Psalm 100

Posted on May 14, 2016 by ehurst

This processional hymn has long been the source of a great many Christian songs of worship. For something so brief, the imagery carries a lasting message that resounds in faithful hearts across the ages.

Picture in your mind some periodic festival wherein the worshipers begin outside the city walls, marching and singing in holy procession. Someone calls out, “Let’s have a song of praise!” Let all the earth praise Him, as is merely His due as Creator. If your heart is truly committed to Him, it’s hard to imagine anyone could restrain the excitement at this celebration.

The psalmist asserts that there really is no other God. It’s not a theological assertion, but a call to forget the question in favor of devotion to the One God who calls this His people. Had He not made them, they would not be. No human holds such creative power in his hands.

Pass through the Eastern Gates of the City with thanksgiving. Throng the Temple courts with praise for His name. Make His name glorious. He is the definition of goodness. His mercy runs out beyond the threshold of human awareness. He is trustworthy from one generation to the next.

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People Who Want to Hear

Posted on May 14, 2016 by ehurst

My son drove me to the VA yesterday and accompanied me to the various appointments scheduled that day.

As you might expect, a hospital like the OKC VA Medical Center is loaded with atypical people. These are not your average folks, but highly educated and very aware that different people have different ways of looking at things. Most of them would qualify as some brand of socially liberal or progressive, but that comes with the territory, working in a federally funded medical system that caters to folks who served in a very powerfully socialist institution — the US Military. (Stop and think about how the military actually gets things done.)

So his VA atmosphere is loaded with people who are more likely to take an interest in my oddball religious stuff. There was one fellow wandering around whose job was obviously related to mental health, in the sense of getting people to talk — very smart man with a mind like a steel trap. He sat down across from us in the waiting room and engaged us in conversation. One thing led to another and I responded to one question with mention of a “fringe ministry” that attracted a lot of people who would never be caught dead in a church. His radar perked up visibly. I mentioned Christian Mysticism and he probed hard, not with antipathy, but with genuine interest. At that point, I suppose I was quite ready for a summary lecture.

But I only got as far as describing our tilt toward grasping at the ANE mindset as wholly different from the Western. He recognized that and I was about to outline it when I was called back to one of the exam rooms. He said to my son, “Man, I was really looking forward to hearing about that.” I’m going to trust that God gave him as much as he needed to hear for that moment, because I was back there a long time getting the stitches removed from my wound. He was gone when I returned to the waiting room.

The doctor who took the stitches had been a member of the Bahá’í Faith. If you aren’t already familiar with it, Bahá’í Faith is not the simplest thing you’ll ever encounter. I knew enough about it to engage her and she spoke of the disappointments. So I spoke to those things and how you didn’t need to belong to a religion to find peace, but were morally obliged to build your own religion. Our parish is wide open because it’s actually meta-religion, not so much religion itself. I’m supposed to see her again in a week or so, and I’ll follow up. Meanwhile, she showed me a picture she took at Stonehenge where a large crow was flying between two of the stones at sunset, and I commented on the symbolism.

While I knew what kind of social mix I would encounter there at the VA, I’m still just a bit surprised how hungry those people are to hear about something like our faith. It’s not that we can’t reach out to the folks lower down the social scale. I suspect the middle class would often be the toughest segment for us, but thoughtful folks at all levels have found it useful. Plenty of poor folks have agreed with me on some issues. Still, we would naturally be led to respond with a greater investment of ourselves into places where folks really want us.

And the folks who want what we have are out there.

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Progress: First Return Visit

Posted on May 13, 2016 by ehurst

Had appointments back at the VA.

Today the good folks in Orthopedics removed my stitches and approved of my wound care. No more bandages required — yay! Went down to Physical Therapy and the gal showed me a bunch of exercises. I discovered my knee would voluntarily bend 45° so I’m resetting the knee brace to 40° and walking a lot without so much as my cane. And ice-packs work now because there’s no bandage. So I’m rocking and rolling along.

I’m still not thrilled with the elevated heart rate, but someone who loves me has suggested some ideas that might help. I’m getting a free starter of curcumin and some other stuff. I’ll let you know.

Also, Sister Christine’s generous supply of comfrey root tincture seems to make a real difference in helping the joint heal faster and better. The medical folks said they are impressed with the speed of progress for someone my age.

Thank you all for praying with me.

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Work Day

Posted on May 12, 2016 by ehurst

Necessary labor today: I had to put the fat claim file together and stuff it in an envelope. There were two forms to fill out from the City. Then I added a five-page attachment that described the incident, included the pictures and various odds-and-ends of why they didn’t have to worry about direct medical costs or lost wages. I discussed the process of deciding the bike was a total loss because a conservative estimate of parts and labor exceeded the cost of replacement. As it is, the City is getting a really good deal on that, because they will pay about 25% less than I did. I somehow got a copy of what EMSA wanted, included the bike tech’s written estimate. That’s a lot of paper.

