Let's learn from Lincoln

As Inauguration Day nears and we enter an era of new leadership, let those whose candidates lost and those whose candidates won in the recent election be reconciled. In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president (and a Republican!) said this during a time of civil war:

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

God bless Barack Obama, God bless those who disagree with him, and God bless America and the world it seeks to lead by example.

(Photo swiped from http://www.dirtwrites.blogspot.com )

Surprise ending

The nice dog we found and lost Wednesday night was found again by a neighbor this morning.

Our neighborhood association president had received an email plea for help from the dog's owner, and he forwarded it to everyone in our neighborhood.

The neighbor who found the dog called the owner, who lives in an adjoining neighborhood, and the reunion occurred minutes later.

Last we heard, Newton (he turned out to be a boy; our bad) was on his way to the vet to get his foot looked at.

Unfortunately, his brother (who knew?) is still missing. But Newton found his way home, so maybe Archimedes will too. He has a microchip, we're told, so that might help.

Newton's return home was a real community effort. Thanks, everybody!

Easy come, easy go

Late this afternoon My Lovely Wife was just getting home from the grocery store, and our sobriety-challenged neighbor Andy walked up the driveway with a beautiful stray dog following him.

The dog appeared to have a broken right rear foot and a contusion on her left hindquarter, leading me to believe she'd been hit by a car. She was very calm and sweet-tempered, though.

Andy said he wasn't willing to do anything for this dog, but, after hesitating, said if we wanted to seek treatment for her leg he would throw in some money. We didn't commit at that moment to doing anything either, as we felt we were having a dog dumped on us. Andy walked away and we walked inside.

I couldn't stand the thought of that poor dog, with her pale blue eyes and her nice disposition, hobbling around out there, so I said something to MLW. We agreed to put her in our fenced back yard while we made an effort to find her people. She was well fed and well cared for, so we knew someone would be missing her.

We contacted our neighborhood association president, who sent an email to everyone in the neighborhood, and I posted an ad on craigslist. Then we went out to talk to some of our neighbors who we thought might know whose dog this was.

One of those neighbors, a guy named Richard who has an ancient Mustang parked in his driveway, has two dogs, both of whom were accounted for. But he was kind enough to bag up about three servings of dog food to take home to our urchin.

After checking with a couple of other neighbors -- one of whom may have provided a good lead to the owner -- I went home, put the food in a pie pan and took it out to the backyard.

"Doggie! I have food for you! Come and get it! ... Doggie! ... Doggie?"

She was gone.

We searched all over that yard, under the shed, under the deck, behind the composter ... nothing. Gone.

Somehow that dog, who I guessed was half Malamute and half ... something else, had either leapt over the fence with her one good hind leg or squeezed through a narrow opening by the gate. Neither one seems plausible.

I feel terrible about this, and I don't really know why. She hadn't acted afraid or uncomfortable around me at all, and didn't seem to have a problem with our yard. I was trying to help the poor thing, and she took off. I'm almost ... insulted.

Maybe I was looking forward to being somebody's hero when the reunion happened. Maybe I liked playing the role of rescuer. Maybe I secretly hoped I'd get to keep her.

I don't know, but it's all over as quickly as it began. I just hope she found her way home.

Women begetting badly

Matthew's genealogy of Jesus covers forty-and-two generations, but it mentions just five women -- and only four by name. The interesting and fun thing is that every one of those women was scandalous in some way.

Tamar had been married to Judah's son Er, but Er died. According to Hebrew custom, Er's brother Onan was supposed to take on Tamar as his wife to provide offspring for his late brother, but he failed to fulfill his duty. (Onan "wasted his seed on the ground," meaning he pulled out so Tamar wouldn't get pregnant; it is misunderstanding of this Scripture that has led many Christians to condemn masturbation, which in fact has nothing to do with this.)

