just an ordinary kid with an extraordinary mission

Eight days later, when the baby was circumcised, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel even before he was conceived. (Luke 2:21)

The baby is born, the shepherds come and worship and maybe the wisemen. The next day, things are back to normal.

Joseph is a new father, Mary is a new mother and is sore from the delivery, the baby needs feeding and his diaper changed.

The animals are still eating, the census is still going on, the sun is still shining, the dust is still blowing, people are still being born and dying, and the King has come.

We tend to think about the earth shifting on its axis when Jesus was born, that everybody on earth felt a tremor in the ground at the moment of his birth. But they didn’t. And the earth didn’t shake.

Romans 8:22 says: all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And it had been and still is. When Jesus was born, the whole creation shifted on a different level. Now the King was here and things would be different.

But the groaning is still going on in our own lives and in the lives of those yet to come. When Jesus came, it changed everything on a spiritual level. But not necessarily on a physical level.

Life went on. People were still being born and dying.

The birth of Jesus was so ordinary. The conception was miraculous but the birth was ordinary. The life was ordinary. His death, although undeserved and brutal was ordinary to a point. He was not the first nor the last to be crucified.

The difference between him and all the rest was the resurrection. By his resurrection he showed himself to be extra-ordinary.

But there was nothing really all that special about his birth. And God meant it that way.

It even could have been that Mary and Joseph were expecting something amazing to happen, but the baby just lay there and slept. And gooed. And wiggled. And cried. And messed his pants. And finally walked, and ate solid food, and learned to play games, and grew.

Nothing special, except maybe for the time he was twelve in the temple. Otherwise, it was just a kid growing up in a family.

But what a kid. One who was the King of Kings and Lord of Lords incognito. I don’t think he even knew it himself until that day of his baptism when he went into the wilderness for forty days.

Just an ordinary kid with an extraordinary mission: to seek and save those who were lost.

i should have been killed

Lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. (Ephesians 4:1)

October of 1971. I was I was 22 years old, fresh out of the army and freshly married, and working for Bell Telephone in Houston, TX, taking money out of pay phones. It was a good job for a young man. You got to go everywhere. Everybody, no matter how fancy or ordinary, if they had a business, they had a pay phone.

And my job was taking the money out of them, putting it into a big barrel kind of thing in the back of a step van and taking it back to the central office over on Polk Street in downtown Houston.

It was a sunny afternoon in October, a beautiful day. I was driving along the Gulf Freeway south of Houston coming back from Texas City, just about completely loaded with coins. These were mostly dimes and nickels as phone calls were 10 cents. The truck was really heavy.

All of a sudden, there was an old gray truck in front of me and I swerved to avoid him and went into the median, bouncing end over end. The whole time the accident was happening, I was holding onto the steering wheel thinking, Wow!

When I came to, the step van was lying on the driver’s side, the engine was lying on the driver’s seat and I was standing on the engine. I have no idea how I came to that position. If I had been wearing a seat belt, I would be dead, crushed by the engine.

I jumped up to the top of the van (I had both adrenaline and youth on my side – I was 22) and there was a crowd of people looking at me as if I were Lazarus come back from the dead. No one expected the driver to even be alive, much less mobile.

I leaped down and everyone gathered around me to see if I was a ghost or something.

I had glass in my hand, a small bump on my forehead, a tiny cut on my back at the beltline and the right bellbottom of my pants cut off. That is all.

The truck was demolished and I was barely touched. Everyone wanted me to sit and I didn’t. I was too pumped. Soon a 1965 Ford Country Squire station wagon came up and I said, there’s my mother. A weird looking guy got out who had the same hairdo as my mother. The people around looked at him and then at me and began to encourage me to sit down again. Again I refused.

A tow truck guy (who must have been following me on spec) bandaged my hand and took me to the office.

On the way, my father pulled up beside me in his dark blue Houston Lighting and Power car. The phone company had called my wife who called my mother who got my father on his radio and he came to find me. he figured, how many demolished phone company trucks would be going up the freeway so he didn’t figure it would that hard.

I turned to the tow truck driver and said, there’s my father. He truly didn’t know what to do since I had already seen my mother (who wasn’t). I finally convinced him to pull over (in fact I had to threaten him) and my father came up to the tow truck. Needless to say, the tow truck driver was relieved. My father took me to the hospital.

Forty years ago this next month. I destroyed the truck  I was driving and I was barely hurt.

