People matter

Posted on August 14, 2014 by jwfisch

th-21We started off this week being reminded that God wants us to get along in the world surrounded by people we know, not labels and categories. The issue is not abortion as much as it is Alison. The issue is not homosexuality as much as it is Larry. And for the last two days, the issue has not been suicide, but Robin Williams.

So how appropriate it was that on our BlogTalkRadio show this week, our guest would be Marshall Snider of Bridgetown Inc., a relational ministry to people in downtown Portland, Oregon with the mission statement: Loving People because People Matter. Now that is one of the best mission statements I have heard. It’s a mission statement we should all adopt because it works anywhere. It doesn’t just work downtown, it works uptown, around town, any town.

People matter. One of the greatest things we can do in the world is let people know that.  It’s simple enough.

How do you make people around you feel that they matter? We’d love to hear back from you some stories that will help us all do this better, but here are just a few things to get us started. They are all common sense things, but easily missed if we’re not consciously aware of them.

Notice people. This is probably the most obvious and the most overlooked. We all walk around, even in a crowd, surrounded by our own cocoons of isolation; and now, with cell phones, the shells have gotten even thicker. You have to break your own cocoon to notice someone else, and you’ll have to break theirs in some way if you want to get through.

Listen to people. Listening is probably the greatest art in making people feel that they matter. I can’t think of anyone who does not want to be heard. Listening is simply saying “What you have to say right now is important to me.” And remember – listening is active involvement and not just waiting to talk.

Get interested in the things that interest others. Sometime this happens naturally because we all have shared likes and dislikes, but sometimes it will take some effort on our part to do this when we don’t. Marti sometimes plays like she is interested in baseball only to give me the opportunity to talk about something that happened in today’s game. Last night was Women of Vision’s turn to treat the Isaiah House women without homes to an Angels game. Now that interests her. (So I get to talk about how they won, even if Marti doesn’t care!)

Stop listening to yourself! Do you talk to yourself? I do, especially when I’m alone. I love this because I always find someone intensely interested in the conversation. If you want to have a real conversation with someone else, however, you have to stop the conversations going on in your own head.

Bottom line, you just have to get out of yourself. I’ve found out that when I really do this and get interested in someone else, the conversation is much more intriguing than the one I would have had.

Why do we do all this? Because people matter. They matter big time to God — He died for them — and that ought to be enough to get us interested … big time.

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God bless all clowns

Posted on August 13, 2014 by jwfisch

I will turn their mourning into laughter and their sadness into joy. (Jeremiah 31:13)

th-19The death of Robin Williams has us all in this very strange, almost sacrilegious place of laughing amidst grief. Don’t try and fix that, because that’s the way it should be.

One of our readers pointed out that Stan Laurel, of the famous comedy team Laurel and Hardy, used to always say, “If any of you cry at my funeral, I’ll never speak to you again.”

And, in fact, at Stan Laurel’s funeral, Dick Van Dyke read the following eulogy:

God, bless all clowns.
Give them a long good life.
Make bright their way…
Their race apart
Alchemists most.
Turn their hearts’ pain
Into a dazzling jest to lift the hearts
God bless all clowns.

Turning pain into “a dazzling jest to lift the hearts” is a neat little trick, but it’s not at all outside the will of God. Jeremiah the prophet spoke of how turning “mourning into laughter” was part of God’s plan for His people, even His new covenant people.

In other words, someone like Robin Williams was turning his mourning into laughter all the time. It was the only way he could cope.

It’s important to note that “mourning” is part of a believer’s reality. This is not something that faith is supposed to cure. Nor is laughter in the middle of pain some sort of false denial or escape. It’s really part of the hope that God is going to somehow make sense of this human debacle we call life.

Life itself is a conundrum. We are born into death. There may be 70 or so years of “life” in there somewhere, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are born into death. And so faith and hope in the midst of that death is a sort of comedy that we all experience, and some, like Robin, can capture that incongruity especially well. But they do it for all of us, and, as one of our other readers pointed out, they do it amidst their own pain.

“Very sad,” she wrote. “Really no words to describe losing someone who makes you laugh without even hardly blinking an eye. I think God holds a special place in his heart for those who cannot hold their grip here on earth.

