50 years – The Fifth Decade 2004 -2014 – The One with the Sabbatical

I turned fifty last month and wrote 4 blogposts looking at each decade of my life. I got as far as 2004, when I was well-established in field administration. This is the installment that brings us up to the present and then “to infinity and beyond”.

Places lived: Mali, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, USA. 

Verse:

Jeremiah 6:16
This is what the Lord says: “Stop at the crossroads and look around. Ask for the old, godly way, and walk in it. Travel its path, and you will find rest for your souls. But you reply, ‘No that’s not the road we want!’”

Life-Shaping events:

In 2004, due to political unrest and its aftereffects, I ended up going from being assistant director over one country to full director over two countries. The day before I was elected, we had some sort of group mixer in which we pasted bits of cardboard to a map to represent the different parts of our work. For some reason, I had to carry it home for the night and bring it back the next day. As I picked my way carefully through mud puddles, I had a fear that I would drop the poster in the mud and mess it up. And then I realized that I had a much larger fear: “What if I drop the BRANCH in the mud while I am director?”

It was a difficult time to be director and as the years went by I wondered why I could not be director at a time when all was normal. We were losing staff and the financial resources that went with them. Work in both countries was threatened by instability.  We joked in meetings about making “more bricks with less straw”.

Key verse:

You keep track of my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book. Psalm 56:8

There were a lot of difficult things during this period, so many, in fact that I was overwhelmed by “unexpected tears” during my sabbatical (2011) when I finally took time to enumerate and grieve over them:

Senseless court cases, civil unrest, threats of terrorists, sickness and medevacs of key people, a suicide, personal and family crises among our staff. So much that might have been, that was thwarted for reasons I cannot now see. So many cases also where we were forced to rely on God instead of our own capacities

 I’d like to say that this was a time that I did rely solely on God, but much of the time I relied on my own ability to multi-task and stay on top of a multitude of things. I am someone driven by duty and the work was without end, with not enough people to do it. People often commented then (and still do) on my seemingly limitless energy and my job became one that no one else could imagine doing.

By 2009, I was nearing burnout. I was dry and thirsty and in exile spiritually.

 But God was seeking after me putting books and sermons and verses in my path. I actually memorized:

“I lie in the dust completely discouraged. Revive me by your word.” Ps 119:25

My furlough was due in mid-2010 and my boss suggested that rather than doing a normal “home assignment” in administration, I consider a Sabbatical. This was a window of hope that was opened to me, that somehow things could get better. But even as I planned things to do during my sabbatical, events combined to delay it until early 2011. Read here (in the first post on this blog) about how God began inviting me to healthy practices of reading and meditation and scripture memory in that time of “delayed gratification”.



In the summer of 2010, when I should have been returning to begin the sabbatical but could not, I went ahead and did a trip to Northern Ireland which was truly a drink of cold water to me in a very dry time.

Read: northern-ireland-and-color-green

This was also a time where I was challenged to begin thinking about Sabbath and what it really means for me, the gift that it is. (See here my “Prezi” sermon on Sabbath, which I have given three times.)

Coming back to Mali, I began getting serious about Sabbath and that is literally what carried me through to the Sabbatical time in 2011.

As that time is mostly detailed in this blog, I will not repeat it here, or this could become very recursive. I've included lots of links to specific blog-posts.

Highlights of the Sabbatical would be

• The time at the Boiler room in Kansas City.



Boiler Room Building in Kansas City 

• A month at the retreat center on Lake Thunderbird

• The Oklahoma Freewheel 500-mile bike ride across Oklahoma. 

 

In this Sabbatical time and beyond, God is teaching me the importance of

• Removing distractions
• Creating space for quietness and contemplation.
• Sabbath
• Creativity – including blogging, making candles, music.
• Reading
• Journaling
• The Liturgical year: Lent, advent. . .
• Living in community and interdependence
• Living in simplicity without a lot of stuff. Being evacuated and then having to liquidate your household in short order will do that to you.
• God’s work is Unhindered by what appear to us to be major setbacks.
• The Responsibility for Getting the work done is God’s not mine.

“Do not feel totally, personally, irrevocably responsible for everything. . . That’s my job. Love, God.”

 After the Sabbatical

God knew what he was doing in arranging the sabbatical before one of the most difficult times in my life: the coup d’état in Mali and our evacuation [March-April 2012]. (Read “In the Pressure cooker” parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). I really do not know if I could have survived this time without the Sabbatical preparation.

