Being SMART

I am a list maker, planner, goal setting kind of guy. Becky is not. She is much more seat of the pants, it will all work out, don’t worry about it kind of person. We are good for each other. Although my goal setting and plan making can drive her crazy.

It is the last week of the year, so my mind is already down the road into 2012. What do I want to accomplish? What resolutions should I make?

I heard a commentator say the other day that we shouldn’t bother, we never keep them anyway. It was interesting because on the same show they featured people who had lost half their body weight without surgery. It all began with some kind of resolution to get smaller.

The reason most of us don’t keep our resolutions is because they are too vague. That’s why we all need to set S.M.A.R.T. goals. Smart Goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

“Get in shape” is too general. “Join a health club and work out three days a week” is more specific.

If I want to read more, how many books would that be...one a week, two a month? When would I read them? Monday and Thursday evenings? Specific and Measurable.

I must keep the goal Attainable. Is one a week attainable? Two a month might be more attainable.

Is two a month Realistic? I must set the goal high, but also be reasonable.

The Time frame is two a month, twenty four by the end of the year.

As a faithful follower of Jesus, one of my goals for 2012 should be to become more like Christ. However, that is a little vague. What will I do to be more like Jesus? In the first century if someone was a disciple of a particular rabbi, they wanted to follow that rabbi so closely that the dust kicked up while the rabbi walked would land on the disciple’s clothing. You would be embracing the dust of the rabbi.

How can I collect some Jesus dust in 2012?

Research indicates that the two greatest catalysts for spiritual growth are scripture reading and service. If I want to be more like Jesus in 2012, I need to engage in some kind of intentional, disciplined, scripture reading program and find places to serve.

I have a bible app on my phone that offers literally hundreds of bible reading plans, from topical, to chronological, to historical and in increments from reading the entire bible in 90 days to a one year plan.

There are literally hundreds of ways to serve by using the gifts, talents, abilities and passions God has given me. I just need to make a decision on where, when and how. The tricky part for a pastor is that I can’t count anything in my job description as serving!

If you are a faithful follower of Jesus, my guess is that you would like to wear “the dust of the rabbi”. But like any other goal, it requires us to be SMART. We need to be intentional about becoming more like Jesus.

If we all would become more like Jesus, a resolution would become a revolution!

What is your plan?

Happy New Year!

Things Get Lost

The date was chosen for pragmatic reasons. It fit our schedule. I was a first year teacher coaching football and basketball in Eaton Rapids, Michigan (a small town about 20 minutes South of East Lansing). Becky was finishing her senior year at Hope. We had planned to get married in the summer after Becky graduated, but decided to move the date up to December.

The window for our wedding was small. It had to be soon after the first semester finished at Hope so our friends could attend without having to go home and then come to Chicago. It had to fit around my schedule which included teaching and coaching until December 20 and returning for basketball practice and games by December 26. It had to be on a Saturday. Thus we were married on December 22, 1973. That’s right 38 years ago! It is really hard to believe that it has been that long.

One of the things we didn’t anticipate when we chose our date was how easily our wedding anniversary could get lost in the craziness of Christmas festivities. Working in full-time ministry only added to that likelihood. There have been many years where the acknowledgement of out anniversary has been an afterthought, or a “drive-by” acknowledgement as we moved on to another event or responsibility.

This is the time of year when things can get lost. The joy of the season can be drowned out by personal pain and difficulty brought on by financial crises, struggles with illness, or a personal tragedy. The peace that is supposed to be central to Christmas can get lost in family dysfunction and turmoil. The mystery of Christmas can be distorted by all of the events, programs, and functions we have to attend that leave us more filled with weariness than wonder. The central event of Christmas, the gift of God becoming man, is often overshadowed by the demands of gift buying and present giving. It is easy for Christ to get lost in the chaos that is Christmas.

Becky and I will take time out from Christmas festivities to have a quiet dinner together to acknowledge and celebrate the gift of marriage. We will reflect on the great adventure that God designed for us with all the ups and downs that 38 years can bring. We will thank God for His provision on that adventure and ask Him to bless us with many more years of friendship and love.

Sometime later in the week we will take time to thank God for the unbelievable gift of His Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, whose birth is central to this season of the year. We won’t let Him get lost!