“People who have not experienced it truly do not understand that no matter how much someone lifts you up, tells you how great you are, what good you’re doing, there is a trigger inside that shoots it down every time. Impossible to explain. And those folks work the hardest to make sure you don’t know it, and aren’t brought ‘down’ by their true feelings.”

And we now know that Robin Williams was one of these people who barely had a grip all the time. His humor got him through 63 years, and, much to our enrichment, he shared it with all of us, and through the magic of media, it will continue to play on and on, helping us to laugh in the midst of our mourning.

And for all who believe, that laughter will one day turn into Joy, eternal. So we might as well start laughing now. It’s what Robin would want.

God bless all clowns.

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Thank You! Video Message from John #RIPRobinWilliams

Posted on August 12, 2014 by gunsim11

Here are more of my thoughts on the passing of Robin Williams > Click here to read them.

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The last laugh

Posted on August 12, 2014 by jwfisch

th-20Today, the world mourns the death of its funniest man, who, in the end, couldn’t find that last laugh that might have prevented him from taking his own life. He assumed so many personalities except the one he needed the most — himself. He was uncomfortable in his own shoes, so he got used to everyone else’s, and for that reason, he had a huge amount of compassion for people from all walks of life, in all situations. No one could stand in someone else’s shoes better than Robin Williams.

He left so much of himself all over our pop culture that it will be impossible to not encounter pieces of him everywhere. Even down to his rendition of The Night Before Christmas with the Boston Pops Orchestra that is a centerpiece of our Christmas music every year, or his audio version of the legend of Pecos Bill that we shared often with our children; he is a national treasure that will live on through his art form.

With all that he left us, it might be best to remember him for that ability to identify with someone else’s character so much so that he became that person. (Think Mrs. Doubtfire, or Peter Pan.) That ability is something we could all use more of — the ability to stand in someone else’s shoes — to get out of our own situation long enough to understand someone else’s world. It’s an unselfish quality that helps us relate to others in a real way.

Bob Zmuda, creator of “Comic Relief” said this: “The first time we went to one of the shelters in downtown L.A., on skid row, when he got up in front of the homeless folk, he froze. He was so taken aback.” What was that, if not to be completely overwhelmed by stepping inside their own reality? Bob went on: “The director of the homeless shelter came back and he asked Robin, ‘What happened? They love you and they expect you to be funny.’ So he went back out and killed.”

That’s what we could use more of — to see the world as others see it. Relationships are what we are all about, but you can’t have a relationship if you are stuck inside your own reality.

It was said of Jesus that he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Whose grief and sorrow was that, do you suppose? Certainly not His own. Jesus did not walk around feeling sorry for himself. It was the grief and sorrow of everyone else that He felt so deeply. It’s why He wept.

Perhaps, in the end, that grief and sorrow was too much for Robin Williams. We can only hope that in his passing, he accepted the hand of the One who so identified with us that He died our death and rose again to bring us through death to the other side. Maybe, in the end, Robin will have the last laugh after all.

Watch this short video message for more of my thoughts on the passing of Robin Williams, click here to view them.

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Personalizing life

Posted on August 11, 2014 by jwfisch

I’m going to simplify your life today: Life is full of people we know.th-18

I’m going to announce that the new word for Christian is Tim. And in similar manner:

The new word for single mom is Barbara.
The new word for homosexual is Bob.
The new word for secular humanist is George.
The new word for right-wing Republican is Larry.
The new word for left-wing Democrat is Sarah.

More than black and white, there is Sally. Rather than right and wrong there is Jason. Instead of Jews and Gentiles, there is Aaron and Will. Instead of teenage pregnancy there is Pam. Instead of abortion, there is Alison.

Do you see what’s happening here? We are personalizing life. This is how God wants us to get along in the world — surrounded by people we know. And the more people we know, the less important and the less effective labels become.

This goes for our enemies as well. Jesus told us to love our enemies — that would probably mean we would know their names. You can’t love a group or a category; you love individuals, and individuals have names.

People make labels inadequate. The more you know a person, the less it becomes possible to wrap a label around them. A person is always more complex than their description, and we have relationships with people, not concepts.
th-17
This is all important because relationships are the key to life. God is a relationship in and of Himself. “Let us make mankind in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). He made us to broaden that relationship so that we might all be one.