God prepared me and resourced me to lead our group in this very difficult time, using the unique gifts he had given me. He had taught me that I needed to take time for myself, for reflection and contemplation and planning and rest:

“Get up and go! Come back and wield your sword in the part of the kingdom where you can wield it best.” [see blog post]

The time during the coup is one where God sustained me and where my unique giftings came together for that time. People commented that it seemed like I was truly “in the zone.” It is

During my sabbatical, God introduced me to the idea of being a nomad, living simply and relying on God. 2012 was the year of being a nomad. When I did my taxes for the year 2012, I honestly could not say where my tax home was. In this year, I made 15 border crossings, hopping back and forth between Mali, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Thailand, France, and Cameroon. From March to December, I averaged 2.5 weeks per country and was truly “transient” in this time.

And it was during this time that the Lord led me to accept a regional role which would involve setting up in Cameroon and traveling significantly throughout Francophone Africa. This, too, was a step of faith, but God has been good.

It is interesting to see how the administrative skills as well as my crisis management experience in the past years have prepared me for this role.

“These 40 years . . . “

As I was reflecting on the five decades that make up my first 50 years, I began thinking of theme verses for each decade. The week of my birthday, I kept coming back to Deuteronomy 2:7 which was a key verse for my 3rd decade

“The Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He has watched over your journey through this vast wilderness. These 40 years, the Lord your God has been with you and you have lacked nothing.”

And then I heard a podcast the week of my birthday and it centered on Deuteronomy 8, which had such a similar theme that I thought it was the same passage until I looked it up.

8.2 Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. 3 He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. 4 Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. 5 Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.
15 He led you through the vast and dreadful wilderness, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. 16 He gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never known, 

This really seems to be a perfect description of the past 10 years especially but also the entire 40 years I have been a Christian.

[To follow - 5th Decade - part 2, people, bikes, music, books, etc]

Work Covenant

A few weeks ago all of our leadership working across Africa were together in one place. One of us raised the issue of the seemingly impossible workload and how we could manage that and remain healthy and sane. 

Ironically, we decided to have an extra meeting after dinner to talk about it, but it was a good talk with people sharing what works for them and their frustrations in general. We agreed to work together on it. A few people said they would work up a sort of covenant to guide us.

This made me think of the “Leader’s Covenant” that Dr. Larrie Gardner (SIL Intl) wrote up several years ago (pasted in at the bottom). I pulled it up and inspired by it, I added a section on healthy work habits, working on what we had said as a group but also reflections drawn from my sabbatical and career counseling and coaching.  

I am coming up on a big work change, and am currently in-between job assignments. I move in a few weeks to a new location and am hoping I can use the new environment and job as a chance to make a fresh start at doing this RIGHT. (Hold me to it, will you?)

Leadership Covenant work habits

(Tim Tillinghast)

With God’s help, I recognize that the work is the Lord’s to accomplish, not mine. I will, therefore, seek to honor God in the way I work, not taking on more work than is healthy nor modeling incorrect work habits to those under me, thus creating unrealistic expectations.  I will not seek my significance in the work assigned to me. 

• I will keep a Biblical Sabbath, realizing my work will never be done.
• I will set additional boundaries around my time as needed, communicate those with my colleagues and not feel guilty about keeping  to those.
• I will not take work home with me, either physically or in my mind, so as to be fully available to those closest to me and to myself.
• I will seek to delegate to others, especially in my areas of weakness.
• I will not be afraid to say “no” when necessary.
• I will communicate to my supervisor if I feel like I have too much to do or if a deadline is unworkable and seek ways to adjust that. I will proactively seek to help those who report to me manage their workload.

I acknowledge that creating balance in my life allows me the reflective and restorative times necessary to fully leverage my strengths for the good of the group in the ways that God created me to. And that not doing this is actually detrimental to the work, the group and myself in the long run.

Leader’s Covenant

 (Source -  Larrie Gardner)

With God’s help, I will not use my position, title or authority to intimidate others or promote myself. I will use these to build others. 

With God’s help I will not pretend to know more or less than I do. I will ask for help when I need it and give credit. I will demonstrate an attitude of continual learning and growth.

With God’s help, I will be faithful to my spouse in body, mind, emotions and thought. I will maintain friends through openness, reciprocity, mutual support and genuine encouragement.

