The Beatitudes

At the Methodist Student Center, I got a chance to talk to the students about my favorite of the Beatitudes... Blessed are the peacemakers. I know, I know, everyone knows I'm a straight up brawler, so how can that one be my favorite? Maybe later we'll talk about that... "blessed are the peacemakers" means something much different than the surface look reveals...

What was going on with me that night was I was sitting around with the students, thinking about how some of them are under pressure for their faith, have been; some have given their whole young lives to Him. It's not like I came in at the last hour, but it's more like 3 o'clock The Lord came to the city square and found me doing absolutely nothing (oh, I was busy, but it was a big pile of nothing) and said, "Go work in my vineyard."

I got there late, had to learn the job quick.

I have a sense of profound unworthiness that only can be overcome by the grace of God.

I remember my first communion at Annual Conference as a probationary member. I was there with my boy David Crow--we should have known the days were short--they are always short. Anyway, Debbie Padgett was serving communion and I was struck by her smile, of course, but also by the thought that here is someone sold out for a long time to Jesus. And I was thinking, "Man, if they only knew... they would never let me in." I was thinking about how guys with a prison record probably wouldn't make it-- and most of what I did just wasn't illegal. Or there's no piss test for my sins.

So, yeah, communion is pretty sweet.

Random Notes

Lets see... There has been a lot going on lately. Good stuff. Some men in the church cleaned the carpet in our multi-purpose building. It gets a lot of traffic, and man does it look good now. It's another piece of how well Morehead UMC functions-- something needs doing, it gets done.
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Even staff meetings are creative and productive. Looking forward to Christmas in more ways than one is all I'm gonna say.
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We had a great time in bible study on Wednesday. Heavy stuff in Romans 5, great testimonies about personal faith and God's grace. It was one of those special moments with the Word

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I just finished John Noble's book, I Was A Slave In Russia. He was an American citizen arrested by the Soviets. A very interesting read. Heartbreaking.

It will come as no surprise that I have a small collection of books on or by GULag survivors. Part of it is a kind of morbid sense that we aren't free of danger from such atrocities, and we need to know what it is and how it infests a society. And another part is wondering why concentration camps seem to be a fundamental feature of socialism.


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More on Hard Time Witnessing

This is from Theo, Francine's husband:

It gets better

Addendum to the old ultra man

We mentioned that church was good for the soul, to which the old man vehemently replied that idea had been dead for 2000 years. While he stomped off in disgust at these two Christians, one of us called after him "We'll see who's right". Modern humans have made themselves comfortable by the lie that there is nothing after death. After the old man turned the corner and disappeared into the hills, we were left with a sense of having seen a legend in the running world, a hero to us ultra folks, come down hard to being a tragically lost person in great need of a Savior. He is 80+ years, and physical death is around the corner, time to make up your mind buddy. He probably thought we were a couple of Jesus freak ultra runners in need of a therapist. Don't feel bad for us. We were (and every time still are) elated at having been given the chance to be one of the, on average, seven witnessing people it might take before a person comes to faith. So, there is hope! Christ said "Go" and promised He will always be with us. He was given authority in heaven and earth, who can beat that? Evangelism is not hard at all if we humbly accept that we are His messengers and He is fully in control. Don't count the number of converts, He will do that, He knows the total number required before He comes back. Can't wait for that day, and yet, the harvest is waiting, is ripe and abundant. Now go! Thank you Jesus, for letting us do Your work, for giving us the credit.


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Hard Time Witnessing

This comes from my friend Francine, telling of a time that just even a simple word about church freaks people out...


Aaron,

This summer when we were in Colorado, Theo and I went out for a run and then met an old guy (80), who was in great physical shape. He was one of those ultra-guys, he had been out since that morning (it was now 7 pm or so), hiking and running in the mountains.

So we talked about that, running, hiking, mountain climbing etc. Nice talking, and he shared that that weekend there was going to be a big event in town (Bike Fest, which we had seen advertised) and on Sunday there was a special race. If we wanted to come?

So we said, "No, we are going to church on Sunday, nicer to go there (church)."

It was as if he had seen the devil, he turned abruptly, and ran off, cursing on his way down, "church? No way man, don't give me that!" He couldn't get away form us quick enough.

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What does something like this mean? On the one hand, there is a trope in Christian writing and communication where we beat ourselves up, talk about how we do a terrible job witnessing with our lifestyles, etc...

But we also have to keep in mind that people are afraid of the light, for deeds done in drakness will be exposed...

In truth, evangelism is hard work. On the one hand, yes, the Church can give itself a bad name. On the other, the difficulty of repentance keeps some from the Good News.

Nothing can make you feel like a failure like evangelism can. Perhaps worse than being cussed is the apathy?

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Arts and Eats

Morehead/Rowan County hosted the Autumn Arts and Eats Festival yesterday. By all accounts, it was a very successful day-- way more people than anyone expected.