Enrich your life: get more names in it. It will simplify everything.

The new word for atheist is …

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Life on punctuation

Posted on August 8, 2014 by jwfisch

th-14Undoubtedly those of you who have been regular readers of the Catch for some time have become accustomed to recognizing Marti’s writing. She loves long sentences. She loves things to go on and on and on. She jumps from one thing to another without warning. That’s because her mind is racing ten times faster than she can write, and she doesn’t have the patience to take you from one thought to the next; you’re supposed to catch up to her. Read her mind. Join her at her pace. Come on folks, life is happening here, and you don’t want to miss anything!

This is why Marti’s most useful punctuation mark is the comma. Marti thinks of life as a series of events separated by commas. She’d be happy if the period never came. Gertrude Stein writes that “a comma is a poor period that lets you stop and take a breath.” I am frequently introducing commas into Marti’s writing so at least we can take the breath even if she doesn’t. And she rarely does.

And you say you have a hard time reading Marti’s writing? You should have seen it before you got it. I am Marti’s heavy-handed editor. I have to come at her stuff with a machete, and I have to slow her down long enough to have her tell me what she meant by such and such. (She doesn’t like to have to explain herself; we’re just supposed to get it.) Having to go back and extract her thoughts about something she put into writing a few minutes ago is a slow, sometimes painful, process. That’s ancient history for Marti; she’s well past that now.

Marti hates periods. She never wants anything to end. She has little interest in end times prophesy, and eternity is not a major motivation for her. Marti is a heaven-can-wait kind of person. Unless, of course, you are talking about heaven as another dimension to life that we can experience right now, like in Ephesians, where it says we are seated right now with Christ in the heavenlies. She’s all over that. She thinks Christians spend much too much time on eternity. As if the song were “Sha-la-la-la-la-la live for tomorrow.” Her favorite verse is 2 Corinthians 6:2, “Behold, now is the acceptable time, behold, now is the day of salvation.”

Me, I like short, choppy sentences. I like the finality of truth that a period brings. I could communicate fine without commas. Marti could communicate fine without periods. Together, we’re a sentence.

God is both now, and then. God is the beginning and the end, and everything in between. You need all the punctuation available to tell His story (including question marks), and His story is also our story.

“I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.” — Oscar Wilde

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Thinking small; THINKING BIG

Posted on August 7, 2014 by jwfisch

th-13Why have only one when you already have them all?

“So don’t boast about following a particular human leader. For everything belongs to you— whether Paul or Apollos or Peter, or the world, or life and death, or the present and the future. Everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.” (1 Corinthians 3:21-23)

According to this, we are incredibly wealthy. “Everything belongs to you,” Paul writes to the church at Corinth that was divided into factions around which leader they were following. And then he goes on to list everything, and he doesn’t just stop with Christian leaders, but goes on to include things like the world, life and death, the present and the future, and finally concludes with “everything.”

If everything belongs to us, why are we selling ourselves so short?

Do you ever read scriptures like this and just read on, because what it says seem too preposterous to be true? Well, he can’t possibly mean “everything.” But if it doesn’t mean everything, then it is not the word of God.

Here are some things I think “everything” means:

Everything that means anything.
Everything that matters.
Everything that is true.
Everything that will last.
Everything that we need.
Everything that we really want.
Everything that will make us happy.
Everything that will make us successful.
Everything that will make us able to do the will of God.
Everything that will enable us to be who God meant us to be.
Everything that will enable us to make a difference in the world.

If you start out today with the knowledge that you already have everything, you’re going to have a pretty good day.

I desperately need to learn how to think this way, because I’m sure not acting like it’s true. I’m acting like I actually have only very little. That’s because I live in a very little box that only has room in it for just a few little things, anyway — certainly not enough room for “everything.”

But this is a debilitating way to think that is tied to the old covenant where everything depends on me, and therefore I need to keep just a few little things around me or else I won’t be able to manage it. I’m a minimalist — a person who advocates or practices smallness in life. I like to keep my world small because if it gets too big, I just want to go back to bed.

