Some family business:
Teleconference Bible Study tonight. 7pm PDT; 10pm EDT
Dial 218-237-3840; Access code 124393.
A Study Guide for tonight and special Survey have been sent to all our participants and are available to everyone by clicking on each respectively.
As for our fundraising campaign, we are now $5,000 short. (A more detailed report will be coming later.) Please help take us over the top, if only for Marti’s sake, in whose voice today’s Catch goes out.

As we have called on you to help protect the Catch ministry from someone capable of shutting it down, you have generously answered with gifts, challenge matches, prayer and moral support – leaving our hearts full of gratitude.

Yet behind me and before you is a woman whose sacrifices have allowed us to begin and expand a ministry that now is seeing a global impact. I ask and pray that consideration be given to this woman and her family who have loved you – even more than me.

As we near the end of our current campaign to change the course of another’s intent. I am turning to the voice of my wife to connect to us all. The words are taken from a full bevy of running comments she shares with me – some of which I actually understand. Marti’s writing is an intuitive expression of a mystery – for us to decipher for ourselves, for she is speaking of all of us – you, me, everybody within the body of the Catch – when she says, “I know you…”

You know me and I know you – and it has never been easy

You, dear friend of the Catch, have made yourself accessible to me and I thank you.

You have come to know me:  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Wretch describes me best. It is the means of transformation at the end of the road of no alternatives and no options, when, instead of death, destruction, disaster and devastation, I am along side of you, singing hymns of glory. It is like the warm morning sun breaking out on our shivering lifeboats on the other side of the Titanic.

I know you – you are a story about a revolution in a human life.

You may have sat in life’s pews where salvation is ever present, and the knowledge that when the daylight comes, you’ve always got another chance … but sadly for some reason I do not know, you rarely take it to its full advantage.

Yet the first time something comes along – a divorce, a death, a pain in your heart – you are swept along in its sadness. You, the child prodigy, were to be made exempt from life’s hardships unlike ‘those’ other people. So in church you remain dazzling. In private you war, warring with yourself and with your God. Except for Him with whom you battle, you are alone.

I know you do not know how you are surviving and are yet to understand this mystery – the mystery that you will never really know while here on earth with me.

I know you because the first time we spoke I related to your unacceptable self – and you were surprised, agreeing that you had gone on long enough in hiding.

You would say, “What is it about?”

And I would say, “I have no clue what it’s about.”

“But for as long as I can remember,” you would say, with or without the question, “everyone had the answer.”

Yet you knew I didn’t know – didn’t need to know – the answer.  We just knew we fit into each other, and you were no longer alone in your sadness.

You know the times when you connect with someone and you know in the connecting that it is going to be right for you.  It’s like trying on a coat or a dress and going, “Well that fits me. Even if I have to get it altered a little. It’s the right style, it’s the right shape.” That’s how I know you.

I’ve worn you in many different places and you still fit very well. Like a good song, you are a fit that’s going to last forever. I find myself in your story – a story in which I find pleasure, even if I sing it 100,000 times. It is your story. Everybody owns it now because you are finally beginning to give.

You won me over with your story.  You are a love story – a story about unrequited love returning. You are in process, which makes you my favorite story.

And now you know that you must participate in this great adventure – your story. And your story needs to go public. You have to admit now that holding your story privately is rather silly. If I can know you – and I do – so can just about anyone else who wants to know.

I know you know this, but I also know that you find it easier not to participate in your story because it involves others. These others are not like your dazzling’ public side, but are ever so much more like you in your private, sometimes sad story.

I know you. I know you fear connecting because it requires some form of confrontation. But avoiding differences and the potential confrontation is like throwing away the keys to connecting – one to another and someday to everyone.

I understand that it may be painful for you, but I also believe that things that are painful for us sometimes transcend, helping us get through to the other side where there is healing. I’m hoping so.

You know me. There’s pain inside me. Yet, I don’t think I’m different from you or most people. I do experience pain. Yet, it’s always side by side with joy.  And if I do not share the pain, you can never embrace the joy.

The source of that is, of course, the mystery. While I do not think anyone welcomes heartbreak, tragedy and pain, I suggest we nonetheless embrace all three. It is the price of being alive. That’s the journey. The journey is a journey of joy and miracles. And it’s a journey of loss and how to rejoice in that loss.

Imagine being invited to a party, a lavish dinner while sitting next to a guest who is starving. You cannot tell me you do not see the guest everywhere you go. You cannot say to yourself, “I hope he gets help.” Nor can you just shout out, “Call a hotline. Get some help. Go see somebody.” I know you know that it is far more important to you and your guest to show up in this guest’s life and connect with your story. Help them get dressed. Take them out. Make connections. The wonderful thing is that the Healer is there already amongst the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with you if we are with your guest.  And the healing starts to take place in both of you, sometimes in spite of you, but always through you.

I know you. It is very hard for you to give up the public image you so desire with others so that the private story can come forward. It is much easier to keep a stiff upper lip, as they say. But you have to lose the dazzling because that is how you get you back. I think it’s found in your story.  Not just in the old story or today’s vulnerable story but in your new story out there for you to find and tell. There are new things coming, new avenues to travel and new people with their stories for you to listen to, care about, and embrace.

I know you. I know how valuable your life is. I know how precious your life is.  And now I hope you know, too.