With the help of the Lord, I will strive to maintain a thought life that is wholesome and could be published without embarrassment. I will strive to be honest in my view of myself and others. I will choose to fill my mind with positive goodness; my default will be one of good will and trust in God., rather than mistrust, cynicism and suspicion. Trust begets trust.

Candle Tending and Caring for the soul

Abraham Heschel in his book "The Sabbath" says, "Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. ... Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self."

One of the things I do to remind myself it is the Sabbath is to light candles around the house. I see those throughout the day and remember that this is time set apart for resting, caring for my soul, and particularly NOT working.

Candles in the prayer room at the KC Boiler room
(I don't have this many going at my house at once)

As a consequence of burning candles, I tend to go through a lot of them and have started making candles as sort of a hobby, which fulfills two functions: one, it gives me a creative outlet that I can actually do here in Mali, and two, it is a socially acceptable way to play with fire. :-)

One thing I have noticed is that candles, in order to really fulfill their purpose of giving light and burning for a long time, need to be tended to, much in the way the 10 bridesmaids had to "keep their lamps ready" for the coming of the bridegroom. Matthew 25:1-13 tells their story. They got their lamps while they waited for the bridegroom to arrive. Five were smart and bought extra oil in advance and five did not and so when he finally came at midnight, they didn't have enough oil to light their lamps.

Cell phone charging tower on the
bike trip I took last year. 

It seems that the metaphor of constantly tending to something to keep it alive may be lost on our modern culture. What things do we really have to tend to over time? I know early on in my time in Africa, I used lanterns, which need to be filled with kerosene, have their wicks trimmed, and the globes cleaned.  In my daily life now, I still have to tend to my water filtration system, cleaning the filter at least once a week, keeping the siphon going, making sure I don't overfill it which results in water all over the floor, or underfill which results in . . . not enough water to drink.

What are the possible parallels in modern life? Perhaps trying to keep digital devices fully charged up when you're away from home. How would the parable go today? "There were 10 hollywood groupies waiting for the big star to appear. 5 kept their smartphones on standby to save their batteries, but 5 SMSed and tweeted until he finally appeared....."


But back to candles. 
As I thought about candles several things came to mind.
First off, candles can be really beautiful and some people will never light them so as to keep them looking pretty. But they never really provide any light or warmth if you keep them pristine. Our purpose in life is to burn bright for others to see.

If left on its own, a candle will burn out rather quickly. For example, a hole might form in one side and all the wax will flow out the hole and it will be burned down in 15 minutes.
If the wind (or ceiling fan) is blowing and the candle is not properly shielded, it will either blow quickly out OR burn through a lot of wax in a short time. (Cue sappy Elton John music. . . . )

I had a pillar candle in a glass jar in the kitchen last week. This was a home-made candle and the wick was not properly centered, so that it ended up burning straight down one side of the candle. When I came upon it, there was maybe an inch of wick sitting curled up in a bit of melted wax. You could see the bottom of the jar. It would have been "out" in 15 minutes if I had not intervened. I managed to cut off a bunch of the unmelted wax and put it down next to the wick and melt it. Then I gently moved the wick more towards the center and straightened it up. I have been tending to this candle, and it now has several hours of life left in it.
Sometimes in life, we burn a bit too close to the margin and we need to have our wick "re-centered" and boundaries shifted around to provide enough context and margin to keep going. 

I have found that candles in small jars or tins burn nicely for much longer than an equivalent non-shielded candle. The wax tends to melt uniformly and form a pool all the way across the top of the container. It will burn slowly and steadily without distracting air currents. Sometimes, though, the melted wax will get too deep and the flame will go way down, and even go out. In those cases, you have to pour off a bit of the excess wax that is drowning out the flame.  What distractions are battering your flame left and right? What excess things in your life are drowning out your flame?

Other times the jar candles will burns too quickly and the flame gets big. I found that if I have some left over wax from another candle, I can hold this over the flame and let it melt down into the candle, providing a bit of extra fuel, filling up the "reservoir" and allowing it to burn a lot longer.  We need to make time to get "fueled up", especially in times when our activities cause us to put out a lot of light. 