I almost went back to bed this morning. You almost got an old Catch so I could get this out and go back to bed for an hour because I didn’t get much sleep last night. But then I came upon this verse that God bopped me over the head with, and here we are awake and aware and finding out how big our world is. Do you want to find out with me?

To see this any other way is an affront to God. It’s to read His word and not believe it.

We need to step out of our little boxes into the big, wide world, where everything is ours and we are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. That’s being a part of something pretty darn big!

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Faith of our Fathers

Posted on August 6, 2014 by jwfisch

image001I wasn’t born yesterday, and that’s something you can say about both me and my faith.

After almost four decades of exhausting ourselves chasing relevance, it may be high time to look back. Back past the Jesus Movement; past three Great Awakenings; past the Reformation; past the Late, High, and Early Middle Ages; past the Imperial Church; the Apologists; the Early Church Fathers; the Apostolic Period; past the Martyrs; back to the first accounts of the early church in the New Testament.  This is a faith with a rich history and heritage. Unfortunately this is not something emphasized in much preaching today.

Since the Jesus Movement of the 1970s to the present day, the goal of the Christian church in America has been to be relevant to the culture around it. From Francis Schaeffer’s The God who is There in 1968, to Bill Hybels’ The God You’re Looking For, thirty years later, popular Christianity went from spurring us on intellectually to stroking our felt needs — giving me the religious experience that relates to me now. Even the hymns of only one to two hundred years ago have all but disappeared from the Christian’s worshiping repertoire, giving us the experience of a rock ’n’ roll faith that just arrived on the scene in our lifetime.

In one of our most memorable BlogTalkRadio shows to date, we discussed these and many other related issues with Duane Arnold and Michael Glen Bell, creators and producers of The Project/Martyrs Prayers, an album of First Century martyrs prayers set to contemporary music performed by the likes of Phil Keaggy, Randy Stonehill, Jennifer Knapp, Glenn Kaiser, Kemper Crabb and Margaret Becker, among others.

There is a great identity crisis in the church today, caused largely by chasing relevance for the last 40 years, much as a dog chases its tail. It may be that the best the church can do in these times is to look back to its roots. Remember the early church fathers, the martyrs, the missionaries, the carriers of the gospel over time and trends to a vital and personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ — the same one believed and followed down through history. To be sure, the new is important for a vital experience of a faith that is fresh and alive and connects to the world around us, but the old is also important for the depth of belief and the knowledge that the gospel has survived literally unchanged for 2,000 years, passed down by men and women who were more than willing to die for it.

Take, as an example, Saint Apollonia, who was one of a group of virgin martyrs who suffered in Alexandria during a local uprising against the Christians. The story goes that they dragged her through the streets and with repeated blows broke most of her teeth. Then, when they reached the center of the city, they built a bonfire to burn her alive if she refused to blaspheme Christ or utter prayers to heathen gods. Given, at her own request, a little freedom to “think it over,” she sprang quickly into the fire on her own accord rather than give them the satisfaction of exacting the punishment themselves.

Doesn’t it do you good to know that Apollonia, in doing so, handed down her faith to us in this way, and though we may never be called upon to be a martyr for our faith, we know that, in similar circumstances, we would do the same?
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Click on the Project logo at top of article to go to the Martyrs Prayers website.

Click on the picture of Duane and Michael to hear our interview On Demand.

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Jonah just doesn’t get it

Posted on August 5, 2014 by jwfisch

Humpback Whale, Megaptera novaeangliae 29 July 2010I am a lot more like the prophet Jonah than I would care to admit, but I’m going to try to this morning.

Jonah is often called the reluctant prophet because God called him to preach to the town of Nineveh, and he went the opposite direction. And you know what God did about that; He sent a big fish to redirect him back to Nineveh.

But why? Why didn’t he want to go preach to Nineveh? Did he have sudden stage fright? Was he afraid they would reject his message and come after him? No; none of the above. Jonah’s message was one of both good and bad news. The bad news was that the city was full of wickedness and that God was getting ready to punish it. The good news was that if they repented and turned from their wickedness, God would be merciful and spare the city.

