human person made in God’s image, occupying time and space, has been helpful. Sometimes, I operate in fifth gear, a thrilling experience of enjoyment and productivity. Sometimes, I operate in first gear, with little excitement or joy, whether from reasons outside or inside my choosing or causation. Sometimes, I also have found myself stuck in first or second gear and lapse into habitual despair or depression, stuck and struggling with how to find joy in life yet again.

Within a span of four years (2018ish to 2022ish), I varied much of the time between one and two and found myself stuck and despairing. Many of the reasons are explicated in my previous posts about my parents’ deaths. Alongside their deaths, however, were two other extenuating circumstances, first being led by God to leave a well-loved religious tradition and a comfortable (financial and otherwise) career in the United Methodist organization (due to its apostasy), and second by walking through a season of great darkness and dysfunction with one of our adult children.

My reality has coalesced in my mind and practice as a priest in God’s Church, with a clarion call to trust God and his will for my life. Historically, I struggled with my understanding of God’s will for me and others, mostly due to my disagreement with much of the “pop” theology flitting around about God’s will. I rejected then, and reject now, any semblance of theology that believes God causes bad things to happen or “allows” bad things to happen to teach lessons. I also rejected then, and reject now, the existence of a divinely pre-determined ideal whereby God has a “plan” that is detailed and specific for me, and if I only hold my "spiritual” nose in the right way, I’ll, in time, figure it out.

As I navigated my choppy waters and my personal growth-in-God issues, I’ve come to clarity that God's will for me isn’t based on a cosmic plan of future events but rather is based on a cosmic plan related to my origin story, my nature as a man created in the image of God. What does it mean to be me? What does it mean to be human? What is the purpose in life? Of my life? How am I, as a human in time and space, my particular time and space, meant to operate within it?

A way to discuss this is the idea that God’s overarching will is for my (and thus your) flourishing. A way I pepper this idea in my weekly sermons is that “God’s will is for us to learn day in and day out what it means to live in and enjoy living in the shoes that God gave us.”

God’s will is a given; it is revealed. Human flourishing and joy in the present are predicated on my coming to terms with these facts and submitting myself to them. God has a design for me and you, for what we do on the ground, with our minds, with our bodies, and among each other. Operating inside said design, revealed in Scripture and taught by Christ’s Church, is required for life as intended and the pleasures that accompany it, such as joy, peace, and love.

As I got stuck in a despairing first or second gear, I realized my ideas about what I should or should not do were irrelevant. As a Christian, I am rooted in facts. As a Christian, I practice or inhabit a revealed religion. God created. God created me. God designed life and what it means to live it well or constructively AND what it means to live life poorly or deconstructively. God has revealed in His living Word, Jesus Christ, and His Word as proclaimed within the teaching authority of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church what kind of life fosters flourishing and what does not.

Much of modern cultural angst coalesces around the human desire to be his or her own designer. A besetting sin I have rightfully hated and worked with God to remedy is that I often find myself seeking comfort by gorging on food or drink. My experience over time was consistent. This doesn’t work. You cannot shift from a stuck and despairing first and/or second gear by trying to heal your heart wounds with methods that contradict and work against God's design, that are contradictory to God’s revealed will or Word. My body does not work well by gorging on Doritos and downing 200 ounces of Diet Coke or a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Trying to live that way is akin to spastically shifting from one gear to another and hearing that blaring grinding sound between gears. (Side note - that is as far as I can go with a vehicular metaphor! My behavior with my mechanic evidences my limits as I simply mimic the sound my car is making and then trust the expert from there!)

God’s will for you and me is that we would flourish, function well, and operate as intended on the ground in the time and space God has entrusted to us. Such operating depends on my willingness to cooperate with God as God and my willingness to stubbornly refuse to seek to supplant God as God over my own life and my hair-brained ideas about what will make me happy.

You can read Paul’s letters (or the other epistles) as a collection of doctrines, but that would be an unfortunate misread. Your New Testament letters are written to individuals and to groups of Christians who were hard to live with. They are letters born in conflict and frustration with the complexity of living the Christian life in their real day-to-day lives with each other. The letters are dirty in that they are collections of real-life examples of the dirty laundry of regular people trying their best to live for Jesus, even when and especially when their fellow humans were making it particularly difficult to do so.