We will also thank God for the gift of ministry in a new place, with new people, who have been wonderfully warm, accepting and encouraging in our brief time at Elmhurst Christian Reformed Church.

It is also easy for some of the more pragmatic aspects of ministry to get lost during the Christmas season. One of those pragmatic things is our church budget which runs through December 31. We have a receipts deficit of $200,000 that we need to receive to meet our budget for 2011. It is imperative that we meet this receipts target to put ourselves in an acceptable position relative to financing opportunities that may be available to us and that we must pursue in 2012. Please consider how you might help us achieve this year end goal.

May God bless all of you as you celebrate Christ’s birth in the many and various ways that will take place. Thank you for the gift of allowing me to be your Lead Pastor.

                              

May God bless us, everyone!

                                                                                 

Rev.

God is Odd

As I have been preparing for this week’s message, I have been reflecting on the events that make up the Christmas story. My text for this Sunday is the story of the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary (Luke 1:26-38). Gabriel lays out the whole plan for Mary. She is going to become pregnant, through the Holy Spirit, and be the earthly mother of God’s own Son, the long awaited Messiah.

This leaves Mary with a lot of questions. And it makes me wonder. I wonder what I would think if one of our junior high girls came to me with this story. I am pretty sure my reaction would be filled with cynicism and skepticism. I would wonder about her mental stability. I might suspect drug use. I would think she was delusional.

I would spend time with her parents, who would corroborate that she had told them the same story and they had many of the same reactions. That’s why they sent her to the pastor! She had never demonstrated this kind of thinking or dreaming previously.

Can you imagine how this must have unfolded for Mary? What does a teenager tell her friends about this pregnancy? The whole situation was embarrassing and unbelievable. No doubt her friends would abandon her. She would be the talk of the town, but not in a good way.

And her fiance, Joseph, how would he react? He was a super nice guy, but no guy would take this news well.

My guess is that people her at church would whisper about her, wonder, shake their head in dismay, disgust and disbelief.

We have romanticized, sanitized and commercialized the story and in doing so it has lost its scandalous nature.  If this happened today, we wouldn’t do so well with this story, I am afraid. People don’t get visits from angels. Young girls can’t be impregnated by the Holy Spirit. God wouldn’t become a human being. Certainly if Jesus would be born today it would take place in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, not Hull, Iowa.

There is so much surrounding this Christmas story that is incredible and incredulous. It is hard to believe, which is what makes the story so powerful. It is a story that requires faith; faith that our God is the God of unlikely choices, of unpredictable activity, of unusual means. God doesn’t play by our rules. God is subversive and counter-cultural. Part of what this story teaches us is that God wants to use ordinary people, like you and me, to do extraordinary things. His choices might not seem logical, or fit our idea of how things should work, or be in our plan for how life should go, but “His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts”.

The stories of Christmas remind us of God’s unusual way of going about His business and call us to be alert to what He may be saying to us and asking us to do today.

Are we watching, listening, and open to the unexpected and usual?

Romantic Notions

When we lived in Downers Grove 20+ years ago, we lived close enough to walk downtown to Main Street. We loved to walk there with our young family and shop locally. I had a favorite store I would visit frequently. I loved that store. It was quaint, cozy and had merchandize that met my tastes. It wasn’t a national chain. It was local.

           

Feeling nostalgic recently I visited that store again. I am not sure what happened. It didn’t seem as cool or quaint or interesting as I had remembered. The store felt cramped and claustrophobic. The lighting was harsh. The décor was dated. The carpet and rugs, well, the carpet and rugs were gross. As a matter of fact I thought they could have been the same carpet and rugs that were there 20 years ago. What happened to my store?

           

Nothing. In a literal sense not much had happened to my store. It was pretty much the same, but didn’t seem as quaint or cozy. I loved the merchandise in this store and therefore had fallen in love with the store itself. I think that over time I had romanticized how cool that store was and now reality set in. Or, 20+ years later my ideas of quaint and cozy have changed significantly.

           

We have a tendency to do that. As time goes by we romanticize the “good old days”. Anything that was bad, or average seems to fade away and we make whatever was good, great.