Lord, help me keep me care for the seed of eternity planted in my soul, 
Tending to the unique flame you have given me to burn in my corner of the world.
Help me not to burn too quickly - bright but burned up before my time.
Help me to keep my wick centered on you and not over next to the edges, 
where I am likely to melt out and make a mess without having given much light.
Protect me from distracting winds that blow, 
From having too much to do which will drown my flame
or from burning while low on fuel which will cause me to burn too fast and too bright. 
 Amen

Counterbalances to our Natural Impulses (Disciplines)

As I have read and reflected over the past 7 months on my sabbatical journey, the spiritual disciplines keep coming up, something God is calling me back to, or in some cases, to do for the first time. As I read more about various ones, I find that they almost always seem to be a counterbalance against some aspect of our nature, which when left to itself leads us far away from God. The disciplines are like course corrections, guiding us back to center.

It might seem that without these, you will keep going straight, but our sinful natures pull us off to the left, further and further off course, without us even noticing. These disciplines pull us back to the right until we are heading straight on course again. Like a rudder they counteract the winds and currents pulling us off our heading.  

In evangelistic Christian circles, we have a tendency to question certain disciplines as being legalistic and binding. The October monthly reading in Common Prayer: A liturgy for Ordinal Radicals ( p. 462) speaks to this:

“Growing up in a legalistic Christianity” many of us have developed a suspicion a discipline and order that can lead to a pretty sloppy spirituality. Reacting against the institution’s sickness, we easily find ourselves with little to help us heal from our own wounds, create new disciplines and carve out a space where goodness triumphs. People who are afraid of spiritual discipline will not produce very good disciples.”

So here are some of the disciplines I have run across. Not an exhaustive list, and perhaps better called Practices.

[1-4 are time oriented, operating on daily, weekly, annual or even longer cycles. The other ones are not really tied to cycles in the same way]

1.      Daily prayer at set times in the day - “the office” as practiced particularly in monastic communities. As protestants, we resist scheduling times to pray, but if we don’t, we often forget. Oddly enough, we don’t have to schedule daily meal times. We just stop and eat as a matter of course. Stopping to pray at set times regardless of what else is happening reminds  me that the work I’m doing in the kingdom is not paramount. I bend the knee to something that takes priority over what contribution I happen to be making at that moment. Prayer reminds us of our dependence on God and that the real fruit comes from him, not our efforts. It’s a way that God chooses to involve us in the outcomes, even though He is sovereign. St. Igantius says, “Work as if everything depends on God and pray as if everything depended on you.”

2.     Weekly Sabbath keeping is a counterbalance to the idolatry of control through work and technology and the quick pace they bring. Sabbath keeping – it provides a detachment from the workplace, from the world’s way of doing things, from our compulsion to take things into our own hands. Or as Eugene Petersen puts it ‘a weekly housecleaning’ that allows us to enter the week “uncluttered with idols”. It “erects a weekly bastion against the commodification of time, against reducing time to money, reducing time to what we can get out of it, against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that cannot be used or purchased. It is a defense against the hurry that desecrates time.” (Christ plays in 10,000 places, p. 111)

3.      Lent is an annual time to look at our habits and weaknesses. We examine our habits and lifestyle for areas that may seem harmless but may not be and abstain from them. It is also a time to remember Christ’s suffering in the month leading up to Easter.  

4.      Pilgrimage – As mentioned, the first four disciplines take their place in daily, weekly, annual and higher cycles. Pilgrimage is on a very slow cycle, perhaps something you do only a few times in your life. It is also one that few people actually do. The book, Sacred Journey posits that pilgrimage is a counterbalance to Gnosticism, a heresy that says that the spiritual is “good” and the body and all things physical are “bad”.  Going on pilgrimage calls us away from the many aspects of our lives that we control (lodging, meals, who we interact with), to follow God where he leads us, out onto the periphery of society, rubbing shoulders with whomever, depending on the kindness of strangers, etc.  (See Journey's End, Wielding the sword for more from this book).

5.      Fasting is a way to take the focus off of things that distracts us from Jesus. In A man’s guide to the spiritual Disciplines, Partick Morley says “Fasting releases the participant from the confusion of competing voices. Your personality and temperament will affect the kinds of things that distract from your relationship with God. For me, it’s work. I’ve discovered fasting as a way to slow down my RPM’s protecting my focus on Jesus Christ.“ p. 121.

 

6.      Living in Community is a balance to living centered on self. The Benedictine monks placed a high-value on “Stability”: staying put to get somewhere. That is staying with the community of people God has called you to, rather than flitting from church to church and job to job when we come across someone or something we don’t like. If we wander from place to place, we become slaves to our wills and appetites.  God has placed us in communities and has called together “this particular constellation of people to speak and hear from each other what is needed for their mutual growth in Christlikeness.” (Monk Habits for Everyday People, Dennis Okholm, p 91)  Community forces us to practice our gifts, and roots out our selfishness, and develops character in us as we learn to love others, even the difficult ones.

