Dan's Thoughts

Dust and Ashes

2012-02-10T11:10:00.000-08:00

Dying is a lot of work.
I know this to be true.
I know because my wife died on December 31st. She took her own life when she lost hope. She did not die happy, although I know that she is happy now. I know this because she knew a risen Lord who promised her peace, and He always keeps His promises.
When someone dies they leave behind a lot of stuff. Some things that others will find useful and some no one will know what to do with. All of them held some significance to a life now absent here, and it is up to those of us who remain to sift through them all to understand their value.
A prominent aspect of going through all this is dealing with all the accumulated dust that coats anything left untouched for a significant period.
Dust has a purpose. It marks the passage of time, and movement, or lack of it, regarding the things we hold on to. I wonder sometimes if in some way it even has preservative qualities since there’s often so much of it.
There are things on shelves up too high to be easily seen or reached, and therefore summarily forgotten. There are things in the dark corners of the closets similarly removed from our normal range of senses. There are some things you can’t believe you’ve forgotten, and some things you wish you didn’t have to recall.

And then there are the ashes.
The last vestiges of the physical form.
We spread the ashes at an island where she last seemed truly happy. The waters took her on the tides, and she was really gone. Human ashes are different from what I expected. They are white and granular and they don’t really dissolve as I expected them to. They formed a cloud in the water when I poured them, almost as if she was hesitant to leave. I think it was in that moment that I discovered that I loved her more than I thought.
The last few years of our life together were marked by a steady decline in her mental and emotional state that led to a lot of acrimony. Her life was difficult at best. She suffered from many ailments both real and imagined. At the end nothing I did to help was helping her, and she would do nothing to help herself. Her doctor’s ran every test they could and came up empty.
To be completely honest it was often difficult to say we liked each other, but we both understood the meaning of 1Corinthians 13 when, in describing the qualities of love, Paul says that, “Love endures,...Love never fails”. We always loved each other.
Real love defies the logic of this world. Real love has never been about meeting my own needs. It could never survive any conflict if it was. Real Love, as God created it, is meant to allow marriage to last through the worst of times even if it hurts me. Love is capable of living through pain. Love and forgiveness go hand in hand for a reason. It is very difficult to maintain one without the other.
The bottom line for me was always this: I made a promise, and I put God’s name on that promise. He keeps His promises, and He wanted me to keep mine. So I did. It wasn’t easy.

On December 31st I was married, and on January 1st I was… not.
That’s a pretty short sentence, but there’s a lot to process in spite of that. There are 30 years of habits and expectations to change. Thirty years of thought and emotion that I now have to merge into someone new. Thirty years of stuff to work through to figure out exactly what kind of man I am, because in the end I’m really not too sure right now. I have to learn how to relate to people differently, because my responsibilities have changed so drastically. There are times in almost every day where I find myself understanding how different things really are now. All the decisions I make are now my own. There is no one to share responsibility or enthusiasm with.

I am one.

A friend described my life at this point as a race. This part of my life is at an end, and I have finished this race, but I didn’t get the prize. The prize would have been to see my wife happy and whole. I know she has both of those things now; I just didn’t get to see it.
It is the nature of races that when you cross the finish line at the end of one race there is another waiting to be run, but you don’t run a race that you haven’t trained for.
I believe that God created me to be Sue’s husband. I believe that He made me to be uniquely suited to that role. Now that role no longer exists, and I have to discover what He has in store for me with the qualities He has instilled in me. I do truly believe that whatever He has placed within me has made me a better man than I was, but I have to figure out what to do with that, and when to do it.

So I guess I’m back in training for the next race, just not quite ready to go yet.

©Dan Bode 2012

Security

2011-12-31T19:33:00.000-08:00

I have discovered that there are certain moments and places when I feel so “secure”, so “safe”, so “loved” that I just don’t want to lose it at all. But like everything in this world these are things to be “glimpsed” rather than fully lived. They are places of refuge in a chaotic world.
One of those places is the arms of a child. Whoever would have thought security could be found in such a small circle? I have discovered that when one of my grandchildren gives me a hug I would rather just stay there. With their arms around my neck, and their head resting on my shoulder I can find no good reason for me to move. I want time to stop right there.
It was the same way when my daughters were little. Even now as adults I find that simply knowing that I have their enduring love and trust inspires me to greater things. Two of the greatest feelings I think a parent can have is when a child simply puts her arms around your neck and holds on, and when they fall asleep in your arms. It shows that someone is willing to put their complete trust in you whether you feel worthy of that trust or not. When a child falls asleep in your arms you realize at some fundamental level that they have just placed their life in your hands. And at that same level you make a commitment to protect his or her life at the cost of your own if necessary, just because you know they trust you. This is why the betrayal of a child’s trust is so horrendous, and why the punishment for it should be just as severe.
When a child asks the big questions in life that occur to them (usually at inopportune times) they trust that we will have the answers regardless of their difficulty.
Our children do not consider whether we deserve their trust, they simply give it. They do not understand that our answers may be incorrect, and that they are based on our own limited knowledge of the creation in which we live. We are the sole source of their knowledge until they reach a point where they obtain the tools to gain it on their own.
I have to wonder if this is one of the things that Jesus was talking about when He admonished the disciples for attempting to keep the children away from Him. He asks us to be like children in order to come to Him. He is, in effect, simply saying, “Trust me.” And when He called the His most frequently used phrase was made up of two words, “Follow Me.” And they did. They left everything they knew because they suddenly knew Him better. They trusted Him for the simple fact that they recognized Him as the One Who Loves Us.
He will never victimize you.
His love for you will never be less than complete.
We begin a new year. My prayer for you right this minute and throughout your life is that you will begin again with the knowledge of His limitless love for you. That you will learn to live a new life according to His view of you rather than your own.
His image of you is perfect.
He sees you as He made you to be.
I pray that you will see the love in His eyes as He gazes at you while you fall asleep in His arms.
I pray for you, and for me, that we will learn to live His life as our own.
©2011 Dan Bode

Gifts

2011-12-15T10:28:00.000-08:00

There were so many unknowns right from the beginning.
Mary was a young woman, unmarried and pregnant in a culture that, in many cases, stoned to death those caught in adultery. Still, even knowing and accepting this practice as a product of this same culture, her first response is not one of fear but puzzlement, “How can this be since I am a virgin?” Luke 1:34
The Jews had been waiting for the Messiah’s birth for thousands of years. Most women wanted to have the honor of being the one to give birth to Him, but I doubt they thought He would come in this manner.
Even after time to reflect on the situation where most would agonize over it her response was one of the most beautifully heartfelt paeans of praise recorded in scripture:
The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-56)
And Mary said:
"My soul exalts the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
"For He has had regard for the humble state of His bond slave;
For behold, from this time on all generations will count me blessed.
"For the Mighty One has done great things for me;
And holy is His name. …”

Joseph, a carpenter, well liked in his community, stops to wonder how his betrothed could possibly have done this? Did he wonder how she could come up with such a story? Did he look around with suspicion at the other men in his community and wonder which of them could be the father?
And yet, after just a dream, he believes God, and in turn chooses to believe Mary. His trust in the reassurances of God led to his trust in Mary.
“And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and took Mary as his wife, but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.” (Matthew 1:24-25) He “kept her a virgin” implies that he believed she was a virgin still, and therefore believed what God had told him in his dream.
What a truly astounding man Joseph must have been to be chosen to raise the Son of God! I have so many questions for him!

And after all of this they are forced to undertake a journey to Bethlehem for a census. When they started their journey to Bethlehem did they see the star? Did they look at the sky in awe, or did they have their eyes constantly on the road ahead? Were they aware that it had anything to do with their child? Did they realize it was a sign for others?

The birth of Christ was the greatest Gift ever given, but for all of us, not just for Mary and Joseph. I wonder sometimes just when did they start to see this unfolding series of events as the Gift? Did they understand what it cost God to give it as they dealt with all its ramifications in their own world?
Do I?
Not a chance.

The list of the gifts of God in scripture is rather long, and generous as well if you look at them merely from the standpoint of numbers. God gives us gifts that are a part of His essence. He gives us something that is not separate from Himself. The Gifts of God are a living part of Him, and they remain alive within us.
When we give gifts they are not predicated on any sacrifice of ourselves. We spend money to buy something someone wants (hopefully). Our concept of “gifting” does not generally include giving something that is precious to us. We take something that exists somewhere and pass it along. We rarely make it our own. It is really more like a transaction than anything else.
Yet when God gives us gifts we are empowered on His behalf to make something ultimately better in this world for someone else, but in His case the gift is never separated from Him, and therefore maintains our connection to Him whenever we use it.

Perhaps it is not so much what we give, as it is that it be given willingly. When the Wise Men came they brought gifts fit for a king, but I wonder if they realized that what they offered was something He already owned?
What is precious to us is precious to Him only in the sense that we have become willing to let something go, or embrace something more fully, in order to draw nearer to Him. And so what holds value to me becomes more valuable to Him because I gave it up for Him.
My pain.
My grief.
My sins
My talents.
My joys.
My loves.
And the gifts He gives to me are tools that ultimately improve my relationship with Him.
My ultimate question in this regard is this: What is the quality of the gift I give to Him?
If it all belongs to Him anyway what is the difference?
What do you give to the One who has everything? We keep applying the human concept of gift giving to God. We can never fully understand the value of the gifts of Christ. He gave us Everything, but we can only give back what He has already sacrificed everything to give us.
The greatest gift I can give to Him is to use what He has already given me for His glory up to, and including, my life.

When I was a child I wanted to give my mother a Christmas present. I had no money of my own to buy one so I had to ask her for some. And of course she had to approve the purchase, so she knew everything about my gift to her before she received it. I remember agonizing over my choice as I stood in the hardware store aisle. I bought her a clear plastic bin with a blue lid that I presented to her as a “bread box”. I don’t think that was how it was advertised as I couldn’t read at the time, but that’s how I thought it could best be used. It sat on the kitchen counter as a bread storage bin for quite some time. She chose to use the gift for the purpose it was given. In a sense my gift to her was something she already owned by the time she received it, yet what gave it worth in her eyes was the simple fact that it came from my hand with the heart of my intentional love for her.

Christ’s birth was an intentional event. It was planned to have the impact it had on Mary and Joseph. God knew what it would do to their lives. He is not oblivious to the impact His actions or gifts have on us. It takes on even greater value when we individually realize the overwhelming love for each of us that went into the choice of that Gift.
I have to wonder if God chose the Messiah to come as a baby just because the birth of a baby will always change your life. Always. He could have had Jesus just appear as an adult, but no one really likes to wait for their gift do they? If Jesus had been accepted as the Messiah by everyone from the day of His birth I have to wonder how patient the world would have been if they knew they had to wait 30 years before He would do anything. Even though they had been waiting for thousands of years already I’d be willing to bet they would have complained about it. I’m pretty sure I would have.
We never know what impact any event will have on our future, but like Mary and Joseph, we know God can take ownership of it if we let Him. In their case God had ownership from the beginning, but they acknowledged it knowing how far beyond them true understanding was.
A true gift to someone, even in human terms, has some basis in our affection for the other person to varying degrees. This is also true of God in the gifts He gives to us.
The difference is that there is no variance in the degree of love He pours out on us. His love for us is complete, total, and unconditional. When God says He loves you there is no doubt that the one and only Maker of All Things is ready and willing to cradle you in His arms.
And when He gives you The Greatest Gift, your greatest gift in return is to simply accept it. All you have to do is say “Yes”.
I look back on my childhood concept of gifts and realize that I had very well defined standards of what qualified. It all revolved around two key concepts: “need” and “want”. If I needed it (like clothes) it didn’t qualify as a gift in my mind. A gift could only be something I wanted. God, in His Gift to us, combined these concepts so that we might “want” what we really “need”. And, like the child I often still resemble, I fall asleep eagerly awaiting Christmas morning where my most desired gift will be there under the tree, the wrapping still pristine. I will tear through the wrapping and my need will be satisfied eternally. And I will fall asleep again and wake up the next morning to the same gift, wrapped the same perfect way, and open it all over again, so that my eternal “need” will be daily fulfilled with what I really “want” and just didn’t know it.
Every day is Christmas.
Merry Christmas.
©Dan Bode 2011

A Silent and Holy Night

2011-12-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

It was indeed a Silent and Holy night.
There was little left to do but watch. The animals had long since fallen asleep. The small town activities had for the most part ceased, and those who still escaped the realm of dreams were oblivious to the occasion to which they were not witness. Most were merely puzzled by the Star never seen before even though it seemed to hover right over this little town of Bethlehem, a town whose very existence was based on the industry of providing sacrificial lambs for the temple in Jerusalem.
The only sounds were the moans of a young, soon-to-be mother in the final hours of a labor that had begun in the Garden so long ago. The will of her body was overcome by the need of the moment as contraction after contraction contorted her features with pain. But she had known this was out of her control from the moment she became aware of His presence.
The only other person aware of the import of this moment is the man at her side. The one on whose shoulders fall the responsibility of helping to bring into this world He who will be the Flesh of God.
All the questions that race through their minds are pushed aside as the symphony of the birthing process reaches its crescendo, and suddenly the Life of Man is Present in this world.
I find myself envious of their perspective. They were there at the beginning, and all they knew of the child at that moment was the name of His Father and His role as Savior of the world. They could take joy in the grasping hands and the baby’s laughter.
I, on the other hand, have the historical perspective as well.
I can look back at His birth, and look back at His death as well.
And there lies the difference..
I cannot see the newborn babe without the grown man on the cross.
I cannot see the grasping hands without the nails piercing His flesh.
I cannot see the smooth brow without the thorns.
What I can see is the mercy of our maker.
Some would say we deserve only His pity for what we’ve done with what he’s give us, but pity is merely mercy without action, and God can never be described as complacent.
He has always been active in His love for us, even undeserving as we are. And because of all this I will always see the whole life of Christ as the Great Substitution. Completely undeserved.
Undeserved by Christ for suffering penalties not meant for Him.
Undeserved by me for being unable to make the necessary sacrifice. It took so long for me to discover that I truly needed a Savior.
And so I sit as the world goes by around me; almost everyone once again oblivious to the occasion to which they are not witness.
So, into this Silent and Holy Night I have these three things to say:
God have mercy.
Joy to the world when you recognize your Lord.
Happy Birthday Jesus!
©Dan Bode 2002

What did the shepherds think?

2011-12-02T06:50:00.000-08:00

What did the shepherds think?
Their part in the life of Christ did not end on the night of His birth.
How did they feel when the angels told them of Christ’s birth?
Certainly they were awestruck. They were most likely quite shocked to be chosen to receive this announcement. They were, after all, fairly low on the social scale even though they were the guardians of the main resource of the towns’ primary industry. They were perhaps not well known for their social skills. They were out in the hills by themselves for long periods of time, and human interaction seldom occurred. The appearance of angels announcing a birth would be shocking enough, but they must have wondered at the significance of their inclusion in it at all. They were, as a matter of course, avoided by the general population.
Perhaps it was later that they began to understand the significance of their role in Jesus’ life. Perhaps even years later, when Jesus’ ministry was in full swing, and if they realized that this Jesus was the same babe they once honored, when John the Baptist announced Him as the Lamb of God, maybe it was then that they began to see the implication of their presence in the stable. For the reality of their job, their vocation, one that was often passed on from father to son for generations, was to raise these lambs for sacrifice in the Temple at Jerusalem.
This was the industry of this little town of Bethlehem.
They were raised to be laid across the altar as atonement for the sins of the people. The perfect lamb was chosen and killed from the flocks they raised! Not since Abraham had stretched his own son Isaac across the stones had a human ever laid upon the altar, and he had been spared. Simply taking the title of The Lamb told the world who He was, for those who had ears to hear.
Did they perhaps hear of this and cover their mouths as they gasped in surprise? This babe, this Man, the Lamb?
How could this be?
And again, how did they feel when this same man who called himself the Son of God, also named Himself the Good Shepherd? Did they straighten their spines with the implication of the honor He gave them? Did they plant their shepherd’s staffs a little more firmly and let the light of pride shine in their eyes? Did they smile and think, “I knew Him! I was there when He was born!”?
Would they not also bow their heads in sorrow, and let a tear roll down a weathered cheek when they new the final destination of the unblemished lamb?

And how is it that He was both lamb and shepherd?
As the Lamb He knew He needed a caring and watchful eye on Him to insure His safety and fulfill His needs.
As a Shepherd He knew exactly what a lamb needed when He took them to the still waters, He knew how best to protect them; by laying down His life for them on the altar where they were meant to lie.
As a man He knows our needs.
As our God He knows our needs.
But all of this must have come later to the minds of the shepherds. They could not have known all that He was as they beheld Him in the manger. All they knew was the joy His birth brought the world that day, overwhelming as it was. They saw and heard a heavenly host, and found a King in lowly circumstance.
And in so many ways and so many times I am left to wonder what it must have been like to be a shepherd, kneeling before that bed of hay bringing with me the only gift I had available to me and saying,
“I am but a lowly shepherd and I have so little, but here, I have brought for you this perfect lamb….”
©Dan Bode 2004

Moments

2011-11-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

I wrote this back in 2000. A friend recently reminded me of it and I thought it was worth putting it out there again. I hope you like it.