           

We’ve done that with Christmas. We’ve taken that original Christmas night outside of Jerusalem in Bethlehem and we’ve painted a Norman Rockwell painting. A beautiful, glowing young mother, her sturdy husband by her side; a sanctified barn with golden straw; a well groomed cattle and sheep stand nearby; a star looms overhead; well groomed shepherds kneel before a carefully constructed manger. It is so beautiful, it brings a sentimental tear to our eye.

           

I don’t mean to be “Rev”eneezer Scrooge, but the picture that we paint on Christmas cards and in church pageants isn’t very accurate.

           

Mary was a very young, unmarried teenager, who was no doubt an outcaste, if not the talk of the town, because of her presumed immorality, from a backwater town in Northern Israel. She had been accompanied by her humble carpenter fiancé to the home of his ancestors outside Jerusalem to pay still yet another Roman tax. The trip had been arduous. She had bounced along on a donkey over uneven terrain while nine months pregnant for 3 or 4 days. Dirty, dead tired and in labor, this illegitimate mother and her fiancé couldn’t find a place to stay and finally collapsed in a lean-to, or perhaps a cave, where animals were protected from the elements at night. The straw was no doubt urine soaked and dung infested; the animals scrawny and scraggly. Joseph, understandably, struggled to stay awake. When the baby was born someone had to cut the umbilical cord and clean the new born up. When shepherds arrived, they must have startled the parents and probably smelled worse than the animals.

           

Not very romantic. But that non-sanitized version of the story is much more meaningful for me than the romanticized version. God loved us so much that he was willing to endure that kind of beginning to become one of us. It was a foreshadowing of His life and ministry of mingling with the marginalized, living humbly, often being lonely and alone, not forcing his way into lives with fanfare and bright lights, but understated and lovingly simple. God used ordinary, common, down to earth, “real” circumstances to give us His greatest gift! He can, and is, still doing that today.

           

I understand why we romanticize the story. The real story is kind of gross, messy, and perhaps not as attractive. Which is often God’s way.    

Wearing Your Colors

Part of my Thanksgiving weekend festivities included attending the Michigan State vs. Northwestern football game. My son, Jesse, is an MSU grad, and he had gotten tickets through the principal of the school where he teaches. She is also an MSU grad.

The weather wasn’t the greatest...a steady drizzle all day which made it seem colder than it really was. We arrived early and walked around the stadium. I was shocked at the number of MSU supporters at the game. They were easy to spot. All decked out in their green and white Spartan gear. Once we were in the stadium it seemed as if there were almost as many Spartan supporters as there were Northwestern fans.

Our seats were in the middle of the Northwestern cheering section. The Northwestern band and students were one section over from us and the people around us all were sporting their purple Northwestern colors. It was clear we were in enemy territory. However, we were not to be deterred. We stood and cheered every MSU touchdown with great enthusiasm. We were not concerned at all about what those around us might think or say.

As I thought about that this past week, I wondered whether I would be as bold in obviously hostile situations to my faith. When you are a pastor, the majority of your time is spent with people who are on your side; people who believe in Jesus and who are anxious to discuss faith issues. In fact, I have had to be purposeful in engaging people who do not share my faith views. I actively try to engage in situations and with people who are not believers. It takes more effort for those of us who serve as full-time Christian professionals than those who do not. But I have rarely found myself in hostile situations.

Would I have the courage of Daniel who maintained his faith and his faith habits in spite of threats of persecution?

Would I have the confidence of the Apostle Paul who entered into situations where people were obviously hostile toward Christianity?

There are thousands of Christians around the world who deal with persecution every day because of their faith.

Persecution doesn’t just happen in foreign countries. Chris has not been raised in a home where Christianity was practiced. She became a Christian in college and after college felt called to some kind of mission work. Her biggest obstacle was her family. Her father couldn’t understand why she would throw away such a promising future to pursue mission work. He considered Christianity to be laughable and only something that weak people would embrace. For Chris to pursue her calling, it would cost her a relationship with her parents. Chris followed God’s call.

In the same situation, would I?

I would like to think so, but I wonder. I wonder because, thankfully, it has never been necessary for me to do so. Certainly I have had conversations with doubters, and I have been in situations where faith was in the minority, but I never felt like I was threatened or that important relationships were in jeopardy.

I pray that I will wear my Christian colors boldly, in all situations.

Oh yeah, by the way, MSU won!