Love

February is often called the love month, and with everything that's happening over the next month here at Harbor View it is a fitting title.  We kick off the month a little early this year as the annual Oyster roast falls actually this weekend, but as a February tradition it is an event that we here love, and that shows our love for one another as we join and fellowship together.  This love is familiar, the kind we feel as part of a family, a happy joyous love.  No sooner will we be full of oysters than we'll be preparing to talk about our love for the church together.  On February 12 we will come together to talk about what we all see as the vision for Harbor View.  This love is a self sacrificing love, as we talk not only about what we desire, but hopefully can put aside our personal desires and hear what God desires for us. As soon as we're done with this event many of us will be preparing for St. Valentines day.  There is no great history to St. Valentine, but the name is fitting for the day as Valentine comes from the latin word for strong, worthy, powerful and that describes the love we often celebrate on the 14th of February.  It is a day that we all talk about the power of love, and the passion it can make us feel.  Finally, let us not forget the love of our families, and especially our Children.  On February 24 and 25 we will be holding a Parenting Workshop here at the church. This is a great place to come celebrate being a parent, share with our leader and other parents your experience and hear from them as well as we discuss the balancing act that is parenting and how to show love to our kids in a Christian and constructive way.  As you can see, February is a month of love, and throughout it I hope that we remember the greatest commandments:  Love the Lord God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and Love your Neighbor as yourself.

1 Corinthians 13:1-10 MSG
If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.
   Love never gives up.
   Love cares more for others than for self.
   Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
   Love doesn't strut,
   Doesn't have a swelled head,
   Doesn't force itself on others,
   Isn't always "me first,"
   Doesn't fly off the handle,
   Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
   Doesn't revel when others grovel,
   Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
   Puts up with anything,
   Trusts God always,
   Always looks for the best,
   Never looks back,
   But keeps going to the end.
Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompleteness will be canceled.

The Spirit of Everyday (Final Day. . .sort of)

Today we close our series on Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life.  In some ways this blog series has been about finding ways to use spiritual disciplines in our everyday life.  Spiritual disciplines are the things of life that keep us from becoming comfortable being less than we are created and called to be by God.  These are habits or regular patterns in our lives that bring us back to God and open us up to what God is saying to us.  These are not what to do, or a checklist of things we have to (or even should) do, but things that we do because of why we do them.  They are only disciplines when they are part of being and becoming.   We can't will ourselves into these disciplines, we truly must discover them in our lives, and then nurture their growth as where God is active in our live becomes clearer.  With that in mind here are what are known as the 12 classic spiritual disciplines:

• The inward disciplines -
• Prayer
• Bible study
• Meditation
• Fasting
• The outward disciplines - 
• Service
• Simplicity
• Submission
• Solitude
• The corporate disciplines - 
• Worship
• Celebration
• Confession
• Guidance

Some of these are easy to integrate into everyday life, some harder, but in all the cases the term disciplines doesn't do much to encourage us to try.  The idea that probably does this more justice as we go forward trying to find the spiritual in everyday life is "Otium Sanctum" also known as "Holy Leisure" or "Taking a Break for God."  I have discovered if I look for places where I can find God already close by I can more easily make a time for spiritually recharging. What I have discovered is there is one act I do regularly that includes a high number of these disciplines naturally. That to even my own surprise is playing Ultimate Frisbee. Frisbee for me can be a time of prayer, meditation, and guidance. It also is a celebration of unity and love for others and the world.  All the while I often find myself serving others, enjoy simplicity, and most amazingly finding solitude. 


Frisbee as a time of celebration is easiest to explain. I enjoy being outside, being competitive, and being with others, by playing frisbee I find even in my worst games much to be thankful for and people to celebrate with. Because groups I play with are made up of people from many different places in life, discovering our similarities and differences has become a very meaningful, refilling experience for me. This also though makes the Frisbee field a place of service as I get to share the stories of their lives and often talk with them about their joys and struggles. In sharing our lives I often find things to consider for myself as well.

The greatest joys I find on the field though are actually the peace and solitude I find in playing a simple game among the commotion of the everyday world. As an extreme extravert, I derive almost all my energy from being around people. Thus I have discovered the need to find solitude in ways and places others may not. I discovered back in High School that I would often find a feeling of peaceful solitude while doing something athletic.  Something about the simplicity of sports (at least in my view) gives me space to be quiet internally and let the God who runs with me have some time all of our own, even as the world keeps spinning. 

This is just one example of how I integrate spiritual disciplines into the things I do everyday and enjoy.  I also know people who claim things like laundry, music, art, playing with pets, and even watching TV to be things they can treat as "Otium Sanctum."  I encourage everyone to think about where the spiritual may already be intersecting life (or is close to it) and find ways to nurture this and become a more active participant in all that God is doing, everyday, in everything we do.