Our lives are often marked by moments.
We do not remember every day of our lives, but there are some that stand out as milestones that are indelibly etched in our memories. Whether they are good or bad, they play a role in shaping us as persons. Sometimes our entire lives revolve around one single moment. It can take years before we live in another moment that impacts us like the last one.
A friend of mine related a story of a moment in a young man’s life that he had the opportunity to witness.
My friend’s son is on his high school’s basketball team, and they were playing their last game of the season. There was a boy named Patrick who is the student-manager. He is a special education student, and always enthusiastic in his role. He has tried to make the team in the past, but he never qualified so he shifted his considerable energies to supporting his team in the best way he could. He apparently had a positive attitude and spirit the team appreciated, always there to pass out towels and water. Always there to encourage the players in open admiration of their abilities. As a means of expressing their appreciation of him the team approached the coach and asked that he be allowed to wear a team jersey and go out on the court to participate in the game. The coach agreed.
When the team gave Patrick his jersey on the day of the game he put it on and proudly wore it all day at school. It was the beginning of his moment.
The game began that evening and the coach spoke to the opposing team’s coach to tell him of his team’s intentions regarding Patrick. The other coach agreed to help. At a certain point in the game Patrick was sent in. His team had the ball and it was passed to him. The opposing coach called off his guards and Patrick took a shot from the 3-point line. It fell short, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he got to play.
Later in the game, just a few minutes before the end, my friend’s son Ryan signaled the coach indicating that he should take him out and send in Patrick.
The other team had the free throw and they were ahead by several points. There was no way his team was going to win, but that didn’t matter. He was in the game and he was going to play his best. It was his moment.
As the other team made their free-throw Patrick was sent down to the other end of the court. Two of the guards started to follow him down, but their coach waved them off and Patrick found himself by the basket alone. One of his teammates rolled the ball down the court to him, and he looked up at the basket and took the shot.
The ball went through the hoop just as the final buzzer sounded.
Everyone went wild. His team rushed him and hugged him. The other team cheered him too. The crowd chanted his name, “Pa-trick! Pa-trick! Pa-trick!” His team, whose jersey he proudly wore, had lost the game, and yet they cheered for him. They lost, yet they won. By allowing him to play they had contributed to his worth and affirmed his spirit with dignity. They had given him an instance of greatness, and in the gift had attained a greatness of their own.
They gave him his moment.
And don’t for one minute think he will ever forget it.
He will be defined as a person by knowing that others thought enough of him pass him the ball, and truly be a part of the team. Something he had longed for.
I suspect everyone else in that gym watching the game will remember it too. It was a moment for them as well. A moment when joy was suddenly present in what would have been a less than boisterous instance. A moment when the good in this young man was acknowledged as each of us wishes to be acknowledged.
But this is just one moment out of a countless multitude of them.
Consider the moments in your own life. Try as you might you probably can’t remember them all right now, but the ones you need come to you when you find yourself in a situation that reminds you.
Here are some of the moments in my life:
My big brother Bill coming home on leave from the Air Force.
The big family Christmas gatherings.
The day my mother told me she and my father were getting a divorce.
The last time I saw my mother before she died.
The day I met my best friend Shawn.
The last time I saw my father before he died.
The day I became a Christian.
The day I married my wife.
The day my first daughter was born.
The last time I spoke to my childhood friend Ron before he died of a brain tumor.
The day my second daughter was born.
The games I used to play with my daughters when I woke them up on Saturday mornings.
The day my youngest daughter had surgery to remove her adenoids.
The day my oldest daughter had her gall bladder removed.
The day it was discovered my wife had a brain tumor.
The day she had surgery to remove it.
The overwhelming support we received from our family and friends and the strength I gained in my faith.

One after another the moments of my life come to me. All of them are related somehow. If my parents had not died I would not have met and married my wife. I would not have the privilege of being her husband and being the father to two wonderful daughters. If I had not been there to watch Ron die I never would have developed the appreciation of my faith that I have. If I had not seen my parent’s relationship, I would never have known what to avoid in a relationship.
There are many others that I have not named, but I could fill many pages and still not name them all. Some are painful and some are full of joy. There were times when a certain moment eagerly consumed all of my resources. I would examine and reexamine it for what seemed like ages. Many times I would not stop thinking about it until another came along that derailed my scrutiny of the previous one. God used each one to create in me something He could use, and I may never know His full intention in His use of me. I no longer have a need to know it all. What I do know is that He is not creating me in a casual manner. He is doing it deliberately and lovingly. He is taking His care with me to make me into someone valuable to Him. We are infinitely more valuable to Him than we are in any human eyes. It is not just a simple sketch He draws with us, but a full painting using every color He has created; a masterpiece that will always have His full and undivided attention as He perfects every detail. Every stroke of the brush on the canvas is a defining moment in our lives. When the moment comes I am astonished at the notice He takes of me, and I either weep at being humbled, laugh with joy, or both. All of my expectations and values are suddenly suspended. I abruptly find myself looking at life with no preconceptions. All of my expectations become meaningless. All of my good intentions are worthless. My reaction to His touch is never indifferent. Neutrality is simply impossible when dealing with God.
Now I tend to live my life moment to moment, and sometimes there are significant intervals of time between them. But given the reaction I usually have each one gives me plenty to work with until the next one comes along. There have been plenty of times when the moment was not welcome. His touch upset my plans, or brought to light some aspect of myself I had been comfortably ignoring. But even as I acknowledge these attitudes I am forced to recognize that before God I have no rights. He holds all the cards. He made all the rules. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," (Isaiah 55:8). He is perfectly within His rights and abilities to interrupt me whenever He wishes.
And so I lay here on the ground staring at a night sky so vast I get lost just looking at it, knowing that behind it all God, in His most intimate knowledge of me and my needs, is preparing to send me my next moment.
©Dan Bode 2000

Dependence

2011-10-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

I’ve been learning a lot about the “D” word lately.
Dependence.
I recently had surgery on my right foot and Achilles tendon which requires a lengthy recovery period. I can’t put any weight on it for six weeks and I have to keep it elevated. This means that have to sit around with my foot in the air and let everyone else do a lot of the stuff that I would normally do myself. I recently noticed that the cushions of my couch are starting to conform to the shape of my backside. Of course it had to be my right foot so I can’t even drive.
It’s driving me up the wall, but I am very reluctantly learning a few things.
Allowing yourself to be served is as important as allowing yourself to be used as a servant.
Being served by others has forced me to recognize my limits. I’m one of those people who really just hate to ask anyone to do anything for me. I don’t like to ask for help. I don’t want to be needy. The real disadvantage to this is that all of us will eventually come up against some task that will overwhelm our individual resources. When this happens to me I then fail to fulfill my obligations because I don’t want to depend on anyone else by asking anyone for help in doing a job that was never meant for just one person. The task then remains incomplete or inadequately completed. The ironic twist in this situation is that the ability to depend on others actually makes me more dependable when a group of individuals comes together to complete the task as one.
This is the essence of fellowship. The members of the Body are supposed to depend on each other.
“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.” (Heb. 10:23-25)
We each take up a little bit of the slack in each others’ lives to make it less of a burden, because life is truly a burden for some. Dependence requires contact with others that prevents us from retreating into our shell of isolation that we are naturally prone to do, and which, by the way, Satan uses to great effect. Dependence allows us to appreciate the gifts of others. We see skills and abilities in others that were previously unknown to us.
This is also an area where many churches fail. We each see ourselves as caring individuals, and we see others as being just as caring. The problem is that we assume all of our caring friends are acting on their caring motives, while they quietly assume that we are doing the same.
And no one does anything, and a quiet sigh of lonely resignation is breathed over the phone that does not ring, or the knock on the door that never comes.
Waiting to say “Hi” to someone or pray for them when you see them at church is not enough. If no one seeks them out between Sundays there is simply no reason for them to return. Thinking good thoughts about someone does them no good unless I tell them I am thinking of them to find out what’s really happening in their lives.
Several years ago I read a news account of a man in Germany who was found dead in his apartment. The saddest part of the story was when they noted how they knew the approximate date of his death. He died sitting at his table reading the TV guide for a date seven years before the day anyone noticed he was gone. All that was left of him was a skeleton in rotting clothes. His monthly stipend had been automatically deposited in his bank account, and his rent automatically deducted. He depended on no one, and no one depended on him. No real value was assigned to his life by others so he was simply forgotten.
We live in what is becoming an increasingly “virtualized” world where electronic and social media have expanded our social “reach” by allowing us to communicate instantly with anyone in almost any part of the world. This is not a necessarily a bad thing, but it does promote an illusion of social intimacy that does not exist in reality. We need to hear a real voice. We need to see a real face. We need to feel the touch of a real hand.
We need to be familiar to someone else.
And the word “need” is correct. We were made to “need” and be “needed”.
The concept of “need” in human interaction is meant to nullify the effects of our inherent forgetfulness.
Dependence is a big deal.
It is a core concept of the Christian faith.
We depend on Christ for our eternal salvation.
Christ depends on us to carry out His desires here on earth.
But there is a world of difference in the type of dependence that is expressed in these two aspects of that concept.
Our dependence on Christ develops out of our inherent need. Our survival depends on the salvation that only He provides.
His dependence on us develops out of His desire to save us from ourselves. He calls upon us to give to others what He has given us to benefit everyone. He doesn’t need us to accomplish this, but He gives us the opportunity knowing that it will benefit each of us as much in the giving as in the receiving of the gift.
I have come to understand that my desire for independence makes me a lesser person. In terms of my faith and fellowship it separates me from those I need in order to be complete. In the words of John Donne,
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”.
I cannot be an adequate servant if I am unable to allow myself to be served. I will never understand the needs of others if I only look at life through my own eyes.
Give yourself up.
Surrender.
Submit.
Be Dependent.
©Dan Bode 2011

Sovereign

2011-10-04T10:12:00.000-07:00

God is Sovereign.
This is a fact that will affect every one of us in the end whether we like it or not. The word “Sovereign” is typically used in reference to royalty. It means the person in royal authority has the final say and complete control over those subjects within the kingdom. While the word does describe God’s authority over His creation I think it falls short of the full implication His presence means to us. For God to be Sovereign means that He does not delegate or diminish His own authority to anyone. For God to be Sovereign means that He has full authority over everything. That means everything. Every person, every animal, every blade of grass, every molecule of oxygen we breath. His Sovereignty permeates every aspect of every moment of our lives. Because of this He can be seen in every aspect of His creation, He can be heard in every expression of joy and every cry of pain because He knows them all.
The human limitation to sovereignty demands that we acknowledge the sovereign ruler in order for him to have authority over us.
The Sovereignty of God knows no such limitation. My belief or acknowledgement of His authority has absolutely no bearing on the reach of His power. This has never stopped man from trying to express himself as his own highest authority. From the beginning man has striven to prove his autonomy. In every society that is known there has always been some evidence of worship offered to some deity, but there is always some way to manipulate that deity to reflect the will or characteristics of the people who “serve” them.
This is not true of God. God gave us absolutes that would reflect His sovereignty. Yet the hallmark of man’s existence is in his desire to look at everything in terms of a relativistic mind-set.
God created us with a need for His presence, but the moment God showed us His authority we began to seek the means of our independence from Him. We rebel against Him because we want equality with Him, not submission to Him. The Tower of Babel was built by man’s desire, and destroyed by God’s Sovereignty. We demand proof of God’s power with miracles, yet when faced with the facts of those miracles we still refuse to acknowledge His power over everything. We call the miracle a great trick, but we choose to ignore the power of a God who would pierce the wall of creation to directly intervene. Our rebellion originates with our discovery that God cannot be manipulated. God alone once ruled the nation of Israel, yet they decided that they would rather have a human king. They wanted a king who had the same frailties and faults as they themselves did. They, being as human as you and I, wanted a king who could be manipulated.
The story is told of how man one day decides he no longer needs God. Man looks upon his scientific abilities and accomplishments and determines that he is self-sufficient. Man can create life on his own and God is no longer necessary. So, man comes before God and says, “God, I have reached a point where I no longer need you. To prove my point I am going to create life just like you did, and you can create a life too and we can compare the results.”
“All right”, says God, “let’s get started.” He then picks up a hand full of dirt.
“Ok!” says Man. Man also bends over and picks up a handful of dirt, but God stops him.
“Wait a minute,” He says, “you go make your own dirt.”
This really is the essence of where man is today. Man thinks he can stand on his own, yet he fails to realize that no matter where he goes or what he does God is already there. God already knows all the facts, God has already been through all the joy and the pain, God already knows all the circumstances, and God already knows all the outcomes.
His Sovereignty will be our saving grace, or our ultimate condemnation. The choice between heaven and hell is ours, but they are ultimately the only choices we have. No matter what we do or say in life our final disposition will always be in the hands of God, not Satan, not angels, not people. Only God will ever have the final say. He has always reserved that for Himself.
Another fact about the Sovereignty of God is that He never forces it upon us.
In human terms if you are a citizen of a true monarchy you are subject to that monarchies rules. There is no vote on whether you think the laws are worth adhering to or not. You must follow those laws or face some form of condemnation.
God, on the other hand, never forces Himself on us.
We have a choice to follow some other teaching if we wish, or just go off on our own. We have a choice in this life to do whatever we want. However, His Sovereignty is proven when we discover at the end that while He gave us free will our only choices are:
1) God
Or
2) Not God.

And if you choose door number two, no matter what name you put on it, whether it be Satan, money, power, oneness with the universe, sex, etc., if the name you fill in the blank with is not God then you will not be in His presence in the end.
God’s Sovereignty is final, and it is our only hope. It is a fact during every moment of our existence whether we are doing the dishes, or kneeling piously at the altar in church.
When I was 15 my father committed suicide.
The day of his funeral I came home and found a letter from him in our mailbox addressed to me. It was only two lines:
“Things have been a little crazy lately. I’ll be all right in a few days when I get my head screwed on straight. Love, Dad.” It was postmarked the day before he shot himself.
I still have that note somewhere. It’s packed away where I don’t see it unless I am looking for something else in the dust covered boxes packed in storage. Though it’s not always visible, the words are always there in the back of my thoughts to remind me of the consequences of waiting until the end to deal with the inevitable. My most fervent hope is that my father’s last thought was “Jesus help me…” because it is only with God’s help that I will ever see him again.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans 14:11-12 we are told:
It is written: "`As surely as I live,' says the Lord, `every knee will bow before me; every tongue will confess to God.'" So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God.
Paul is not vague. He says every knee will bow. Our desire to stand on our own arrogance and accomplishments will mean absolutely nothing in His presence. He completely overwhelms all that we are or ever will be. There is nothing else.
This is the Sovereignty of God, and because God in his Sovereignty is all powerful, and just, He also extends to us His Grace.
His Sovereignty demands justice, justice determines guilt, and guilt demands punishment, so He meets our punishment with the sacrifice of His Son, which gives birth to Grace. And it is His grace alone that insures our ultimate survival; I have nothing to contribute to my own salvation.
God doesn’t operate on the same principals as we do. The wisdom we think will save us is nothing compared to His power, His sacrifice and His love. We want the benefit of heaven without the cost. We assure ourselves that everyone we love will be in heaven without acknowledging what we really deserve, and in doing so we are attempting to tell God who is deserving of His reward as though we are worthy. We waste our energies by listening to, and participating in, things that demean those whom we don’t think are living correctly. Because God is Sovereign it is His determination not mine. Our job is not condemnation, for we are ourselves condemned; our job is reconciliation, for we are truly reconciled who have accepted Him as Sovereign. We must learn to set aside all that we know – our highest wisdom – to allow God to fill us with His foolishness.
For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. (1Cor 1:25)
As I write this many things are happening in the world around me:
A popular high school student is killed in an auto accident,
A high school student kills several classmates with a gun he brought to school,
A baby is left in a dumpster,
A high school girl chooses to become a missionary,
A young couple joyously prepares for the birth of their first child,
A man is coming home to a wonderful family he loves with all his heart,
A broken marriage is being mended.

As far apart on the spectrum of human experience as these events may seem they are all happening in the same world, a world in which God is still Sovereign no matter the circumstance. A world in which as the ultimate Sovereign Lord, He can still heal the pain that is the result of man’s “wisdom”.
I want everyone to think of me as a nice guy, but all those whom I allow to think this don’t see me as God does. Most people see only certain facets of me rather than see me from all sides at once. They don’t see my hypocrisy, they don’t see my sin, they don’t see that I am simply as human as they are and that despite every flaw of my human condition God still allows me to call Him my Sovereign. I couldn’t even do that without His permission. Because of His power, authority and love I must always be aware that I cannot treat this relationship in a casual manner.
Because of who He is, and all He has done, I cannot give him anything less than my entire flawed, broken, and tumbledown life and say, “This is all I have to give.”
And, because of who He is, after He has stepped down from His throne and lifted my head to look in my eyes He replies with a smile brighter than the sun,
“This is all I ever wanted.”
And with those words begins a relationship that is characterized by the names of God:
King of the Jews
King of Heaven
King of Glory
King of Peace
Abba (Daddy)
Father
Sovereign.
Dan Bode©2001

Who Am I?