Paul’s letters are parental exhortations; they are fatherly letters to young Christian communities that were struggling with how to live the Christian life in the context of their much-too-real lives. A favorite text of mine of Paul’s that connects back to the dirtiness of life and to his leadership in that context is Colossians 3:12-13:

Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? He wasn’t being nice. It was grating and frustrating and hard to hear him out. I am sure, too, that it was frustrating for Paul to have to be so direct, and it was clearly frustrating to his listeners as he was scolding their immaturity and unnecessary destructiveness.

Paul is anything but nice when he says to them in verses five through nine, in leading up to his conclusion in verses 12 and 13, as he exhorts them that as Christ's followers, they must:

Put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you. Have nothing to do with sexual immorality, impurity, lust, and evil desires. Don’t be greedy, for a greedy person is an idolater, worshiping the things of this world. Because of these sins, the anger of God is coming. You used to do these things when your life was still part of this world. But now is the time to get rid of anger, rage, malicious behavior, slander, and dirty language. Don’t lie to each other, for you have stripped off your old sinful nature and all its wicked deeds.

Get what I mean by dirty? You must put to death what is sinful! Put to death what is lurking in and around you that is destroying what God has called you to be as Christians and as a Christian community!

Sometimes, what happens, in an effort to be nice, what we actually end up doing is lying to one another and cooperating with the evil one in the destruction of what is good, true, and beautiful. Sometimes being nice or trying to “make allowance” for one another is actually us throwing parades for what God calls sin and thus causing harm to ourselves and to those we claim to love. It is sinful to be sexually immoral. It is sinful to be lustful. It is sinful to be greedy and angry and foul. It is sinful to slander someone. These are violent behaviors against God’s character and against His will for our lives.

Niceness, too often, is an expression of the demonic underbelly of sin. It is sin crouching, sin undercover, seeking to steal, kill, and destroy. Ephesians is another one of Paul’s dirty letters (meaning human, messy, sin-filled, etc.) where he challenges his readers to “speak the truth in love.” His exhortation to kindly live the truth in and among each other is preceded in Ephesians by his explanation of the role of the Church, her teaching authority, and the command for the Church to help her members no longer be children who are “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.”

It is not kind to preach, teach, or encourage unsound doctrine or immoral behavior. It is not kind to placate or participate in lies. Too often, Christians who have not abandoned the faith like others who deny the authority of Scripture, choose silence in the face of evil to appear nice when, in fact, what is called for by God and by our fathers and mothers in the faith is to be truly kind by speaking the truth in love.

A simple way to envision the reality of being a person who responds to what is true is the fact that we have a body. As an embodied person, it is now your choice, right now, as to how you will respond. Will you choose to eat and move in ways that serve the body's design? Or will you choose to eat and not move in ways that are contrary and counterproductive to the body’s design? You are able to make a response, which will you choose?

So, it is true that you are a recipient of the gift of life! You are breathing! There is much evidence of this; the most obvious is the fact that you are presently reading these words. The life we have received is a gift from God. God caused this reality to be true today. He is the author and designer of life. God gave us life and calls us to live it, to respond to life’s reality in alignment with how He designed life to work at its conception.

Making a rightful response to the fact of one’s possessions of the gift of life is your responsibility. It is our responsibility as sentient beings to live our lives as they have been designed by the designer, created by the creator, and given by the giver. This is a fundamental plank of ancient Christianity. The responsible life of the human being is one of holiness of heart and life, one marked by growth in connection to God as one’s Creator, as one who is made in God’s image and after His likeness.

By faith in God’s Word and His leadership (Lordship) over our lives, we live into our identity as persons. We, in turn, are able to respond rightly to God by offering our lives to Him in thanksgiving. This self-offering is our joyful response to God first offering Himself to us in His Son.

How will you respond? We answer that question each moment of each day. God's invitation is to grow in your daily, moment-by-moment, awareness of the holy ground you are standing on and the holy design of your body that God in Christ wills to fill with His presence.

