Get Lighter

Changes are more often by necessity than by choice. Circumstance, context, or crisis dictates our doing something different. Adjustments and alternate ways of being are adopted according to the needs of the moment, rather than as an extension of a grand design.

Our global pandemic–this moment of humanity’s shared plight–has created just such a circumstance where changes are not so much chosen as they are simply required.

The range of options has narrowed. A recent walk around the neighborhood gave me time to reflect on this reality, on how the past few months have reduced my commitments and have opened up space. I’ve spent less time in the office and much less time in the car. I’ve spent less time involved with youth sports (soccer season was cancelled, as was coach pitch) and more time in the presence of my family. I’ve spent little time at the church building but more time in study and in reflection. There has been less money spent at restaurants and more intention directed toward what I eat (or don’t) while at home. I’ve spent less time in a gym and more time biking, hiking, walking, and exercising with equipment I own.

The pandemic has given me the opportunity to get lighter. Some responsibilities were naturally released or discontinued; others were paused. The lack of mobility has led to deepened presence, and greater awareness, directed toward one place: my life. Energy reserves that were previously consumed by other commitments and interactions have been released for other endeavors. Margin, which I did not actively choose, was opened. I’ve been free to evaluate systems, assess gifts, reflect, and to look forward. Deaccumulation, which I did actively chose, has become a discipline of freedom. Closets and drawers now have more space, piles have disappeared.

A life, like a good story, has arcs and spirals, peaks and valleys, ascents and descents, triumphs and defeats, in-breakings of light and unforeseen moments of enveloping darknesses. The journey metaphor, though overdone, remains useful. The passage of time and the traversing of distance often result in us picking up a thing or two. Some mementos are tangible and physical, others are ephemeral or emotional. All carry weight.

Moments like these allow us to reflect and decide that which we will continue to carry and that which we will choose to lay down. Some of us find that our lives are evenly weighted; we bear exactly those things that are ours to bear. Others find that responsibilities are now before them they must take up, that now is the moment of maturity and growth and expansion. Lastly, and finally, there are those of us who will discover that they are weary, that the load must be lightened, that strength must be gathered, and preparations must be made for the work and the walk that remains ahead.

Getting lighter does not mean seeking after the life that is easiest, but rather seeking the life that is best. Jesus, after all, described his way as the taking up of the easy yoke and his burden as being light, not because it was not a burden, but because in the bearing of it consistently and over time with him, one discovers what it means to be fully human while living in full communion with God.

Cover Fire for LeBron

Ten years ago LeBron James sat down on ESPN for “The Decision.” Thirty minutes into the program he spoke the infamous utterance, “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.” James, who grew up in Akron, Ohio, was drafted by his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2003 NBA Draft. His free agency was a tremendous moment for all sports. Cleveland wanted him back, the Miami heat won the day, but big market teams like the Knicks, Bulls, Nets, and Clippers also courted Mr. James.

The program, which raised $2.5 million dollars for charity and sold $3.5 million dollars worth of advertisements (portions of which also benefited charities), generated tremendous backlash. Jim Gray hosted the conversation, held at a Boys and Girls Club in Greenwich, Connecticut. Children surrounded the platform to hear James’ announcement. The optics were terrible. Mr. James’s choice to join two-time NBA champion Dwyane Wade in Miami alongside big man Chris Bosh, who had been courted for the construction of a super-team, was viewed by fans as an easy way to title contention, a betrayal of local community, and a sign that small market franchises could never retain top-talent, only serving the league as developmental stops for the NBA’s best players before free agency and their prime productive years. Small markets couldn’t win, and this was proof.

In 2012, James was named by Forbes as one of America’s most disliked athletes, largely because of “The Decision.” By 2015 he was both one of America’s most loved and hated athletes. When he went back to Cleveland and won a title in 2016, I think a lot of people forgave the guy and accepted him as one of the greats.