2011-08-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

I ask many questions in life, but that’s the way I learn.
If you ask no questions you get no answers, and then you know nothing.
Now I must admit that I can wax philosophical on any number of issues, and if I listen to myself too much I start picturing myself sitting around in a sixties beatnik coffee house wearing a black beret, a turtleneck, and a goatee spouting big words whose definitions escape me while drinking carrot juice (produced from organically grown carrots of course).
Scary picture, huh? I think so too, but that doesn’t stop the questions from coming. And then my test anxiety kicks in and I can’t remember the answer! It’s not like I consciously go out of my way to ask them either. They just pop up out of nowhere. Like this morning.
I was driving into work like I do every other weekday. I was approaching the freeway on ramp minding my own business and all of a sudden I get hit with a Question. These are capital letter Questions too, not just run of the mill everyday stuff. I have no idea where they come from, but once they form my mind just runs away with them and for the rest of the day everything is viewed in the light of that Question.
So what is the Question of the day you ask?
“Who am I?”
Seems simple enough most of the time. Usually a name and Social Security number is sufficient, but this time there was a need for a deeper answer. It was as if there was suddenly a need to quench a deeper thirst that had been neglected for too long. I began to wonder if the answer is tied up in all the relationships that I am part of. I am a husband, father, brother, son, uncle and cousin. Friend and spiritual brother to numbers that time has rendered uncountable. Many relationships are close, but many are more casual as well. Regardless of the proximity of the relationship though, each one has contributed something to my life. I have learned something from everyone I know whether it is good or bad and I have contributed in the same way to others. The lessons are endless, and although the lessons and the contributions of others in my life are valuable, I am not the sum of the parts of other people.
What else is there to make me who I am? I suppose my life experiences in general could be a part of me. Many of my actions are determined by my past, yet that alone is not who I am either.
Food? Well, if we are what we eat then I’m everything, but mostly red meat, potatoes and chocolate, but that’s not the answer either.
Some of us get caught up in our possessions, and there are times when we might feel that we are owned by them rather than their owners. However, there is nothing I own that defines who I am. They may reflect some of the values I hold, but they do not define me.

The kicker is that the reality of who I am does not lie within me. My actions or philosophical viewpoints do not create my identity. In fact, at the most basic level it really has nothing to do with me at all. As a creation I take on the value my creator ascribes to me.
A potter creates something for a specific purpose, and it becomes valuable to him because of how and why he made it. It is the definition of his purpose. Anyone else’s opinion on the matter is irrelevant, because the image cast in the clay is the expression of the potter’s purpose and no one else’s. The value is in the hands of the potter.
My value lies in the hands of God. My God brought me out of nothing and made me someone. From the first He has never ceased to be devoted in His care of me. “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.” (Psalm 139:13)
He knows who we are and He loves us because He created us to be loved by Him. No one among us is capable of His level of love, and so our greatest value, our most intimately understood secret, is in relation to Him alone. It is to Him we must look for our self worth rather than man.
If we look at the results of our value in the human race and our value in His eyes there is no comparison.
We have striven for independence from the beginning, and it has gotten us nothing. Our search for independence means we must find value in ourselves aside from God. So we search for some new standard, and most of the time we settle for the standard of the society in which we live. God forgives; the problem is society does not.
If you are not physically attractive by society’s standards (and every society’s standard is different) then you have less value to them.
God is not swayed by society’s values.
If you have made mistakes society will shun you.
God willingly sent His son to die in your place to cover your mistakes.
You in your supposed independence have scorned others who needed Him.
Christ was still there to welcome you with open arms when you finally acknowledged your need of Him.
All of these things are true because your identity and your value in His eyes never changed. Never.
Not at any time, nor in any circumstance.
The fact that He created you never altered. Your strengths, weaknesses, deficiencies, and mistakes are all known to Him, and they never diminished your value in any way, because nothing you did changed your value in His eyes. He has already determined your value from the beginning. While my actions may cause me to drift away from Him, His love has never diminished with distance. His attentions did not leave you when you first walked upon the earth. He has stayed with you all of your life whether you have acknowledged Him or not.
I can complain about how unloved I am by the world, or I can take comfort in the fact of God’s overwhelming love for me. He gave me purpose when no one else could give me anything.
I am constantly confronted with the idea that man seeks independence from God.
The question “Who am I?” seeks purpose, but gaining purpose comes from outside of ourselves. Therefore we have to acknowledge someone else’s authority over us, but at the same time this threatens our search for independence. This becomes a vicious circle that leaves us purposeless, without definition. If we have no definition, no purpose, then we are simply wanderers, truly separated from the love of God.
All this because we seek a complicated answer to a simple question. We refuse to realize that the One who created us did so for the simple reason that He wished to love us.
Man in his prideful attempt at independence claims, “I think, therefore I am.”
God in His loving and gracious patience with us says, “I AM, therefore you are.”
And so, at last, we come to the simple answer to the simple question that we make complicated.
Who am I?
I am…
Loved By God.
©Dan Bode 2001

Skipping Rocks

2011-07-12T19:37:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid my father would sometimes take me and my brothers or friends down to the marina by our house to do some fishing. An inevitable activity that occurred at some point was skipping rocks. My dad could really skip rocks well. When he taught me how to do it I can remember my excitement as I watched that first skip over the surface of the water. That activity seemed to occur whenever I was near a water source with rocks nearby from then on.
When our kids were younger my wife and I would often go out to the river that winds its way through our town to take our kids for walks along the banks. As always I continued to automatically search for rocks that I could skip. After the kids saw me do it for the first time they were suitably awed at my skill, and wanted to see it again, and again, and again. It became a custom to automatically search for rocks for dad to skip anytime we went to the river after that. Even when I didn’t really feel like skipping rocks I would find myself standing there with handfuls of rocks that my family had gathered for me. It’s not that I was that good, they just hadn’t seen anyone else skip rocks before. It’s kind of like being the first one to play a new video game, no matter how bad you do you still get the highest score on the score board because no one else has played it yet.
I taught the kids to look for rocks that were best for skipping. It had to be flat on at least one side, preferably round and not too big. I had to make the size limitation after they tried to bring me rocks they could barely carry with both hands. One day as we were on one of our outings at the river, during the inevitable rock search one of the kids found THE perfect skipping rock. It was perfectly round, just the right thickness and weight, and fit my hand just right. This was the rock David would have kept as he searched for rocks to put in his sling against Goliath. It wasn’t possible to mess up a throw with this rock. Anyway you threw it this rock would skip!
“This is a PERFECT rock!” I exclaimed.
I don’t know of anyone who ever got that excited over a rock. My kids looked at me smiling in expectation. My wife laughed. “It’s a rock!” she said.
“Yeah, but it’s a PERFECT rock!” I replied in defense.
“Throw it dad, throw it!” the kids yelled excitedly.
I set my feet for the proper throwing stance. There is a science to this after all.
I hefted the rock in my hand to gauge the weight, and took the proper grip. I swung my arm experimentally a few times just to make sure I had the right angle.
Then came the throw. I brought my arm back and pivoted as it swung forward, and let the rock fly, almost loathe to let it go because I knew I would never see a rock like this again. It flew toward the surface at great speed, and I wondered just how many skips I could get out of this one.
Ker-PLUNK!
There was a little splash as the stone hit the water, and sank straight to the bottom. Ripples radiated out from the surface where it hit.
There was a stunned silence before I heard Kaytie say, “What happened Daddy?”
“How come it didn’t skip?” asked Jennifer.
I could hear my ever-graceful wife stifling a laugh behind me.
“I messed up!” I whined.
Somewhere along the way I had miscalculated. I had failed to use the rock in a way that would bring out its greatest potential. Now I realize that this rock was not created just for me to skip it, but its presence on that shoreline taught me a lesson.
There are a great many tools that God has placed at my disposal which I often fail to use in the proper way, or even fail to use at all. My life is one of them.
I have a great potential in the hands of the living God. Unlike the rock, which simply sits there to be used for anything that the mind of a wholly uncoordinated individual like me can come up with, I must choose to put myself in the hands of Him who has the ability to use me best. All the yesterdays I look back on will not change them. All the things I think I could have done better will not change the past, however, God is fully capable of using my worst days for a future good. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28. By giving Him our past He can change our future, and when we still make our mistakes, or fail miserably at things, or experience the proverbial “trial by fire”, our greatest strength is not in the way we pick ourselves up and go on. Our greatest strength is our ability to recognize our inabilities, to recognize that out of the lump of coal we have produced He can make a priceless diamond.
The real issue then, becomes one of ownership, because I have to give Him my life in order for it to be transformed. I cannot expect the coal to become a diamond if I do not first put it into His hands in order to apply the correct pressure at the right time.
After my failure to skip that perfect rock, I picked up another, and skipped it successfully. I skipped several more and my children forgot about my failure, as children often do. They were more than willing to leave me up on a pedestal because I was their dad, even though I did not deserve that honor. As children they were more than willing to dismiss my faults, and I tried to show them a better side of myself, even while I moped inside at my loss of that perfect stone. Now they are adults, and I find I have to try harder to show them that honorable side. They are more astute at recognizing my failures, but at the same time just as willing to forgive them. “You didn’t come to a complete stop there dad.” “I don’t think you’re supposed to make a aU-turn there, dad.” Needless to say I become more conscious of some of my less than stellar habits.
The more willing I am to come down off that pedestal, the easier it is to gain forgiveness. As I put God on the pedestal more often, instead of claiming ownership of that position for myself I give Him the authority to make the necessary changes in me. He is not the God who gives me what I deserve, but who gives what I desperately need. My survival in Him is painless for me to gain, because it was painful for Him to pay the price. So I am more than content to merely sit at His feet. “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” Psalm 84:10
It’s funny sometimes, but not surprising, that when I step down and He takes His rightful place on that pedestal He looks a lot bigger than me, and the best that I can do is just a feeble imitation of Him. I suppose the humor lies in the fact that I thought I could adequately fill that space at all. I have discovered that my role in the lives of others is a tool as well. I can do damage in that role or I can be a healing, comforting and joyful presence.
“Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” Romans 12:15. There are times when I struggle with how I should accomplish those things. It is often easier to lash back in anger than to reach out in love. It is easier to sit in judgement than to offer forgiveness. Frankly, the bottom line is that it’s easier to be an idiot than it is to be vulnerable. Putting myself in God’s hands for His use almost guarantees that I will wind up being used in a way or a place that I do not prefer. I will likely wind up somewhere outside of my own “comfort zone”. I have my own ideas of what I should do in this world that I have thought through pretty thoroughly. If things go as I want them to then all will be well, but there are plenty of examples in my lifetime of the best laid plans gone awry. And, every so often, my preferences actually fall in line with His when I actually spend time listening to Him before I make my plans.
So now I have a choice when I skip rocks. I don’t have control over the physics that cause them to fly in a given direction or angle once they leave my hand. So I can make a big pile of perfect rocks and stare at them wondering at their potential, or I can just start throwin’ em and see what they do. They will all eventually wind up where God needs them to be regardless of my influence.
©Dan Bode 2000

Priorities

2011-06-18T22:59:00.000-07:00

John 12:8 “You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

There are some things we will always have, both good and bad, but Jesus overcomes all things. He is more important than the best and the worst that we experience. We devote our time and energy to those things that have the greatest impact on our lives. We see sickness and health, wealth and poverty. All these things have a great impact on us for good or bad, and all of them can, by their impact, distract us from Christ. The essence of our relationship with Christ is that while all these things affect us at different levels we need to deal with Christ first and all other things through Him, not before or after Him.
The sequence of events in how we deal with any occasion in our lives determines the impact they have on us for Christ.
Occasionally, in some form or another the question is asked of me, “With all that you have been through why do you hold on to your faith?”
I think the answer to that question lies in what my priorities have become. I simply cannot bear to imagine my life without my faith. I’ve been there and done that. I have changed too much to go back and find satisfaction in a world without God. It would be barren and lifeless. I can no longer tolerate the world’s value system. I think about what offends God and I care about it. These things were once the furthest things from my mind. At the same time I have also reached a point where, while I love, fear and respect God, I have also come to understand that He allows questions. He allows challenges from us, for that is how we learn submission to Him. He can overcome any challenge. It is we who fear challenges to God, because we fear that He cannot meet them. We apply our own limits to God which automatically makes Him inadequate for our needs.
In his book “Reaching for the Invisible God.” Philip Yancey quotes Kathleen Norris.
“One so often hears people say, “I just can’t handle it”, when they reject a biblical image of God as Father, as Mother, as Lord or Judge; God as lover, as angry or jealous, God on a cross. I find this choice of words revealing, however real the pain they reflect: if we seek a God we can “handle”, that will be exactly what we get. A God we can manipulate, suspiciously like ourselves, the wideness of whose mercy we’ve cut down to size”.
In ancient times it was common practice for a farmer to worship gods that were representative of the things he had to deal with. Hence there were gods of the soil, of the sun, the rain, the harvest. He sacrificed to it in the way he saw fit and made up his own priestly rules. His god’s influence ended at his property line.
By cutting God down to a “manageable” size we attempt to make Him into someone who is our individual ideal of “enough” to satisfy our personal needs. Yet God, being limitless, is more than enough; our need, also being limitless, can never be filled by a god of our own making.
I don’t love God enough.
I don’t love my wife enough.
I don’t love my children enough.
It can never be “enough” when the source that satisfies your need is limitless.
A limitless source supplies a continuous need. A limitless source will also provide a limitless means of expression. There is always more available to give through Christ.
We are the Beloved of God. We must never desire less than He offers us. We must not maintain a minimal faith.
When our faith reaches a point where we have had “enough” then we have begun the slow and painful spiral down to death. A real faith recognizes that there is never “enough” to satisfy our thirst. True faith is never satisfied. It always searches for one more thing to believe, one more wonderful piece of evidence that proves for me once again that God loves me.
Sometimes that search takes us into areas of our lives that we would rather not go.
In the midst of my selfishness and pride I discover that my humility gives me value.
In the midst of my anger I find that a peaceful heart will accomplish more.
In the midst of all my wonderful “Christian Activities/Ministries”, I find exhaustion that forces my dependence on Christ.
In the aftermath of a cruel and bloody crucifixion, I find the pearl of the Resurrection. The latter is not possible without the former.
Sometimes the greatest treasures are the ones left unused and forgotten in the corner of the attic, covered with dust. They are the things of my childhood that were left behind with the advent of “maturity” in my social lexicon.
Many times when I am helping to care for some of the children in our church nursery, I will attempt to get them interested in some of the toys in the arsenal. Sometimes they can be a pretty hard sell, but most of the time there is something that will catch their fancy. In the process of using a random toy to catch their attention I have to admit that it gets my attention instead. Sometimes I use a particular toy to get their attention because it’s a toy I want to play with. I keep thinking to myself, “Why didn’t we have toys like this when I was a kid?” (Although I have to admit that if Elmo doesn’t shut up soon he’s gonna get his batteries yanked.) And for a little while I give up the weightier theological/social/important matters that occupy my thoughts and try to pretend that I barely know how to walk. I try to learn all over again instead of rehashing the same old information. The “big” things will all still be there when I get back to myself, because “You will always have the (fill in the blank)…” But Christ is bigger.
My priority then is to become the child Christ called me to be. To regain some of the purity of spirit that I had before I was influenced by the rest of the world. When Christ called us to be like children, I don’t think he necessarily meant for us to be blindly trusting. He wants us to trust Him completely, but He wants us to come to Him with no regard for the limitations this world would place on our relationship to Him.
When the children wanted to be near Jesus the adults were trying to hold them back. He told the adults to let them come.
“Then little children were brought to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked those who brought them. Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." When he had placed his hands on them, he went on from there.” Matthew 19:13-15. If there was one sound that I had to think of that inspires joy in me I would have to say it is the sound of a child who is just learning that he or she has a voice. They have not yet learned to form words. Every sound they make is an experiment. Every sound is the embodiment of wonder. God knows what kids are like, and He enjoys it. Children are capable of understanding the intimacy that God desires to have with us while still acknowledging Him as the Creator of all things.
Children first want to be loved.
Christ first wants to love us.
Be like a child.
I want Him to enjoy my presence as well, and so I attempt to be the kind of person He is making me to be.
Our lives take on a weird cycle. We start out as children wanting to be adults so we can do more, and then we become adults who want to be children so someone else can take all the responsibility and we can go back to enjoying life.
Christ calls us to exactly that life, but the joy of life He desires for us is based on Him rather than the empty, selfish pursuits of the world. By the world’s standards we need “things” and “stuff” to be “happy”. We must be “visible” and “prominent”. And when we have bought all the “things”, and got all the “stuff”, and become “visible” and “prominent”, we find ourselves withered, dried up, and lifeless, dying for nothing.
The world wants me to have a relationship with Christ on its terms not on God’s terms. The world doesn’t want to actually know anything about our relationship with God. It’s enough for them to know I have that relationship as long as they don’t have to hear it. That’s enough for them.
It’s not enough for God. God is not silent about what He wants from us. “You will always have the …”, but you have God first. He wants you more than any need anyone else has, and your satisfaction in life will be greater when you seek out His desires for you before your own, or the world’s.
I don’t always want to do that though. Sometimes my desires are in direct opposition to my faith. Sometimes I collide with my faith, and it shakes me to my core. Because while I am fickle and flit to and fro amongst all the “things/stuff/values/…garbage” that the world offers, my faith being a gift of God, remains firmly fixed on God. I drift further and further from it at times, but I remain attached with this “spiritual rubber band” called my conscience that can only stretch so far before all of my justifications for doing the things I do can’t be stretched any further and I get yanked back to that rock hard and fast. I collide with my faith. After I have slammed into it and the stars have cleared from my eyes I finally get back on top and realize, “Wow! The view is so much better from here!”
It’s much easier to see the benefit of my faith in the aftermath of a crisis than in the midst of it, but it’s always what I hold on to the hardest in the difficult moments. Anything else would crumble beneath me. I know this from experience.
So now instead of trying to be a child of this world, I strive to be a child of the next, sitting in the lap of the God of Wonder…
©Dan Bode 2004

Sewer Golf

2011-06-12T15:28:00.000-07:00

I had dinner with an old friend that I hadn't talked to in a while last week. It reminded me of a story I wrote a few years ago that was actually inspired by him. No deep spiritual truths here, just fun...a lot like my friend.