Second, I think of how weird my father-in-law is. Have you seen his yard?! Let me explain…no (taking Indigo Montoya’s advice); let me sum up… walking into his yard is like walking into the wonderful world of growth, of plants and flowers and color, design, beauty, and wonder. Yes, really. I don’t know about you, but I hate dirt, and the last thing I want to do is plant a flower or pull up a weed. I have always hated dirt; ask my mom, who (when I was very young) would make sure I had a wet washcloth by my side every time I was at the kitchen table to eat so that I could keep my hands clean.

My father-in-law’s yard is a sign of the will of God, not that all of us (and especially not me!) are into gardening like him, but that God wills our growth and is present in our lives to help this growth happen. The primary context for your spiritual growth, meaning you are becoming who you are created to be, is the presence and, consequently, the leadership of God. The Church proclaims a wonderful central framing truth for our present moment, and the truth is that God, in His grace, has come to us. God is here with you right now. God has an active, personal, loving, and clear will for your becoming today and into tomorrow.

This context of God’s presence for your personal spiritual growth begs how we know what God is saying. How God is leading? What does God want for you today? There is significant debate regarding the answer to this question. The question of what God wants for you today is personal and intimate, and our common temptation is to place ourselves (our thoughts, feelings, assumptions, preferences, traditions, etc.) in the place of God over your own life, to appoint yourself as your own authority and definer of yourself and your purpose. Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, however, says this temptation is as old as Genesis 3 and is based on the first lie (false premise) that we, as a person, are qualified to decide for ourselves what is good and evil.

More next week. Thanks for reflecting along with me.

What is real about personal growth is that growth is not easy. One lens through which I see this reality, growth being hard, is in my history relating to weight management! It is hard to become morbidly obese. It is also hard to become and stay somewhere in a healthy range weight-wise for one’s particular God-given frame. Gaining weight requires choosing time and again and again to hurt yourself, to do something that is not going to help your growth but rather will stunt that growth and thus, in reality, make you weaker and less free to be what you are.

Shift this lens from weight to the broader issue of spiritual growth. But before I say much there, let me be really clear about what I mean by spiritual. Every person is, at his or her definitional core, a spiritual being in the sense that God is Spirit, and He created you in His image and likeness. Spiritual, and thus spirituality, is learning to live and grow from within the factual basis of our real identities as persons living today in a body with time and space to occupy because of the willful initiative of a Creator who is external to ourselves.

Your spiritual growth is bound to the reality that you are a person made to be a person as God defines a person. So from here, big questions arise, such as: What is a person? Who defines what a person is? Who says what a person isn’t? What diversity fits in the definition of a person? What do all persons have in common and why? Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of my life?

All people’s purpose in life is to grow spiritually, to become what they are, as defined by their Creator’s design. So, back to where we started. I am the worst at getting in the way of my own becoming! So are you! That is something we all have in common. And it is in common for two primary reasons:

1. Growth is hard, and

2. Growth requires a context conducive to growth.

Thankfully, God has created the context within which we are invited to grow. I’ll reflect on that next…unless I change my mind!

I remember, too, at Trinity Methodist Church, where my early faith was nurtured, singing the Sunday School song… “The joy of the Looooorrrrdddd is my strength, the joy of the Loooorrrrd is my strength, the JOY of the LOOOOORRRRDD is my strength, the joy of the Lord is my strength.”

Joy took on new meaning for me, however, through my exposure to two quotes, the experience of intense personal suffering, and the context of a popular scripture text that includes the concept of joy. The first of two quotes is actually the title of C.S. Lewis’s autobiography, “Surprised by Joy,” which tells the story of how God revealed His steadfast love to a hardened, prim-n-proper Englishman scholar. The second quote is one from the 14th-century saint Julian of Norwich, who reflects on joy in the face of Jesus and declares that all humans are invited and called by grace to “take possession of our birthright of never-ending joy.”

Carrying with me these two quotes became a different thing entirely to carry around when suffering (including my parent’s untimely deaths) came to me in ways that were not only shattering emotionally but also shattering to my faith and, in particular, to its oftentimes shoddy assumptions about what it means that God is both loving and powerful, while looking directly at the reality of life as it is and not as I wish it were.

