When Worlds Collide

One of my favorite preachers is Fred Craddock. I was privileged a few years ago to attend a preaching seminar where he was the featured speaker. He is a master story teller, which he says he learned from his father. He said, "Preaching is more than boiling water, it is making soup." He adds the ingredients of vivid characters and imaginative words to create a feast that satisfies the deepest hunger. One should create in the story a sense of anticipation that has the audience hanging on every word and longing for the next.

He calls his style of preaching "Overhearing the Gospel." His thesis is that we often encounter the Gospel message in the events of daily life. There is a connection between our stories and those that occur around us and the Gospel story. We can discover the word and the presence of God in the little slices of life all around us. He encourages all of us to be keen observers of the human condition.

It is at this intersection that God's word and our lives collide. There amidst the din and confusion in the collision's aftermath, is the junction where the stories of our lives and the story of the life giver converge. The epicenter of the this seismic collision is our daily lives. The magnitude of the eruption varies with the intensity of the spasms. Sometimes bursting forth soot, lava and ash, then at other times carrying precious diamonds from the earths core to the surface. These rare jewels are forged in the unfathomable heat of the earth's core. Tempered with water and ice as they are spouted forth from the belly of the beast. Some days are diamonds others are coal. A glory to behold are these rare gems. His story becomes our story and we reflect his glory along our "sacred journey."

When these two worlds collide we find ourselves navigating through a debris field filled with God's truth. In the little snippets of everyday life the divine drama of salvation is being played out. Sometimes these truths explode into our field of vision. They flash with the intensity of a Super Nova, blinding us with wonder. Yet, at other times they fizzles like a sparkler on the forth of July. The keys for us are observing and listening for and to the word of God as he reveals himself in and through our daily lives.

Frederick Buechner describes this as "Listening to your life." He reminds us that the Gospel is "bad news" before it is "good news." The bad news is that I have failed God. The good news is that God has not failed me. If God is speaking to us today, and we believe that He is, then He is speaking both in and with our lives, "our foot steps are sacred journey's." Buechner says,

" He speaks not just through the sounds we hear, of course, but through the harmonies and disharmonies and counterpoint of all that happens."

He continues,

"But I choose to believe that he speaks nonetheless, and the reason that his words are impossible to capture in human language is of course that they are ultimately always incarnate words. They are words fleshed out in the everydayness no less than in the cries of our own experience." As I read these words I realize that the question is not if God speaks or even ultimately how God speaks but whether we are listening for God to speak and observing his "Incarnate words" in our present "sacred Journey's."

I like the term "everydayness" because it reminds me that if we are listening we may hear God speaking in our rush,even in our hurried and speeding lives. The fact that we recognize that we are rushed and that it concerns us is evidence that we are listening. Could it be that our concern about our rushed lives is a response to hearing God speak in and through our lives? Is it possible that the deeper our concern the more sensitive we are to the presence and whispers of God in our lives?

Just somethings to think about along the way.

Bob

Things Remembered

The holidays were a time of reflection and a time for me to take a short hiatus from writing. Yesterday I heard a song by the group Alabama entitled "High Cotton." It is a song about growing up in rural Alabama. But the similarities between their experience and the days of my youth in Rural Oklahoma are simply amazing.

The song resurrected memories I thought were long dead and buried. It is amazing how something so simple can conjure images that have been dormant for decades, hidden securely away in the dark recesses of my mind. It is not a simple magician's trick that I so readily remember the humble circumstances of my youth. These are events that are vividly stamped upon my soul.

The first image was of an old four room shack with cracks in the walls wide enough to throw a cat through. A wood stove for heat. In the winter there was always a quilting frames hanging from the ceiling. Sleeping to the soothing sound of the gentle rain drops falling on our tin roof. Drawing water from the well for drinking, cooking and bathing. We didn't have indoor plumbing. The entire family would take their turn bathing in a number 3 wash tub on Saturday night with water heated on the stove. As I recall, we never knew we were poor until Mr. Johnson's "Great Society" informed us that we were living well below the poverty line. We always talked about helping the poor and we gave to those in need. But since we did not consider ourselves poor we never thought about needing help. I guess we were simply to poor to know that we were poor.

I remember milking the cows, feeding chickens, hogs and the cattle. We butchered hogs after the first freeze of the winter. There was always a garden to be planted in the spring. We gathered poke salad and other wild greens that grew close to the barn. There were, what seemed to me at the time, these massive Blackberry vines. We picked the bounty from the vines that left your hands and arms scratched from the thorns and hands stained from over ripe berries. We canned Blackberry jelly but best of all was when Momma would make a Blackberry cobbler for Sunday dinner.

Sunday dinner was a treat. I remember meals being a special time for our family. But Sunday dinner was something we looked forward to all week, beans cornbread or biscuits, fried chicken, deviled eggs, mashed potatoes and gravy followed by piping hot Blackberry cobbler. Sometimes we would have the preacher over for Sunday dinner. Company for Sunday dinner was always a welcomed change since we lived so far out in the country that visitors were rare. When you live more than 10 miles from the nearest paved road not many people just drop by.

On Sunday morning the whole family would load up in the old station wagon for the trip into town for church. We always dressed in our Sunday best. The boys in clean jeans and white or dress shirts, Momma and sister in their dresses. Shirts and dresses were often homemade. Momma would sew them from nice material that had once been either feed or flour sacks. Daddy would dress up in his blue Sunday dress overalls and white shirt.

I find myself amazed(even though i shouldn't) at how important Sunday's were to our humble existence. Driving 15 to 20 miles to church was a way of life me back then. Maybe that's why I think nothing of driving 20 miles to church even to this day.

I am fascinated by how much more complicated life has become as I have entered the last quarter of my life and as I prepare to shuffle off this "mortal coil." But I am also reminded of the things that are important to me in this life. These are attitudes and characteristics ingrained in me and which come from these early formative years. At the end of the day or near the end of my life here is what I find important:

Faith, Family and Fellowship.

What do you think?

Just somethings to think about along the way.

Bob