For a better life and a better eternity
I’m usually not very fond of the videos where someone plays God. Something about it often sets me on edge. However, I’ve seen a couple lately that I really like. God’s Chisel was a great one. Here is another one posted by OneTime Blind. I think I like this one because that other character, the one whose not supposed to be God, reminds me way too much of me.
Time for some surrender. Enjoy.
(If you need to know what this is all about, start with the first post in the series and click through the succeeding links. Also, as posts are added links will be placed in that first post to each one. By the way, please check out the site for the Kelsey Wynne Harris Foundation and help promote the foundation by purchasing any of the Life’s More Interesting products. By the way, unlike the other links in this post, there is no affiliation link here. None of your purchases of these products grease my pockets.)
I don’t even want to go into all the emotional reasons I took a break from this series. However, for those who have been faithful to check back every Wednesday to find out more about “Something Worth Doing” my tribute to Kelsey Harris and her poem, thank you. To those who have been disappointed with their absence. I’m sorry. However, I’m excited to provide you with the next installment. Enjoy.
Today, I Want To…
The Sounds of Silence
The world is a cacophony of noise. Everywhere we go, we hear it. We can hardly think in restaurants with televisions blaring, background music bopping, and conversations echoing off the ceramic tile floors. Hop in the car and we usually elect to have the same experience there by turning on the radio. We carry our mp3 players with us so that when it gets too quiet, we can have some noise.
Noise, noise, everywhere but not a sound to listen to. Before you even worry about listening to something worth hearing, you need to get comfortable with silence. Of course, there is no complete silence. You just need to get used to time without artificial noise.
Walk outside, sit in your yard, close your eyes, and listen to God’s creation. Hear birds calling. Hear the distant dog barking. Hear the grass whisper. Hear the leaves cackle. Hear the wind whistle. Have you ever noticed that all that is going on? Let what God has made in this world amaze you. Meditate on your part in it. Notice the noises man is making. Hear the neighbor cutting his grass. Hear the cars travel down the road. Hear the far off plane fly overhead. Hear the neighborhood kids shout as they play ball. Hear a nearby mother call for her children. Have you ever let any of that human activity register? Let what goes on in life impact you. Think of your part in it.
Don’t stop this too quickly. Don’t get impatient thinking you need to get something done. Simply be amazed and sit in humility over your small part of this gigantic world and community. The sound of God’s world and God’s people is worth taking some time to listen to.
Recognize the Worthiness of Those Talking To You
Here is the first key to be able to listen to things worth hearing. SHUT UP! So many of us miss out on what is worth hearing because we won’t stop talking. We want everyone to believe we are worth listening to. Quit making every conversation about you. When your friends are telling you about their frustration, their success, their struggle, their victory, resist the urge to follow it up with, “I know just what you’re talking about, listen to what happened to me.” If you ask someone a question, close your mouth, open your ears and listen to their answer. You might just end up listening to something worth hearing.
This, of course, take a healthy dose of humility. You have to realize that you aren’t the only person in the world who says things worth hearing. This especially takes humility if the one speaking is saying something with which you disagree. You need to understand that worthiness is not based on whether or not it agrees with what you already think. We have to learn to turn off our quick judgment and listen to understand. There have been many cases in which I discovered that what I initially disagreed with was right, I just had to take some time to hear the person out.
In addition to having some personal humility, start granting to others that they are worthy to speak. What your spouse says is worth hearing. What your parents say is worthy hearing. What your kids say is worth hearing. What your co-workers say is worth hearing. What your neighbors say is worth hearing. What your friends say is worth hearing. What your fellow church members say is worth hearing. They aren’t all idiots. They are worthy. That doesn’t mean you have to always agree or accept what they say. It does mean you need to back up and recognize their worthiness to speak. You never know what you might learn and how you might improve when you recognize that you do not have all wisdom and knowledge; these people God has placed around you might just be of some help.
Place Yourself In Situations to Listen to Things Worth Hearing
Too many of us don’t listen to things worth hearing because we hang out in places and relationships where nothing worth hearing is said. Instead, we need to go to places and find people where worthy things are said.
If we watch movies, listen to music, hang out with people that promote immorality, pride, revenge, hate,
and other sins, we are only going to listen to things that aren’t worth hearing. However, if we find wise counselors, moral friends, pure music and movies, we have a much better chance for reaching this goal today.
I can’t help but think about Paul’s words in Ephesians 5:11-12. “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret.” Get these situations out of your lives. Turn off the crass comedians. Turn away from those who brag about their sin and wrongdoing. Instead, put yourself with people who say things worth hearing. As the Proverbialist says, wise counselors bring safety and victory (Proverbs 11:14; 24:6).