Jonah liked the bad news. He wanted God to rain down His justice on these wicked people. But Jonah had an inclination. He was afraid that if he preached this message, they would choose the good news. The city would repent and God would be merciful, and for Jonah, that was the worst possible outcome.

We don’t know from the story why Jonah had it in for the city of Nineveh. It could have been his own self-righteousness. It could have been that he had a history with these people. Maybe they had hurt him or members of his family in some way. Whatever it was, he wanted the place destroyed.

So, when he finished preaching to the whole town, he retired to a hillside overlooking the city to wait and hopefully witness God’s destruction. But nothing happened. And the more nothing happened, the more upset he got. So God sent a very hot sun to burn down on Jonah from his vantage point without any protection. And Jonah complained about the sun. So God sent a plant to grow up rapidly and provide some shade for him, and Jonah was thankful. But no sooner did that happen than God withered the plant and left Jonah in the sun. And that made him angry again.

And God had something to say about that: “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:10-11)

Jonah was so caught up in his own self-righteousness that, in the end, all he could care about was himself and a stupid plant. Meanwhile, God was having compassion for a hundred and twenty thousand people who were trapped in their own ignorance, along with many animals, which God cared about, too.

I really get this story, and painfully so. It hurts how much I identify with Jonah — his self-righteousness and his focus on his own needs to the exclusion of those around him. And that silly plant! I get that too, based on the silly things that become so important to me when I am inwardly-focused. And I identify with his desire to see justice meted out on all the bad people in the world. But in the end, I am also relieved to find that God is the way He is. That He is full of mercy and unlike me. Because if God were like me, I wouldn’t have a chance.

God, help me to see people the way you see them, as those who don’t know their right hand from their left (as if I knew any better). May I be quick to show mercy to all, because mercy is what I want for myself. And take my eyes off me and my needs and put them on you, and on others.

You’d think that after three days inside a whale  Jonah would have learned more than this. Then again, self-righteousness is a hard thing to shake.

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The comedy of grace

Posted on August 4, 2014 by jwfisch

th-9We need not take ourselves so seriously.

We ended last week with laughter — how there is humor in God planting His Holy Spirit in these frail, fallible, human vessels of ours. That’s grace, and there is a part of grace that is comical.

Frederick Buechner calls it in the subtitle for his book on telling the truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale. The tragedy is sin; the fairy tale is the “and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after” ending; and the comedy is everything in between. Not to make light of the many awful tragedies of human existence, but to put them in the context of grace, where God’s grace ultimately conquers all, and we laugh in the victory. Sometimes we can even laugh in the tragedy because we can see the ultimate victory through the eyes of faith.

Two sisters got ahold of me last week because they were with their beloved mother in a hospice home, waiting for the inevitable, which appeared to be only days away. They got ahold of me because, in reminiscing about their lives with their mother, they recalled many special moments spent at the camp I mentioned in Friday’s Catch, and the catalyst for those memories was one of my songs, “the All Day Song” or “Love Him in the morning…” The sisters got to thinking how great it would be if I could be at their mother’s service and sing that song, so one of them found us on the Internet and sent me an email.  I love it when people act on ideas like this, and I would have done it if I didn’t already have a full month with more deadlines than I can meet.

I did offer them the song, however, and sent it to them as a download and encouraged them to play it for their mother, which they did. I mentioned that I sang that song at my own mother’s bedside a few weeks before her death, and how she opened her eyes after 24 hours of being totally unresponsive, and was clear as a bell in blessing a 6-month old Chandler whom I had with me.

I mentioned that especially because their description of their mother so much reminded me of mine. They said she was a faithful church woman, but her real love was a Bible study outside the church that she taught to a bunch of “worldly,” non-church-goers. This was exactly the case with my mother, so much so that many of these women showed up at her funeral service, and were the most vocal about what my mother had meant to them. While most of the church people, who thought my mother’s life revolved only around them, looked on and wondered who these people were! No big deal … they’re just a bunch of “pagans” my mom led to the Lord!

When the sisters said they had played the song for their mother a number of times, I suggested they not overdo it for fear she might sit up and tell them to please stop playing that song — a little humor that was not inappropriate, given the hope that lies ahead for her and them. It’s just a part of the comedy of grace.

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