John Fischer The Catch

"...a couple miscues."

(Marti’s comments on the first Isaiah House event since summer break.)

The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim gave up two unearned runs Tuesday night and lost to the Mariners, 2-1, to fall 3 1/2 games behind the Texas Rangers in the American League West.  The Angels simply did not rise to the challenge, committing as many errors (four) as they had hits.

Angel manager Mike Scioscia commented:” We let a couple of miscues get us.”

The women of the Isaiah House know a lot about miscues – they live a daily odyssey of small joys and huge challenges that leave me feeling as though I am a spectator to some grander game of life.

We all have had a coach that was an influence on our life — people who appear on our life’s path and sadly, it is often in hindsight that we come to realize the gift that was embodied in their ideals, spirit and lens to the world. Individual women at the Isaiah House have let me stand in their shoes or see what they see, which has provided me with a new perspective on life. How these women see me doesn’t always jibe with how I see myself. Scotland’s favorite poet, Robert Burns, summed it up well when he wrote, “I wish to God the gift he’d gi’e us, to see ourselves as others see us.” This could be the patron prayer for all of us. Therefore, I would consider several of the women my coaches and I am glad I know them.

Just like everyone, their pursuits are colored by their life experiences. While they can relate to the Angels’ loss better than any one of us, we all recognize the validity in the following quote by Angels skipper, Mike Scioscia, “This didn’t eliminate us tonight, but any time you lose ground, the challenge gets a little steeper.”

Win or lose, the women had a wonderful time Tuesday night at Angels Stadium. They were on their feet for the great plays and shouted encouragement when the opposing pitcher was keeping the Angels down. They know a lot about this game of life — trial, travail, questioning, doubt and suffering are part of their DNA.

They’ve managed to puncture through my well-developed veneer of a fair-weather Christianity and pegged me for what I truly am — someone with good intentions.  Instead of berating my indifference or patronizing my lack of action in a world filled with inequity and suffering, many of the women have led me by the hand like the Ghost of Christmas Present sharing the joys and tragedies from their lives including following through on one’s ideals and betraying something at the heart of who we are, beset by materialism and narcissism and all the other “isms” of indifference.

Like the Angels’ coaching staff cares for their players, several of the women care deeply for you and me — their “players.” They recognize our team’s foundation of family, service and integrity.

They know we are selfish and self-centered athletes as well, taking the field each day expecting to be the center of the offense, insisting that someone “give us the ball.”  We can be all about winning the game and changing the rules if the end can justify the means.

The Isaiah House women play by a different and not necessarily better set of rules. Having been impacted (but not necessarily caused) by traditional male thinking, an unwanted pregnancy, divorce, etc., the proliferation of both spoken and unspoken judgment has forced many of our sisters into the world, unarmed. The fact that they are seeking to survive by taking advantage of second chances given for all sorts of reason, gives them the right to redefine what “winning” really means.

Sometimes our “smarter” self thinks we have it all figured out. Perhaps that is why sinners make the best saints; they bring a simplicity to the game. They listen, practice, accept new perspectives, and take in new advice on how best to play the game. To strive to understand before being understood. Let’s not miss our cue.

The Angels lost Tuesday night. They let a couple of miscues get them.

We let a couple of miscues get us, but with a coaching staff like the honorable women of the Isaiah House, we can surely learn from our mistakes.

If you’ve ever driven through the southwestern United States you undoubtedly have encountered the quirky and bizarre, from reptile villages to snake pits to dinosaur replicas, there is something about the desert that attracts the peculiar. That’s why I wasn’t that surprised to find on our drive to the mountains last weekend that Pearsonville, California 93527 was the “Hubcap capital of the world.”

I had to laugh out loud for quite some time in the car before I could tell Christopher and Chandler about it because we past it so fast that I was the only one to see the water tank boasting Pearsonville’s claim to hubcap fame along with a 30-foot statue of a lady welcoming people to nothing more than a junk yard and a couple run down trailers and what looked like it was once a playground for children.

I was so taken with the place that upon our return from the mountain, I insisted we stop and take some pictures. Up close it wasn’t much different. It wasn’t until we got home and I searched the Internet that I found there was a very colorful person at the center of this strange place: Lucy Pearson, the Hubcap Queen.