LeBron James is the best basketball player I have ever seen with the exception of Michael Jordan. Though I do think an argument can be made that James is the better player, ultimately I think that argument fails. The variables make it an argument that can never be settled. James’s story is still being written, and if basketball ever resumes, his resume may eventually cause him to eclipse Jordan. But if I was building a roster in any era, and could choose any player from any era in the prime of their career who would be the cornerstone of my franchise, I’d choose Jordan.

So why am I bringing up “The Decision?” Mainly because we are approaching the ten year anniversary of the televised event, and ESPN has announced “Backstory: The Decision,” an upcoming documentary retrospective that looks at the development of the idea and the difference it has made in the landscape of sports. In the article I just linked from Awful Announcing, Ian Casselberry writes, “The 2010 TV special featuring LeBron James announcing which NBA team he would sign with as a free agent was a huge ‘get’ for the network. Yet neither ESPN nor James came out of the moment looking good. The entire circumstance continues to be the subject of ridicule and derision nearly 10 years later.” Yep. That’s right.

So its funny to me that in the publicity leading up to the release of the documentary, ESPN trots out this headline: “ESPN Show Confirms ‘The Decision’ Was Fan’s Idea, Not LeBron James’.” A fan, Drew Wagner, submitted an email to then ESPN personality and writer Bill Simmons suggesting the idea. Simmons pitched it to Mr. James’ people, and eventually it came together.

USA Today also picked up the story, with Scott Gleeson writing an article headlined, “A Decade Later, ‘The Decision’ Hardly Represents LeBron James’ True Legacy,” as though anyone is actually arguing this. It’s as though the publicity packet for this upcoming documentary read, “Hey guys, we really want it out there that ‘The Decision’ wasn’t LeBron’s fault.”

Scott Gleeson at least gets it right when he state’s that James’ legacy is a complicated one. And part of that legacy is that a fan submitted a suggestion to a Bill Simmons’ mailbag, it got passed on to ESPN and James’ team, and the adults in the room said, “Yes, that will work. Let’s work out the finances.”

LeBron could have let “The Decision” fade into history. But he didn’t. So here we are again, re-litigating whether or not the program was a good idea. It was a great idea for a Bill Simmons’ mailbag, but it wasn’t for LeBron. It was a poor move then, it’d be a poor move today, and regardless of who initially thought of it, James made the decision to go through with it.

Sandra McCracken: I Will Sing

A new single from Sandra McCracken. Her music lifts my heart.

Online Theological Education

Not everyone is called to seminary or divinity school. In fact, I’ve long contended that the local church is the center of theological education. Everyone can get serious there. I think you can learn more about ministers from the churches they’ve been part of than you can from their educational pedigree.

Nonetheless, institutions are important, and it does make a difference if someone has been trained at a reputable school. Two or three years of intensive theological study helps, and it is true that local churches can be limited in terms of depth, scope, and concentration of study made available. You can learn a great deal in the local church, but it helps when other avenues for learning are available.

Throughout the years I’ve come to know many people who have been well trained in their local church and are excellent leaders. You may be one of those friends, someone whom I consider a saint, a co-laborer in the good work of God’s kingdom. You might not be, too. This website is free and open to the public! You might be someone who found this post with a Google search. Glad to connect! But there’s another possibility (please read the following while imagining me with a wink and a smile): we may only be acquaintances, or someone I’ve been praying for for a long time.

What I’ve learned through experience is that there are those I know who could benefit from further training. We could do a lot in the church, but we couldn’t do it all. With the help of a designated course of study, these leaders would be helped to grow in biblical and theological knowledge, gain some outside perspective, learn pastoral ministry skills, and be better equipped to serve in their local contexts. More education would complement and strengthen what has been and is being received in the local church, and thus, by helping the individual grow, the local church would become stronger.

One of the cool things I learned after joining the staff of Truett Seminary is that we provide a form of online theological education. Truett’s Online Certificate Program is for bi-vocational ministers, congregants who serve as lay-ministers, deacons, Sunday school teachers, youth ministers, children’s ministers, and other ministry volunteers. The online courses are complemented with a few opportunities each year to receive in-person instruction during short on-campus seminars. David Tate directs the program. He’s great. And they have great staff who help to teach and facilitate these courses.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “That’s me!”, what are you waiting for? Check it out!