The Spirit of Everyday (Day 5)

I am rereading a book that I picked up overseas while on a trip about 12 yrs ago. The general idea behind the book is that it follows the first half of the life of Bluebear.  The book starts with baby Bluebear floating in a walnut shell in a storm on the sea alone.  This is a constant theme in the book as he comes across many different creatures but always seems to realize that he doesn't know exactly who he is.  As he goes through his adventures he can't find anyone quite like him, yet he realizes that just about everyone he meets has something to teach him, be it practical, artistic, or spiritual.  He forms life long friendships, discovers some people will hate him just because he's different, finds out more about how he is similar and different than others, and discovers the vast mysteries of the world he's part of.

Yet, it wasn't until this rereading that I really saw how Bluebear's story parallels ours as Christians.  We are in this world that doesn't always make sense to us, but we have to live day to day in it as things happen that affect us.  These things change us, help us discover who we are, and bring us into relationships with others who make us who we are.  Yet we know this world as we know it is not our home, we are seeking always to know more about what it means to be that which we have been created to be, and seeking to be with others who understand us in such a way to know what it is to be "us."  So we live in each moment, trying to do what is best, what we feel is right, true to ourselves and our beliefs, and move forward seeking meaning, seeking community, seeking God.  We, like Bluebear, know lots of truths from experience or from our studies, but there are also lots of things that are not quite as they seem and many experiences that will continue to shape us.  Our lives are not just a series of short stories, but the stories do make up our lives, they make and remake us moving us forward on life's road.

In the last life covered in the book, Bluebear discovers he's not alone, he finds different forms of community, but he also hints in his final narration that this is not the end of the stories. This is true of us as well even as we begin to feel at home with who we are and find those who love us as part of community.  It is not the end of the story, the stories continue, the seeking for a better understanding of what's true and real continues, the changes in us and the world continues, but we do not yet know the story we are writing here.

The Spirit of Everyday (Day 4)

"When you feel sad or under a curse" . . . whenever I hear those words it always picks me up a notch.  Yeah, I know that's odd, but Godspell's All for the Best is an odd song.  A song about how unfair life is to a catchy happy tune.  Not only is it about the unfairness of life, but also the seemingly ridiculous response Jesus gives to our realization of this. Who is it that is will be blessed in Matthew 5?

• The poor in spirit
• Those who mourn
• The meek
• Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
• The merciful
• The pure in heart
• The peacemakers
• Those who are persecuted

These are not those who normally feel blessed.  I know I rarely feel blessed when I'm struggling with either my own stuff or with seeing the world as something less than God wishes it to be.  Yet, these are according to Jesus times of blessing, times when we can see somewhere out there a world that is as God would have it.  That is the tension of our faith, we both realize the problem of sin that keeps this world from being what God would have it be, but also are blessed with the knowledge that God does not mean for it to be this way.  We long for that world everyday because that is the basis of Faith(fulness).  The dichotomy of a life in Christ is that we today live both in the "now" and the "is to come."  Our blessing is found in the second half of that, we are already able to live that life, striving to see it more clearly every day.  Yet on Edgar Allen Poe's birthday we'd be remiss if we thought that the tension is easily resolved.  Much of Poe's great, albeit somewhat dark, work came from his experiences where he felt broke, betrayed, alone, and desperate. Likewise we see the struggles of this world and this life, and our laments of "God where are you?" are real. Though based in the same thought, these laments beg for the voice of one who loves us, who brings us peace, who will bring a new day, who never leaves us, and who makes things new.  Yet it doesn't change the cold we feel, or the darkness we experience and in this time we can do nothing but cling to that hope, that promise that we are not alone. 

Be it in sadness, hope, anger, faith or a sense of peace we all live in this world "in between." We know the good, we know the bad, and we know the One, who creates, redeems, and sustains all things.  May we feel protected, loved, hopeful, and most importantly blessed. 

(This song also inspired this post.)

The Spirit of Everyday Life (Day 3)

Today while driving down Camp Road, I once again noticed what I've grown to call the "stairs to nowhere"  This set of well made stairs seem to lead to a platform that serves no purpose as far as I can tell from the outside.  I constantly wonder if they have a purpose, or if they are there as a memorial to some former purpose they once served.  I don't know what they are there for but it seems that those who own them want them there for some reason, and that's all I need to know.

Today it struck me that this is a lot like the idea of God's mysteries.  Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 that God has "made known to us the mystery of his will."  I have always wondered what that really meant because I certainly don't know God's will for my day to day life, much less the will of God in regards to some of the bigger questions we face in this world. Sometimes I think I have the answers only to find out that I'm still far from fully understanding things.

I do though think we can know God's love and know that sometime, somehow, someway it brings everything back into relationship with it's creator.  But the questions remain: How? When? Which way? We don't know any of this, that is the mystery, known only to the one who owns the mystery.  We are given a vision of what it's all about, but at most hints about the rest. 

Much like the stairs to nowhere, it's not important that I know all the answers.  I trust that the owner and creator of them had and has a purpose and reason for what he does.  Likewise I must trust that God who creates and is part of everything in this world has a purpose and a reason for what happens here that will lead where God wants it to go.

