People of the Second Mile

I have always been intrigued by sleep.  Why did God make us to need our slumber?  It seems like such a waste of time!  Think of all the extra things we could do if one-third of our life was not spent resting up for the remaining two-thirds of our existence.

And when we sleep we dream.  Granted, we don’t remember too many of our dreams. Why?  We dream mainly when we are in deep sleep, and our dreams are forgotten before we awake.

However, every now and then we wake up quite suddenly and a dream sticks with us.  If it is a really good “movie of the mind” we may want to go back to sleep long enough to see how it ends.  But if it is a bad dream, a nightmare, we not only don’t want to know the ending, but we are troubled by it throughout the day.

Consider:  The average American dreams for over 25 years of his or her life.  If we have 5 dreams per night (which is the norm), that comes out to 136,000 dreams in the course of a lifetime. 

Most often “dreaming” is used as a metaphor.  George Bernard Shaw said:  “There are two great tragedies in life – one is to not get what you have dreamed for –  and the second is to get it!”   Remember King Midas?  He got his wish and lost his beloved daughter.  His dream turned into a nightmare.

This is happening more and more these days to all of us…

A marriage, begun in hope, is in turmoil.

A child, once the apple of your eye, is a source of heartbreak.

A job, once so secure, hangs by a slender thread.

One’s health, once so robust, is failing.

One’s hopes, once so bright, are fading by the day.

Your economic position, once headed for a small but secure retirement, has tanked.

In the Bible, Book of Genesis, there’s a wonderful story about a real dreamer by the name of Joseph.  Until he was 17 his dreams were on the fast track, heading toward certain attainment.  And then in a matter of 24 hours everything  fell apart.  His dream became a terrible nightmare.

He was thrown in a pit. Then he went to prison. Finally, he was made Prince of Egypt. But even then the dream of his youth, that he would save his family from destruction, was not realized.  Undoubtedly he reasoned that “this is as good as it gets”.  It had taken him from 17 to 39 to get where he was.  Why push it?

But Joseph refused to doubt in the darkness of his nightmare what God had promised him in the delight of his dream.  His situation provides us with five responses to what we can do when our own dream becomes a nightmare, too.

1.        Make sure the dream that has gone “south” was actually from God!  We all make mistakes. We can talk ourselves into choices that originate more from the well of our desires than from God’s will. But if we know that what God has impressed upon is real then…

2.        Make a commitment to be faithful and true while the dream unfolds.  The nightmare segment will not last forever.  What God has promised He will perform.  Don’t yield to the temptation to rewrite the dream.  (A night with Potiphar’s wife will only make the nightmare worse!)  Don’t become bitter.  (Name you child born during the nightmare stage Manasseh, “God has made me to forget”).  Look with faith to the future.

3.        Give glory to God while the dream that has become a nightmare reverts back to something positive.  Don’t settle for 90% of the original dream.  Wait until your Benjamin shows up.  Remember that you saw 11 brother bowing in you dream, not 10.  Don’t sell God’s will short.  Hold out for everything that He has promised to you.

4.        Become a dream manager, even while in the midst of your own nightmare.  Joseph helped both the King’s baker and Pharaoh while he was still a slave. The danger of a dream morphing into a nightmare is that we become cynical.  Our attitude can hurt and hinder others when we lose our perspective.  If you haven’t been healed, don’t stop praying for those who are infirm!  If you a lacking, don’t stop interceding for those who are in want.  Be an encourager in the midst of your nightmare.

5.        Leave a heritage of new dreams (not nightmares) for the next generation.  When Joseph died he told his heirs to not give him a state funeral in Egypt.  He asked for his bones to be kept in a box, in readiness for the Exodus!  After a four hundred year nightmare, his last dream was became reality on the night when Israel was granted freedom.  Although the Dreamer was long dead, the dream still lived on – and still does.  Read Exodus 13:19.

“Our Father and Our God, help us to dream big dreams.  And when our dreams become nightmares, as they are wont to do, may we not doubt in the darkness what You revealed to us in at noontide.  May our faith be focused, not on ourselves (for we are weak), but upon You.  May the One who gives dreams, even in times like these, be rendered all of the glory.  Amen.”