Over 50 years ago, Lucy ran away from Kentucky because she didn’t want to get married. “I eloped by myself.” In California she met and married her husband Andy and they bought some land in the desert and opened a wrecking yard. That got Lucy going collecting hubcaps. Over the years she has collected what she claims to be over 140,000 hubcaps. She’s even become a sort of celebrity boasting visits from Whoopi Goldberg and Jim Belushi, interviews in the Los Angeles Times and one for CBS News only two years ago.

Pat Beckett of a North Hollywood-based company that supplies cars to the film industry sought her out to scrounge up hubcaps for a 1974 AMC Gremlin. “I didn’t think there were any of those left in the world,” Beckett said. “She had enough to do three cars.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Pearsonville is a census-designated place (CDP) with a population of 27 in 2000, down to 17 in 2010. Although we were hard pressed to see any signs of life when we stopped by.

I could go on with more fascinating information I have dug up about Lucy (she has a website www.hubcapqueen.com), but the point of this is to share with you a lesson I learned. My interest in this began from a very cynical place. In my sinful nature, I would make a big joke about this just for a laugh. And I did laugh. I must say, Lucy has had the last laugh. I don’t have a town named after me. I don’t own a water tank. I don’t have a successful enterprise and a colorful life sought out by famous people and news media.

My cynical self haughtily put all this down. My divine nature would give anything just to meet Lucy.

“My hubcaps is my hobby. I talk to people and show them my hubcaps.”

I just returned in time to write this (a little late, my apologies) from a weekend trip with my two sons that Marti describes as “nothing more than an excuse for men in the wilderness to do a lot of peeing, pooping, and burping.” I take offense with that. She left out farting, probably the most important bodily function in such company. We may have driven farther than appropriate for just a two-night stay (five and a half hours), but I wanted Chandler to experience fishing in a High Sierra lake.

Christopher and I were careful to point out to Chandler that this wasn’t THE trip, a 5-day backpacking trip into an isolated wilderness lake that has become a Fischer family legend, but only a 3-day version to a lake we could drive to. It occurred to me later that all our talk about THE trip, and our tendency to compare this trip to that trip was completely useless to Chandler. He knows nothing about THE trip, he only knows THIS trip, and this trip is now complete with memories and stories of its own.

I wonder how often we do the same thing in relation to spiritual experiences. We gauge one person’s spiritual experience by another’s, or, worse yet, we gauge everyone else’s by our own.

What I missed was the opportunity to put myself into Chandler’s shoes and do whatever I could to make this THE trip for him, because that’s exactly what it was. Putting ourselves in other people’s shoes is one of the most important ways we can care for them. It’s hard to care for someone when you are always working from yourself and your own perspective. For instance, we found out that Chandler doesn’t like trout. That may just rule out THE trip entirely for him. Maybe we have to come up with a new trip. Chandler’s trip.

For now, and for Chandler, this was THE trip with his big brother and his dad, and that is all it needs to be.

We have very dear friends who live in Branson, Missouri^[1] who responded to Thursday’s “My Turn” Catch quite positively because they felt it put both John and me into “the category of real people who have real needs.” It was suggested that perhaps we have yet to provide you with an understanding of what it takes to cross the threshold of our family with you, our Catch family. Therefore we look to provide you on Monday with an appropriate summary of Catch financials.

***

John and I are real people with real needs and probably the greatest gift we can offer you is the gift of gratitude.

Gratitude is an emotion that occurs after people receive help. Specifically, gratitude is experienced if people perceive the help they receive as valuable to them, costly to their benefactor, and given by the benefactor with benevolent intentions (rather than ulterior motives).

It is important that we understand that gratitude is not the same as indebtedness. While both emotions occur following help, indebtedness occurs when a person perceives that they are under an obligation to make some repayment or compensation for the aid. The emotions lead to different actions; indebtedness can motivate the recipient to avoid the person who has helped them, whereas         dgratitude can motivate the recipient to seek out their benefactor and improve their relationship with them. Indebtedness separates; the gift of gratitude unites.

I know this to be true. A very special woman, also from Branson, graciously gave me generous gifts during times when I really needed her. However, I allowed my emotion of indebtedness to get in the way of our valued relationship. Indebtedness blocked me from seeing realities I could have tended to freely in her life. And yet she continued to give freely, never asking for an exchange for the gift I could (and can) give of gratitude.