Another online option I’m familiar with is the Tony Evans Training Center. I have done curriculum development work for Urban Alternative, and while the TETC isn’t a seminary institution, it does provide opportunities for learning, growth, and online community, with a strong emphasis on the study of Scripture.

Other institutions offer online instruction as well, but these are the ones I know. If you are interested in broadening your biblical and theological knowledge, make a choice and pick your resources, dedicate yourself to the task, and get to work. By God’s grace, the church is strengthened when her servants are in pursuit of a deep, passionate, thoughtful, and active faith. Take the next step.

Optimize

We have too many pens.

Molly and I know this. A few years ago we bought pencil boxes to keep them in. We have one for mechanical pencils, one for Sharpies, and our largest one is for ballpoint pens. Assuming they hold their ink, we could live our next couple of lifetimes without ever having to purchase another pens.

We pick up clutter. Mess. Junk. We keep stuff “just in case.” We accumulate.

That’s true of possessions. It is also true of commitments. We make friends, build relationships, and choose to sign up, be present, and to attend. Our lives get full.

There is one more area where this is true: we allow excess in our thoughts. We’re inundated with information. We’re flooded by news. We’re overwhelmed by messages. Notifications: red. Emails: unread.

Our cultural and economic pause has forced me to take notice of the excess. I’ve slowed down enough to see. I’ve been present enough to feel, and aware enough to notice. My pace has blurred my vision, dampened my emotions, and weakened my observational powers.

Where things have been full, where pace has been fast, now there is space, and movements have slowed.

Slowness and margin are two soul training exercises, as James Bryan Smith calls them. These are not well know as Christian spiritual disciplines, but that is what they are.

They are closely related to simplicity. To live simply involves several tensions, or paradoxes. Richard Foster notes that simplicity is both a grace and a discipline, it is easy and difficult, it encompasses the inner and outer life, and affirms the goodness of material things while admitting their limits. Simplicity is not simplistic. It can be a lot of work to adopt a life of simplicity. Boundaries need to be clear. Commitments need to be clear, too.

Arriving at simplicity requires commitment to de-accumulation of possessions, commitments, and a discerned approach to receiving information. We also can commit to plain speech, letting yes be yes, and no be no.

During a walk last week I thought about ways the pandemic has led me to optimize, to refine, to sharpen systems, to eliminate waste and hurry and excess. I didn’t decide to do these things. Circumstances created the opportunity. I’ve responded.

But we don’t need a pandemic to optimize. We need planned stoppages. We need Sabbaths. We need little breaks, time to think, assess, adjust, and plan. We need rests between the beats. Those are habits we can cultivate, rhythms we can adopt. Ancient wisdom points the way.

Theological Work and Wonder

A Killdeer (*Charadrius vociferus*) with Nest

In Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, Karl Barth lectures on the existential aspects of theological work, which is firstly distinguished by the disposition of wonder. Barth writes:

The astonishment of the individual carries with it the fact that no one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself. Last but not least, he must become for himself an enigma and a mystery. (Note bene: the same applies even to those who are taking a minor in theology or who will always remain amateur theologians.) After all, who am I to be a theologian? It does not matter whether I am the best child of the best parents, perhaps having known, like Timothy (2 Timothy 3:15), about the Holy Scriptures from the very time I began to think. It does not matter whether I have the cleverest mind or the most upright heart or the very best of intentions. Who am I to have put such trust in myself as to devote myself even remotely to the task of theology? Who am I to co-operate in this subject, at least potentially and perhaps quite actively, as a minor researcher, thinker, or teacher? Who am I to take up the quest for truth in the service and in the sense of the community, and to take pains to complete this quest? I have put such trust in myself as soon as I touch theology even with my little finger, not to speak of occupying myself with it more or less energetically or perhaps even professionally. And if I have done that, I have without fail become concerned with the new event and the miracle attested to by the Bible. This miracle involves far more than just the young man at Nain or the captain of Capernaum and their companions of whom the Gospels tell; far more than the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea, the wilderness, and the Jordan; far more than the sun that stood still upon Joshua’s command at Gibeon. I have become involved in the reality of God that is only signaled by all those things. This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who reveals himself in his Son through the Holy Spirit, who desired to be the God of man so that man might live as his man. I have become involved in the wonder of this God, together with all its consequences for the world and for each and every man. And whatever, however, and whoever I may be in other respects, I have finally and profoundly become a man made to wonder at himself by this wonder of God. It is another question whether I know what self-wonderment means for me, whether I am ready and able to subordinate my bit of research, thought, and speech to the logic of this wonder (and not in reverse order!). But there can be no question about one fact: I find myself confronted by the wondrous reality of the living God. This confrontation occurs in even the most timid and untalented attempt to take seriously the subject which I have become involved or to work theologically at all, whether in the field of exegesis, Church history, dogmatics, or ethics.
Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology, p. 61-62