As Tamar's father-in-law, it was Judah's duty to provide a man to help her conceive, but he reneged. So, Tamar tricked Judah into fulfilling this duty by disguising herself as a prostitute and getting him to sleep with her. When Tamar, no longer disguised, was found to be pregnant, Judah tried to have her burned at the stake. However, Tamar turned the tables by proving that Judah was the father, exposing him as a john and as a man who failed to fulfill his word or his duty.

Judah -- a son of Jacob and patriarch of the largest of the Twelve Tribes of Israel -- admitted in front of everyone, "She is more righteous than I." Tamar gave birth to twins, one of whom was Jesus' ancestor Perez.

Rahab was the mother of Boaz and great-grandmother of David, the greatest king Israel would have and a figure who in many ways was a precursor of Jesus. She was also a prostitute, but she helped the spies who scouted out the town of Jericho for Joshua.

Rahab's son Boaz married Ruth, who was not a Hebrew. She was a minority, a foreigner, a member of a different race, so to speak, but she became David's grandmother.

Next in line is a woman whom Matthew calls "Uriah's wife." Her name was Bathsheba, and David had a one-night stand with her while Uriah was off fighting a war for him. David married her after having Uriah killed. She eventually gave birth to Solomon, who succeeded David as king and was one of Jesus' forefathers.

The last scandalous woman on the list is a girl named Mary, who was an unwed teenage mother whose fiance knew he wasn't the father. Her fiance, Joseph, "desired to put her away secretly." However, an angel of the Lord let Joseph know that Mary had conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, so he stuck with her.

And, as Jentezen Franklin said, Mary had a little Lamb.

Every one of these women was at the center of a scandal, every one a subject of gossip. And every one is in the bloodline of Jesus, the Son of God and Savior of the world.

God esteems -- and redeems -- scandalous women.

Ping me

Eschewing the normal, straightforward list of demands, I got into the spirit of both the season and the workplace earlier this month with this email directed at my office Secret Santa: 

MEMO
To: Santa
From: Floyd
Date: 9 December
Re: North Pole initiatives

Circling back on our facetime Saturday last at your mall locale, the following deliverables are actionable items that will incent buy-in for non-naughty core competencies in your key demographic (me):

▪ Gift cards (Home Depot, iTunes, Ace Hardware, Dunkin Donuts) -- highly scalable
▪ Cleveland sports paraphernalia (Browns, Indians, Cavaliers) -- guaranteed not to be repurposed
▪ Items related to animals (30,000-foot view); cats, ducks, elephants, polar bears, rhinos (granular view)
▪ Baked goods -- but let's ramp down the candy for minimal pushback from the dentist next week
▪ Alcohol -- a robust solution to roll out a quick win

At the end of the day, our mission-critical takeaway is that whatever low-hanging fruit we bring to the table, productizing the joy of the season should not gain traction over established best practices, i.e., a full-on go-live of peace on earth, good will toward human capital.

Things are looking up

Another visit to the hematologist, another dose of good news.

After four months of good eating and right living, my white-cell count is about the same, but my platelets have crawled into the normal range. I guess I can thank my daily vitamin D supplement and weekly serving of red meat for that.

And here's a shocker: My weight was 154.3, a personal record. That's 22 pounds higher than the low I hit in 2007 that sent me to the doctor in the first place.

All is well!

Claim and proclaim

You may remember a series of posts I wrote in February and March about healing. The focus then was mainly on physical healing, but the principles apply to all kinds of healing, including emotional and relational.

The second part of the series was based on the passage in the Gospel of Luke about the woman with "an issue of blood" and how she received healing by pushing through the crowd to get to the source of healing, Jesus. And he so overflows with healing that all it took for her was to touch the edge of the back of his garment.

I love the last part of the story, as told by Luke:

Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

This passage is so loaded with messages, I'll have to go a phrase at a time. Pay attention now; this is for you.

Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed,

This woman had tried to disappear into the crowd, but Jesus easily singled her out as the one among the many. She had been shunned by the crowd because of her problem, but now she was trying to blend in.

