Egregious Reader

I am always asking that question (consciously or unconscionably). What is my center as a pastor? Am I being true to that center or am I lost in the many duties that amount on my desk or issue from meetings or fill my inbox. I must say that I am not totally sure ... So, I continue to read books about it and look in the pages of scripture. The two things I read today are: 1 Peter 5 saying that elder/pastors are to offer willing (voluntary, not for gain) oversight ... but not through "domineering over those in your charge but being examples to the flock." So a pastor is called to be an example of life with Christ. Does that mean showing people my life? How do I do that, really do that in the life of a church our size? That makes me think of a line from Augustine: "What I am for you terrifies me; what I am with you consoles me. For you I am a bishop, but with you I am a Christian. The former is a title of duty, the latter, one of grace. The former is danger, the latte...

In October of 1943, when Josef Pieper was temporarily on leave from military service and at home with his family in Münster, he and his wife decided to take their three young children to the zoo on a lovely, almost summery, afternoon. He took along his camera for the occasion and had taken pictures of the children just a few hundred yards from the house when they heard the air raid sirens begin to sound. As they got down into a trench, he suddenly recalled that he had not closed the garden door of the house. Running the short distance back to do that, he saw the American planes over the very center of Münster, and in a matter of moments the heart of the city was ablaze. Camera still in hand, he ran to the attic and took pictures of the city in flames. And so it happened, he recalled, that on a single roll of film the contradictions of our century-and of human life more generally-are captured. Pictures of happy young children with their parents, heading off for an afternoon's enj...

Recently, I asked my parents how old I was when we moved to Ohio. I was born in Columbia, TN and thought I was about 5 when we moved to Ohio. They said I was only three and so it kind of clicked to me that most of my memorable growing up happened (not in the South, as I always think) but in the midwest. My best friend really until almost college was Mark Haubert. He lived on a corn field and I remember going to his house all the time. So, I decided to go back for a visit. We moved away when I finished 3rd grade and I don't think we went back much after we moved to GA (which happened for 5th grade ... in between was a year in Connecticut). I really want to see those Ohio cornfields again for some reason and the Haubert place (Roger and Alice still live there). So Tara said she was up for it and so we are heading up there for the day on Saturday or Sunday. I think reading the summer fiction (Jayber Crow and Home) has really got me thinking about my past. SO, I am excited ...

A HAWK We will never conquer God's creation ... don't get me wrong, I know that we have doom upon our shoulder (whispering to be done with everything) But here I sit in Atlanta in the upper floor of a Starbucks looking upon asphalt and builder trees with a clever brick Verizonwireless neat and prefab across the street and direclty behind that in my view is the new Piedmont in beautiful glass and concrete and then the open sky above them both and there floats a HAWK ABOVE US ALL eagle eyeing what prey scurries gutters and dumsters ... or perhaps yipping on a leash Jesus, I love your birds. All those fifth day creations those manifold flyers who beat us by 10,000 years and continue to astound silver laptop poets with broken coffee pot brains wearing headphones and writing about relationships and thinking about the natives of old who knew the somber meaning of A HAWK

Listen. I am not sure how many readers I have in this category, but if you are single guy and need a good scare about your bad habits ... ok your sins and the beast they make of you. If you need to hear an incredible song that threatens the unreality that is Halo 2 (behind the times I am sure ... even though the album came out late 2008). If you want to listen to popular culture rip a piece out of popular culture ... actually you can't really refer to the Drones as pop culture just because they play in a rock band, they are too "depressing" in very non-typical ways for that. So I ruined my plot line a little, but go on i-tunes and buy the song The Minotaur by the Drones. Listen to it two or three times. Then look up the lyrics. Then find out what the Latin at the end means and refers to. And then repent and pray for all your brothers. Actually, if you are a man you probably need to lay your $0.99 on the barrel head and check your heart before you turn into a bull-headed b...

Our society, by pushing away all that is demanding ... all that requires responsibility, by embracing all that is easy and "time-saving" or pleasurable immediately ... we have lost ourselves. We are more lost than during war or depression ... we are lost and without place. And Jayber saw it all in his days. He watched the fabric begin to tear and once it was torn it could only continue to tear as it has. There is much more that could be said about this excellent book ... I need to read it again to get it out. More time for it late in life when I am an old Jayber Crow.

I love reading about how typical feelings and thoughts are actually very, very old. Cynic, where we get all our ideas about being cool and cynical of everything, began with a man named Diogenes ... Plato called him "Socrates gone mad." From my Dictionary of Philosophy: "He took 'deface the coinage!' as a motto ... and refused to live by them. He ate scraps and wrote approvingly of cannibalism and [worse things]. One story reports that he carried a lighted lamb around in broad daylight looking for an honest human ... intending to suggest that the people he did see were so corrupted that they were no longer really people. Because of all this he was known as a Cynic, from the Greek word kuon (dog), because he was shameless as a dog." He and his band had a reputation for barking at the rich and respectable. Of course by the next generation his successor was softer and more accepted by society. This always seems to happen. So what does that mean for us tod...