What flows from wonder? Humility. Praise. Joy.

Notice Barth applies dispositions of astonishment and wonder to all who would try their hand and heart and head to the task of theology: “the same applies even to those who are taking a minor in theology or who will always remain amateur theologians.” Whether a theologian is a doctor of the church or a person in the pew, “I find myself confronted by the wondrous reality of the living God.” One and all, together we ask, “Who am I?”

In Barth’s wider corpus, it would seem that to ask “Who am I?” is only possible in response to a prior question, “Who is God?”, a question that cannot be asked apart from revelation. Theology is response. Contemplation of the question, “Who is God?” broadens and expands the possibilities for our answer to the question, “Who am I?” Barth’s wonderment, captured above, is only possible if the answer to “Who is God?” has resulted in the conclusion that the truth about God is something magnificent, expansive, and unimaginably overwhelming, an understanding which is so very small in comparison to its totality that the little that we do grasp is like that of beholding a dewdrop in light of the ocean, or that of a sunbeam in its relationship to the sun.

Barth writes elsewhere that “the God who is the object of evangelical theology is just as lowly as he is exalted. He is exalted precisely in his lowliness.” It is this lowly God who appoints us, human beings, to serve God humbly, and as we serve to exalt that same God rightly, to honor his name as that name which is above all names.

This wonder becomes lost when we mistakenly lose sight of God as God is, and mistakenly exalt human beings (especially theologians!) to a position higher than is fitting for our station as creatures, rather than Creator. The question, “Who am I?”, rightly understood, aligns us with the prophet Isaiah who when found in the presence of God exclaimed, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”

After this proclamation, the response of the heavenly host is one of lowliness, atonement, preparation and equipping, and, subequently, of calling:

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
Isaiah 6:6-7

The next statement from the throne is a summons: “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

Isaiah responds, “Here am I. Send me!”

This call and response continues to issue forth to each one of us. “Who am I?” “Who is God?” It is this very God who has called this very I to do this very work, with wonder.

This Plyo Box is a Work of Art

One of the projects I’ve tackled during COVID-19 was building a 3-in-1 plyometric box. Here is the blueprint I used.

I bought a sheet of plywood at The Home Depot. I brought my supplies home, and my next door neighbor, Lance Lowe, used his table saw to make the cuts.

Due to distancing measures, I dropped the board outside Lance’s garage, and he returned the pieces soon thereafter.

“Because of what Baylor has meant to you in the past, because of what she will mean to you in the future, oh, my students, have a care for her. Build upon the foundations here the great school of which I have dreamed, so that she may touch and mold the lives of future generations and help to fit them for life here and hereafter. To you seniors of the past, of the present, of the future I entrust the care of Baylor University. To you I hand the torch. My love be unto you and my blessing be upon you.”
– Samuel Palmer Brooks

Molly helped me assemble the box.

“We did it our way, baby!” – Barry Switzer

“I didn’t spend the night with the trophy. I spent it with my trophy wife.” – Andy Reid

After I put it together, Lance told me he’d be happy to brand the box with logo art from six of my favorite teams. I dropped the box on his driveway, and this is how it came back.