Let me highlight one specific you need to cut out in order to place yourself in the situation to listen to things worth hearing. Get rid of gossip and slander. If you pursue the juicy tidbit, the speck of dirt, the sordid secret, you aren’t going to listen to things worth hearing. Instead, your going to hear things no one should listen to. Don’t hang out with gossips. If your friends’ favorite words are, “Don’t tell anyone I said this,” you may need to find new friends. Spend time with people who keep their secrets and build others up to their faces and behind their backs. These are the kind of people who say things worth hearing.
Finally, find things worth listening to instead of just trying to be entertained all the time. I love to sing along to the radio as much as the next guy. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if most of your listening time is spent just being entertained, you are missing out on a lot of worthy stuff. If you have an mp3 player, start subscribing to podcasts that will help you be a better person. Sign up to hear sermons from preachers that want to help you spiritually. Purchase audio books to improve yourself. Listen to self-help podcasts. Find trade specific shows that will improve you in your work. Find family related podcasts that will help you at home. Sure, listen to your music sometime, but make sure to let that commute be beneficial, not just entertaining.
Above All Listen to Him Who Is Above All
Recognize that we are not alone in the world. There is a Higher Power who put you here. He does care for you. He wants to help you. Listen to what He has to say. No, I don’t think He will speak to you with an audible voice. However, I do think He will speak to you.
He speaks to you through His Word. His Spirit revealed it so we might know Him. He guides us in all that we need to know and do, equipping us for every good work. He has the wisdom that we do not.
I also think He speaks to you through His other children. Listen to the experience, strength, hope others have to offer. Heed the advice of fellow travelers on the spiritual journey, especially those farther down the road than you. God places these people in our lives for a reason.
Don’t turn your back on what God has to say to you. What He says is the most worthy word to hear.
We hear a lot of things every day. Today lets start filtering some of it. Close your mouth. Open your ears. Listen to understand. Respect others. Listen to something worth hearing.
(Come back next week as we learn about “Teaching Something Worth Learning.”)
Usually Tuesdays are my Springboard for Your Family. Today, I want to take a little different approach and provide a springboard for your church family. The reverberations of last week’s discussions about Jody Lusk are continuing to impact me. On Sunday, I told my congregation that we need to view ourselves as a battalion of God’s army that is drawing together so we can go out and conquer sin and Satan by God’s grace. With that in mind, I’ve been continuing to study and research issues about sexual misconduct and abuse in churches and especially by preachers/clergy. It is truly a frightening prospect.
I want to share with you a particularly helpful site that was passed along to me by one of the members of the Franklin congregation. Baylor University has been conducting studies about Clergy Sexual Misconduct and their findings are amazing. Understand that the scope of this study is not about child sexual abuse, but about preachers, pastors, priests, and rabbis using their role as spiritual leader to prey on adult members. They found that 3% of women who have attended a “church service” in the past month admit to being victims of Clergy Sexual Misconduct since turning 18 years old. This should cause us to stand up and take notice.
Churches, we have got to start talking about this pink elephant in the room. I encourage you to begin by checking out the resources and stories found at Baylor’s site:
Baylor: Clergy Sexual Misconduct Awareness and Prevention
I want to share five things I have taken away from this research, though I’m sure there is much, much more we need to learn.
My family and I like to visit waterfalls. The danger of waterfalls is you have to have huge drop for the water to fall. Many of the waterfalls we have visited have fences and barriers along the trail. Even at the viewing area they have barriers with signs saying don’t cross. Why? Because people who go on the other side of those barriers fall to their deaths. We need to establish healthy boundaries. I don’t think this means we have to be so extreme as to have women on one side of the building and men on the other never to touch, shake hands, or even hug. But, at the same time, let’s not laugh at the extremes so much that we never build barriers allowing everyone to plunge into the ravine. I think James 2:2, 14 demonstrates a need to establish boundaries.
Especially establish healthy boundaries for those in leadership positions: pastors, preachers, deacons, teachers. Make it a boundary that they are simply not allowed to meet alone with a member of the opposite gender-not for counseling, not for teaching, not for working on a project. Make it a boundary that nobody teaches a children’s class alone where they cannot at least be monitored. Have a healthy boundary about taking children to the bathroom from class. I know in my next meeting with the elders here at Franklin, I’m going to ask for a window to be placed in my office door.
Please don’t whine to me about how you will never do these things and it upsets you that the congregation wants to put some boundaries in place as if you are a deviant. Healthy people don’t chaff at healthy boundaries. They recognize that boundaries provide two protections: 1) they protect against false accusations and 2) they protect against temptation you aren’t expecting so there will never be any true accusations. If you are going to buck against healthy boundaries, you probably need to take a closer, more honest look at your spiritual life. You may have a chink in this armor you want everyone to believe is sin proof.