7.      Lifestyle of Poverty – Intentionally living with less, sharing or having things in common. This can be a balance to our protestant work ethic and the materialism around is in the wider culture.

8.      Eucharist – The Lord’s Supper – communion. I keep bumping up against the mystery of the Eucharist, realizing its importance and reality on a level higher than just as a symbol. As someone who grew up Baptist, this is one of the disciplines we regularly do –not often enough, perhaps, but we do hold to it as a practice (ordinance) to be done as a church body.

Communion, as the name implies, is always taken in community, and thus is a counterbalance to our desire for independence, to experience God on our own terms – “just me and Jesus”.  You can’t to communion by yourself. You HAVE to have a group, and it is not even a select group of just folks you like. Everyone gets to come to the table, rich or poor.  Rob Bell calls it a “public display of solidarity wherein we come together and carry each other burdens, elbow to elbow.”

Thomas Merton talks of being “nourished by the sacraments”. What does this mean? The Eucharist seems to have a deep mystical meaning to so many, a mystical meal that nourishes us spiritually, but how? Rob Bell says it is a “time of centering ourselves on where our real strength lies. It is the center of the Christian experience, trust in Jesus crucified.”

It reminds us of Christ’s sufferings, God’s solution to our sin problem: “the fellowship of sharing in your sufferings and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead”.

At one level, the Eucharist very obviously replaces the Passover meal, which was tied to the first covenant. Jesus established the Lord’s Supper as he ushered in the new covenant, sealed with his own sacrifice. The first meal was to be “a memorial day, keep it as a feast to the Lord, an ordinance forever”.  Exodus 12:14.  If Passover is no longer to be observed forever, then it must be only because it is superseded by this new meal.  And so we do what believers have done since that first Lord’s supper: Eat the bread, drink the cup. Receive Christ crucified.

Petersen says participating in the Eucharist “keeps our participation in salvation healthy and not just ‘our thing. It prevents salvation from “being dominated by our feeling and our projects”. (Christ plays in 10,000 places, p. 170, 202). We are tempted to make salvation about what we do, but communion is not about what we do, it is just about reenacting in the meal a picture of what Christ did for us. We proclaim the Lord’s death and receive over and over again what we cannot take or perform as our own.

Finally, the Eucharist keeps Christ before us as central to salvation. Otherwise we might think of Jesus only as our Great Example, Great Teacher, or Great Hero. When we take communion, we are not receiving just ideas ABOUT Jesus, but rather receiving life from Jesus.  (Peterson, p 202).

Okay, there they are -  8 practices or disciplines, among others. Lord, grant me the grace to practice these and stay on course to destination’s end.

It was the Worst of Times --> It was the Best of Times!

I just celebrated my birthday on Saturday. Friday night I was sitting in a concert with friends listening to their sons and others play music and got to thinking about the year that had passed from June 2010 to June 2011 and I realized what a great year it had been. 

The backdrop was the year before that - one of the hardest years of my life, following on some other hard ones. Dry, duty-bound times full of “Martha work” and not “Mary joy”. Dragging in at 7:30 or 8 p.m. each night thinking not uncommonly how I hated my job. Yes, there were bright spots – mountain biking, moments of celebration in our work, visits from friends, Single’s Bible studies.

But if I wasn’t burned out by the spring of 2010, I was certainly on a downward trajectory. When my regional director suggested a sabbatical for my upcoming home-assignment, it was like a window had been opened, with light shining in but for some time in a few months. I envisioned a “rebooting” of my spiritual life. (Hey, if they can reboot “Star Trek” and “Batman”, why not? Seems like a great modern metaphor).

In spring 2010, I started planning a sabbatical: books to read, verses to learn, disciplines to follow ONCE I got away from it all in June 2010. However, God’s plan was different – and better. Two different colleagues were prevented from returning to Mali in June last year and so I had to delay my furlough. When news of this came, I was disappointed, but like Homer Simpson, was slapped around by the Epipha-tree: Why do I have to wait to do those things? Why can’t I start doing them here in now in Mali. I did and God honored that.