A few months ago, I came across a familiar text in preparation for a normal Sunday Lord’s Day eucharist, Nehemiah 8:10c, which states, “the joy of the Lord is my strength.” Kind of pithy, fun, and simple. It’s a saying that we can put on our walls, right next to the “Live, Laugh, Love” placard. What happens, then, when hell is unleashed, and the reality of a true life that is peppered with the inexplicable and painful and is no longer mostly a theoretical idea and is, rather, in full color a present lived experience?

In teaching the Bible for my career time and again, I’ve found ways to help disciples of Christ understand that the Bible is not a collection of sayings that we can pull out of context, but rather it is one narrative of God’s pursuit of His self-and-others-destrutive creation. I, too, need to be continually reminded of this fact about biblical wisdom, and reading Nehemiah 8:10c, even in its most proximate context, is not only helpful but transformative:

Nehemiah 8:9b-10,

“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept as they heard the words of the Law. Then he said to them, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

The “joy of the Lord” promise is stated at the end of a 70-plus-year nightmare at the tail end, chronologically, of what we call the Old Testament. All of the prophetic and historical books in your Old Testament tell the story of God’s establishment of His reign and its eventual and systematic destruction soon after its establishment. The southern Kingdom, Judah, unlike the northern Kingdom, Israel, survived in part, and in phases, groups of exiles returned to their homeland, and with Nehemiah, they came to the day when the temple was rebuilt enough to dedicate it. And God’s people wept. Memories flooding their minds of hundreds and thousands of family and friends mercilessly murdered, seventy years of forced exile from their homeland, stripped of any significant semblance of personal agency.

There, in the deepest darknesses of despair, regret, guilt, shame, and fear, God’s Word is spoken over them, and they weep. It is a lot easier to just slap a “joy of the Lord is my strength” on the wall and slap on a smile. The reality of life, however, invites us to encounter the God of the universe, who promises something we call joy that is not dependent on circumstances but rather on the character of the Creator Himself.

When it comes to being a sinner (which you are, in case that is news to you) means you make your own messes. Even though messes by others are at times hoisted upon us against our will, all humans, everywhere, and at all times, at times choose to sin. Sin is most simply anything contrary to the will of God as revealed in Jesus Christ and proclaimed and guarded by the faithful witness of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

The result of sinful behaviors is that there is always, in the wake of sin, some form of deformation or descent from God’s original plan as a natural consequence of choosing to sin. Choosing to live in a way that God does not will for you is by definition destructive of what is true, good, and beautiful. Although it is not the only way to read John 3:16 one way it can be read, that echoes my point, is “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever trusts in Him will not destroy themselves and others (one way to translate “perish”).

One of the great tasks of Christ’s Church is to train the consciences of her members to listen closely to the heart of God, to the indwelling Spirit of God, to the message of Scripture, and then to simply obey God. Conscience is a grace gift of God. A conscience that is well-trained by Scripture, is able to be one that is practically kept as a good conscience. From the givenness of a conscience, then, there is a second grace gift that God has given that we tend to sluff off, that is the gift of guilt.

Thursday I’ll reflect more on this idea, guilt as a gift, in particular how God speaks to us through our conscience, with guilt as a natural emotion that emanates from sin. And that God’s leadership motivation and acting in our lives at that moment is always towards our flourishing as the person He made us to be in the first place.

1. I’m under 12 - I need my parents.

2. I’m between 12 - 18 - My parents are dorks.

3. I’m between 19-39 - I don’t need (and even hate…some of the time) my parents, and there’s something wrong with them.

4. I’m between 40-49 - I really want my parents around, and I’m like them in many ways; I wonder why we are the way we are. And why am I doing what I have always said I hate about what they did to and around me growing up?

5. I’m 52 - and today, my heart aches for their presence. I love them, and my heart goal is to honor them by taking advantage of the strengths they’ve given me. I also seek to grow stronger in how I am aware of and address my own sin. A part of this awareness is recognizing specifically how my parent’s general sinfulness and their particular sinful behaviors against me have worked against my best interests. These facts challenge me to increase the use of my own agency in making changes in my own life, or I could just blame my folks…

Unfortunately for some, your journey with your real parents is not devoid of criminality and/or fundamental dysfunction in their inability to provide for you as a parent. For some, your parent (or parents) abused and violated your integrity time and again, and for you, walking through steps like those above would have a different kind of gravity and complexity.

