Wading through life

If you get a chance, check out the Johnny Cash story movie Walk the Line. Good stuff.

And I really like Chuck Colson’s article on it, which points out that even though the movie has a happy ending, Cash’s life ended even happier. You only catch a glimpse of it in the movie.

Colson’s Breakpoint article

I was walking back from the Business Office earlier today in the frigid air that has swallowed our region. My teeth chattered a bit in the cold. Then I enaged a train of thought, as we all know I love to do. Teeth chatter is something I’d thought about before, but hadn’t looked at in the light I did today.

So…as I said, my teeth chattered a bit in the cold. Pretty typical stuff. But it wasn’t as if I couldn’t stop them from chattering, because I could. In my mind, I decided to stop my jaw from chattering…and it did. I then gave myself back over to the chatter, and it picked up right where it left off. Chat-chat-chat-chat-chat…chat-chat…chat-chat-chat…ch-ch-chat.

That chatter was clearly real. It’s not like I was doing it out of habit or anything. I don’t know the biology behind chattering teeth…but we all know it can happen in cold air. All the more evidence: try to reproduce the chattering at typical room temperture; it doesn’t work. I just tried and didn’t suceed. So, it is 1) induced by something, 2) can’t be reproduced at will and 3) can be controlled by us.

As I was turning my chattering off and on while walking back to the office, I applied the line of thinking to movements of God. Is spiritual ‘chattering’ something we tend to control to the point that it doesn’t exist in our lives? Could we experience God supernaturally a bit more were we to back off the control throttle?

After leaving Westwinds, I started attending church where it’s not uncommon for people to be prayed for and fall to the floor under the power of God. Happened tonight as a matter of fact. But it’s only happened to me…1 1/2 times…once when I was being prayed for and once when another was.

I wonder how much of my experience of God is possibly being shut down by my mind, just like I could shut the chatter down. As I said: the chatter was clearly real; I wasn’t making myself do it. There was something going on with my body in response to the elements. But I could turn it off if I wanted to.

Do you think it’s possible we do that to God sometimes? Do we turn him off with our minds, blocking movements he wants to do in and through us…"chattering" he wants to well up from within us or perhaps rain down upon us? Maybe we don’t do it as deliberately as I did today walking back from the Business Office, where I set out to stop it and then yield to it, stop it and yield to it again and again.

I think that ‘yield’ is a key word. I think it is quite possible that the Spirit of God is flowing in and around us all the time, and the minute a person yields to it: BOOM! "Chattering" commenses. Maybe they speak in tongues (gasp!) or maybe they fall to the ground or maybe they sing and shout for joy or maybe they dance and do a flip. Maybe they become dead silent. Who knows?

But for the most part, we walk around with our minds set to not chatter. Or maybe even more likely…we don’t even expose ourselves to elements that bring about chattering.

The funny thing is that in general we accept our reaction to physical elements, but not spiritual ones. We say it’s ok for a person’s teeth to chatter and body shiver in the cold. Gotta keep warm, right? But if a person were to shake in response to the Holy Spirit–a FAR more powerful force that your 20 degree winter air and stiff 30 MPH wind–we’d think they were weird or emotional or possibly possessed by a demon.

What about staying spiritually warm?

I’m not about to suggest that people’s spirituality can be measured by how many times they’ve hit the ground by having hands layed on them…or how expressive they are in their worship. That’s not my point. God interacts with people in all sorts of ways. But my point actually isn’t that far away. I say a person’s connection to God CAN be measured in how much that person is yielding to Him.

I wouldn’t dare speculate how much another person is yielding to God; that is judging. If a person is prayed for and doesn’t fall, that doesn’t mean that person isn’t fully yielding to God. Maybe He just didn’t have plans to overwhelm the person.

But the yielding question is very much an inner one. It’s something we need to be asking ourselves. Because the cool, chatter-inducing air of the Holy Spirit is around us all the time. And if we aren’t affected by it, maybe we’ve just deciding not to be, much like I did today on the way back from the Business Office.