How many times have you found yourself alone in the midst of a crowd, surrounded by dozens or even thousands of people, not one of whom knows you or understands your pain? One place where it happens to a lot of people is in church. You show up on Sunday, dressed in your finest clothes and burdened with your darkest secrets, and just hope no one notices you or discovers your uncleanness. Most of the crowd won't take any note of you because they're too busy worrying that someone will notice them and discover their uncleanness. Or they're just there to find a mate or to see the spectacle or to kill a couple of hours on a slow weekend.

But Jesus notices us. We can't avoid him or evade him. He sees that monkey on your back, that baggage in your hand, that cloud over your head. And he knows why you're really there.

... came trembling and fell at his feet.

This woman had spent years in forced isolation, totally shunned by society – particularly by the rigid religious types. The society and the sanctimonious had no sympathy for her, only revulsion and rejection and condemnation. But now at last she had found someone who had compassion for her, and who had already healed her.

So she did the only two things she could do: She surrendered and she worshipped.

Those are a couple of tough things for us -- any of us, but especially us Americans (and particularly us of the male persuasion) -- to do. We're so self-sufficient and self-actualized and self-reliant and self-centered and self-worshiping that we find it very difficult or indeed impossible to acknowledge a force greater than our will, much less submit to it.

But let's face it: Surrender and worship are the only appropriate responses to an encounter with Jesus. Compared to him we are nothing, and to pretend otherwise is not only blasphemous, it's downright ridiculous. Your refusal to worship at the feet of Jesus is like a little poodle yapping at a Great Dane; to anyone with any perspective it's just silly.

So quit yapping and worship the God who stands before you.

In the presence of all the people,

Not in reverent silence, not in her private prayer closet, not anonymously over the phone. In the presence of ALL the people. Yes, those people. The people who had condemned her and rejected her and recoiled from her. The people who didn't have what she had. The people whose faith and commitment were not sufficient to draw Jesus' attention. In the presence of those people,

she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed.

The sister testified. She told the story of how she got over. She said she wasn't gonna talk about it but she couldn't keep it to herself. It was like fire shut up in her bones.

When you find a good dentist or a good pediatrician or a good barber, don't you tell everyone you know about it? When you receive a healing from the Good Shepherd, should you do any less? Shouldn't you tell everybody about it, so they can get in on the action too? You're not ashamed to refer someone to your car salesman; why are you ashamed to refer them to your Healer and Redeemer?

She told why she had touched him. She acknowledged her uncleanness before all the people, and she was not ashamed. She was not ashamed, because there was a second clause in that sentence: "how she had been instantly healed." Jesus had taken away her reproach, and now there was no condemnation. She could speak freely of it because now, thanks to the healing power of Jesus, she was free of it.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty! I'm free at last!

Then he said to her, "Daughter, ..."

Daughter. ... My child. ... My flesh and blood. ... My baby. ... Possessor of my heritage and bearer of my future. Now you are all this. You used to be all that -- dirty, unwanted, untouchable, unclean -- but now you are all this. What a remarkable, miraculous, sudden reversal. But how?

"Your faith has healed you."

Notice that Jesus doesn't take credit for what had just happened. It happened because of her action, driven by her faith. She reached out to him because she believed. He didn't do anything but show up. He didn't wave his hand or utter a prayer or lay his hands on her. Heck, he wasn't even facing her when she reached out and grabbed the healing that was there waiting for her.

It was available to her as long as she was willing to push through that hostile, disapproving, sanctimonious, celebrity-mad, profane, faith-challenged crowd, which represents the world and the church. She said, "I don't care what they all think about me or believe about him, I'm going to reach out and claim my healing."

Are you ready to claim your healing today? Are you determined enough to fight your way through the obstructing crowd and get close enough to Jesus to receive his readily available healing? Are you prepared to surrender your ego and your pride and your failed efforts to fix things yourself? Are you ready to worship at the feet of the Great Physician and admit and declare that he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords? If you will do these simple things, then and only then will you be able to do as this woman did:

Go in peace.