There is something going on in the underworld of cities all over the world. I don’t think “conspiracy” would be the right word, but maybe “secret society” is appropriate. Let me tell you how I know about this.
One day a few months ago I was talking to a friend of mine who was doing some work on a house he and his wife had just purchased. He said he needed a powerful toilet to replace the one in the bathroom his sons use. When I asked him why he said, “Because I have four sons. They are very “productive”, and I’m tired of plunging their toilet all the time.” He said the toilet salesman that he got the new toilet from told him that it was so powerful that it could actually flush 12 golf balls at one time!Now I have to admit that this sounds like an impressive standard to me. Especially when you realize that toilets don’t flush like they used to. The old toilets used to be able to use somewhere around 2000 gallons of water per flush. It was about enough to fill your pool (if you had a pool that you needed to fill in a hurry and about 200 gallons of chlorine to sterilize it with). Then someone said we were using way too much water to flush our toilets and they made a national standard that said you couldn’t make toilets with tanks on them bigger than somewhere around 1 gallon. This of course led to the creation of a black market in old toilets that everyone wanted to buy because they had to flush 50 or 60 times anyway with the new toilets. I personally think this also led to the drop in the level of the world oceans as well. I mean, think about it for a minute. One day we’re dropping 2000 gallons per flush, and the next we’re down to 1! That’s land mass water retention! How could it not have a global impact?
So now you can understand how impressed I am to hear about a toilet that can flush 12golf balls in one flush!
The discovery of this “flushing standard” caused me to start wondering: Why are golf balls being flushed to measure the toilet flushing power in the first place? Why would anyone think that one perfectly good golf ball would be useful in a toilet let alone 12 of them?! Now I myself am not a golfer. I used to play a little in high school (sometime in the last century), but it just never took. It’s a little too sedate for me. About the only real “action” I saw was when the incredibly fat geese that hung out at the pond by the 9th hole attacked my partner and he had to defend himself with a 9 iron. I had never actually seen anyone run on a golf course before. And even the most ardent supporters of the game have to admit that it’s not really an exciting sport. I mean sure things get a little tense toward the end of a high stakes tournament when the purse (there’s a manly term) is a million dollars and the player realizes that he might not be able to make that next yacht payment if he misses this final 10 yard putt for the birdie or bogey or palmer or nicklaus or whatever they’re going for, but for most of us who play on public courses where the squirrels steal the balls before they get to the green it just ain’t that big a deal. Even the announcers on television whisper about everything. It just seems too stinkin’ calm and quiet to be called a “sport”.
Anyway, I started thinking about all the stories I’ve heard about the stuff that’s found down in sewers by the guys that work down there. One of my own brothers used to do that and he came back with some valuable pieces of jewelry. I’d be willing to bet there’s a pretty good sized wild goldfish population down there too (they probably all mutated into carnivorous koi or something). So who would benefit from flushing golf balls? The sewer maintenance guys! They’re playing golf in the sewers! You may think I’m way off on this, but next time there’s a construction crew replacing the main sewer pipes in your town you should look at how big those things are! The average person could stand up in them! It would be easy to set up a tournament too. Just imagine the salesman after he has completed the sale standing in the back room on his cell phone:
“Hey Smitty, it’s Ralph.” (Smitty is the tournament coordinator who works for the city sewer system.)
“Hey Ralph, did you get those balls delivered?”
“Yeah they’ll be around the intersection of 9th and B St. on the east side.”
“Perfect! Thanks for setting that up for us.”
“No problem, and the customer wanted a second demonstration so there should be 24 Top-Flites instead of the usual 12!”
“Way to go! Thanks man! Now remember we’ll be going in at the manhole on 6th and C St. at 6AM tomorrow. It hasn’t rained for a while so the methane buildup shouldn’t be a problem this time.”
“Methane? What’s methane gas got to do with it?”
“Didn’t I ever tell you about that? After it rains sometimes the methane gas builds up in the pipes. That’s probably why you got so light headed last time.”
“Was that it? Wow, I never knew that!”
“Ok well, we’ll see you tomorrow morning!”
“Ok Smitty!”
And I’ll bet the rules are pretty straightforward too. You’re probably not likely to lose the balls very easily. I remember from all the ones I hit into the water that golf balls don’t float, so I’m thinking they’re pretty easy to retrieve from the shallow water running at the bottom of the pipes. It’s probably more a matter of whether you want to put your hands in it or not, I mean those balls were delivered through toilets after all. Infrared goggles are optional, but recommended in case you lose your light and can’t keep track of the other players in the dark. A miner’s headlamp is a must. All players wear rubber boots with special non-skid soles. All players are required to have a functional GPS locator on there person at all times. No smoking or flame producing devices are allowed due to the occasional aforementioned buildup of methane, a flammable gas.
Drivers are rarely used since your shots all consist of putts and bank shots off the wall. Divots do not exist here; therefore they do not need to be replaced. The tee is a specially constructed portable platform that is transported with the group through the course. Its height is adjustable to accommodate for the varying depths of water in different sections of the pipe network.
The course is configured on the morning of the game, and is sometimes made up as you go along. The actual “cup” will be the opening from one of the residential or commercial sewer mains that drain into the main pipe, or a bucket laid on its side according to player preference.
Penalties accrue when your ball ricochets down the wrong tunnel or when your ball takes out a light. Penalties are also awarded if you take your shot after the other players have started to advance into the field of play. If your ball hits another player the rest of the group will determine how many strokes you are penalized. If the player is rendered unconscious you are penalized the maximum 5 strokes. If he does not regain consciousness within 2 minutes the game must be post-poned and the injured player transported above ground and left on a public park bench while an anonymous 911 call is made for an ambulance. This is necessary to retain the required anonymity of the players. When the player recovers and the game can resume the player who made the debilitating shot is awarded 1 additional stroke for every hour it took for the injured player to recover his memory after regaining consciousness.
You are awarded a deduction if your ball takes out a rat or any other resident sewer animal.
I could go on, because the rules get pretty detailed, but I won’t. I think they are actually going to form a club and write by-laws and everything. I’m not really sure where they would build their club although I suspect it would be “tubular” in design.
It is truly amazing how something so simple as flushing a golf ball down a toilet can lead to the development of an entire subculture!
What a country!
© Dan Bode 2006

Trials and Failings

2011-05-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

My initial reaction to trials has always been rebellion. I think I can always say that I eventually learn my lesson in these trials, but it almost never comes quickly.
When I am faced with a trial that threatens myself, I am usually quicker to see the light. If, on the other hand, it threatens those I love I come to the conclusion of my lesson in a more pedestrian manner.
When someone I love is threatened it is my immediate reaction to do everything I can to fix it myself. Now I suppose this reaction, in and of itself, shouldn’t be considered bad. We should all be doing what we can to help each other. For me, however, it becomes more of an issue in that I fail to recognize when all of my resources have failed to obtain the desired result. I fail to recognize when I have failed. I have become an expert in whipping dead horses.
When I have reached the end of my resources, and failed to accomplish what I set out to do, I sit back and rail against my God for not doing it right, in spite of the fact that somewhere inside I am fully aware that it is I who has done it wrong. Pride is a harsh mistress.
When I come to the end of my limited resources, I am forced to admit to a sense of inadequacy that inspires in me an incredible fear. I fear not being “good enough”. If I am not a “good enough” husband and father my family will dislike me. If I am not a “good enough” friend no one will be interested in my needs as a person. If I am not a “good enough” employee I will be out on the streets with my family.
The paradox in all of this is that my definition of “good enough” sets a standard of expectation that no human is able to reach. In addition, I find that no one else sets standards that high for me, however they do set standards too high for themselves as I do. So we are all jumping for the bottom rung of the ladder that we ourselves have set too high to reach.
God also sets a high standard. He asks us to be holy, as He is holy. He asks us to become perfect. God has set for us a standard that we are unable to reach just as we do for ourselves. The unique, and crucial, difference between us and God is that He is willing and able to give us the means to attain His standard, while we constantly fail to meet our own. One of the reasons for the very existence of Christ is that He alone can lift us to the standard of God. He completes our journey toward perfection. A greater wonder still is that He allows us to reach that goal while we remain in our imperfection.
Human nature has always been to strive for control of our environment and our destiny. Rather than acknowledge God’s authority we strive against our own humanity. We seek to exceed our own limitations, and in the end, our entire lives become stories of unending failures that leave us weary, thirsty, struggling to draw our next breath. Our efforts are meant, like the Tower of Babel, to make us equal to God rather than to draw near to Him. We assume that we have some place as divine beings rather than acknowledge that we are subject to God’s divinity.
It is when I have to sit by and watch helplessly as one I love suffers that I become so acutely aware that I am not adequate to the task of reaching the standard I have set. My standard requires that I end the suffering of others, but my humanity proves that I am unable to do so.
This is where I learn the most. This is where I finally figure out that I ultimately control nothing. This is where I finally realize that my choice is to trust that God alone knows the ultimate good that will come out of a given situation, or to leave my faith in Him behind and live with the inadequacy of my own strength.
It’s a lesson I have learned before, I just wish I could remember it for the next time.
©Dan Bode 1999

Everything Changes

2011-05-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

I don’t suppose anyone can be expected to expect the unexpected.
Isn’t that why it’s called the unexpected?
I mean, everything changes right?
For some reason I recalled an incident, out of the many from my childhood, that proved this statement valid.
A few miles from my home there was an industrial park that always had some construction going on one of the lots. A necessary part of the construction process was moving excess dirt off of the site being prepared for any new building. There was one particular lot that, for whatever reason, was used as the dirt dumping ground. As the weather imposed itself on the dirt on this lot it was slowly transformed into a very hilly landscape. There were hills of a variety of sizes here from small bumps to the “main hill” as my friends and I used to call it.
The Main Hill was apparently the first load of dirt that was dumped on this lot. It was located fairly close to the center of the property and it was by far the highest hill there. Without diluting my memory of its size I would say its peak was probably about 30 feet high, which to a grade school kid is relatively high. The Main Hill had uniform slopes on all sides of about 40 degrees.
The thing about this park and this lot in particular was that it was on the route that we took almost every Saturday to get to our favorite candy store. It was the late ‘60’s and my allowance of .50 cents could buy a whole bag of assorted candy back then. I can still remember how mortified I was when they raised the price of my favorite candy bar, the Big Hunk, from a nickel to ten cents. They almost boosted it right out of my price range. I had to ask for a raise in my allowance. The cost of living affected even me. In addition to candy we would also get a canned drink called “Apple Beer”. It was basically carbonated apple juice, but when you poured it into a glass it looked like beer and formed a head like beer. We would slam a can down and have belching contests afterward. It made us feel manly.
Anyway, the usual routine that developed once Main Hill was created was to ride our bikes through this lot on the way to the candy store and ride over the hills. We would go over the smaller hills first and then launch our mobile assault on Main Hill once we worked up enough speed. We would pedal as fast as possible up one side and keep pedaling over the top and all the way down the other side. The speed was wonderfully exhilarating. Coming down the other side at full speed was kind of scary, because you knew if you had to stop for anything you simply could not. It was a great feeling.
One Saturday we were on our way to the candy store, and we approached the hill lot from the far end like we always did. I was in the lead. I had the biggest bike that my Grandma had bought for me used. I was the biggest kid and could always get the highest speeds. I hit the trail for the Main Hill going as fast as I could. We had been doing this for months. It was always the same. I built up speed and went up one side and down the other. This was always how it happened. Unfortunately I had never heard the phrase, “everything changes” at this point in my young life. It never occurred to me, or any of my friends for that matter, that anything could be different about this day.
I approached Main Hill going as fast as I could go. My friend Pete was about 15 feet behind me and Ron was right behind him. Over the top I went, and like always my tires left the ground for the briefest of moments, the wind whistled through my crew cut. It was here that I discovered a new facet of the construction process that I had heretofore no reason to believe existed.
When a new building is being constructed the ground is made level to accommodate an even surface on which the building is meant to stand. Usually, this requires excess dirt to be removed. What I had failed to realize was that sometimes dirt needs to be added to fill in existing holes. This in turn requires that the dirt has to be retrieved from somewhere. The lot on which we found ourselves playing daredevil happened to be “dirt source”. I found that no matter how much grass is growing on a hill, and no matter how well packed the dirt is, it can’t stand up to a bulldozer. I also discovered that Main Hill, being the largest hill on the lot, was also the most obvious source to go to for dirt.
We always approached Main Hill from the same side. Looking at it from our regular approach I could see no difference.
It wasn’t until I crested the hill that I saw that Main Hill was now only half the hill it used to be. It was simply gone!
A bulldozer had come in during the week and stolen the other half of Main Hill!
Worse yet was the fact that not only could I do nothing about it, but I didn’t even have time to express my outrage before I became completely and totally airborne! I let out a wordless scream as my tires left terra firma for the great unknown. I suppose I should clarify that the unknown did not refer to where I was going since the spot where I was going was rapidly filling my field of vision as I unwittingly flew down toward it. No, the unknown in this case was what my condition would be once I physically found that newly ploughed piece of earth with the combined mass of my bike and my body.
I ran across a quote once by Douglas Adams that says “The art of flying is to throw your self at the ground and miss.”
I can honestly say by this definition I failed utterly. I hit the ground with almost wild, yet reluctant, enthusiasm. I have vague memories of multiple impacts. The front tire of my bike hit first, and after that all I really remember is being tangled up in my bike frame as I tumbled over and over. I finally came to rest lying on my back. My leg had somehow worked itself between the spokes of the front wheel. The wheel was completely bent out of shape and the tire was flat. I looked up at the cliff that marked what was left of this side of Main Hill and saw that Pete and Ron had had enough time to stop the only way they could by basically dumping their bikes off to the side of the path at the top. They were lying on the ground looking down at me.
“Are you ok?!” yelled Ron.
“I’m not sure.” I said. I took a quick inventory of myself and found that I didn’t feel any serious pain. “I think I’m ok, but I’m stuck!”
My bike was lying on top of me and with my leg sticking through the spokes movement was not easy. Ron and Pete came down as fast as they could. I waited until they got there before I tried to move. I just laid there on my back contemplating the clouds drifting across the sky, and life in general. It was one of the few genuinely philosophical moments of my childhood. When your life passes before your eyes how does God make it so you actually see your whole life in a split second? Does it take longer when you get older, or is it always the same length of time? I’m gonna ask Him when I get to heaven.
Pete and Ron got there and helped extract me from the tangle of my bike. The spokes of the ruined front wheel were spread apart so I could pull my leg out. It was sore but still functional. Nothing broken. Lots of bruises were starting to form, though, and there were several areas on my body where swelling would be evident in the near future.
The guys sat down and just stared at me.
“Are you really ok?” asked Pete.
“Yeah.” I said.
“Man! You should have seen yourself! You just flew right out into the air! We heard you yell and had just enough time to stop before we went over too!” said Ron.
“Hey, look at your leg!” said Pete.
We looked down at my leg to see the imprint of the spokes very clearly impressed onto my calf. It would serve as my temporary badge of honor for surviving the ordeal.
We walked the rest of the way to the candy store. I wasn’t seriously bleeding and no bones were broken so there was never a thought in any of our minds that we should go immediately home. Nothing short of death would have kept us from our candy and Apple Beer. We ate our candy and drank our Apple Beer and belched. It had never felt better than it did that day.
When I got home with my damaged bike and told my mom what had happened (while wearing a carefully rehearsed stunned look on my face and with appropriate exclamatory embellishments from Pete and Ron), she was concerned enough to make me sit down and make sure there was indeed nothing broken. She brought us all milk and cookies which, was the ultimate cure all for me, and life was good again.
After my dad fixed my bike (I think even he was impressed with my survival after he saw the damage) we went back to the Hill. Another big chunk had been taken out. We could no longer attack the heights there, an activity which I was secretly happy to give up. We had to content ourselves with all the smaller hills. Whenever I get on a rollercoaster now I still feel a twinge when it goes over the hump that makes me feel weightless. I’m just never quite sure if I’m gonna miss the ground this time or not. Of course that doesn’t keep me off the roller coasters.
But because of that I discovered that, even though I may not have realized the full implications of this at the time, everything does indeed change. I also discovered that we are amazingly adaptable creations. And though we do not care for the change that may occur, we make our choices as to how we go on. But we do go on one way or another. I would have preferred that they had added dirt to the top of Main Hill rather than taking it away, but I survived and that is how I measured success in those days. Back then survival was all I needed to be concerned about. I could sit in the back seat and let my parents drive never having to worry about the idiot who cut me off. My responsibilities were limited. So nowadays when I remember the Charge of Main Hill, it is still a good memory despite the pain.
Heck, I’m just glad I survived my childhood.
©Dan Bode 2003