***Edit: Make sure you check out Dan Allen’s suggested congregational sexual harassment policy in the comments section below and let us know what you think about it.
“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (I Corinthians 13:7). Yes, but love does not turn a blind eye to the inappropriate. Sadly, many experience things that make them feel sexually uncomfortable, but instead of expressing it, they internalize it. They even blame themselves thinking they must be overly sensitive. “That brother is just showing his care for me. Besides, this is church, no one would do anything inappropriate here. I need to give him the benefit of the doubt.” Baylor called this having a culture of niceness. Yes, we should be nice, but it is not nice to make others feel uncomfortable sexually, and it is not nice to act like their feelings on the matter don’t matter.
Here is the key in my mind. If someone makes you feel uncomfortable, you are allowed to express that. Expressing that something made you uncomfortable is not an accusation of wrongdoing. It is not believing the worst about someone. It is not refusing to give someone the benefit of the doubt. It means you have a boundary and you are allowed to express it whether the boundary is an issue of personal space during a conversation or the fact that he rubs your back while talking to you or the fact that he is calling you at home. Some people are touchy-feely and that’s okay. But if their touchy-feely makes you uncomfortable, that is okay as well. You can tell them.
There is another side of this. When someone expresses that our action has made them feel uncomfortable, we don’t need to view it as an accusation. We don’t need to get defensive and angry. We definitely don’t need to make accusations back, “You’re just too sensitive. You must have a problem if you’re going to interpret what I did that way.” We need to apologize and stop the action…period.
I guess this could go under the healthy boundaries section, but it stands out so strongly to me that I think we need to state it. Have you ever noticed that Paul told Titus to teach the older men some things, teach the older women some things, and teach the young men some things. But he didn’t tell him to teach the younger women anything. Rather, one of the things he was to teach the older women was to teach the younger women (Titus 2:1-6). I think there was a reason for this. Paul was a believer in healthy boundaries as well.
Perhaps the most important boundary of all is that preachers do not need to take it on themselves to counsel, teach, help, direct women, especially women their age and younger. If they think they’ve got great insight into how to help younger women, they need to train older women in how to do that.
Sadly, whenever we think about someone needing spiritual counsel we think, “Call the preacher.” Do we not have any godly women who can counsel wives to love their husbands and their children? Do we not have any godly women who can encourage younger women in the faith and teach them God’s will from the scripture? Is the preacher the only person in the congregation who can do these things? If so, then the church has more problems than Clergy Sexual Misconduct. If so, that church probably needs to close its doors and let its members join with a congregation that has a healthier more mature membership (yes, yes, I know there are exceptions).
When leaders in the church sexually pursue members, no matter the age of the members, it is not an affair as if both are equally guilty. When a person in authority starts pursuing a subordinate sexually, it is an abuse of power. The vulnerable subordinate is not to blame. I don’t care how you cut it, we just cannot take responsibility away from the person in leadership. That person is the one who is responsible for what happened.
If something like this has happened in your church, the one abused by the preacher/clergy needs support and help now more than ever. Do not turn your back on them and their families. Do not get upset as if they brought the trouble on the church. They did not. They were victims. Yes, the offender has fallen prey to Satan and sin. Yes, the offender needs our help as well. But don’t do anything that acts like the victim is at fault. Lift that victim up and support her. Help her face all her confusion, fear, doubt and walk through it into God’s arms.
If you want to turn someone away from God forever, start blaming them for what the clergy did to them. Watch them wilt. Watch them blame God. Watch them learn that nowhere is safe for them, not even the church. Yes, you might see them leave and think you were right all along, it just proved they weren’t as spiritual as you. But all you actually did was kill a soul.
If you don’t know how to provide the support the victim needs, get them in touch with professionals and be supportive of it. You probably need to get them in touch with professionals even if you think you know how to provide support.
The local congregation needs to be a sanctuary, a safe-haven for the hurting and broken. It is not to be a place that causes more hurt and brokenness. In fact, that principle itself is what causes a great deal of confusion when Clergy Sexual Misconduct happens. The victims, thinking they are in a safe place, start to doubt their own feelings of what is inappropriate because trusted spiritual leaders are leading the way in to sin.
We need to work to keep churches safe. That is what the other four principles are about. I know that is going to be hard because if a church is doing its job, it is going to be attracting sinners. Sinners do bad things even in the church. But we need to go out of our way to provide safety for members. That means providing a safe place to confess their sins. That means providing a safe place to be broken and find helpful counsel. That means providing a safe place to express hurt that has happened between one another.
Keep it safe.
Satan is attacking us. He is attacking churches. There are all manner of sides to this and we must lean on God that Satan doesn’t destroy us at any side of these attacks. We must not stand in arrogance as if we cannot sin. We must not neglect forgiveness when even the vilest of sinners repents. We must not sweep an epidemic under the rug as if it is not really a problem. Let’s stand up and fight. Through God, we will win.
