Losers can be winners too

   In sports, there can only be one winner.   In Super Bowl 51, the first ever overtime Super Bowl game was played.   Before the referee flipped the coin to decide who got the ball first, he told both teams that overtime would be played until there was a winner.  No ties are allowed in the Super Bowl.   There has to be winner and there has to be a loser.

    We read in Romans 8:28 :

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

  Too many who read these words, read into the word "good" as meaning "rosy outcome" or "good ending" but is not always the case.  Take for example of the Super Bowl I mentioned earlier.  How can God work for the good of players who may be on different teams where one will go home "happy" and the other "depressed". 

   The answer is in the 3 words "who love him". 

   When we love God, we love what he loves.  We love what he gives to us and also what he gives to others.   We are pleased because God is pleased.   Maybe our "purpose" is to LOSE so someone else can WIN.   Jesus gives us the best example of this.   He loves the Father and loves us so much that for us to WIN he had to LOSE.  He suffered hell so we could receive heaven.  If God is pleased that someone else wins then I can be pleased that God is pleased.

   In God's world the losers are really the winners.   Their loss is someone else's gain.

Lord,
      Please help me to love what you love and to want what you want.  If my loss is someone else's gain and you desire it to be so, then let me be happy with whatever comes.  In Jesus' name!

Amen

We are not trash!

   I recently saw the movie  "Toy Story 4" and was amazed at how well the story writers put together this movie.  It was an amazing movie I would even be willing to pay money to see again!  In the movie I caught hold of a message that I believe God had woven into the story line for us to see.

   In the movie, a new toy is created by the name of Forky.  The little girl, Bonnie, goes off to Kindergarten and while there she creates a little fork-person out of some items from the trash (Woody had collected them and put them on her table while she wasn't looking).   She takes a Popsicle stick, a Spork, some eyes, some gum and a pipe-cleaner and creates Forky.  She then writes her name his feet which were made of of Popsicle sticks.   Later on, when she is going home Woody is in the backpack with Forky and is shocked when Forky comes alive and starts talking.  This is the beginning of Woody's trials in the movie as Forky does not see himself as a toy, but instead sees himself only as trash and tries to throw himself into any trashcan he sees.   One night, while they are on a road trip in an RV,  Forky throws himself out the back window and Woody has to go after him because he means everything to Bonnie.   He tracks down Forky who is stuck in the dirt on the side of the road.  He pulls him out and begins a long trek back to the RV park.   During their hike, Woody spends time trying to convince Forky he is NOT TRASH but a TOY.  The turning point happens when Woody tells of his own prior owner Andy who loved him and wrote his name on him.  At that moment, Forky gets it!  He no longer sees himself as TRASH but a TREASURE and wants to get back to Bonnie.

    How much is our life in Christ like that of Woody and/or Forky.  How many times do we have people in our lives like Forky who don't see themselves as anything more than trash and throw themselves into the world's trashcan of drugs, alcohol, porn, hate, self-hatred, bad-relationships, crappy-jobs with no future, self-destruction and so much more.  We tell them that they are so much more than that to God.   God has written his name on them and he has written our names into the palms of his hands.


God writes in Isaiah 49:16:

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast    and have no compassion on the child she has borne? 

   I will not forget you!  

 See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands"

    It is not really until we open up and tell our story to them that they get it.  Like Forky coming to an understanding of who he is when Woody tells his story of Andy and how it impacted his life and changed him so also we connect to others with the Gospel when we share with them how God's love  impacted us.  We are transformed in Baptism to being God's children and are marked forever as his own and nothing can change that!

   Finally, it is worth nothing that our attitude towards others should be the same as Woody's who recklessly loves Forky and throws himself out of the window to go after him because Forky means so much to Bonnie.  We too must recklessly love others and reach out to them because they mean so much to God also.  Because God loves them, we love them too.   Because God searches for them (Bonnie in the movie panics every time she cannot find Forky), we search for them too.

John  writes in 1 John 4:19:

    We love because he first loved us!

Size does NOT matter!

    The phrase "Size does not matter!" appears often in many different areas of conversation.  Some of which we will not go into for this article.   It is a human condition to compare ourselves to others.  We do it on Facebook, we do it the car, at work, at the gym.  Heck we even do it at church too!

    Jesus addressed this issue when he was at a dinner party of a noted Teacher of the Law.  While he was there a woman of bad reputation (probably the prostitute he saved from stoning) came in and washed Jesus' feet with her tears, dried them with her hair and poured expensive perfume on them.   The host took offense to it and thought that if Jesus' was a true prophet he would know this woman was unworthy of being in his presence.   Jesus tells him this parable

    "There were 2 men who owed the King money.  One owed him 5 denari (a weeks wage) and another 500 denari (2 years wages).  Both of them did not have the ability to pay him back and so the King had mercy on them and cancelled their debt.   Who of the two men do you think loved the King more?".   The host replied, "I guess the man who had the larger debt!".

    I am a numbers person.  I love numbers.  When I read this parable I can't help but visualize the two debts sitting on a table.   One stack of 5 verses 100 stacks of 5 (arranged in a 10x10 square none the less!).   The problem is when we do this we miss the most important part of the parable.   Jesus said, "Both of them did not have the ability to pay him back".   Both were flat broke without a penny to their name.  In this parable Jesus illustrates that some people are "less sinful than others".   There are "good people" out there.  We often get confronted with that by unbelievers who love to point to very good and well-meaning people out there.   In the credit-card-of-life some people live very responsible lives for the most part.   They don't run up huge debts and live very reasonable lives.   While others run off to Vegas and go on a betting streak!   But in the end, BOTH have no means to pay it off.