The primary besetting and, thus, destructive sin in my life is over-eating, which most simply is choosing to hurt myself to feel something different than what I am currently feeling. In my 20s and 30s, especially, I tended to blame my parents for my choices. This is typical, isn’t it? Growing up is hard to do, especially when you honestly face the impact of being raised by humans and not by inhuman super-saints.

I remember when I chose to become morbidly obese. I was in my mid-20s and had my first significant failure at work. I chose to allow this failure to have a debilitating effect on my sense of identity, often tied to the need to please people. In this deep-pitted and scary place, I used food in great quantities in an attempt to feel better. As you can probably guess, regularly eating in a way that hurt me was not helpful in the long run.

So why did I choose this method to fix what I believed was wrong inside of me? I blame my parents. And their parents. And their parents. And their parents…and Adam and Eve, our first parents. All humans, everywhere, sometimes act the buffoon and choose to harm themselves and others. This reality opens the large theological can of original sin and how our inherited propensity towards rejection of God fleshes itself out in our living.

In an important sense, the reality of original sin is encouraging because it helps us not to be surprised that our parents were (and are for those still living) messed up in their own ways. What is interesting to me is how our response to sinfulness, both others’ sins and our own, is most important when it comes to whether our faith flourishes or flounders. Monday, I’ll reflect more on this, and in particular, why God's gift of grace is at work when I am sick to my stomach (and heart) after inhaling an entire pepperoni, bacon, and onion pizza (which is the best style of pizza by the way, and you ham ‘n pineapple people need help!) in four-and-a-half seconds flat.

A part of my faith flourishing has been allowing the pain of their deaths to serve God’s bigger purpose of my becoming who I am created to be. You might have in your mind a scripture where the technicolor dream-coated one, Joseph, told his brothers when they came to Egypt with their tails between their legs in Genesis 50:20 (ESV):

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.

To reiterate what I alluded to about my theological framing of traumatic events, like the death of loved ones, I do not believe it is biblical, based in reality, or aligned with the Tradition of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church to believe that God caused the death of my parents so that He could bring some good out of it. I have no interest in submitting my whole life to a god like that. Imagine fleshing that garbage theology out… the core faulty premise is that God causes (wills) bad things to happen, so let’s say every sexual assault that occurs today in the United States was caused by a god… There are about 1,270 sexual assaults committed every day in the United States alone (I believe this number is reasonable based on my reading of statistical analysis by experts who do it for a living). So 1,270 people are sexually assaulted every day in our country alone, and if you spill the math, that’s 453,550 people sexually assaulted every year in the good ‘ol USA. Do we really believe that the one God of the universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, caused or willed this to happen? I think not! And that god is a monster worth burning along with the pile of rubbish.

My current plan is to post on Mondays and Thursdays. I’ll reflect more this Thursday on my parents’ normal human sinfulness and how it impacts my life today as a disciple of Christ driven to honor Him as a member of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in the real world as a normal 52-year-old male sinner who can’t seem to stop eating even when he is full.

Modern Christianity, in my view, is too flat, as if flat was most spiritual. Flat being in the sense that no one is great or wonderful since we are all just sinners in need of grace. Sure, I’m a sinner, you're a sinner, and so are Jim, Elaine, Miggy, and Teresa, however, that does not mean there is no greatness in their lives worth acknowledging, celebrating, and as-possible (I wish I could’ve hit a curve ball…) emulating.

In the Miggy photo he is being honored by the Damn Yankees of all teams, and what a wonderful picture. Each major league team on Miggy’s last trip to their town during this, his final season, has honored him. Although his statistical excellence is expansive what is most striking to me is that there are only three players in baseball history who have over 500 home runs, over 3,000 hits, and at least a .300 career batting average: Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, and Miguel Cabrera. Greatness! The Mount Rushmore of baseball greatness. And greatness needs to be acknowledged, celebrated, and emulated.