I have to say I am still being blessed by the thought of what happened. The church decided to purchase a booth and sell "Walking Tacos--" a bag of Fritos with chile and cheese poured in. Man, is it good. We sold close to 300.

But what was so amazing was the number of volunteers from the church. More than 30 came to work at our booth. Many, many more donned the red shirts we had made. No doubt, there were more of those Morehead Methodist red shirts than any other shirts that were out.

Our kids were amazing-- a group of elementary kids came and passed out cards. 400 cards inviting people to our church! The kids were all over the place. I was really proud of them!

I was able to do nothing else but talk to people about the church and their spiritual lives. There were so many volunteers, so many of our church people introducing me to their friends...

And what's wild is that the Children's Ministry Team first started putting this together as an outreach to the community! So from the start, we went into it as an outreach. Can't beat that.

If our church will stay focused on getting out of the doors and helping people to find their way to Jesus and to church, great things are going to happen here!

Sleepy Kids

Joe and Nadia are up, but barely.

John in still asleep.

We had a pile of kids over for Johns birthday and there was lots of excitement and games.

Nadia just pointed at the helicopter, waved her arm around and said "go go go."

Today is the autumn Arts and Eats Festival. We are hoping to get the word out about our church in the community. That's most in my heart for prayer today--that the world may know.


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You really do need to set aside the time to read this 1400 page book...

Great writing comes from great tragedy, from the deep suffering of a people.

It’s always risky to figure out what “cultural artifacts” will endure: what is the great writing of today? What will we pass on to centuries yet to come? Some of you know this is why I half-jokingly say I have not read much past the 4th century; it saves me from worrying about whether what I am reading and spending time on is just a waste of time, because it will be quickly forgotten. I remember a fellow college freshman telling me he thought Midnight Oil would be remembered just like Beethoven... So I won’t have much of an answer for you about Rob Bell or Francis Chan-- not just because I suspect they are hipsters, but will what they write matter in 5 years? Will you read the book again 25 years from now?

Literary critics have spent an inordinate amount of time on Joyce, Faulkner, and Proust (to name a few), only to find that Steinbeck--who was relegated to the second tier-- gains more ground as time passes; that precisely because Steinbeck was not navel-gazing (which, whatever the stylistic merits of the aforementioned Trinity may be, they were navel-gazers), his works continue to speak to readers. There’s a big difference between reading obsessive Oedipal memories and experiencing the cultural pain of something like the Dust Bowl and labor unrest from 1920-40.

It makes me wonder if there is not some great Chinese writing to be discovered for us English speakers, detailing the horrors of that nation’s experiments with socialism. I know we have not paid enough attention to the African American Diaspora from the South...

And then there is Solzhenitsyn. A titan. Someone who is not only a brilliant stylist--Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf and others imitated each other, but what Solzhenitsyn created in GULag Archipelago, we are still sorting through what to call that “style.” A new style, a new genre, had to be created to deal with something unprecedented: the systematic torture and destruction, over a period of 40 years of people in Lenin and Stalin’s death camps.

I first read GULag Archipelago when I was 12. It’s a testament to Solzhenitsyn’s power that even a 12 year-old can understand the book! I remember the Preface, which I suppose is indicative of what Solzhenitsyn was about to unleash over the next 1400 pages... To this day, I think it is the greatest opening in all of literature:

“In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream--and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousnads of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondents reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.

“The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the news of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in a frozen state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.

“As for us, however--we understood instantly. We could picture the entire scene, right down to the smallest details: how those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how flouting the higher claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.

“We understood, because we ourselves were the same kind of people ‘as those present’ at that event. We, too, were form that powerful tribe of ‘zeks” [prisoners in the Soviet system of death camps], unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.

“And the Kolyma was the greatest and most powerful island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent--an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

“And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence, and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.

“But as though stricken dumb on the islands of the Archipelago, they kept their silence...

“...I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come almost to love that monstrous world...”

I suppose there was no writer I wanted to meet more than Solzhenitsyn. He was impressed into my mind early because a distant cousin was part of debriefing him when he was expelled from the Soviet Union. That was just a family story that perhaps put the book on the shelf. Or did my dad know that this was the most important work published in the 20th century? The most important work in how many hundreds of years? We might say this one book tore the Soviet Union down.

The book was Solzhenitsyn’s blackmail; the KGB wanted to kill him, but the book had been smuggled out by (if memory serves me correct) Mstislav Rostropovich, and Solzhenitsyn threatened to publish it if he should disappear or die mysteriously. (side note: many copies of it were typed out on 3 carbons in Voru, Estonia, for all you First Methodist missionaries!)

Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and other intellectuals tried to stop the publication (!) because it would reveal them to be liars and propagandists for the socialist cause, for the excuses and denials made for and about the millions who perished in Lenin and Stalin’s perverse world.

If you want to read anything past the fourth century, you can’t go wrong with Solzhenitsyn. “First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” are easier books of his to break into, but GULag Archipelago is the book to read if you’re only going to read one.