For My Mother -

2011-05-07T13:32:00.000-07:00

It was Mother’s Day, 1980. The second one since I had become a Christian.
My mother had died seven years before, but it was this day that I began to understand the impact she had on my life.
I was new to the church I was attending, the one where I eventually met and married my wife and raised our daughters. I was speaking to a lady after church explaining in one of those awkward situations where I was asked what I was doing for my mother for Mother’s Day. When I explained my situation there was often a brief silence followed by, “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know!” I would then try to give them an out by asking what they were doing for Mother’s Day and wish them well.
This time it was different.
This lady asked, “Was she a Christian?”
I thought about this in that second before I answered. Being a Christian had taken on a new meaning for me. I now understood that is was so much more than going to church every Sunday, and growing up in the church “culture”. I had wandered spiritually for many years before finally understanding the differences between “belief” and “commitment”, “observation” and “relationship”. When I was asked that question I looked back on all the expressions of faith and belief from my mother I could remember. I remembered the stories and plays she wrote for church productions and the themes that ran through them. I remembered the times she would answer my questions, which more often than not had nothing to do with God (or at least I didn’t think so) with, “Because Jesus would (or wouldn’t) want us to do that.” I understood that her expressions of faith were not superficial answers. Her faith was intimately intertwined in her life.
So when I was asked that question, “Was she a Christian?”, I could answer without reservation that, yes, Virginia Bode, my mother, was a Christian. She gave me the seeds of faith that germinated years later and opened my eyes on my past, my spiritual heritage.
“Yes, she was.” I replied.
It was at that very moment that I remember starting to think of my mother in a way that had simply never occurred to me before. It was something I had taken for granted without realizing its true impact. My mother had Faith!
There are times when someone says something to me, and I know it is absolutely Correct. It actually fits somewhere in my soul. It is one sentence that actually changes me.
Her next statement was one of those.
“Well then, you know that she was always praying for you. That’s why you’re here now.”
That one sentence rocked me to the core.
This woman who barely knew me, and didn’t know any of my family was right.
As sure as my mother was a Christian, she was praying for her children. I suspect probably even more for me given the trouble I had a tendency to cause.
I was there because of the prayers of my mother. Even then she could reach me.
I will never fully understand the commitment she made to me, or adequately appreciate the sacrifices she made for me. But I do know now without a doubt that even though I was just a boy when she died it was she who made me a better man.
I will always be grateful to that lady in church for that short conversation. I praise God for that moment when He let me know that my mother knew where I was. That I had finally read that unwritten line in her will where she left me her faith, my legacy.
It has always been one of my greatest regrets that my wife, and children, and now my grandchildren, never knew my mother. I can only hope that they see enough of her in me to recognize her when they meet her in heaven.
When I left church that day I went home and wrote my mother a letter. I’ve reproduced it here. My writing style has changed quite a bit since then, but I’m leaving it as originally written so you see the sentiment more clearly through the eyes of that day.

Dearest Mother, 5/11/80
Since you’ve been gone, there have been so many things I’ve thought to tell you, so much love I’ve wanted to give you. Recalling the commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother”, I realize how many times I did not honor you.
All the times I’ve wanted to call you to share something with you, only to remember that speaking to you is no longer as easy as a phone call, all those times are not easy.
The time when your prayers were finally answered, and I finally made your God my God, I wanted so to speak with you, to tell you that His love was my love, to come to you and give you the honor that I had never given.
I felt so empty when I found I couldn’t.
Yet I know that it was because of you that I had finally reached that point.
How joyful I was when I looked back and was able to see God’s hand upon you as you patiently taught me all that He had shown you.
How immeasurably happy I was to know that you are there with Him.
I thank you dearest Mother.
I thank you for nurturing me in your womb, for giving me birth, for guiding me as I lived my life, for sharing Him with me.
And Mother, know that because you did share Him with me, when He comes again, I will be able to stand beside your empty grave and love you and honor you as no child has ever loved or honored their mother.
Dearest Mother, I love you.

Your Loving Son,
Daniel

Promises, Promises...

2011-05-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

A promise is a promise is a promise.
The strength of a promise is based on the commitment of the one making it.
It is made without regard to the forces that may be brought to bear to try to make me break it. And those forces will be brought to bear.
The moment I make a promise everything that could be a threat to my fulfillment of it is automatically emphasized. All around me I see the roadblocks that would keep me from reaching my goal. Too often I focus so intently on not breaking the promise that I forget the promise itself. I get so caught up in thinking about the responsibilities I have taken on in relation to the promise that I fulfill it simply out of fear of the consequences if I fail. I forget the benefits and impact of a promise fulfilled.
There is a saying that says promises are made to be broken. That is simply a lie the world tells me to accommodate my failure.
That is not to say that promises aren’t broken.
I was recently challenged to list 10 promises that I have broken. It was a process made all the more painful by the realization that I could easily have listed many more than 10. Often a promise made is really made to more than one person so that once broken the failed promise impacts all to which it was implied. But the exercise made me realize how glibly promises are often made. A promise doesn’t always begin with the words “I promise”. A promise is made sometimes by our actions, like a regularly scheduled date. Sometimes it is a result of our traditions, like my Grandmother’s birthday cakes. Everyone always got a birthday cake from my Grandma with a cake ornament in the middle to which was attached a string with little prizes attached. I knew when I pulled the decoration off there was treasure to be had underneath. Sometimes a promise is assumed based on our knowledge of the person making it. I have friends who will not make a promise unless they are absolutely certain they can fulfill it. It would take their death or the death of someone close to them to keep them from keeping it. Regardless of the circumstance or conditions we expect that which we consider a promise to be fulfilled. When it is not then we deal with the heartbreak and disappointment accordingly. The promise breaker may not even be aware of his/her failure yet our trust in that individual is based on his/her consistency in fulfilling their promises. Who we are to others is often defined by the promises we make, or become, to them. So it is not the promise itself that reflects our hope, but the means by which, or the person in whom, it is fulfilled.
Promises are made without definite knowledge of how they will be threatened, but with the knowledge that they can be threatened. If we knew ahead of time the trials we may face because we make a promise we may not go ahead with it. But the fact that we make a promise must include our commitment to its fulfillment regardless of the challenge.
I think we grow into our ability to keep our promises. When the promise is new and young so is the strength of our commitment. As the promise endures so must our commitment to it.
My wife has had to deal with some severe medical problems with lasting effects for the last several years. Some time ago someone asked me how she was doing. As I detailed all that my wife had gone through she said something that, while complimentary, made me wonder if I am disconnected from the rest of the world.
She said, “You are a good man. It’s amazing that you are still married with all that you’ve gone through. Most men would have left.”
Now that statement probably came out of this woman’s personal experience, but I have a hard time imagining that I am the exception. Most men I know would never think about leaving their wives because they became ill. Our marriage vows incorporate every type of circumstance that could be viewed as a threat: “for better, for worse, for richer for poor, in sickness and in health…” It seems pretty clear to me.
The marriage vows are a promise.
My love is a promise. In one of his sonnets Shakespeare wrote,

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not Love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever Love’d.”

Every relationship has its rocky times. There are days when we may not want to be around each other very much, but that does not diminish our love for each other. Those times are painful precisely because we love each other. Those moments are very brief because we are committed to keeping our promise to each other.
When Sue and I first began to talk about marriage we started to examine our relationship more closely. We talked about the impact of our potential commitment to one another. With stars in our eyes we said even if one of us was paralyzed we would remain fully committed to each other and care for each other through it all and life would just be wonderful. Well, now reality has set in for us, and while neither of us is paralyzed there are some serious long term health issues being dealt with in our household. They are having a significant impact on all of our lives. But guess what? “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds”. The promise we made still stands. Neither illness nor conflict will be allowed to defeat it. There is no easy way out, nor is there a need for one. Our commitment, our promise, is greater than our pain, our trials, and our deficiencies. To break the promise opens the floodgate on doubt and exposes us to violation, mistrust and even hate. It can bring about the complete perversion of the true intent of the promise. Promise requires sacrifice. The moment it is made I have determined that it will, by nature, supercede other commitments. A promise is something we sacrifice other things for, because what it represents to us is more important than our own immediate need. It gives us an often prophetic look into a future without it whenever we are reminded of it.

God has made many promises to man. He has not broken one of them.
He promised Abraham that he would be the father of a nation, and gave him his son Isaac. Then he told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on the altar.
Think of all the conflicts this created.
God Promised Abraham he would be a father of a nation.
As a means of fulfilling that promise God gave him a son.
Now God is seemingly taking away that Promise.
Herein lays the power of this Promise. The power of this Promise is that it was believed.
Abraham did not doubt that God would fulfill His Promise, so even when what God told him to do appeared to contradict everything he knew about God he still prepared himself to do it. He knew what God could do, and what He said He would do, and he never doubted. That’s not to say that he was not subject to anguish in making that decision. The Bible does not tell us the thoughts that were going through Abraham’s mind during that time, but because he was human and loved his son I think it is safe to make the assumption that he was in pain over this.
But here again we see the power of this Promise.
His faith in what God had told him reconciled whatever conflicts he faced. His faith in the power of the Promise of God overcame his agony.
Isaac was not a spectator in this either. Isaac was young. He was strong enough to haul the wood up the mountain for the sacrifice. He was aware of his place in the Promise. When Isaac was born Abraham was 102 years old, so we know Isaac was the stronger of the two. When Abraham bound Isaac in preparation for the sacrifice and laid him across the altar he could have easily resisted. He could have fought his father, but Isaac too, knew the power of the Promise God had made. He had the faith of his father. He knew that because God had made the promise it would be fulfilled, and so he sacrificed himself willingly.
God provided another sacrifice, but nothing could prove Isaac and Abraham’s commitment to the Promise more than their willingness to give what was most dear to them to fulfill it.
So this is what I learned about my Promise:
God is fully committed to any Promise He makes.
When I make a promise before Him, when I invoke His name in a Promise that is clearly within His will, then He is completely committed to meet me in the fulfillment of that promise. The only point in which that Promise can fail is in my own weakness. The responsibility for the failure of this Promise will be mine alone, because God’s commitment to me has never faltered. And so I must also believe that whatever trial, pain, or conflict I face due to a promise I have made before Him will be overcome by the power of His Promise to me.
My love is a Promise proclaimed in His presence. I will not allow it to fail due to my weakness.
In 1 Corinthians 13 we are told many things about the love that endures: “love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous, love does not brag, and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails…” (Italics mine).
Every aspect of love that is named in this list is a worthy trait, but the last two mentioned go hand in hand and seem to me to be the foundation of the whole concept of love.
Love endures, and it never fails.
If we in our human weakness fail in any aspect of keeping our love pure, for instance by being jealous, we can trust that true love has been imbued with the strength of God who created it. Even though we may have momentarily failed in keeping that love pure, God’s commitment to it has never failed, and He overrides our foolishness with the essence of His love. In doing this He allows me to keep my promise, because at that point, when I take on His commitment to my promise it becomes His promise too. With a commitment to the Promise like God gives to me, how can I be silent with the joy and gratitude it inspires in me? His commitment to the Promise is so great that when we give our life to Him He holds it in safe keeping and gives His only Son as a sacrifice that should have been us. A life was demanded as payment to fulfill His promise, and His Promise was to give us life. So He kept His promise by providing a sacrifice of His own.
His love never fails.
He keeps His Promises. So also must I keep mine.
And so, as I go on in this world, with every thing that is thrown at me, with every thrust of every sword this world impales me on to force my failure, I will know that though I die the Promise lives on, for it is no longer just mine, but His as well.
He is Love.
Love Never Fails.
The Promise lives on.
©Dan Bode 2002

Worship Defined

2011-04-28T11:24:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking a lot lately about the quality of my worship. When I begin to think about one aspect of something it usually leads to a process which causes me to think about all other aspects of the same thing. So, as I thought about the quality of my worship I had to go on to think about the concept of worship as a whole.
Worship can be directed at anything or anyone, and often is. We as humans were created to worship, and if we are not properly directed to the truly deserving object of worship we will fill that need by giving ourselves to something completely incapable of accepting it. Worship, in its truest form, is voluntary. It is a gift to be accepted, and cannot be coerced or it is not worship. In the same way worship based on addiction is not truly worship. Worship is given without thought of what we will get in return. These same qualities should mean that worship can only be offered to a sentient being, yet it is one of our greatest human failings that we offer it to simple objects of our desire with the thought that we will somehow be compensated.
So in the end our worship becomes more about us than it does about anything else. It becomes a means to satisfy our own need instead of the gift it was intended to be.
I am reminded of the first line of a book titled “The Purpose Driven Life”, by Rick Warren.
No matter if you like the book itself the first line is so applicable that you cannot help but wonder what else he’s going to say after that.
The very first sentence of chapter one states this:
“It’s not about you.”
And that is the essence of Worship properly directed.
My problem with my worship began when I unconsciously began to treat it as a form of entertainment.
I ostensibly come to share my love of the risen, living Lord, Jesus Christ, with others of the same belief.
The reality of my presence there became something entirely different, and wrong.
I came to realize that I was sitting there waiting for everything to penetrate the walls of my discontent. I offered nothing. I refused to accept any responsibility for my worship.
We are called in scripture to “present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God which is your spiritual service of worship.” (Romans 12:1).
Worship is a sacrifice, and I am considered an acceptable sacrifice, therefore, all of my life is an acceptable sacrifice of worship.
He wants it all, the good and the bad. He wants our sin and our bitterness as well as our happiness. Christ says that He will take our burdens for a reason. He wishes us to be able to reach a point in our living worship; worship that occurs in every moment of our lives, in which we can reach that level of joy that occurs when we focus exclusively on Him.
The worship service is not meant to entertain. It is not even meant to educate.
The worship service is a place in which we can corporately offer sacrifice together.
The musicians offer their sacrifice with the music they play. That is what musicians have to offer Him as a result of the gifts He has blessed them with. That’s what our gifts are for.
The rest of the body joins in that sacrifice.
The pastor offers his or her sacrifice in the message they bring. The sermon is his sacrifice to God, and it is not my place to criticize it unless it is contrary to scripture. To sit there and say, “so and so really needs to hear this”, is merely a pretense to avoid applying our convictions to our own lives. Search for the meaning that applies to you instead, and live by example for other eyes to see. It is not my place to apply His word to someone else. I am not the Holy Spirit for anyone’s life.
If you do not think you are “getting enough” from the sermon remember that you have a responsibility in worship. You yourself are obligated to dig into the Word to establish and maintain the proper relationship with Christ. It is not up to anyone else to spoon feed you. It is for you to be discerning. In the book of Acts when the people of Berea heard the gospel for the first time they took time to study the scriptures before they accepted (Acts 17:11). They thought about what they were going to believe.
Others fulfill their sacrifice in other ways and with other gifts.
I was attending a worship service at my brother’s church several years ago. There was a young man there who was an usher. His name was Robert. He appeared to have cerebral palsy, or a similar condition, that affected his ability to walk normally. When he walked he looked as though he might fall over with each step, he was overjoyed to be there. Everyone he saw got a hug whether he knew them or not, including myself.
After the service began the time came to collect the offering, and the ushers came forward.
To my surprise one of them was Robert. He held an offering plate in his hand as he came forward. He still looked like he might fall over as he walked, but as I watched I realized his steps were as sure as mine ever were. He was not bitter over what I saw as a disability. In fact I never saw him without a smile on his face.
I never saw or talked to him again, but I have never forgotten him. His sacrifice was complete and undiluted. It was as though it was a natural extension of his life.
His worship was what he did, and my opinion of his ability meant nothing because he was there to offer his worship to God regardless of anyone else’s sense of “rightness”, or “perfection”. His act of worship was pure and whole and to this day it puts mine to shame.
I once read a book in which the writer used an exercise to help him concentrate more fully on God and His will for his life. He imagined that God Himself was in the air he was breathing. He imagined that the essence of God filled his lungs. I tried to imagine the same thing. To think of the possibility of allowing God to fill me so completely as to be completely dependent on Him to sustain me physically as well as spiritually.
It follows logically that if I “breathe God” then the words I speak with the essence of God should naturally be in praise of Him or, at the very least, express His will for me in some way. It occurs more often than not, unfortunately, that my words are my own, with little enough thought given to what God intends.
There is an element of choice in the worship we offer that centers around the words “can” and “will”.
To say “I can” implies that I have the ability to do something.
To say “I will” implies that I choose to apply that ability.
And somewhere between the two lies the word “should” that implies the knowledge of what would be appropriate in my own worship.
God gives us a choice in our worship. I have a choice in my own worship, but none in the manner that others worship, and therefore no qualifications to judge theirs. If someone sings too loud or off key it doesn’t matter. Neither the quality of my voice nor the style of music is the issue.
The only valid concern in worship is the quality of my sacrifice.
When a child cries in worship we grow irritated at how it “disturbs the flow” if the child goes on too long without the parent taking them out. But if our worship is “not about us”, and we truly seek to focus on Christ, we should be able to continue in our worship. Do any of us honestly believe that God is offended by the cry of a baby? Would He demand that we require a parent to leave a worship service, because a baby was crying in just the way he or she was created to do?
Did David worship God any less during his fight with Goliath? Or Noah as he built the ark amidst the jeering crowd? How much easier should it be then for us to focus on God during worship with only a child’s cry in the background?
Why do you think Christ asks for your burdens? He asks because they are a part of you, and as such are important to Him. Your cries of frustration and pain are important to Him. He wants to take them from us in order to allow us the opportunity to worship Him fully.
We were created to worship Him. When we worship we are doing what we were created for.
We need to worship as though we know it is the one thing we were made to do.You might think since we were made for it that it would be the easiest thing on earth, and you would be right; this is how it should be. That is how we were in our original created state as humans. Before the Fall our human nature was to be fully focused on God.
After the apple was eaten our focus shifted to ourselves, and this is the reason our worship is now considered a sacrifice. True worship requires me to make a conscious effort to turn my back on the mirror, and pursue my original nature and purpose. It requires me to focus on the specific person of God rather than leaving my attention hanging for the next pretty bauble to capture me.
Instead of thinking about what we are not getting in our worship experience, we should be asking what God is not getting. Only I know what I am holding back from Him.
What are your expectations in worship? Remember that it is not your expectations that matter here, but His. Even though I may be there involved in a group, the act of my worship is still dependent on my individual personal relationship with Christ. When I am sitting there in worship it should be as though Christ is sitting in a chair directly in front of me, the complete focus of all my senses. Even though I am there with others I am still alone in the sacrifice of worship. I still have the choice of what I give Him.

