John Fischer The Catch

Gratitude is the current of the river of grace.

The giving of thanks is the only logical response one can have to a forgiveness and a holiness that are totally undeserved. By nature of the fact that grace is a gift, there is nothing one can do but receive it and be thankful for it. Thankfulness is so tied to grace that the absence of gratitude in a Christian’s life is an indication that legalism still rules the day.

Most of us have a hard time responding to gifts. Gifts run contrary to those who trust only in what has been earned. Gifts imply a need or a weakness, and if the thing one receives is righteousness, it means admitting to the failure of the holy effort to produce it.

But what a glorious failure! Who has managed to join the ranks of sinners save by grace without possessing a deep and abiding, ever-flowing gratitude of the heart? We have done nothing to deserve, create or maintain the righteousness we have been given, and therefore we can do nothing but be grateful for it. Even our reward at the end of the journey will come as a thankful surprise, because we will have become so well acquainted with our sins and shortcomings along the way that we will not be expecting it. So we will throw ourselves on the mercy of God when we meet him, just as we always have done, because we have no other option, and yet, in his eyes, we are already clean. We have been clean all along through the blood of his Son. That’s why it will take heaven to contain our praise and an eternity to give proper thanks. “You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing to you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever” (Psalm 30:11-12, emphasis mine).

Chandler’s timing couldn’t have been worse. I came home from a late night run to the grocery store to find our kitchen had been turned into a department store. All sorts of household items had been arranged on the counter with a little strip of masking tape bearing a price. Monopoly money was handed to Marti and I and we were invited to shop. Though there were a few deals to be had (the little single-cup espresso maker I like was only $25), most items were way overpriced, like the Sharpie and the framed picture of Marti and Anne that were each $500. I asked Chandler about the Sharpie and he said it was a rare version… very old.

The lateness of the hour made me want to get him to pack up everything and head to bed, but the creativity, the imagination and the spontaneity of the moment were undeniable. So shop on, we said, and we did until we dropped.

You can’t always pick teachable moments, in fact you rarely do. You have to be ready for them when they show up, even if it’s after midnight. All that creativity and imagination brimming in a 10-year-old? Stop that? Are you kidding?

Don’t you think God has us learning through similar teachable moments? Don’t you think he wants us to check in with Him all the time? All of life has significance, if nothing else, just to learn. Don’t miss it.

Marti and I were engaged in a somewhat heated exchange the other day when she asked me why I was being so defensive.

“Because you accused me,” I said.

“I didn’t accuse you,” she replied, “I was intuitively assuming.”

Ah yes: the prerogative of wives—to intuitively assume. In other words, she knows me so well that she thinks she knows what I’m up to even before I’m up to it. And the problem is, she’s usually right, which makes it very difficult for me to argue with her. She has me arguing with myself most of the time—tying me up in knots with my own words.

But I asked for this by being defensive in the first place. I’m so good at this. I suffer from chronic caught-in-the-principal’s-office syndrome. Half the time, I’m acting like I just got caught, and the rest of the time I’m wondering if I will be.

How much of your negative patterns have you ever examined? This is part of the value of friends and spouses: They are like mirrors—they show us what we can’t see about ourselves. My fear of getting caught is so ingrained, I never thought about it until Marti questioned me on being defensive. By golly she’s right.

As much as I know and believe about the grace of God, my forgiveness, and the absence of condemnation when one is in Christ Jesus, I still find out that there are areas where what I know doesn’t touch where I live or even who I am. Just because you know a scripture or biblical principle doesn’t mean it’s a part of you. But it might take an intuitive assumption to find that out.

An ongoing theme of the Catch of the Day has been a Christian’s place and testimony in the world. Much has been done in the last 20 years to damage a credible and trustworthy image of Christians in society. The attempt of Christians to gain an influence in culture using tools and weapons that are not of the Spirit of God has been costly to the gospel in that those who so desperately need the hope the gospel provides have been driven away by the fear and anger of those who should be carriers of that hope.

We know that Jesus did not come to condemn the world (John 3:17), but most of those who are not Christians today are convinced his followers did. We have exchanged the good news of the gospel for the bad news of a culture war, and the battle continues to rage in many sectors and in many minds. In light of this, The Catch is seeking to help advance a different worldview and redefine a Christian’s role in society.

Today I share with you a work in progress—a new manifesto for global change. Reflect on it. Comment on it. Pray over it. We will be looking more deeply into all 10 of these as the days go by, but this will get us started.

“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.” (Proverbs 23:7) What you think ultimately effects who you are.