Gratitude can also set our family members and friends free to continue their lives without bitterness or self-recrimination. We recently received a request from a Catch member asking for prayer as he traveled to where his father was dying. He was anticipating a time fraught with turmoil for him, because of unresolved “stuff'” between his Dad and himself. In such times the gift of Gratitude may be the only way to connect to a family member or friend who has simply failed and erred and caused pain and even evil with their existence, and who because of death or fixity will never turn around. Whatever evil and lack they have unleashed on the world, they took the gamble of life, and in the case of a parent, brought us into existence, and perhaps did one or two other things toward sending us alive into the future. The gift of gratitude sees this.

If we loathe our lives and ourselves, then we will loathe others – and if we loathe others we are loathing ourselves. If we stop the cycle then what remains is what remains – here we are, there they are, or were, and to be alive is something. A root gratitude for existing is necessary for anything good to happen to anyone.

At the end of a certain process, it is nearly inevitable, I think, to have a very basic root gratitude. Not perhaps grounds for throwing a party, but more than sufficient for maintaining a gift of gratitude.

Well I’ve been up most the night trying to figure out what to tell you. Many of you have responded to our recent requests for funds quite generously and we are excited about that and so grateful, and yet we still face home-threatening issues. It’s a little like Chandler and his downhill skateboard. In the picture, it looks like he’s done, but you know that in no time, he’ll be altering this design for something else. Good work is never done; you just figure out how to do it better.

So we are sticking with our request for contributions knowing also that not everyone sees every email. So we appreciate the patience of those who have gone before.

Some of you are doing more; now we need more of you to do some.

The Catch had grown from a daily devotional into an online community, to that place where it hovers at the edge of viability as a “real” (rather than an “I-just-can’t-help-doing-this”) ministry. We simply cannot do other than to do everything to continue with this and do what needs to be done to pursue all his avenues of ministry and meet all our responsibilities.

Remember, we’re not there yet. The Catch is a prototype, not a stereotype, and we are still in the building stage. Come build with us; these are important days in the lives of many on the fringes. Many are seeking truth, but do not wish to identify with the popular version of Christianity that is commonly portrayed in the public arena. We are filling an important gap and we need you.

Blessings to all, and thank you in advance for your kindness.

The sharp pungent smell of acetone meets me at the front door as Marti calls me out of my office to help Chandler in a sudden unplanned late-night project. I find him in the kitchen bent over his skateboard spraying “Goof-off” and rubbing off the graphic on the underside of his board. He has some new plan about how he wants to change the look.

These re-modeling moments can strike at any time and they always receive Marti’s full endorsement, as does anything that even slightly smacks of personal creativity. To her credit, it is moments like this that are contributing to what could be a design or engineering career. Chandler is always altering his stuff, putting his own personal touches on things.

In like manner, the Catch of the Day is giving thousands of people all over the world an opportunity to reexamine their faith by sharing daily in the personal touches we bring to a life of faith. In a time when much of Christian truth is pre-packaged, the Catch effects change by coming alongside and sharing life – uncovering truth in the ordinary human experiences common to us all. And because we value self-discovery, we are seeking not to tell as much as to lead to where one can discover the truth and make it personal a little like Chandler and his skateboard makeover.

Though thousands now receive our daily messages, only a relative few have taken to supporting us regularly, necessitating this call for a one-time gift. Please consider making a generous contribution today so that we can continue to make the Catch the priority it deserves. Our needs are great but our reach is greater. Help us continue to provide this beacon of hope for those who may not be able to contribute.

Well the smell of acetone is giving Marti a headache and I have been called in to help Chandler relocate his workspace. Thank you for your gift today.

We love you all and look forward to our growing influence in the marketplace together.

In response to yesterday’s Catch, someone wrote in the following. As I was reading these words, an answer came that I believe is important enough to share with everyone, because we all have these recurring questions all the time as we view so much evil and injustice in the world. Suddenly I saw this as not a simple answer, but an all-encompassing one.

God, where were you when the little girl was padlocked in a cooler and left to die in there while the adults left in her charge sat in lawn chairs drinking?

God, where were you when Jacee Dugard was being raped night after night by a religious nut?

God, where are you when the innocent are victimized?

I believe there is an answer to these very difficult questions.

God was on a cross, reconciling these very victims to himself through his own bitter death — a death that reaches into time and eternity and forgives perpetrator and victim alike. Christ’s death is not a thing of the past; it is actively reaching across all time and paying the price for everyone. I believe the very horrible acts listed here were laid upon Christ.