This week has been momentous.  The historical connection between Monday and Tuesday has been made over and over by the media. On Monday and Tuesday we celebrated back-to-back the events of great importance: Martin Luther King’s birthday and Barrack Obama’s inauguration as our 44^th president. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up to be the most recognizable voice in the civil rights movement.  He used his oratorical gift to preach that African-Americans had been cheated or their rights, most famously in his unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech. 

Promises had been made, he said, that were still unfulfilled.  The promissory note to people of color had been returned marked “insufficient funds”.  Although he couldn’t give a history lesson in his short sixteen minute oration, anyone familiar with the US constitution knew he was referring to the words of the 14^th Amendment.

So, when President Obama was inaugurated the day after the birthday of the man who grew up to deliver that momentous speech, the coincidence was lost on no one.  No matter who we had voted for in November, there was a national sense that the time had come to make things right.  It was time for Ammendment 14 to be more than just words.

But there is another date, a much darker date, which is not being spoken of very much this week.  It is January 22 – today – a day that should “live in infamy”. But it is being conveniently forgotten. 

Strangely enough, the 14^th Amendment that was drafted to give slaves their rights and freedoms after the Civil War was also utilized to under gird the indefensible argument supporting Roe v Wade on January 22, 1973!   (If you go back and study the arguments that were handed down on that fateful Monday morning by the Supreme Court, you’ll see that the majorities’ opinion was based on Amendment 14.)

Since then, over 50 million children have been sacrificed on the altar of expediency.  We assuage our horror with the small comfort of knowing that all of these unborn children are with God. 

Who knows how many would have survived the rigors of being unwanted, and followed the right path had they lived?  I can never support Roe v Wade, but to be brutally honest, perhaps God through this very bad law has saved some very good little people.  They are now all with Him, and ever shall be.

But that truth should not become a cheap rationalization, lulling us into a somnolent state of apathy.  Until everyone has rights, none of the rights of the rest of us are safe.  We must speak for those who have no voice, or our national dream may well turn into a nightmare. 

So, let us remember the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. that have been fulfilled in part, but yet not in whole, this week.  

Let us remember what he said when he ended his masterful sermon and, when he refers to “God’s children” in his last line, let us take the words to literally mean children of all ages, both prenatal and natal. 

Let us agree that until January 22 becomes linked to January 19 and 20, the children are not safe and, hence, we are not safe.

“Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants, and Catholics —will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Amen, Martin. Amen.

Atop my desk sits a faded black-and-white photo of a dwarf and a giant.  I knew them both, back when I lived as a child in the Dominican Republic.  And though they long since “slipped the surly bonds of earth”, the dynamic duo still speaks to me each day by way of that yellowing, fifty year old snapshot.

Lape is the little one.  He wouldn’t have won an argument with a yardstick.  He had a full-sized head and a tiny, shrunken body.  Even so, his lungs were like giant bellows, capable of projecting his piercing voice over great distances.  And his large head was home to a great intellect.  The picture on my desk shows him grinning mischievously, which is how I best remember him.

Cecilio is the big one, really big.  He stands, frozen in time, behind Lape’s buggy (actually a homemade wheel chair designed by Lape).  He appears befuddled, which was his trademark look.  His super-sized feet are hidden by the buggy’s wheels.  His hammy hands seem anxious to push the cart, right now; to get moving.

Lape and Cecilio were inseparable, though they were at once both opposites and akin in ever so many ways.  Each one had a radical conversion experience on the same night, in the same church.  And both men were called into the ministry, almost simultaneously, shortly thereafter.

But their call was questioned, if not by them, by many church members. The more logically minded wondered, not without reason, how Lape was going to get around and how Cecilio, with his obvious mental limitations, was ever going to preach a sermon worth hearing.

Then God did the remarkable:  He made a team out of them by bringing together the seeming misfits!  That’s right; Lape and Cecilio joined forces, and thereby was birthed a most unusual (and effective) evangelistic team.

Lape designed a buggy for himself and his considerable stuff, then Cecilio built it.  Lape preached the sermons outdoors with his powerful voice, and then Cecilio pushed the cart to the next town so the exercise could be repeated. Lape was the brains and Cecilio was the muscle.  Their work never flagged because neither cared who got the credit.