Perhaps one of the most difficult things to do is learn to weep with those who weep. When we see someone hurting what do we do? The Skit Guys who brought us “God’s Chisel” tell us about mourning and what we need to do when we know someone is sitting in their mourning booth.
I had just finished breakfast at the Early Bird in Beaumont, Texas. My windows were down. My coffee cup filled with my second latte of the morning. A cd was playing. My phone rang as I was about to turn from Phelan Ave. onto Dowlen Road. He asked, “Have you listened to the news?” “No, what’s going on?” “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.” “What, no way! Oh man, somebody has made a big mistake.”
Before I got to my office at the church building my phone rang again. “You’re not going to believe this. Another plane just flew into the other tower.” “Oh no, this was no accident.”
I arrived at the office. We figured out how to use the monitor in the nursery to receive a television signal. A plane flew into the Pentagon. What on earth was going on?
We didn’t work, we went back and forth from television to radio. While watching one of the channels, news anchors were talking with an inset window focused on the towers. Suddenly there was a lot of smoke. I asked Helen, our secretary watching with me, “Wait, what just happened? Did you see that? Why is there all that smoke around the towers?” Moments later the report came that the first tower had fallen.
I went home and we watched the tragedy unfold.
On this day of memorial we need to pray as we did right after the tragedy.
God in heaven, thank you for our great nation. Thank you for our freedom to worship you. Thank you for our freedom to pray. Be with our president, our congress, our judges that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.
Thank you for our safety. Thank you that 9/11 has been a freak event and not an every day occurrence in our country. Thank you that so many were kept safe on that day. Help all those who were kept safe to find their strength and comfort in You.
God, please bless those who lost loved ones on that day. Today is a huge reminder of their loss and even with time the wounds still hurt. Strengthen them to find comfort in You.
God strengthen us to have peace, individually, nationally, globally. Help us to take your gospel into the lives of one more individual today that they will be governed by peace and one less person will pursue this kind of violence.
Thank you for our eternal hope in you, that we might one day be in a place where Satan’s power of violence no longer holds sway. Thank you for Jesus, through whom we have that hope.
We praise you, O God.
Through Jesus, I pray,
Amen
The past few days have seen a bevy of activity regarding Jody Lusk. I appreciate the conversations I’ve had both publicly at this site and privately. I appreciate the challenge to look at things from multiple angles and the realization that nothing said can ever encompass all that we need to think about as motivated by this situation.
I do want to pass on a statement that Jody made to WBKO in Bowling Green, KY. I have copied it directly from their site below.
“I am deeply sorry for my sinful actions and I am in deep shame. I have been asked what could possibly motivate me to do such a thing. I can’t quite explain why. Satan binds us to sin and what it is and what it really does. Being a preacher I know that God’s Word warns us about Satan and his ways. Unfortunately, until I experienced that first hand I didn’t fully grasp it. I was on a spiritual high as 2009 began but I let it all come crashing down, I let Satan have his way with me. My faith wasn’t as strong as I thought it was. Looking back on all that I’ve done it’s hard to believe this was me doing this. I had been hardened to sin and it’s consequences. On Saturday after the events of the day had transpired it all hit me like a ton of bricks – what I’ve done, the people I had hurt, especially my dear wife and kids who deserved none of this. Jail is bad enough, but the idea of not having them in my life is absolutely crushing, I cry everytime I think about them. I think about the young lady I had the affair with and hope she will be okay and that she can renew her commitment to God. I hadn’t studied His Word or prayed in months. I was so weak. Since being in jail I have cried out to God frequently and begged for forgiveness. I know He has forgiven because He promises in His word that He will. I have studied His Word more in 2 days that I had in the past 6 months. I feel much better spiritually but emotionally I’m a wreck. I can’t stand that I’ve put my family, the young lady’s family, and all my Christian brethren through so much pain. I hope people can look at my failures and learn from them. Never give in to any sin. Satan wants all of us to think that some sins are OK. But what seems like a small sin will always progress and lead to other sins. Don’t let him fool you. I ask for everyone to forgive me – my family, her family, my brethren, my friends, and my community. I realize that even with forgiveness there are consequences and I will face them. I hope that while in jail that God can use me for His glory to help some lost soul find Him. Please pray for me. Please don’t give up on me. I take full responsibility for my actions. There are no excuses.
Jody Lusk”
While we continue to pray for all those who have been hurt by Jody’s sins, the victim, the victim’s family, Jody’s wife, Jody’s kids, their extended families, the Auburn Kentucky church, the Auburn community, let’s remember to pray for Jody as well.