     All too often we try to impress on non-believers that their debt to God is this HUGE mountain of debt and we are a bit put off when they seem to shrug their shoulders and say, "I don't think I am a bad person!  I am not as bad as Hitler!".   They see themselves as the person with the 5 denari debt and it not being that big of a deal.  The real issue is not the size of the debt but the total lack of income to pay for the debt no matter how small it is.  For some, they think they can "work the debt off" with their good works.   The problem with this idea is that there is no "over time credit" in God's economy.

    To illustrate this imagine you work for a small company and you get paid $100K per year.   A sign at the door reads:

All employees must be at their desks at no later than 8AM and go home no sooner than 5PM with lunch from 12:00 to 1:00 , Monday-Friday.  

    One day you make a mistake that costs the owner $20K.   You go to the owner and say, "To work off the $20K I will be at work from 8-5 Monday thru Friday and only take 1 hour for lunch!".  The owner would point to the sign and say, "That won't pay it off!  That's what I require all my workers to do!"  He then tells you "Since you lost 20% of your salary I am going to require you to work 20% MORE!  You will work on Saturday from 8-5 with 1 hour for lunch for the entire next year!"

    But in God's world the sign doesn't read: "Be holy 40 hours a week!", instead it reads "Be holy!" (24/7).  There is no overtime in God's business.   There is no extra we can do.   It's what God already requires us to be, so when we give to the poor, that is what God expects of us anyway.   Even if we try to use our money or even our very bodies as "guilt offerings" we accomplish nothing because all our money and even our bodies is HIS!  He owns everything and using them to pay off the debt is like you trying to use the company credit card to pay off your debt.

    Instead, God asks us to trust him that he loves us and has take care of it all.   But to get there we must first admit we are flat broke and have nothing to offer of our own.  Like those 2 men in Jesus' parable who trust showing themselves in front of the King and telling him they are flat broke.   We must trust our loving and merciful Father who has already paid the full amount because he is the only one with the resources to cancel the debt.  Jesus declaration on the cross of "IT IS FINISHED!" is his stamping on our debt "PAID IN FULL". 

Don't use a hammer to drive a screw!

    Recently the Supreme Court threw out a court ruling by an Oregon court to force a Christian-owned bakery to pay $135,000 in fines for refusing to bake a wedding cake for gay couple.  Regardless of which side of the gay-marriage issue you stand on; the SCOTUS decision was the right one in my opinion and it will benefit all of us.  The problem stemmed from the Oregon state anti-discrimination law which forced all the people of Oregon to get in line on gay-marriage and ruled that one could be compelled by a government to turn away from their religious faith and to say whatever people want them to say.     The SCOTUS ruling dictates limits on such laws and that the government has no say in such matters.

    This is not just a win for religious freedom but also a for an individual's right to their freedom to speak, or in this case, NOT to speak.   All Americans won with this ruling and not just Christians.

     At the heart of the issue is people using the wrong tool to fix what they perceive as a problem.  Back in the 1960's we had a problem of segregation in the US.  This problem took 2 separate forms.  The first was in the separating of the schools into White-only and Blacks-only schools.   This was enforced by the local governments and the school boards that ran the schools.  It was a government initiated problem and therefore it needed a government-initiated solution to end the problem because government problems are typically immune to free-market responses like boycotts etc.   The famous case of Brown-vs-the-Board-of-Education was brought before SCOTUS which decided that "WE THE PEOPLE" cannot be read as "WE THE WHITE PEOPLE" and "WE THE BLACK PEOPLE" and therefore governments cannot provide segregated services even if they can be assured to be "equal".     This is a case of a hammer driving a nail.  

     At the same time in the 1960's there was segregation occurring at the private institution level.  One of the most prominent was the separation of blacks and whites on public buses.   MLK saw the problem and found the right answer to the problem.  He did not run off to the courts to force the bus companies to end their segregation.   Instead MLK lead one of the most successful boycotts of the bus system to force these companies to end their appalling programs.  It did not take long for the bus companies to realize their dependence on the black community and it hit them where it hurt them the most:  their pocket books!  A free-market-solution solved a free-market problem.  This was an outstanding case of a "screwdriver driving in a screw".  MLK used the right tool for the right problem and all Americans benefited from his wisdom.

 
      Now come 50 years later and we have lost our abilities to distinguish nails from screws anymore.  Today, too many on the left, view everything as a nail and see only a hammer (the government) as the solution to be used.  The case of the Oregon baker's vs the Oregon state government is a perfect example of a hammer being used to drive a screw.  You may not agree with their decision to not bake a case for a gay-wedding but forcing someone to do something their conscience is not right either.   Do we really want a country where people lay in fear for what they believe?   Do we really want a country of people who "turn off their conscience" and do what the government dictates?   A conscience is a terrible thing to waste in my opinion.  I would rather have a country full of people acting on their conscience and analyzing their morals and ethos rather than a country full of mindless, morally bankrupt and soulless beings.

     I believe the real solution would have been for the gay-community and it's protractors to launch a boycott of the bakery.   If enough people stop buying from them then they will go out of business unless those who support their beliefs back them up monetarily.  There was no reason to use the "hammer" in this situation as there was no governmental influence forcing the gay-couple to purchase from this bakery.

    Maybe now, we can get back to using hammer-for-nails and screwdrivers-for-screws and create a more fair, reasonable and moral country again.