I have always felt the Lord had a reason for me to survive. I just hope I have not disappointed him.

daily java

Daily Java:

Tax collectors and other notorious sinners often came to listen to Jesus teach. This made the Pharisees and teachers of religious law complain that he was associating with such sinful people—even eating with them! So Jesus told them this story: “If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others in the wilderness and go to search for the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he will joyfully carry it home on his shoulders. When he arrives, he will call together his friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’ In the same way, there is more joy in heaven over one lost sinner who repents and returns to God than over ninety-nine others who are righteous and haven’t strayed away!” (Luke 15:1-7)

It is so easy to lose track of your mission. What did God send you to do? To whom did he send you to minister?

On the one hand, there is the church. It is full of people who are usually pretty good people. Some are old and some are young. And they have needs. They need to be ministered to.

But then again there is a big world out there full of lost and dying sinners. And they have needs and they need to be brought to Jesus to experience his grace.

The problem comes when the difference between the two is noticed so much.

One group is the church, the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. The other isn’t. and it is easy for the group that is in Jesus to become smug and self-satisfied. We have made it. We are God’s children. Isn’t it great that we found the right church and worship the right way and live our lives in the right way?

It is so easy to begin to see yourself as the one that God is proud of.

Jesus faced that problem. Those that were here already felt a sense of entitlement. They had worked for this church and had gotten all this stuff together. They had paid for it and fixed it up.

Then comes the feeling that they were worth it. When the Messiah came, he was going to come to them and tell them how good they were. He would uphold the corporate theology and make sure they knew God loved them. He would put his stamp on the fact that they were the true righteous.

But when he came, he went to the other side. He hung around with people that were not like those who were in charge, those who had seniority. These people were sinners. They drank and they caroused, they didn’t dress like us nor act like us. Jesus had no right to be with these people and prefer them over us.

Jesus tried to tell them that the sheep who were already in the pasture were fine, that he came to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. In fact, he even goes so far as to tell them that God and his angels are happier when someone comes back, then when someone stays. Especially when they have the attitude of the ones who stayed: self entitlement.

It made him sad and it made him angry at times.

And I think sometimes it baffled him as to why they refused to accept him and what he had to say. He was, after all, human and subject to the same problems we have.

He finally found that they were not going to hear him and not going to listen to him. so, like the apostle Paul after him, he turned to those who needed him.

There is more to life than what the people in the church think there is.

Of course, it ended with his death. Or at least the church thought it did.

But our life came from that death. And our life came from the resulting resurrection.

Praise the name of Jesus.

forty days later

Look, there on the mountains  the feet of one who brings good news, who proclaims peace!  (Nahum 1:15)

Cut in to a picture of a pair of feet. They are dusty and cracked and very brown. One of the toenails is growing out from being hit by something – a rock or root. The sandals are ordinary and have been worn to the point that they will need to be replaced before long.

They are standing on a piece of rocky ground. There are stunted plants around, some prickly pear. A scorpion scuttles by not far from the right foot.

Bring the picture out a bit more and there are the legs visible from about mid calf down. The clothes are dirty. It has been a long time since the one wearing them has had them laundered. They are also ordinary, nothing fancy. Just utilitarian sandals and clothing.

The hands are visible now. Like the feet, they too are cracked and dirty, and very brown from the sun.

The face comes into view. Unkempt, tangled hair, cracked lips, burned face, emaciated features, yet there is a serenity in his eyes that is at odds with the rest of him.

That serenity was not there forty days ago. Forty days ago, he had been baptized by John the Baptizer, they called him. Forty days ago, the Spirit of God came to rest on his shoulder like a dove. The Lamb of God John had called him, who came to take away the sins of the world.

Forty days ago, the full knowledge of who he was flooded over him.

And it scared him to death. Or at least he thought he might die from the enormity of it all.

Forty days ago, he had stumbled into the wilderness in a daze. He had gone home, gotten some water and took off. Mary kept calling after him, asking what was wrong. But he couldn’t talk.

Forty days ago, he was afraid. Now he knew what he was going to do. Now he had reached the acceptance of his mission.

Forty days later, he emerged from the desert a different man. Forty days ago, he was a carpenter who had felt the hand and call of God on his life from a very early age. He had always known there was something special he was to do. He figured that maybe he was going to be a prophet or something like that, but he was thirty years old and God had still not called him out.

Now he knew. He was the Son of God, the Messiah.

He figured he had sat around long enough now. He had better get busy. First, though, he would talk to his mother. He had some questions.