I was just a boy when this mighty dwarf-and-giant team was in its heyday.  My parents were missionaries.  I remember little Lape and giant Cecilio coming to our home quite often, always unannounced, except for the sound of the cart’s wheels scrunching on the gravel of our long driveway.  They’d come in and we’d all sit under the mango tree in our courtyard, drink rich Dominican coffee, and they’d tell stories of what God had done in a recent crusade.

The missionaries were somewhat awed by the pair, and not without reason.  It wasn’t unusual for a missionary to take a four-wheel drive vehicle into the hinterlands, expecting to blaze a fresh Gospel trail, only to find that Lape and Cecilio had been there a few months earlier.  The strange and wonderful “twins” were the stuff of ministerial legend.

But, alas, there came the Great Falling Out.  Something happened of an unhappy nature between the fabled pair.  No one ever got the whole story, but the word on the street was that Lape had to use the bathroom at midnight, and Cecilio wasn’t of the mind to help him at the moment.  Apparently, sleep was more important than service.

So words were exchanged; heated words, unkind words.  Deficiencies were pointed out.  (“You have no brains.”  “Yeah, well you have no brawn.”)  Yes, it was childish, but dawn found the team tragically dissolved.

“Pero no habia problema”, as one might say in that culture.  Cecilio was convinced that he could be a good street preacher.  But a few days out in the open air, in a few town squares, proved otherwise.  He soon found that no one would listen to him, though more than a few laughed at his mangled efforts.

Lape thought he could easily find another willing fellow to push him across the island or into the hills.  But he soon discovered that there was a dearth of buggy-pushers, especially big ones.  He was confined to a dark little house where he sat, alone, wishing that his eloquence hadn’t been misused to insult his now-offended partner in ministry.

Fortunately, mutual friends intervened.  The dwarf and the giant were soon reconciled by the very Word they preached.  The team was back together. 

 They were disposed to come to our house more often after that brief lapse. We would spend an hour or two drinking rich black coffee and hearing stories about their ministerial adventures, usually under the shade of our drooping mango tree.  On those occasions, Lape’s contagious laughter and Cecilio’s shy giggle affirmed that interpersonal healing among God’s people is a miracle of the first order.

I look at their photo often.  A picture is worth many words.  It isn’t good to be alone, to serve alone, I seem to hear them say.  Esteban, remember that we were made for community. You see, mi hijo, Jesus sent His disciples out two-by-two.  He still does.  Don’t ever see your brother as a bother.  We did and, even though it was for an instant, we suffered great pain and temporal loneliness.

Amen, I mumble, amen. You are ever so right, hermanos.  What one can’t do the other can.  We’re all called to be twins, and at times, even triplets.  Some preach and some push.  If we do our part well, God gets the glory. 

That’s what my aging photo of Lape and Cecilio conveys to me, whenever my eye catches it, as I interact with a fellow minister across the table, especially one I am irritated with.  It has saved me countless hours preaching to myself in a lonely room, or pushing an empty buggy down a lonely road.

The Apostle Paul was a devout Jewish man who had been personally tapped by God to minister to the Gentiles.  Ironically, he was a most unlikely candidate for this assignment. 

Early in life, Paul had despised anyone who didn’t share his Pharisaical devotion to the Hebrew world view.  His theology was simple:  Jews were made for heaven, while hell was the destiny of everyone else — meaning Gentiles.

In fact, his religious snobbishness was such that he not only snubbed — but hated non-Jews — and sometimes allowed his vitriolic attacks to spill out upon suspect Jewish sects, such as the followers of the Nazarene.  Paul was an inquisitor; a bigot; a trafficker in racism; a dogmatic zealot.  He was not a nice guy.

Strangely enough, his fanaticism was fueled by an obsessive desire to please God.  He was walking proof that one can be entirely sincere and completely wrong at the same time.  Paul was an enigma — a well meaning religious man who was cruel to the point of sadism in his “persuasive” techniques.

Indeed, it was while on a rampage to arrest disciples of a dead man named Jesus that he was unexpectedly transformed.  At high noon Paul was a proud sheriff on a steed, leading his posse to round up varmints. Seconds later he was sucking dirt on a road into Damascus, having been dismounted by a hand unseen, gloved in a flash of light.  In a moment his life turned around.