Our God is not a “beggar” King longing for the scraps and crumbs that we leave at the table of our worship. His existence does not depend on whether we believe in Him or not. He wants it all, and in the context of worship that is “not about me” what He receives should be all that is me. If He is truly all sufficient, as we believers so often profess, then He is worthy of our complete attention.
We live in a world that demands that we pursue our individual desires at any cost. The cost we pay is usually the death of relationships that fall by the wayside when our pursuit of happiness becomes too frantic, and we find ourselves alone amidst the crowd of others doing the same thing. Then we blame God for our problem never realizing that if we had truly understood that it was never about us, it wouldn’t have happened.
We must deal with the truth in worship if it is to be true worship. God wrote the Truth on our hearts so we would always have access to what He offers, but we do everything we can to deny that truth. We wish to live as we choose and in avoiding His truth we live a lie and we become the masters of our own deception.
When we come before Him in worship the lie is more visible than at any other time, and so we deflect our lack of true worship with criticism of someone else’s worship rather than recognize the deficiencies of our own.
Worship is a result of relationship, and the quality of one directly affects the quality of the other.
I once heard a quote that I think sums this all up very nicely. From a man named Peter Forsyth:
“The first duty of every soul is to find not its freedom, but its master.”
My worship identifies my master to everyone else, and He remains my master whether I am in church or not.
My greatest need is to let down the walls and actively seek Him.
Because it was never meant that He should come to me.
The choice for relationship with Him, and therefore my worship of Him, has always been mine.
©Dan Bode 2008

In His Image

2011-04-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

In His Image.
What does it mean to be made in His image?
Are there scars upon my brow, or was it sculpted to don a crown of thorns? Was my side made to accept the spear? Were my hands created to receive the point of a nail? Or are there scars to show they were there?
No.
My wounds were healed before I had them. My sins forgiven without a memory of their occurrence. And yet I bear a cross daily. I still suffer a small portion for my responsibility in my sin. Yet He endured to insure my survival, my freedom.
What is the image of God?
He is perfect. Am I? No.
Can I be? Only when He perfects me. Perfection is a process.
Isn’t it odd how the crown of thorns, when we picture it on His head, seems to fit so well, even having been pushed down upon His head? As though the thorns were grown to fit His brow alone? As though, because of His great love for us, His very flesh knew He took it willingly?
Did the nails pierce His hands and feet and separate the tissues as though they were meant to be there?
I see His pain, and I wonder at His endurance, and then I find His peace.
Like Thomas I doubt Him, and I doubt what I see and what I touch. Every part of my life is a process of eliminating my doubt. I am shown repeatedly that I am loved, that I am cared for, and because of this I discover that while His crucifixion is a daily occurrence in my life, so is Easter, and all I can ever hope to be is His image.
A mere reflection.
A shadow.
For only Christ is Truth and Love Incarnate.
The sad fact of the matter is that even though God has done so much, I still try to take it back. While God’s word on the issue is final, because it is indeed “finished”, I keep trying to do it over until “I get it right” once and for all. I don’t want to be the cause of His pain because I am convinced that His sacrifice leaves me in His debt, and I can’t stand that! I hate debt! I hate obligation! Why? Because it forces me to admit my incredible, all consuming need for a Savior.
“by his wounds we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5
So do not come to me for comfort in your pain for I stand useless in shock, in horror, in awe and in love at His sacrifice. I have no words that would be adequate to match His actions on our behalf. Only His open wounds can fulfill our need, and He is waiting for us to touch them. The greatest joy in Easter is that He is greater than all the pain of my sins to kill him. Every wound He took is one more I don’t have to bear.
And what that proves, in the end, is that there is not enough blood in my veins to cover the sins of the world.
©Dan Bode 2004

One Last Breath

2011-04-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

One last breath.
Everyone has one.
That final exhalation that marks the demise of our physical form.
The moment that often defines the historical impact of an individuals’ entire life.
How many deathbed quotes have you heard or read about? It seems as though every historically famous figure has been documented as having some profound last words that usually define their entire life. This leads me to think that I’ll have to come up with something really cool to say for myself, only because I’m secretly worried that the only comment I’ll have is something about a water stain on a ceiling tile or something.
The thing is; we cannot rewrite our personal history with one sentence. Our last words will not redefine our lives in the eyes of those who know us. We cannot undo all of our mistakes at the end. We leave what we leave.
There are no “do overs”.
And yet we have hope.
When we give ourselves to God we do not merely give what we are, but also what we were, and what we can be. Each of these is influenced by who or what we give them to.
Christ is the Lord of everything, including our past. The influence of our past has a much different impact on our present, and our future, when we allow it to be seen in the light of His forgiveness.
My last breath will know His love, regardless of the words carried upon it.
But that’s just me.
My last breath will have no eternal impact for anyone else.

The last breath of Christ was the final mortal exhalation of divine breath on this earth.
In that one agonized cry He gave the words, “It is finished.”
And while it may not have been loudly spoken, it was very clearly heard.
Those three words were the clarion call of Heaven, and the death knell of Satan!
His last words were the beginning of my life, and what made me complete.
The curtain was torn! The door was opened!
His last words were just the beginning for you and me.
“It is finished!” John 19:30
These words indicate the end of a process.
It means Christ knew when He had suffered enough.
He was saying that the process was now, in this very moment, complete! Somehow, by means completely beyond any human capability to understand, God had a divine equation by which He determined what amount of suffering would be enough to save us. Not only did He know, but it was all determined by Him. There was a point that He would not go beyond, because only He was the one to determine the process by which we would be redeemed. God determined the end point because Satan could not be allowed to have the last word in the process. Satan could not be allowed to be in any semblance of control.
Christ had a reason for living and dying when, where and how He did it. It is imperative for us to understand that He did it by His own choice. His only motivation was His love for us, not any threat of Satan nor any human claim of independence. Every single aspect of my salvation is provided by Christ because He chose to give it.
We have always underestimated the willingness of God to sacrifice for us, and just as surely underestimated our need to sacrifice for Him.
“Into Your hands I commit My spirit.” Luke 23:46
Satan could only look over his shoulder in shock and fear in his new found understanding that he had not taken Christ’s life after all. Christ gave it up willingly in His own time.
Satan never understood the rules. His failure was already determined.
Satan has always been completely aware that we are not worthy of God’s attention, but he was always just as unaware of the lengths God would go to make up for our lack. It was for exactly this reason that God determined the appropriate method to give us the qualities necessary to make us worthy. There was nothing we could do to earn it, and nothing Satan could do to keep it from us.

Nothing is ever free. Someone always pays a price.

And so Easter begins with Christ’s last breath,
which becomes my first breath of heaven…
©2011 Dan Bode

Believing

2011-04-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

“I’ll be back in three days.”
That was the essential truth of Christ’s final night with His disciples, even though He’d told them before. They had all been with Him for the better part of three and a half years. They knew His personal habits, His quirks, His personal preferences in His day to day activities. He always spoke truth even when unpleasant, and this time was no different from any other in that respect. He was telling them that the “Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”(Mark 8:31)
So He told them the truth, but what if they had really believed Him when He first told them? How would their lives have been different?
I think it’s fairly obvious they didn’t believe His statement. If they had believed, Peter would have had no need to deny Him three times that night. Thomas would not have needed to touch His sundered flesh, or reach inside the gaping hole in His side. It was essential, I think, for them to see Christ still alive in spite of the wounds He still retained. He was not a healed risen Lord. He lived in spite of the wounds inflicted on Him outside of the constraints of human flesh. Organs were torn apart. They could not function. Yet He lived. God provided life even in the face of death as the only possible result of these wounds.
If they had truly believed Christ from the beginning they would never have needed to lock themselves away in fear of the authorities. If they had believed they would have had no fear of anything.
But the other half of the equation is simply this: Since they did not believe their ultimate subsequent faith was strengthened by the conceptions it had to overcome. They had to finally and completely understand that God was able and willing to overcome human limitations for their sake, because in the end they would need to do the same.
If they had really believed Him they would have understood His sacrifice. They had to see death conquered from the human side.
Assuming His victory would have rendered it meaningless.
Suddenly, what Christ had been telling them became reality. There was no sense of symbolism, or metaphor. There was no sense of ceremony, or fantasy.
One reality had been replaced by another that was completely outside of their experience.
They had always said they believed, but they knew what they had seen.
They saw the blood and pain. They saw the cross. They knew there was no coming back from what they, being human, knew to be final.
They knew what they saw with their own eyes, and they knew it was true. Up to that point they only believed in themselves and the knowledge they had accumulated during their lifetimes.
Their unbelief provides the contrast between what we have, and what we need.
That is the difference between stated belief and actual belief.
Between stated faith and actual faith.
Between fantasy and reality.
Between the life we want to live, and the life we actually live.
It is a decision to live up to a certain potential.
The decision to live as a potential hypocrite, or a potential martyr.
Each way of life has the potential to lead to either way of death whether you are called specifically to it or not.
We tend to think that the disciples had about three and a half years to figure it out, but it was really only three days.
They had three days to figure out if they were going to live by what He said was true, or continue to live life based on the failure of their own beliefs in fear of man. Because everything He had said and done was leading up to that period after His death.
There was one thing that the disciples got right about Jesus.
They understood that Jesus was going to do Something Big that they didn’t have to do anything about.
They weren’t doing anything and they were ok with that.
They didn’t mind that Jesus was going be the front man in a revolution (they thought). The last thing they wanted was to be on the receiving end of the first blow struck.
When they thought they knew what was coming they didn’t mind following what they believed in, because they still believed in themselves.
When Jesus was doing what they thought He was doing, they were happy.
It was when He left the path they thought they had been on that they weren’t so sure about their own actions anymore. I think they looked back on their actions over the previous three years and said to themselves,
“Maybe we’ve been stirring the wrong pot after all.”
The First Communion occurred before the Crucifixion.
When Christ broke the bread, He knew the pain of His broken body. (“This is my body, given for you…”)
When He poured the wine did He knew the blood He would shed. (“This is my blood…which is poured out for many..)
Since this came prior to the Crucifixion it is no wonder then that the disciples were so thoroughly confused.
They thought they were celebrating the Passover; a ceremony commemorating their survival. What was this talk of betrayal and death?
How could this pinnacle of the most significant week of their lives turn so quickly into what it did, particularly in light of His entrance to Jerusalem just the week before?
And then, against all expectation, He died.

But then He rose.
It was, again, the last thing they expected.
I can just imagine them thinking:
“He spends all this time speaking in parables and then goes literal on us?!”
Look at the contrast of their lives before and after their belief.
When Peter saw Him on the shore after He had risen he jumped in the water to swim to shore rather than wait for the boat. The minute he entered the water I think he yearned to break the surface just so his eyes could rest on Him again. When his feet touched the stones on the shore he felt nothing, for his need to see the Living Christ overwhelmed the need for any other comfort.
They preached openly in spite of the opposition of the authorities they originally hid from. They endured prison and torture. They joined the ranks of Hebrews “great cloud of witnesses” because they ultimately believed Him to the exclusion of all others, receiving the faith He offered.
Judas actively betrayed Him, and Peter actively denied Him, but both the betrayal and the denial had the same effect of cutting them off from God. These are important events, but I think the more important issue is that someone returned. I have to wonder which was the greater sorrow to Jesus; that Judas betrayed Him, or that Judas never gave Christ the chance to forgive him?
Faith is a gift of God; belief is a choice of man.
His gift is giving us Someone to believe in.
Faith in Christ means that we should believe everything He believes about us. He believes we are worth much, and because He made it so we must know that it is true. The logic is inescapable, yet we’d much rather see ourselves as worthless. It’s easier to accept our own failure when we don’t have to see how far we’ve fallen. It’s easier to be a victim than it is to take responsibility.
It’s easier in our own mental condition to say “Oops.”, and just move on than it is to acknowledge the pain we’ve caused someone else and ask forgiveness, in addition to asking Him to save us as well.

“Lord I believe. Help my unbelief!” He has overcome the greatest obstacle to my belief by conquering death, so the greater my faith has the potential to be.

In so many ways it all boils down to the difference between the words “say” and “do”.
Every day I make a determination about what I believe. I make a choice about what actions I will take in light of my Christian beliefs, and I make a choice to defy those beliefs as well.
This is the point of my sin.
The professions I make with what I say and what I do are often entirely different. Sometimes it may even be questionable even when my words and actions match simply because my motivations for those actions are known only to God and myself.
The struggle is completely internal, and usually unseen.
The disciples couldn’t keep any secrets from Christ. They weren’t getting away with anything when they sinned. Christ knew what they expected of Him, and He went so far as to tell them what they could expect of Him. They simply failed to understand it, or perhaps more accurately they chose to understand it in the way they wished it to be.
The disciples, just as we ourselves, learned to live by their own version of the truth.
And so it happens that the disciples and I have a great deal more in common than I would like to admit. I often wonder if the disciples were chosen solely as examples of the potential failures in our human condition that lead to the conflicts of faith that we all experience.
They made the choice to follow Him, and then despite having all their sins identified in His presence, they made the choice to stay as well.
Why?
When my natural tendency is to run from anyone who would identify my shame, why would they stay with Him?
Christ pursued the disciples. He approached them and said “Follow me.”
And if they are examples of human failings, they are also examples of saving Grace.
They are examples of the result of succumbing to the relentless pursuit of the Holy.
I am like them in my failings, but I am as much like them in the potential of what I can be, because the Source of strength involved, and its purpose, are the same.
Why do I stay?
Grace.
Forgiveness.
Mercy.
I stay, because He stays.
He came back for me!
And for that reason alone I can say on Easter with full conviction…
I Believe!©2008 Dan Bode