10 Prerequisites for Being Effective in the Marketplace

1. A personal understanding of my own sinfulness

2. An overwhelming sense of God’s grace for me, and for everyone else

3. A heart that forgives and forgets

4. An absence of agenda

5. An expectation that God is already in the world (I am joining Him there, not taking Him there.)

6. A sense of the church as the Body of Christ Universal

7. An insatiable curiosity for all that is not yet known to me

8. A belief in the intrinsic value of every human life

9. An assumption that I have something to learn from everybody

10. A deep and abiding desire for everyone to know what God has done for them through Christ

“The Tillman Story” is a new movie opening on Friday that tells the story of the cover-up that surrounded the death of Pat Tillman, NFL star turned combat soldier in Afghanistan. Spurred on by the love of his country, the violation of its freedom on 9/11/01, and his sense of duty, Tillman forsook his lucrative NFL career and joined the army. He was subsequently killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire, except that the army covered up the friendly fire part, and used the opportunity to turn him into a hero by falsifying a story of how he was killed storming an enemy-fortified hill to save his buddies. Fellow soldiers who knew the truth could not in good conscience carry out the lie that was being propagated by the army intelligence, and as the news media started to smell a rat, Tillman’s family began an all out campaign to find out what really happened. The movie apparently dramatizes how all this unfolded.

In a review of the movie in the Los Angeles Times this week, one critic pointed out the irony of how a movie dedicated to uncovering the truth had to struggle with its own temptation to sell out the truth to avoid an R-rating, and thus limit the market to which the story could be told.

“It’s part and parcel of this unwillingness we have as a society to face what our soldiers do for us,” commented filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev. “The idea that we’re embarrassed in some way or it’s inappropriate for kids to know how soldiers talk when they’re being fired at, or how people talk when they’re grieving. It’s a slap in the face.”

“The basic thing we owe the people who put their lives on the line for the country is the truth, and we owe their families the truth too. They can handle the truth.”

Jesus said the truth would set us free. I have always had a tendency to think of this in positive terms. The truth sets you free; how fun is that? Well, in reality, sometimes it isn’t fun at all, and the story around this movie is certainly one of those times. Truth sometimes hurts, but it is still the only thing you really want to know.

The truth will always set us free, it just might not always be what we want to hear.

I have a friend who breaks out laughing whenever I call him. That’s right—before I can say anything he’s laughing. He sees my name on his ID screen and laughs at the thought of me; so he’s still laughing when he picks up the phone.
Now it’s true that he’s part comedian and we’ve always had fun together, but I don’t know of anyone else who laughs at the mere thought of me. Really. I’m not that funny of a person, in fact, I have more of a tendency to be depressed than to be happy, but Chuck thinks I’m funny and that’s fine by me. I have been known to call him just to hear him laugh.

We need to laugh more. The enjoyment of the current moment is so often overshadowed by pressures from without and within. We postpone laughter because we don’t think we have earned the right to be happy. Or we are postponing laughter because we are waiting to turn a corner in our circumstances. Well we haven’t earned it and that’s one of the reasons why we can be so happy. It’s not attached to us or our circumstances. We are happy for other reasons. So go ahead and laugh; it’s good medicine.

It was one of my mother’s favorite verses. Pardon the King’s English but that’s the way I was used to hearing it, and I heard it often. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones” (Proverbs 17:22).

In a personal account of his experiences covering the devastating earthquake in China two years ago that leveled cities and claimed at least 67,000 lives, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times revealed some of the psychological toll of seeing what he had seen over several days—his sleep disturbed by dreams of corpses, and the anxiety of not being able to get his story finished in time.

In the process of interviewing survivors, he was surprised by how many were eager to talk. “This was the pattern, almost without exception. Not only were victims who’d lost everything willing to talk; they even at times sought me out. With everything broken around them and so many of their friends and neighbors overwhelmed by problems of their own, many seemed to hunger for someone who would listen to their story and validate what they had been through.”

There was something about his detachment that made him a welcome receptacle for their pain and grief. And they wanted to talk.

I think there will be times for all of us when we will be able to provide this service for someone. We are the distant relative or the step-father or mother who doesn’t know all the family history but can provide a welcome place to receive the painful emotions of those who at least are temporarily overwhelmed by them.

I think we often underestimate the value of listening. Listening can validate someone else’s experience. It can help them come to grips with what they have not been able to sort out alone. This is one time when having little knowledge of someone’s ordeal can actually be an advantage. We may feel we have little to offer, when in fact, we have much. Don’t sell your listening skills sort. Sometimes being detached is just what is needed.

Maybe there is someone you will be able to listen to today.