In June 2010, I decided to go ahead and take the trip to N. Ireland that was to have begun my furlough. There the window began cracking open wider. The guy at the retreat center encouraged me to just ride the bike out along the cliffs and sea and NOT take books with me to read.  Just see what God might have to say. Very freeing for a protestant work-ethic bound person who felt the need to have something constructive planned all the time. I was also challenged to be serious about Sabbath rest and that flowered into a time of delight and rest that began wonderful transformation in the fall of 2010. Ask my friends and colleagues.

Perhaps I could have learned that lesson in the US on a proper sabbatical time, but it made a lot more sense couched in the weekly cycle of work (6 days) and sanctification of Sabbath time (7th day). It’s hard to “give up work” when you are on a time of sabbatical when you have no structured work duties. Not unlike starting a diet when you are already doing Lent.

Flash forward to February 2011 – home to the US. Sabbatical time begins formally in March. Lots of making space for God to speak in whatever way he might choose: reading in coffee houses, listening to music, visiting museums, walking through parks and cemeteries, meeting new friends, living in community, writing and blogging, cycling, cycling, cycling, Cycling across Oklahoma – call it a quest or pilgrimage but it was icing on the cake.

There was a stripping away of many of the extra things that we so often use to anchor us: familiar places and people, TV, work, regular internet connection, constant surroundings. And guess what? When you clear those things away, it’s easier to hear God speak. 

It’s been a time of God lavishing his love on me as His adopted son. It took me a while realize that this thing I couldn’t put a name on was what they call “Grace.” As I was writing this, as has happened so often, a song came on my computer that seemed hand-picked: 

This is what it’s like to be loved. This is what it’s like to be forgiven. This is what it feels like to be alive. To be living in a way that you don’t have to fear being zapped by God ‘cause you don’t measure up. After all. . . . that’s the point.
Charlie Peacock, That’s the Point, 1996

There was also healing (see blog post “unexpected tears”) and tears and grieving for those hard things of the past years. Someone said the tears are like vomiting – not pleasant when it happens, but you sure do feel better afterwards. And I can say that as I go back and review those things now, the scars are there but the soreness is drained out.

So as I was thinking of this past year, June 2010 in Ireland to June 2011, I can say it is probably the best year of my life. A great time of God following after me, pursuing me, bring me back home, rebooting me. Life 2.0 – that may be a bit extreme, but that is how it feels.

I went to sleep with this on my mind and woke up on my birthday. The Common Prayer for Ordinary Radicals Liturgy for that day had a reading from Ezekiel 34:16 that was a great birthday present:
I (the Good Shepherd) will search for my lost ones who strayed away, and I will bring them safely home again. I will bandage the injured and strengthen the weak.

"Idolatry" by any other name.

I’m still reading Eugene Peterson’s “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places” (p 116-129) where he has the audacity to name workaholism as “idolatry”.

“Without Sabbath. . .the workplace is soon emptied of any sense of the presence of God and the work becomes an end in itself, …a breeding ground for idols” as we “reduce work to the dimensions of ego and control.” p. 116

The wonder that is associated with creation and resurrection and worship has no place in the world of work, even in a Christian organization if we are not careful. 

Gradually the sense of wonder is squeezed out of us, as we gain competence and mastery over ourselves. This greatest in the workplace where information and competence are key values. (p. 122)
KSA’s anyone? (Knowledge, skills, attitudes). It’s time to prepare the report on Key Indicators of Progress to our Ends. Where are our 3-year goals? Sure, we pray at the meetings where we put those things together, but . . . 

Peterson emphasizes that at work, there is a subtle shift from the primacy of God and his work in our lives to the primacy of our work for God. We no longer worship God but enlist Him to assist us in “the work”. This is idolatry: using God instead of worshipping Him (p. 124)

Recently I have been getting feedback from close friends and colleagues, and people keep coming back to the fact that I am competent at what I do.

•“You are above all, competent, again. Your high ‘C’ (conscientious nature) kicking in. You wouldn’t know who you are if you weren’t competent.”
•“We were just saying the other day that Tim can get more done in one day than most of us can in a week.”

Pluh-ease, people, il ne faut pas exagérer.  But seriously, if you are highly competent, then you don’t need to depend on God. Ouch!

What is the cure for workplace idolatry? Peterson says it is Sabbath keeping – it provides a detachment from the workplace, from the world’s way of doing things, from our compulsion to take things into our own hands. Or as Petersen puts it ‘a weekly housecleaning’ that allows us to enter the week “uncluttered with idols”. p. 128.