With a clear conscience, I’ve put it all in the envelope and it’s going out in our mail later. Veloyce will have to go and get some extra postage. Pray with us that I didn’t mess something up. Someone at the City offices already hinted there’s no reason to expect a denial of the claim.

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Heart-led Therapy

Posted on May 11, 2016 by ehurst

Sister Christine reminded me of something easily forgotten in the midst of all the churning in and out of the VA hospital: I still need to be outside. What drove me out in the first place to get hurt still drives my very real need during recovery.

So after thinking and praying about it, I asked Veloyce to drag out one of our camp chairs. We also have a couple of tall laundry baskets, and I loaded one with chair, a blanket for padding, Bible and hymnbook, and some water. Walking with my cane, I dragged it outside the door to the first patch of grass outside our living room window. Setting up the chair in a spot that had mixed sun and shade, I flipped over the basket and set the folded blanket on top. Then I hoisted my leg up onto this padded rest and proceeded to read a few chapters in Romans (I’ll be reworking my book on Paul’s Letters next).

After a while, I swapped that for an old Baptist Hymnal and sat there singing out loud some of my old favorite hymns. It wasn’t important at this point whether anyone else heard; God heard. The grass, bushes and birds heard. I stayed until the wind kicked up too hard to even sit there like that. We’ll have storms later today, but I got some fresh air and sun, and some serious worship.

It’s good for what ails you.

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Chair

Posted on May 10, 2016 by ehurst

ChairOn a brighter note, events finally coalesced that I got a new recliner. I’ve wanted one for several years, but I suppose it took some kind of excuse to get humans moving. At any rate, my friend came over with his truck and picked me up. While the cheap deals were gone, I still found something suitable. My buddy paid most of it and I covered the balance and sales tax.

They brought it out in a big box, two pieces inside. We just had to slide the back onto the rails at the back of the seat.

The chair ain’t the best, but it’s better than the old one. It’s actually my size. The nifty camouflage fabric annoyed my skin (probably something they spray on it before shipping) so I covered it with the blue plaid you see. However, the size and padding on this thing is obvious.

Thank you all so much for praying with me. The other good news is that I’m up on my cane now.

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Site Update

Posted on May 10, 2016 by ehurst

Our parish static site has been updated. I managed to finish the review and rewrite for the study in the General Letters. The whole thing is now one single HTML page and still loads pretty quickly. You can review that here (gone). Update: This document was lost in the transition between computers.

As an aside, I can tell you that with an elevated heart rate, I am generally tired a lot and find myself dozing off way too often. This makes it hard to generate strong content on either of the two parish blogs (edit: there’s only one blog now). Pray with me about this. I have been fitted with a cute little high-tech heart monitor. I’m torn between hoping that we can catch the next episode of tachycardia, versus hoping there aren’t any more. Tachycardia is a little painful and very disorienting, but the doctors don’t think it’s life threatening just yet.

Also, by all means please ask questions. It’s easy to generate a post from a good question.

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Complication to Progress (Updated)

Posted on May 9, 2016 by ehurst

Went to bed last night and fell asleep without painkiller. Sometime within two hours I awoke to tachycardia. This time it was persistent. After a half-hour of this, my wife drove me to the VA emergency room.

This was the first time they actually saw it for themselves. In times past, it had always been too brief and too inconsistent to show up on their instruments. It did begin to slow just a bit — tapering was an entirely new experience for me. In times past, it was some 10-15 minutes, and then suddenly stopped and went back to normal.

I was shuffled through EKG and CT scan for the heart and lungs. They found no blood clots, so could take no action. By this time my pulse remained in a somewhat elevated rate in 80-90 BPM. They sent me home and I have more appointments coming on this issue alone, but as I type this the heart rate remains elevated. I’m not a happy camper.

For now, my wife and I theorize that the cause is likely food-related. We are pulling back to a known safe diet and praying this thing gets flushed out or we can find some way to get my heart back into its previous normal state.

Pray with us.

Update: Review of the CT scan indicates I have a gall stone. Currently I have no symptoms, so I suppose I’ll need to keep from making things worse.

Update 2: Shortly after that last paragraph above, I was hit with another episode of tachycardia. According to our instructions, we returned to the ER and this time the Cardiology folks decided to fit me with a heart monitor. Those used to be big bulky affairs with a short operating time. I have this nifty little chip stuck to my chest up near the shoulder and it will record for 14 days. I don’t hope for another episode, but if if comes, we can capture it.