The Mother Teresa photo is probably the most physically endearing one of her that I have come across. Too often when the word Saint is used in church what we mean is someone who is wholly different from a normal me and you. Mother Teresa hated this tendency, this flattening of the general call of all Christians to allow the power of God to be seen in how they live their lives. She is a witness to the power of a human being operating in her freedom to do the right thing because God told her to do it.

My parents’ picture is just a normal one of them being grandparents to Dennyse and my five children one Christmas week in Newalla, Oklahoma. My folks, like your folks, are normal. Not superhuman, but normal. My mom and dad, in their normalness, and empowered by the Spirit of God in them, displayed greatness in different ways, ways that are worthy of acknowledgment, celebration, and emulation. My folks were also buffoons sometimes. Some may “Amen!” as they fondly remember my Dad’s anti-social grumpiness.

My parent’s greatness, at least in my view, coalesces around their choosing to practically love real people in real places. My mom was overt in this. Her heart spilled out with compassion to the elderly, to young parents, to babies, to her kids, to her grandchildren. She, like Mother Teresa, was a diminutive dynamo (meaning she was short of stature…really short…), but full of the love of God and not afraid to share it. She also struggled to give herself that same love and compassion as she would often worry herself to death over life’s varied challenges.

Dad’s heart spilling was different, but for those who saw it spill, it was obvious and worthy of a greatness designation. My remembrance turns to his investment in soup kitchens, in going fishing with a neighbor kid, in working hard every day to make sure he could afford to take his baseball-fanatic eldest child to at least one Tiger game down at the Corner every summer, or in mowing the yards of elderly neighbors who needed their lawns mowed because their “loser kids” weren’t taking care of them. Dad also struggled with his own anxieties and at times chose to cope with one too many beers (he drank that nasty Busch Light elixir, mostly because he was cheap) or one too many bags of Cheetos.

Heroes. We need them. I need them. Among my spiritual growth heroes is Pope Benedict XVI or Fr. Joseph Ratzinger. One of my favorite quotes from him states:

Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched.

Too often our definition of a hero is so narrow, especially when it comes to important things in life (and not just hits and home runs), and miss out on the celebration and joyful stretching that is our birthright as we trust God in our own becoming who we were created to be as His children, made in His image. Today I (and you) are surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses!” I hope Miggy whoops on the Yanks tonight!

Special thanks for so many subscribing. My hope is to post once or twice a week, maybe more here at the start. We’ll see.

One of the most important things I have made part of my weekly life is lifting up my parent’s names in prayer each Lord’s Day. A weekly part of our worship service, called “The Prayers of the People,” includes this invitation:

“We remember before you all your servants who have departed this life in your faith and fear, especially those we lift up to you now, that your will for them may be fulfilled; [Silence] and we ask you to give us the grace to follow the good examples of St. Michael and of all your saints, that we may share with them in your heavenly kingdom.”

During the place within the petition for silence, I thank God for Jim and Elaine Snyder, my dad, and my mom. Each time I say this my thankfulness for them is tinged by the grief of their deaths. This tinging roots my spirituality to reality, whether I wanted it to or not.

As I have grown in my faith, its flourishing or lack thereof, has been tied to my willingness to look reality in the face and allow God to be God in the middle of reality. In 1984 my cousin, Howard Dean died. He was 19 years old. It was then I heard for the first time that “It was God’s will,” and that my acceptance of this as fact was part and parcel of my Christian maturity.

Fast-forward to today, almost 40 years later, I comfortably and without equivocation believe that this is a lie, both that death is God’s will and that accepting (rather than rejecting) said lie is tied to Christian maturity.

Today, almost five years after my Dad died capping a nightmare season of loss in my life, I still hate that my parents died. I hate that they died when they did. I hate that that they died how they died. I hate that they were in their early seventies. I hate that they weren’t able to be a part of my three eldest children’s weddings. I hate that Dad is not available to me to help me with manly “around the house” questions and needs. I hate that my last memories of them are their lifeless bodies and the reality of death.

Living with this reality, and learning to let God be God within my reality, has enabled my spiritual life to flourish, but in ways that I did not anticipate.

This website is my attempt to begin putting on paper and making available to those who’d like to listen and reflect along with me, my reflections about God, life, and in particular how reality and human flourishing blend.