A Splash of Blood

2011-03-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

I was walking to work one day, and I noticed something on the sidewalk. I had actually seen it before, but never attached any significance to identifying it.
It was a stain left by some dark liquid that had splashed and dried. There was a trail of drops leading away from it back up the sidewalk for a few feet where it ended. It was interrupted by a footprint that cut across the trail. I had seen it for a few days prior to this, but in my hurry to get to my desk each morning I had given it almost no thought. Why today it caught my eye I have no idea, but as I passed it again this day I noticed the color of the substance. It was a deep, reddish brown.
I stopped in shocked realization that I was looking at blood!
How many people had walked past or over it every day and given it no notice? How and why had this that had passed through someone’s veins been so haphazardly spilled? It was no small amount. If I had a wound that allowed that great a loss I would surely seek help with it. There was no way to tell how this occurred, and yet my mind called up violent images that seemed unavoidable. How could blood be spilled after all without violence in such a public place without edge or forceful impact? And then I had to ask how having spilled could it be so easily ignored, as I had in fact done? How could I not have seen it for what it was?
It had to follow, of course, that my thoughts would lead me to Someone else’s blood, also shed with violence, but violence that ended in glorious purpose. And just as so many of us had walked over this splash on the sidewalk, how many have waded through rivers of the stuff that rage across our lives grasping for our attention only to be studiously ignored in an effort to maintain our self determined path at cross purposes to the Truth? What does it take for God to get my attention?
Just who am I living for anyway?
In the process of the Hebrew sacrificial rites that ended when the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, one of the final acts was the pouring of the “drink offering”. Thus Paul, when he felt his death was near, wrote that he was being “poured out as a drink offering” (2Tim. 4:6). But just as Christ was the final sacrifice, so His blood is the final blood shed for our redemption, as He said at the last supper , “Drink from it all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” (Matt. 26:27b-28) And yet as final as that act is the flow continues at whatever rate is necessary to cover the sins of this world, for where sin is grace abounds.
What all this means is that we must let go, dive in, “go with the flow”, drowning and dying to live again.
And it all started one night long ago in Jerusalem.
Satan called upon Death, his most powerful weapon, to finally put a stop to the machinations of grace which Christ had begun. Death was a warrior at whose feet everyone had ultimately fallen. Death took Christ up in his giant fist and began to squeeze the life out of Him.
This Blood, this stuff of eternal life began to flow one drop at a time.
The whip scourges the smooth skin of Christ’s back.
Drip.
Death is confused by this sudden pain he has never felt before, caused by the touch of the blood of this Lamb.
The crown of thorns is beaten down upon His brow.
Drip.
Death begins to squeeze harder and harder trying to stanch the flow.
The nails are driven through Christ’s wide open hands.
Drip. Drip.
His body is taken down from the cross.
Death has used up all his strength to vanquish the enemy of Hell.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The stone is rolled away.
Death collapses, defeated, destroyed, a useless and empty husk.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Death has himself died, and from his lifeless grasp Christ has risen!
“O death, where is your victory?”(1Cor. 15:55)
Thomas places his doubting fingers in Christ’s open wounds.
Dripdripdripdrip….
The apostles live and die for the life He gave them.
Dripdripdripdripdripdripdripdripdrip…..
And as every river starts with just a trickle so this trickle becomes a torrent raging across time that no force of darkness can ever hope to stop, divert or slow.
“…this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many…”
He left a trail of blood that you can miss only after you have seen it first, and actively choose to turn away, but the Word was made flesh and He refuses to be ignored!
God could never again be relegated to the back of our minds as a mere “concept” anymore. He created a hallowed ground in every human heart; a holy of holies where only He can tread. His presence there suddenly made one thing obvious:
A choice must be made.
Always a choice.
Live or die.
You have a 50/50 chance of survival if you’re merely looking at the odds, but if you choose life it’s a 100% guarantee.
It seems a simple choice, but we make it difficult when we think we have a lot to lose. We try to hang on to what we have by shedding our own blood to pay the price for our freedom, but all I have is as nothing against the payment of this debt. And the only thing I have to show for my efforts are the scars left from where I’ve ironically slashed my own wrists trying to save myself.
Every year we celebrate Easter. Like many other things the true purpose of this occasion has been overshadowed by meaningless customs involving eggs, chocolate bunnies and new hats.
But some of us will remember.
I tend to look at it as two distinct events; His Passion and His resurrection. In reality I should see them as one. His death and resurrection were a single process that qualified Him as the complete sacrifice once and for all. Both events had to occur in order for His life to be enough to tip the scales in my favor.
Some only see the inside of a church at Christmas and Easter, and I suppose if you are only going to come twice a year those are the times for it. But I have to wonder if you aren’t hearing the same message both times.
At Christmas you hear the announcement of the angelic host:
He Lives!
Throughout Christ’s entire life on earth He prepares us for the show of strength that only He could perform. The one thing we take most for granted in Christ’s existence. For the Point of Easter, the Bottom Line, the Final Act is really the same that we hear at Christmas.
The inevitable conclusion of Christ is this same angelic message at Easter:
He Lives!

And as we come and sit on the banks of this never ending river of cleansing, bloody Grace, as we begin to comprehend that the supply never runs out we realize:
He Lives!
©Dan Bode 2005

Ash Wednesday

2011-03-10T06:34:00.000-08:00

The ashes of Your entry
Lie cold upon my brow.
The Sacrifice once made,
Is so quickly forgotten
Even as your glory burns before me.
Smoke by day and fire by night
I swear I will not forget and yet,
And yet as I walk the path
And see the charred remains of past ambitions
And tyrannical needs
I find myself walking on my own power,
And not on Yours.
My memory fails, and so
The sacrifice must be made once again.
My horror at the pain You feel as the consequence
Of my sin is suffered once again.
I stand in awe at Your resurrection, once again –
And I am reborn.
©Dan Bode 1999

My Mother's Letters

2011-03-04T16:30:00.001-08:00

My sister Diane recently showed me a collection of letters that were among some of my mother’s possessions. They are providing me a great deal of insight into many different aspects of my parent’s lives that I had not previously been aware of.
My parents divorced when I was 10, and the end of that marriage was not pleasant. Since they both died when I was still too young to really understand the reasons for the failure of the relationship there are many questions that will remain unanswered for me. I can only go by what I experienced directly. I remember many nights when I could hear them arguing in the living room. I would lie in bed listening to the sharp words through my bedroom wall desperately hoping it would stop. I remember one particular night after I heard one angry retort after another I called out to my mother. The argument stopped suddenly and she came into my room.
“What’s wrong?” she asked quietly.
“Please stop fighting. I don’t like it.” I said
“It’s ok, Danny.” She said as she stroked my cheek, “We’ll be all right.”
“Ok. Can I talk to Dad?”
“Sure.”
She gave me a kiss and a hug and went back into the living room, and I could hear her say to my father, “Your son wants to talk to you.”
My father walked in a few seconds later. His step was slower and gentler than I was used to hearing.
“What’s a matter son?” he asked. Maybe it’s just me looking back with a tainted view, but I would swear he was close to crying when he asked me that question. My father was never one to cry.
“I just want you and Mom to stop fighting.”
“Ok. We will. But don’t worry, we’ll be fine. Ok?”
“Ok.” I sat up and gave him a hug, and he held me tight.
“You go to sleep now. I love you.” He said.
“I love you too.”
Looking back I realize that this occurred near the end of the relationship. I have no idea what, if any impact this incident had on them, but for me it came to define in later years what I thought their relationship was like. It was the last thing I saw, and the first thing I remembered when I thought about their marriage. I allowed this to color my thinking without giving thought to the fact that they had been married for almost thirty years at that time. I assumed their relationship had always been like this.
As I began to read my mother’s letters, I found they had a union that was worlds removed from my perceptions of it. Some of these letters are written in the very early years of their marriage, around 1943-‘44. In some my father is in Europe fighting in World War II. She is writing to her parents in Petaluma, California, from where she has moved to Cleveland, Ohio where my father’s family lives. She is pregnant with my oldest brother Bill. She writes about daily life, the clothes she is sewing for the baby, the price of food and the things she is doing with his family. She also talks about my father. She talks of how much she misses him, and how much she wants to see him again. She tells her parents what a “great guy” he is. There is no question that she loves him.
There are also letters from my father to her parents. He talks about what a great wife she is, and how deeply he loves her. He talks about how much he misses her and their son while he is overseas.
I will never know all the reasons for their divorce. I will never know exactly what led to their disillusionment. Some answers are locked within a life that I have no access to. There are times when answers to some things are simply beyond my reach, and no matter how great I think my need to know is, that chasm between question and answer is not going to be bridged. As much as I cry out what I think are the right questions the only response I get is the empty echo of my own voice. With that in mind I look at what I do have at my disposal, and I find that though the end of their marriage was not happy, the end did not define the whole. I am given the opportunity to see the beginning that I was not there to see. I can infuse my memories with some of the happiness that I have discovered did indeed exist in their life together. I can see that there was a time when their relationship was a good example of what a marriage should be. I can only guess at the changes that occurred between them that led them to their point of no return. They were probably very gradual in their nature. A slight change of habit here, a different need appearing there. A desire expressed by one refused by the other. I don’t know. There is always more to any situation than I can see.
The first document in this binder is a poem that was apparently written by a good friend of my mother about her. I do not know exactly when as it is not dated.

“Hollywood Episode”

Once there was a little girl,
A sweet and wholesome maid,
Who heard of glamorous Hollywood,
And its lure could not evade.

She thought she’d like to be a star,
And live in regal splendor
With closets full of lovely gowns
And rings on every finger.

She envisioned every week a check
Too big for simple math
And clearly saw outside her door
The crowds awaiting autographs.

And so we find this lovely miss
Leaving friends and home
Telling those she loves farewell
To seek fame on her own.

But this little country lass
Fools no one with such chatter,
It isn’t a career she wants
It doesn’t really matter.

What her heart is really set on
What she dreams about at night
Is the day she’ll finally meet The One
And know that He’s just right.

In a cozy little cottage
She’d love to settle down
And raise a happy family
In a shady country town.

Her friend compares what she initially thought she wanted out of life, and what she later realized that she truly wanted. She did indeed go to Hollywood for a little while, and did some acting and dated some actors that went on to make names for themselves. Yet she also left it behind when it did not satisfy her true desire.
We all seem to start out that way. We walk into life thinking we know what we want, only to find that what we truly want is either something completely different from what we are pursuing, or something we had all along. In his book, “Lake Woebegone Days” Garrison Keillor says it this way “Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.”
My mother was a beautiful woman within and without. In her letters I find myself marveling that the woman I knew who had all the right words of comfort for me growing up, and all the answers to my questions, knew so little at times. She asks her parents for advice on many things that I took for granted. She had to learn things too. There was a time when she needed to depend on her own mother for different things. It was a time when the things parents passed on to their children were still considered worthwhile.
There are letters to my mother from my father, telling her of events that are happening and hoping he will be home soon. My father was not what I would term a sentimental man, but the pain of their separation is infused in the words of his letters. He was not as hard a man as I remember. He was lost at times, as I am too. He was a much better man than I have given him credit for. He was the man who was my father, and he was worthy of the love I gave him even with his flaws.
It was a time when they longed for each other’s touch, and valued each other’s company. It was a time that I had forgotten, or perhaps had allowed to be overshadowed by the pain of their divorce.
There are other letters in this collection as well. They are from friends overseas in the army. They describe different aspects of the war. Some of them have holes in the paper where the wartime censors have cut out words that describe their locations. I had always heard that this kind of thing had occurred but I had never seen it with my own eyes. Somehow as I read these 60-year-old letters, they didn’t seem so old. The physical connection of the actual paper that I was touching brought everything closer over that expanse of time. So much of our history is tucked away in the boxes in our attic. We have so much to learn from our past, and yet we try so hard to forget it sometimes. Sometimes we don’t want to give up our preconceived ideas for the incontrovertible truth, and sometimes we would just rather not change. It’s simply too much trouble. After all, it takes a lot of work to change your life when you find out that some of the basic experiences that have shaped you as a person were based on misconceptions. The marriage that I saw end in anger and bitterness began with love and devotion, even longing. It was richer than I had imagined, and all the years of my life that were influenced by acrimony are now found to be incomplete. This incompleteness within me was what caused me to search so hard for a greater love, and a greater peace to put my faith in. It was this that allowed me to discover the healing that takes place when I experience both the receiving, and the giving, of forgiveness.
So then this begs the question: How will this change me? What difference will this make, and who will see it?
The answer is: I haven’t got a clue.
The fact of the matter is that I am a man who, when faced with a personal epiphany, often expects to see great change in my life when I am on the mountaintop. Yet shortly after I return to the day to day tasks within the valley the changes I see aren’t all that dramatic. I have a hard time following through on some things.
But I will say this: I will appreciate that which God has blessed me with more readily.
My wife says we should live every day as if it were our last, and having so far survived a brain tumor she is more than qualified to make that statement. I agree with her, but I have no idea what I would do if I knew today might be my last. Did my father ever wonder about that when he was in the middle of a battle? Did my mother ask herself this when she was lonely and waiting to see if her husband would come home? Do we ever bother to wonder about this when we don’t face a crisis in our lives?
If today were my last day would I bother to do the dishes or mow the lawn? Would I still take out the garbage? I doubt it. Or would I do the normal things with a greater appreciation of my ability to do them? Would I be able to spend more time with my wife and children, or would I only be able to look at them and wonder how I could possibly say in one day all the things that should have been said over a lifetime that could convey the depth of the love I have for them? Perhaps we can live our last day only as well as we have lived the days that have gone before it. Can I make each day the sum of all that have gone before? Can I live well enough to be certain all of those whom I love will know of my love for them if I never speak another word to them?
To express a lifetime of love to someone takes a lifetime. It requires every day that relationship exists, because each day builds on the next. It is a cumulative effect. It can’t be done in one day; rather it must be done every day. And if it is done every day, as it was the first day then the relationship will never end. Because when it comes right down to it the only love that is capable of surviving in its purest form is the love of God, and that will live beyond us as a legacy to those that come after. The legacy we leave our children goes far beyond what is written in our wills. There is always more left unsaid and unseen that still influences generations yet to come. Several years ago I attended a party for our pastor and his wife who were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. At the surprise reception the congregation had for them their children said a few words. I will never forget the words of their oldest son. He said that while growing up people would inevitably ask him what it was like being a “pastor’s kid”. He said, “It didn’t matter to me that my dad was a pastor and my mom was a pastor’s wife, because they were always my parents first. We always knew they loved us. We always had priority.” He honored his parents by giving back to them what they had given him: the love that never dies.
So I must consider the truth and substance of the legacy I leave from this day forward, and pray that I leave behind something worth keeping.
©Dan Bode 2000

The Joy of Discovery

2011-02-27T16:03:00.000-08:00

We started our little excursion with great expectations. We were eagerly anticipating the excited exclamations over all the new experiences to come.
My wife and I were given the opportunity to take our then 11 month old granddaughter Kaya to the zoo for the first time. We thought that the variety of the animals would consume all of her attention, and that she would thrill to the sites of all the exotic places represented in the confines of the zoo.
We were wrong.
At our house she is fascinated by the dog and the cat.
I think it’s probably fair to say the fascination is not necessarily mutual. While our dog seemingly can’t get enough of her, the cat tends to quietly walk (or run) the other way when she approaches her. There at the zoo she saw animals like the giraffe, the tiger, monkeys, snakes, flamingoes, and even the rear paw of a lion who was wisely lounging in the shade of a rock in the 103 degree heat. They used to have a hippo, which was kind of fun to watch when they fed it, but I think it died several years ago and they haven’t put anything else in its pen. How do you tell when a hippo is dead anyway? Does it actually go belly up like a goldfish, or does it just float there like it does when it’s alive? Something to ponder. Anyway, I suppose the heat had something to do with Kaya’s lack of appreciation as well; it certainly sapped a lot of our enthusiasm.
Instead, when she was given the opportunity to choose her own object of interest, she sat down on the ground and picked up a dried leaf. She stared at it in fascination for a few moments and then proceeded to bring it toward her mouth for a taste test. I’m relatively confident that she has a discerning enough palate that she would have grimaced and spit it out, but you never really know at that age so my wife deftly intercepted it before she reached her goal.
In retrospect I suppose we should have expected this. She was at a stage in her development where she was more acutely concerned with what was immediately within her reach. The dog and the cat are within her reach; the giraffe and the screaming monkey were not.
It seems as though we often have an appreciation of simple things only when we first discover them, or when know we are about to lose them forever.
The beginning or the end.
The first flush of passion in a relationship puts our entire life plan in a new light. By the same token, the end of that relationship will often cause us to make terribly unwise decisions that we only recognize as unwise in hindsight.
When we find ourselves in a situation that we dislike our tendency is to berate ourselves (or someone else depending on how well we accept personal responsibility) for the actions we took that put us there instead of dealing with the situation as it is.

Over the years as Kaya has grown I have watched her develop in ways that I knew would eventually happen, but astound me even though I expect them. When she was two she had a different point of view.
On a typical drive home for my daughter Jennifer, and Kaya they were just driving along talking about whatever came to Kaya’s mind. She was talking about some trees. Jennifer asked, “How big were they?”
Holding her hands up above her head as high as she could Kaya replied,
“They were THIS big!”
And then, with her hands still in the air, she looked to the side and asked,
“Do trees have armpits?”
Jennifer laughed, and I laughed when she told me about it. But then I started to think about it a little.
Do trees have armpits?
My immediate and automatic response is “no”, but how do I know this? Just because I never thought to ask the question doesn’t automatically mean it’s not so. I can’t recall anytime in my life in which I’ve heard the words “trees” and “armpits” in the same sentence.
So who am I to say “no” definitively?
So I did some research.
We have a sycamore tree in our front yard that I planted several years ago. It has grown well and quickly, but I’m going to have to cut it down and plant another one. I didn’t plant it correctly and now I have a lot of surface roots, and surface roots on a tree that can grow to 30-40 feet tall right in front of my house is not a good thing. Anyway, it has a lot of low branches that are perfect for just this kind of research. I went out to the front yard, at night, after looking around carefully to make sure no one was watching, and I sniffed the tree right where the branch joins the trunk. It smelled like I would expect a tree to smell; kind of green, and woody. Definitely woody.
I smelled another part of the tree at the trunk. It was the same.
Next I went to that source of information that everyone knows is absolutely ironclad in its accuracy: the internet.
I actually found several references to the armpits of trees, but they were used figuratively by artists in their description of a tree. No one really identified a tree armpit as an actual thing.
Regardless, I don’t think I will ever look at the point where the branch of a tree meets the trunk in the same way ever again.

Kaya is now three and a half, and her dialogue has taken another turn.
In another discussion with her mother she stated,
“I think when God made me it was like a puzzle for Him.”
“What do you mean?” asked her mother.
“I mean that when God put me together it was like putting a puzzle together.”
I’m pretty sure when I was three and a half I NEVER got philosophical about the process of my creation.