While cloistered, recovering from a temporary bout of blindness brought on by that midday encounter, he received divine orders.  He was to present the Good News about Jesus the Christ to Jews, always to Jews first. However, if they rejected the Gospel (as it was prophesied they would) he would then preach to Gentiles with equal fervor. This was his destiny.  He would build a bridge between the Chosen and the Barbarians. 

Paul had a late start as an apostle.  But he quickly caught up with the best and the brightest of them.  He concluded that Grace was God’s special gift to him, but what he did with his allotment of Grace was his unique gift to others, and hence back to God. 

Fueled by this reasoning, he went on many a perilous journey, preaching to Jews and Gentiles with equal fervor.  In writing to the Roman church, a congregation he was preparing to visit, he addressed both of these cultures. 

Paul explained in his letter to the Roman church that when he spoke to Gentiles he always had his wayward countrymen in his thoughts.  Whenever he gave a message he valued the Gentiles who responded affirmatively, but he admitted that there was extra, undeniable exhilaration when a fellow-Jew acknowledged Christ as Messiah.

He had been given an office by God — apostleship.  He had been granted a title — ambassador to the Gentiles. He had been bestowed with spiritual authority by the Holy Spirit. 

However, in the end he had to work at his craft and his calling.  What spiritual victories were won by Paul did not happen by mere happenstance.  He called it “the work of God” for a reason.  It involved Paul’s work — and God’s will.

Paul wrote to the Roman church “I magnify my office”.  The term he used was actually “glorify”.  In context it means to enhance or expand; to beautify; to improve what exists.

For example, an unadorned Christmas tree is not very attractive.  But when an artsy person adds lights, tinsel, bulbs, and ribbons it becomes a thing of beauty. Even so in ministry:  God gives us the raw material and we “magnify” it for Him by our efforts — done for His honor rather than our own.

It has ever been so.  The first Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden before the Fall to “work and take care of it”.  Why this seemingly innocuous assignment? 

There were no weeds to pull. There was no lawn to water.  God had made a beautiful paradise without Adams’ aid.  What could this created man do to make God’s creation better?  Could he be expected to improve on “and God saw that it was good”?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he could!  God had left some small things undone so that Adam could “magnify”, not himself, but Him.  The ever-so-slightly unfinished work of creation was to be gradually completed by way of a partnership between God and Adam. Since Adam was formed in God’s image, he possessed a natural penchant for making things better and more beautiful.  This was in his DNA.  He took after his Father.

But after the Fall the human inclination to invent, improve, discover, and create became selfish in the extreme.  Creativity morphed into a stage upon which to magnify Adam, rather than glorify God.  The Office of Topiary to the Glory of Elohim became prostituted.  The process became something base and ignoble. 

Now all-too-mortal arborists trimmed trees and improved flower beds with nary a consideration for the Almighty.  They no longer sought God’s smile or His favor.  Furthermore, now there were weeds, a sign of the new sin-full order, which took the delight out of work as worship and turned it into drudgery for momentary self exhalation.

However, Paul regained the right perspective and focus.  It was all about God, not about him.  His purpose was to magnify his ministry, so that God could be honored. His life’s work was to the end that he could one day hear “well done, my good and faithful servant”.  He served his Savior, not his self.

Today we who are called to be “God’s gardeners” have been set apart to work in a Fallen Eden.  Our labor is made increasingly difficult by the thorns and thistles that aim to choke out the very Word we proclaim. 

Yet, we seek to magnify our ministry – not to our glory, but His.  We are all too aware that without God and His giftings we can do no-thing, but even with His divine enablements the job won’t get done unless we give it our full effort and panache.

Paul made much of his ministry for Jesus of Nazareth, whom he had encountered at high noon two decades before. 

He transformed the dirt from the Damascus Road into divine gold dust for God.

He took the shabby threads of his BC existence and wove a testimonial tapestry in honor of Christ’s goodness. 

Paul’s scars bore witness to the fact that he had not fled adversity, but had been true to his primal call.

Any and all of us who are in ministry, called by Almighty God, could do worse than have an epitaph that reads:  “He magnified his ministry” or “She made much of her call”. 

May we strive to festoon and adorn the Gospel of Christ until the falleness of this Adamic planet is transformed into an Edenic paradise once more.