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Your Theology Is Your Problem

Posted on May 8, 2016 by ehurst

Let me say this with as much clarity as I can marshal: Theology is a human activity in response to divine calling. Theology is religion, a mere expression of faith. Theology is not wisely discerning objective truth about God, because there is no such thing as objective truth about God. Truth is God’s personal moral character, an element of His living Presence. Theology is just a tool, one that can be modified as needed and discarded when it wears out. Your theology is not eternal; it will remain here in this world when you go home to be with God in Heaven.

My theology is just a part of me. Your theology cannot be mine, nor vice versa. If we overlap, the common ground says more about us than it does about God. That we have a common ground says something about God and how He intends to work in us.

Human intellect cannot be made un-fallen. Intellect is redeemed only in surrendering to something eternal in you — your heart-mind. Theology can never be more than a human effort to organize and implement faith. You cannot trust your theology to answer all the questions; treat your theology as a mere tool, a provisional set of handles for grabbing hold of reality. Reality itself is fungible, so theology cannot possible be any less ephemeral.

People who take their theology too seriously are actually taking themselves too seriously. Idolizing your own intellect is called “sin.”

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Picture This

Posted on May 8, 2016 by ehurst

Let me propose a working model for this.

My wife and I often discuss the sense of calling that drives me out on those long rides with a camera. At a fundamental level, Scripture says that all of Creation speaks non-stop of the glory of God. The people who wrote the Bible would take that more literally than our culture does. The Hebrew people were natively comfortable with the heart as a sensory organ that took substantial cues from Creation as a whole. It fed back into their conscious minds a broad grasp of God’s moral character, which itself is woven into Creation. We’ve learned something from that, so that Veloyce and I experience the sun glinting off the grass and birds trilling in the shrubs with a far deeper meaning than mere aesthetics.

There is no good way to summarize how cycling in solitude fills my soul. It started as just basic exercise that distracted my ego so that my convictions had a more direct path to my conscious awareness. All those nagging questions in my soul started coming untangled. One day I get a distinct answer to how I should think and write about some issue of faith. Another day I find a sense of peace and resolve about some troubling moral issue latched onto my life. Yet another day I simply find the soil of my heart plowed and ready for something not yet seen that God wanted to plant later. Riding a bike answered endless needs; it was very much where God wanted to meet with me.

When we add in the relatively new habit of taking pictures, my awareness of this whole process shifted to a higher level. It took awhile to parse out the meaning for my own satisfaction, but it became a new means of sharing my faith. I firmly believe that Creation is far wiser than any of us will know, and seeks a jillion different ways to help guide us into the shalom of God’s truth. When I go out for a ride, Creation itself summons my eyes in different ways. Sometimes it’s a moment of power that grabs me before I get there, and I know I’m going to see something of God’s hand. At other times, I barely notice out of the corner of my eye, and have to stop and circle around to see what it was that just flashed in glory at my awareness. Creation knows what a camera is for, and uses it far better than I could without that assistance. Creation grants me visions of things it wants me to share from it’s vast wealth.

And it’s not just “nature,” but humans are an integral part of Creation, knowingly or not. It’s not so much that what humans might do in Creation is precisely proper; it’s that humans do stuff. We rightly notice what they do against the living background of Creation. Sometimes the message is unhindered, perhaps in ways even enhanced, by what someone built or destroyed. Failure itself speaks volumes. The natural world is designed for our use in seeking God’s glory; most humans are blind to that, but we cannot waste all our waking hours seeking to measure and assess the moral good or bad in what they do as a whole. The lens of my heart isn’t measuring whether that barn belongs out there on the river banks, or that asphalt bike path there along the man-made lake, or the gravel road running across the hills and plains. I’m not trying to morally interpret those images, only record them because they speak so very loudly.

What I now realize is that those images, taken by the guidance of God’s voice in Creation, can in turn speak to heart-aware readers of this blog. To most of humanity, those are just pictures. To some of you who participate in this oddball approach to faith, those images speak back to you the same ineffable message of God that it spoke to me. The images are prophetic utterances of God for some of you. They speak of things without words, and it calls to us seeking to open that ancient part of our awareness where words can’t exist.

I confess sometimes I don’t quite get the picture, as my heart will tell me later when I try to process the images. Or sometimes the camera can’t quite capture it due to design and technology limitations. Yeah, the PayPal fund isn’t that far from a decent replacement camera, but it will be awhile before I can do anything with a camera anyway. I’m trusting God for His rich supply at His timing. But even if there are few comments on the pictures, this would hardly slow my efforts once I’m able to get out there again. I have the powerful assurance that God is speaking through this work and I’m determined to give Him all He can take from me.

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