Where was God when these things were happening? He was right there, closer than anyone ever would want to know.

And God goes on reconciling the world to himself through Christ on the cross, and the resurrection that follows.

If we could meet God for a casual chat, I wager we would find him interested in virtually anything. I think we’d find him pretty well read and up on current events. As a matter of fact, because of the huge variety of interests he has, he might appear to some Christians as a rather secular God.

Either God started the world in motion and slipped away to his holy heaven to let it run on its own, or he started it and stayed with it as a player – a participant in his own creation. This is certainly the biblical model and part of the reason why there are three of him. The Father has an eye to and fro on the whole earth with nothing escaping his gaze (2 Chronicles 16:9). The Son walked here once in the flesh and knows what it is like to come from dust and return to it (Genesis 3:19). And the Holy Spirit now indwells our flesh, going where we go, seeing what we see, and hearing what we hear – even praying for us when we cannot find the words for our emotions (Romans 8:26). That all sounds to me like a God who is pretty involved.

If God sees everything, wouldn’t you want to know what he thinks about what he sees? I venture to guess he has an opinion; why don’t we ask him about that? Do we walk out of a movie and wonder what God thought of it? Do we finish a fine meal and wonder if God liked it? Do we read the paper and wonder what God’s take on the news is? Or better yet, do we find him in the news? We need to adopt a way of thinking that puts God within the frame of our daily vision.

I am near-sighted. The professional term for this degenerative vision condition is myopia. I can see fairly well up close, but I can’t see well far away. It’s a strange label that identifies a strength and leaves the assumption that the opposite is where the problem is. To put our spiritual state is similar terms, you could say we are “upsighted.” Upsighted people can see God lifted up, but they can’t see him down or across or in or out. Instead of myopia, I would call this “utopia.” We only see God in the perfect.

Utopic Christians can’t see God in the flawed, in the disappointment, in the poor, or in the unfinished quality of their lives – even in the average. They see him in the winners, not the losers. They see him in victory, not defeat. They are utopic Christians, only capable of worship when everything is supposedly perfect and we are all looking up.

If you can only see God when you look up, then faith will never meet your daily life. You can’t walk around looking up all the time. You can’t do your work well, and you run the chance of running into somebody or something because you are not paying attention to where you are going. We need a vision correction that allows us to pay attention to God and what we are doing at the same time. People who are nearsighted need lenses to help them see far away. People who are upsighted need lenses to help them see down, and in doing so, to see God down here. He is everywhere, all the time. This is where real faith begins: seeing God down… around… in… out… through… beyond… before… after… between… and in the middle of… everything.

Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. (Acts 17:11)

“Truth seekers rarely take someone’s word for anything.” And what that means is that they have to find out things for themselves. That doesn’t mean they don’t trust people; it just means they have to do their own thinking and their own research, both of which are required in order to come to their own conclusions.

It’s always been a real boost to my belief in independent thinking that Paul commended the believers in Berea because they checked him out by the scriptures to see if what he was saying was true. In other words, they didn’t take even Paul’s word for it. And what’s even better about this is that the writer of the Book of Acts commended them for this and called them of noble character—more noble than the Thessalonians, who, by implication, didn’t check Paul out with the scriptures, but must have just taken his word as truth. Paul is basically saying here… “Don’t do that. Don’t just take anybody’s word for it, even if it’s my word.” How daring is that?

How contrary this is to so many today—myself included—who would love to have people eating out of our hands instead of constantly questioning us and measuring our words by the scriptures. So it’s more noble to think your own thoughts and to question things and to dig for answers that back up what someone says. Here, here, for the modern day Bereans who don’t care who you are, they only want to know what you are saying and how you are living it out in your own life, and how does what you say and do relate to the truth as it has been revealed in the scriptures and as God has revealed it so far to them.

I’m sorry, but this is revolutionary. This flies in the face of mass marketing, personality cults, and a follow-the-leader mentality that accompanies much of what goes on in our society today. You don’t really have anything to say until you are somebody, and once you are somebody, everything you say is golden. It’s the truth. It’s at least marketable. “Everybody line up and take notes. We’ve found the truth now. We’ve got it right here.”

Is that the way it’s supposed to be? I don’t think so. No, that sounds like what was probably going on among the less noble Thessalonians. Give me the Bereans. They’re scary. They’re not very good for my ego. But they are people who won’t be denied the truth. If you seek me with all your heart you will surely find me.