The Spirit of Everyday Life (Day 2)

Today's post will once again include music, but it starts with a different sound. I woke up this morning to the sound of sirens outside my bedroom.  Not completely unusual, but 30 minutes later I heard them again going the other way.  And then as I left the house and drove to the church, I passed 3 more in different locations.  This at best was a little unnerving.  I have now been here long enough to realize that while I'm in "Charleston" that James Island is in some ways still a small town, That means even though it seems none of those ambulances were treating anyone directly related to the Church that chances are someone here or someone I know here was affected by them.  This is one of those things that just makes you a little uncomfortable, but also makes you pray for those unseen, unknown people who are part of our community who are experiencing some kind of sadness.  We all need support of a community and of God when we feel a loss or pain.  This is how God made us, and he made us all that way.  We so often in this society find ways to divide ourselves from others.  We discuss how an accident happened, what could have gone wrong, or more likely what someone did to cause it as we sit in traffic waiting and rubbernecking as we travel by.  We talk about how those of a different ideological bent are supposedly affecting our lives here in the country and wonder why they don't think like we do.  We connect quickly to those with shared experiences, but sometimes find it too hard to talk about things that are really important with those who see things differently than ourselves.  Yet, God calls us all, God created us all, God is part of us all as we are all made in God's image.  That spark of God is what connected me this morning to all those who I knew were affected by those ambulances, it was a spirit of community that was created along with our individual spirits.  God is larger than all of our differences, and calls us first to connect with that piece of God that is part of all of us, that binds us together in one mission, one world, one life before getting caught up in the differences.  Five for Fighting had a song a few years back called Slice that asked the question "How can you be as nice as me?  You're not from the same slice as me." I think as people of faith our starting point with others should always be a feeling of "Hello, my fellow child of God.  God loves you, and I do too."  If you want to hear all of "Slice" click here.

The Spirit of Everyday Life

We often search our worship experiences for those moments that touch us, change us, push us forward.  Often we find them in small places, sometimes in larger themes, but while we often seek these when we find ourselves in a worship service or church wide events we rarely seek them as much in our day to day lives, letting words, sounds, smells, and sights pass by like they had no spiritual significance.

Here is a one week challenge:  This week seek the spiritual in everyday and then tell others about what it is that you find.  Likewise you will find a series of blogs this week outlining what we found spiritual in the day prior.  So if you feel you don't even know where to look, start here.  We may spend the entire week just finding the spiritual in one thing, or we may find it in so many variations that we don't repeat the same thing twice.  Both are okay, but if we want to see the world change, we must first change how we see the world.

Today, we found the spiritual in the music we were listening to in the car, in this case Mumford and Sons.  You can find a version of the song that is stuck in our head here.   It is a simple song, and the lyrics certainly seem spiritual, but at the same time it's not inherently "Christian."  Yet it speaks to the soul, speaking of the things that connect us all to some greater vision, and the desire to better understand it while we are still here on this earth.  The most poignant moment for us was: "In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die.  Where you invest your love, you invest your life."  This one snippet challenges us to really think about what we put our "love" (passion, energy, spirit) into.  It very much fits a desire to be changed from the inside and touched the spirit and soul today.

Hopefully you will join in the week long journey together, and more so that this will help us all see the world just a little more through God's eyes.

Times of Discernment and Visioning

Another year has begun and many of us have probably made some resolutions about what we'd like to do different this year.  Likewise we start our new year as a church looking at what we may do different this year and in the future.  Much like our personal resolutions, these changes are not to change who we are at our core, but things that we hope will improve ourselves and in turn the world around us. 

The thing with change though is that we often try a number of things before we find the way to actually make a change that works for us.  Sometimes we're not even completely sure what it is that we need to adjust in order to make the changes we feel we want to make.  This is where the work of discernment plays out both for us personally and as a congregation.  If we just make changes without thinking about why and how we're going about changing we often find ourselves unable to become what we really want to be.  Changes don't stick, or have side effects we didn't anticipate. 

When we take the time to really make a plan and a commitment to something we're truly are passionate about though, we become quite able to do things that maybe we thought were impossible, or at very least frighteningly imposing when we first considered them.  Taking time to really examine ourselves, being completely honest with ourselves, and even looking beyond ourselves is something that is scary but necessary if we want to be the best we can be.  It is not just a product of hard work at getting to our desired end result but also of the hard work of really understanding what we want that end result to be, and in the case of the church as it should be in our own lives what that end result that is that God wishes for us.  It is when we passionately seek to better understand God's will above our own that we are most in line with what it is that God wants from us.

We must continually seek God in order to see where we are going, but remembering that we are following a lamp unto our feet with every step.  This is not a process of quickly moving towards a bright light, but a slow progress, step by step together relying on one another and that dim reflection we see of God in the world.  May we all move forward this year yearning to discern that which God wants for us, and clinging to a vision yet unkown.

Amen.