This is awesome stuff. Michael Redd, of the Milwaukee Bucks, who recently signed a maxed out, $91 million, six-year deal, fulfilled an old promise and bought his dad a church. And it wasn’t just lip-service with financial backing…doing what he said he would do and blindly writing a check. It’s a kingdom-building thing.

"The Lord, he gave me life. What I did was to give it right back to Him. That’s the least I could do, is buy a church. The very least I could do."

Very cool article. You should read it. I like the slant the author takes by sarcastically blaming Redd for raising the bar too much. Now everybody else looks like schmucks.

No, you had to make us all look bad, including the rest of your multimillionaire peers in the NBA. At least they have the decency of being predictable. They buy their pops one of the five crown jewels of big-ticket items: car, boat, vacation, fractional jet ownership, house. Didn’t you get the e-mail?

You bought your dad a house, all right, but it was a house of worship — the newly named Philadelphia Deliverance Church of Christ in your hometown of Columbus, Ohio.

Read it all here: Church is Redd’s gift to his grateful father.

To slightly transition topics…

This reminds me a bit of the article snippet I read over the weekend at Eric and Amy’s. It was a feature on Bill and Melinda Gates in Time magazine’s special look at global hunger. I guess they’ve given over $6 billion toward research and development of drugs to fight the diseases and conditions that ravage third-world countries–diseases like malaria.

These are often overlook by the developed world because we for the most part don’t struggle with them. When the Gates’ got into philanthropy, they researched where they wanted to pour their money. And they found considerable lack of government and private funding for such initiatives. So, they started leading the charge.

$6 billion is a lot. Spring Arbor University’s annual operating budget is roughly $50, maybe a few million less. Our university could be run for over 120 years on that amount of money.

But that is just the start of it. The $6 billion is literally the tip of the iceberg. While Gates’ fortune rose from $46 billion to $48 billion in 2003 (keeping him the richest of America’s 313 billionaires), it could be a lot larger had he not given away over $28 billion to charity.

Are you kidding me? $28 billion? That’s 1/3 of his fortune! That’s a WAY higher percentage than our nation’s other top philanthropists. The editorial In Defense of Bill Gates talks about that.

One article even claims that the $6 billion given toward third world heath is "more than any other charity and almost every contributing nation combined." That’s just sad.

So…any plans to give away 1/3 of your small fortune?

Interview with ABC news here: Why Bill Gates Is Giving Away His Fortune
Time article I mentioned is available to premium subscribers here: Riches to the Poor

A man in a wheel chair just held the library door open for me and another person. That’s high end.

When I struggle to tell people what I do for my job, it’s mostly because I could answer with what I’m supposed to do, or I could go through the hours of each day that are consumed with what I really do. This isn’t always a bad thing…it’s just a reality–both a blessing and a curse. At least it keeps things interesting.

One of my responsibilities–not assigned, just assumed–is to follow up on the "General Inquiry" e-mails we receive through our Web site. In our Contact Us section, we have forms for people with questions regarding undergraduate studies, graduate studies, degree completion, transferring, getting certified to teach and general questions that don’t fall into those categories. I handle the general questions; the rest are routed to other people. I mostly just forward the ones I get to the appropriate personnel.

Yesterday morning as I was sifting through those e-mails, I came across a really unique one. A person had forwarded an anonymous suicide note he or she discovered on the Internet and had traced to the arbor.edu network. It read:

One of your students has posted a [note] expressing his/her intention to commit
suicide this thanksgiving holiday in a Usenet newsgroup. Details below. I hope
you can locate and help this individual.

Yikes. Wasn’t sure if it was a hoax or not, but you obviously have to assume the worst in those situations. The "details below" seemed legit enough.

After alerting the appropriate big-wigs, I did everything in my knowledge to track down the supposed student. Thankfully, the student was a fairly active Internet user and poster on discussion boards and blogs. Using the e-mail address associated with the student’s identity on the Usenet group, I discovered the student looking for tips on giving a valedictorian speech at graduation–and even read the rough draft of the speech, in which I discovered the high school the student attended.

Student development staff have talked with the student, who is meeting with a professional today. Parents are being notified. Suicide plans called for it to take place over Thanksgiving break. Pray it isn’t so.