I was thinking on all this and reviewing memory verses and came across this one:
2 Corinthians 3:3-6 Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, bur our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant - not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills but the Spirit gives life.”

Wait a minute! This is PAUL we are talking about here. And he claims not to be competent. Wasn't he a Pharisee trained under Gamaliel at his rabbinical school. He had clout in the Jewish scene before his conversion. He was a gifted writer for sure. Perhaps not so convincing a speaker in person, as he mentions in one of his letters, but still he had to have had human competencies.

Still he plays these down and opts for competence that comes from God. And that makes all the difference: human competence is compared to the letter of the law and it KILLS.

Godly competence comes from the Spirit and gives LIFE presumably to those ministered to, but also to the one serving as a conduit.

Lord, help us to slay our workplace idols and live in your competence.

Eternity, planted in our hearts

Eternity
This one has been rumbling around in my head for a while, beginning with my wrestling with Sabbath issues last fall (see my Sabbath sermon presentation.) where I learned that our Sabbath rest is just practice for eternity - a time to nourish the seed of eternity in our souls. (cf. Abraham Heschel's book "Sabbath")

And like so many things during this season of sabbatical, God just keeps weaving this theme in and out of whatever I read or listen to.

Thoreau in "Walden"

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.

and elsewhere in Walden:

 As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.(Thoreau)

"Quiet desperation" - that sounds a lot like the Teacher in Ecclesiastes who says that "Everything is Meaningless"
The word "meaningless" is from the Hebrew Hevel = vapor, breath. In a Rob Bell sermon on Ecclesiastes, he says that we can try our best to manage the vapor in our lives. Normal wisdom literature tells you that if you do wise things, you will succeed. And those who do foolish things will fail. But in Ecclesiastes, the Teacher says none of it matters. The rules that you thought worked before, the way you were working before, they do not work. It is all "vapor". At least that is true for all that is "under the sun", e.g. created by God or created by us.

The counter balance to this is "eternity" which shows up in Ecclesiastes 3:11

Yet God has made everything beautiful in its own time.He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end.

In part 2 of the Ecclesiastes sermon series, Shane Hipps says that this experience of eternity is independent of time. We all experience time dragging out (waiting for a package to arrive or in line at the airport) or speeding up when we are fully engaged in an activity we enjoy. When time "speeds up", we experience joy and peace.

How do we get to this point of eternity? We get there by "seeking first the kingdom of God", entering fully into the current moment with Jesus.

Everything else -past, future, mourning, dancing, gathering and throwing away - is transitory, vapor. We can do "vapor management" to try to control all those things, but when we get tired of playing "musical chairs" we can return to this place - this eternity in our hearts" with the help of the master. Just don't forget where the chair is when the song ends. Ask the Master to help you find it! (Musical chairs metaphor: Shain Hipps)

Peterson's book "Christ plays in 10,000 places" also touches on this (p. 108ff).

"How do we live so that the wonder and astonishment that so often comes to us unbidden and spontaneously isn't dissipated in trivial pursuits?" He says we need a focal practice which "focuses on eternity in a culture that is increasingly depersonalized and alarmingly fragmented". That practice is Sabbath keeping. 

"Sabbath creates a weekly bastion against the commodification of time, against reducing time to money, reducing tiem to what we can get out of it, against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that can not be used or purchased. It is a defense against the hurry that desecrates time."Peterson, p. 111.

 I guess for me, this boils down to making time to nurture the seed of eternity in my heart, the presence of God, the kingdom of God, abundant life. 


At the Christian Leadership Alliance Conference last week, I went to a seminar on building a "Personal Rule of Life" by Steve Macchia (Gordon Conwell Seminary). The PRoL is

a holistic description of the Spirit-empowered rhythms and relationships that create, redeem, sustain, and transform the life God invites you to humbly fulfill for Christ’s glory.

To create a Personal Rule of Life you look prayerfully at your gifts, role, call, vision, mission, desires and then figure out
the "Rhythms and relationships" you want to to focus on for this season in your life: particular use of your time (spiritually), talent (missionally), temple (physically), treasure (financially), trust (relationally) in each major quadrant of life.
then  you map out activities and limitations for each day, week, month, season, year each of these areas.

Anyway, i am looking forward to having time to process this when part 3 of my sabbatical resumes in May 12.