It occurs to me when she says something new that she is in the process of discovery. She sees it all with new eyes. No matter how many times she sees something, or how much she actually knows about it, she seems to sense that there is still something about it that is new to her. There is still some mystery left in everything, but I, in my adult “wisdom”, have chosen to focus only on what I know instead of pursuing what I don’t know. In doing so I have remained safely rooted on the “solid” ground of my own knowledge. I have effectively clipped my own wings. I have bound myself to man’s earth and denied myself the heavens.
Jesus said, “Behold I am making all things new.” (Rev. 21:5). This is the same line that we Christians only read occasionally and rarely ever apply. It takes a crisis of major proportion to bring us to the point where we see the old as new, and the sunrise as original as the sunset. My granddaughter is fascinated with dried leaves, and yet it takes space probes to Mars and beyond to hold my attention. I cannot make a leaf or a blade of grass, and yet the process of its growth only concerns me as far as my need to rake it up or mow it down. Even closer to home is my own body. I abuse it regularly, but I take little heed from my doctor when he tells me what I need to do to care for it properly, and it is such an incredible wonder of creation!
And I can’t be the only one to realize at moments like this that in the end I really have no ability to create anything at all. The only skill man has is to manipulate what has already been created. We certainly have the ability to warp and abuse this creation, and we do so regularly to our shame, but really create? No. The simple fact that we exist as created beings means that we cannot create something out of nothing, because we ourselves are created. The title of Creator can only be applied to the one who was there first, and that is God alone; the First and Last, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End.
We are only stewards of what is.
There are things to wonder at all around us, but our preoccupation with “progress” and “forward” thinking causes all of them to be ignored, left to lie haphazardly in our destructive wake, and leaves us in a related state of ignorance.

Once discovered, how can I ignore the reality of what He sets before me?
It may seem as though this indicates some special divine attention to my life, but that is not so. He gives the same attention to each of us, and I am loved by Him no more than anyone else, but just as certainly no less. He loves each of us with His whole being; for when we are told “God is Love” it means that He is Love. He is the only source of it. It is who He is.
It is when my pursuit of His presence takes an active note in my life that I begin to see things more clearly, because a relationship with Him requires my active participation, just as He has actively put me in this world. It is my responsibility to move in this life rather than sit and wait for my inevitable death. I cannot sit and do nothing while I am pinned beneath the boulder of my doubts. What holds me back must be let go, done away with, cut off. Amputation is never pretty whether it’s done in the wilderness or on the surgeon’s table, but it is often necessary for survival. The truth of the matter is that a relationship with Christ is a transaction: You give Him all of you, and He gives you more than you could ever be on your own, and more than you ever even thought to want.
The process of discovery, as I recognize all that He puts in front of me, is His method of showing me His active, daily presence.
This is where I discover the gap in my life.
This is a gap that even the love of God will not cross.
It is the gap of my own choice.
That choice is the most important thing that Christ has given me. It is the only thing that allows grace to save me from His wrath, for while God is love He is also just, and in His justice He demands that all debts be paid by me, or by Him.
And I myself am wholly incapable of settling that debt.
And so the process of discovery, while usually worked out at the beginning or the end, really should be a continuous practice that starts at the beginning and never has an end. It has eternal potential depending on our choice.
Christmas is the offer, Good Friday is the payment, Easter is the redemption, and His flowing blood is the currency of my survival.
My choice of Him seals the transaction in my favor.
The Choice, beloved (for you are His beloved), is yours.
©2008 Dan Bode

Wandering

2011-01-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid I went wandering with a friend of mine. I was very young; probably only five or six, at the time when “wandering” was not as unsafe as it is today. Still, given my youth, it was probably one of my first Bad Ideas. My memory of the incident is somewhat hazy, so I don’t remember exactly what possessed us to go anywhere, but we did. Probably the monotony of being safe and well fed every day of our lives was getting to us.
My friend Carol lived across the street from us, and we were friends all the years that I lived in that neighborhood. We probably just told our parents we were going out to play and took off without a second thought. We started walking up our street and eventually, as one always does, we reached the corner. We had never been this far before so the view was different. We had been past it in our respective family cars of course, but the view from your feet is always different than behind the car window. It’s always been a wonderful experience for me when I wind up someplace new. The air is different, the sights are new, and everything has a refreshing look.
We chose a right turn at that corner, and as we came to the next corner turned right again. We walked about halfway down the street, and stopped in front of a house we did not know. The house was owned by an older couple who were enjoying the day in their front yard. They recognized that we did not live on their street, and that we were much too young to be off on our own as we were, so they invited us into their home and started gently pumping us for information. I vaguely remember being asked if we knew our phone numbers, and addresses. They were suitably impressed with our knowledge, and put it to good use. While one of them made a discreet phone call the other kept us occupied by showing us their television remote, which was quite a gadget back then.
To understand the impact of the remote control I should tell you the state of television technology of the times. Anyone under 30 probably takes the current technology for granted so I must give some background. I should also say here that I know those who are older than me (like all of my siblings since I am the youngest of six) will be quick to remind me that all they had were radios (just kidding!). Rest assured: I know.
It was around 1965 and most people still had to get up and actually touch the TV in order to change anything on it at all. If you wanted color and you couldn’t afford a color TV you got a glass screen that was strategically tinted. The top third was blue for the sky, the middle was clear, and the bottom was green for the grass. This worked well if everything you watched were panoramic outdoor scenes, but if you were watching anything with close-ups of people you thought they were either aliens or very, very ill. We didn’t have one, and I don’t recall missing it. Today it’s possible to get a system which receives 47,892 channels. Back then we had 7, maybe 8 if you were lucky and had a rooftop antenna. So you can understand that when the remote control made its debut people thought it was the biggest thing since Bisquick. I had never seen one before and was quite fascinated by it.
It consisted of a small box with two buttons. One button changed the channels forward and the other backward. There was a long wire connecting this box to another box fitted over the channel knob on the TV. That was the other thing about TV’s then: everything was controlled by a knob. It was called Knob Technology. The box over the knob had a small motor in it that was activated by the button on the remote box. I could not get enough of this technological wonder. Why is it that anything with a button seems to be irresistible to a child? If you want a child to do something that he or she doesn’t want to do, all you have to do is glue a fake button on it and that child will do whatever you want them to do as long as you tell them they have to press that button to do it. I really don’t know why the child psychologists haven’t caught on to this yet. They were probably remote control deprived as children. I pressed the button and the channel changed! I pressed it again and it changed again! When I held the button down it changed over and over again! I’m sure this gentleman must have been getting a little irritated with me because I’m pretty sure I remember seeing a football game on the screen when I first looked at it.
At any rate, this adventure eventually came to its inevitable end. I walked out of their house (apparently I got bored with the remote), and I looked up to see my sister Diane standing a few houses down with her hands on her hips and a very stern look on her face. Now everyone has had some experience with "The Look". "The Look" is a genetic code that is imprinted on every persons DNA. As children we have receptors in our brains that allow us to recognize and interpret the threat level related to "The Look" that we are getting. As we grow these receptors convert to what are probably best described as “generators” that give us the ability to actually perform "The Look" for our own children or any children under our care. I was obviously still in the receptor stage of development; because when I saw my sister with The Look on her face my immediate reaction was to run in the other direction. I didn’t get very far though. She easily caught up to me, and I was soon being walked back home along with Carol. I don’t remember the punishment I received for my wanderlust, but I suspect I was probably grounded for a while. Such was the end of my adventure that day. I have rarely thought of it since then, and as is usually the case I don’t know what made me think of it now.
But one thing that I never thought about before now was what everyone else went through when they realized I was gone. My family was looking for me, but I was oblivious to their concern.
One thing I know for sure is that I was missed. I was marked by my absence from someone else’s life. Each of us has a place, a spot that only each of us individually can fill in someone else’s life. God knows my place, and He’ll put me there if I allow Him to. I often try to determine my own fate, go my own way, but my feet are rarely pointed in a satisfying direction. I am never satisfied for very long, and I become again that child with the remote just watching the picture change and never settling on one channel.
Do you know what God’s first concern for you is? It is not that you become famous or rich or influential. It is not that you become an advisor to kings or presidents. It is not that you be a hero. God’s first concern for you is that you allow Him to show you how important you are to Him. It is that you let Him show you the mansion He has prepared for you. The place you are meant to be. The thing you are created to do; the “calling with which you have been called.” (Eph.4:1) Your worth is not in your work, nor in your looks. Your worth is wholly determined by God Himself. When the world ignores you, when you go missing, God is calling your name to the farthest reaches of heaven! He knows where you are, but He longs to hear you answer.
When I wandered off I never asked why I was doing it or why I wanted to. I never once thought about the impact my absence would have on someone else. When I walked away my whole family mobilized to find me, and when I wander spiritually all of heaven is moving to intercede for me. But the impact of the action of God on my life is determined by how, or if, I acknowledge His action on my behalf.
Do I acknowledge that He knows my needs better that I do? Do I make myself ready and willing to act on His desires before my own? Have I done what I can to make my need of Him match His desire for fellowship with me?
I will never know all of the people I have influenced for the good or bad. Not everyone tells me what they think of me, or what I’m worth to them. This is probably just as well because I’m sure there are many to whom I mean very little, but God has said, and I must believe Him that I am worth more than all of creation to Him. It is His devotion to me that needs to find my corresponding devotion to Him. I need to allow His presence in me to become so complete that I can love Him in myself.
The path I need to choose is one that most have long since abandoned. The path of faith is often overgrown and clogged by the weeds of my self indulgence. He finds me anyway, trapped in the thicket needing Him to free me once again. Hoisted onto His shoulders He carries me so I can replenish my strength to walk again. And later, when I am again distracted by something off the path, He once again comes in search of me, calling my name.
And I can tell you from personal experience that the sweetest sound the ears of this constant prodigal have ever heard is my own name on the lips of God!
©Dan Bode 2005

Patience

2011-01-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

Looking back on the last year I have come to understand something about myself.
It is this:

God has made me into a patient man.

On the inside at least.
There are those who would disagree.

I know this because the year before I was a person who could have made very rash and stupid decisions. This last year I wasn’t that kind of man.
Patience is something I’m pretty sure I have never consciously asked for. Mainly because in asking for it I know that I will be faced with something that will cause me to have to be patient.
It is a very painful process.
And God made me a very patient man.

I know that I am patient because I did not make a lot of decisions that I wanted to. Decisions that would have changed my life, and maybe the lives of others, in a less than positive way. There were so many times when in the midst of my fear or anger I was so tempted to do something, and God would whisper, “Hush. I have given you another day to live. Tomorrow will be different from today, and better than it looks right now. You have another day to see the difference. Wait, and I will show you a better way.”
So I waited. And He did.
And God made me a very patient man.

I used up a lot of Grace. Boatloads, as a matter of fact. Supertankers even.
It is my abundant good fortune that God does not put a quota on it.
It was in making me patient that He allowed me to see that I was, in fact, extending His Grace to others through me. Because Grace is all about Christ bearing the consequences of our sin, is it not? And I am not in a position to extend the consequences of someone’s sin on to their shoulders am I?
Many things did not go according to my plans or expectations. Maybe someone didn’t do something the way I wanted, or circumstances turned against me. So, I made other plans to make up for it, and once again found that my ability to control anything is insufficient. So things went differently, and wound up being just as good, or better, in the end.
And He said, “Hush. I have given you another day to live…"
So I just moved forward and did what God needed me to do instead.
And God made me a very patient man.

I discovered that the only real things of any value I have to offer anyone, and that I have any control over, are my love and my own integrity. I realized this year that my patience kept these things intact.
Years ago a friend once told me, “The things God calls us to do are very often those things that are the exact opposite of what we are naturally inclined to do.”
Patience has never been an automatic, or natural, response for me. It is something I learn on a continuous basis. I think the difference now is that I expect to learn it. I already know that I will be “naturally inclined” to do something differently, and so I will wait and look at the opposite response.

In the coming year on those occasions when I find myself sitting in that room of unfulfilled desires and failed expectations, and I spread my tears upon the dusty floor, God will whisper once again that ever present refrain, “Hush. I have given you another day to live. Tomorrow will be different from today, and better than it looks right now. You have another day to see the difference. Wait, and I will show you a better way.”
And I will continue to be the very patient man God made me to be.
©Dan Bode 2011

Why I Joined the Mob

2010-10-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I joined a mob.
It was not a game, nor was it organized crime. Although it was an organized mob.
We came together through a loosely connected network of Face book and Twitter announcements to meet at a specific time and place, and take a specific action for a specific amount of time, for a specific purpose.
There was no single leader, I know it had to have started with someone’s vision, but I don’t know whose, nor does it really matter.
As I was walking to the designated location I realized that I was nervous. I did not at first understand why. We weren’t going to be doing anything illegal or threatening in any way. After some thought I understood my nervousness.
Let me explain:
I was about to be a part of a flashmob.
A flashmob is a group of people who come together in a seemingly random fashion to one spot. At a designated time they all perform a specific action for a few minutes and then disperse. If you look up the term “flashmob” on YouTube you will see videos of huge pillow fights, or people swatting each other with folded newspapers or performing highly coordinated dance routines. All harmless, but all designed to attract attention and break the routine of those around you.
Sometimes it’s meant to inspire joy, sometimes serious thought, sometimes just to get you out of the rut you find yourself in.
At first I thought that I was simply uncomfortable with the attention it might bring to me, but I dismissed that because I generally don’t care if I am the subject of anyone’s attention, unless they happen to have a gun. I was nervous because I was about to become part of a cause.
I was about to take a public stand against something that I believe is one of the greatest offenses one human can inflict on another. It offends me so much that I find it very difficult to control the anger I feel against those who are guilty of perpetrating this crime against others.
The issue is Human Trafficking: The buying and selling of one human being to another.
Also known as slavery.
That’s right. That disgusting thing we thought ended with the Civil War in our sanitized histories. Alive and well in the United States of America, and incidentally, quite virulent in the rest of the world. It is an international disease.
It occurs all over the world, and it crosses socio-economic, racial, religious, and sexual lines without thought. It has happened in my town and yours. A young girl just a few miles from my home was kidnapped. She was claimed as “property” and taken from a happy home in a nice neighborhood then sold on Craigslist for sexual use.
She turned out to be a case of one who was rescued and returned to her family. She has the opportunity to recover, although that will be a long and difficult process that she should not have to go through. Sadly, she is still in the minority. And that’s just one of the ones we know about. Most of those forced into this life cannot escape. This is real. It’s not just something you see on a documentary that will only affect “someone else”.
It is currently estimated that 27 million people around the world are enslaved in some form. Between 14,500 and 17,500 people a year are brought in to the US from other countries as slaves. At least 100,000 American minors are sex slaves.
Human Trafficking wasn’t even a crime in the US until the year 2000!
Safe houses are being built by rescue organizations to help these victims get out. They give them a place to recover and rest in safety, but there are far too few.
These organizations need our help in every area: finances, manpower, administration, everything. I will post links to their sites at the end of this article.
This issue makes me angry as few other things do. The thought of what these victims go through sends me into a spiral of fury that, if left unchecked, would turn into white-hot, unadulterated RAGE!
If I were faced with one of the perpetrators of this crime I don’t know that I would be able to control anything I did to him.
The reason is this: I have a beautiful wife, and daughters, and grandchildren and nieces and nephews, and friends who could all be made victims of this crime, and the thought one of these sub-human perpetrators even coming close to any one of the people I care about and attempting to victimize them is absolutely horrifying to me. That, coupled with the idea that it is an absolutely credible threat in the real world that I live in, in my town, seems beyond comprehension.
But here it is, as real as breathing.
As our economy tanks and our governmental authorities claim a lack of funding and resources to adequately combat any number of problems, this is also given a lesser priority.
Why does it always come down to money?
One side makes money doing it, and the other side needs money to fight it.
It started by someone wanting to make a profit, and reducing human life to the status of a commodity, a thing, something to own and dispose of when used up.
There are those who would like to legalize it so the government could reap the benefit of the taxes levied on it. Might as well get something out of it since we all know it’s going to happen, right?
Oh yes, and when it’s legal all the abuse and kidnappings will stop because the kidnapers and pimps will suddenly see the benefits of actually filing tax returns and claiming their long deserved status as entrepreneurs.
Idiots!
And because those in authority lack the funds and the drive to respond adequately to this issue (although I have to give them credit for trying) we are left as a society to come up with our own solutions. And since it is unacceptable in our society to remove the perpetrators from the gene pool without the approval of our court system (because even though they obliterate the rights of one human they are somehow allowed to retain their own) we can instead pursue the victims of the crime to rescue them.
We can be there to help them pick up the pieces, and return to some semblance of a “normal” life.
And this brings me back to the mob.
I joined a group of people who quietly gathered at the steps of the California state Capitol building, put on shirts with a message stating that 27 million people were being trafficked, and…
stopped.
We simply froze in the process of whatever action we were in the midst of at that moment, and didn’t move for five minutes.
People would walk through the crowd and suddenly realize that they were in the middle of a group of people, all dressed similarly, who were not moving. At all.
It was weird.
No one does that.
And they noticed.
I don’t know how many people noticed enough to go out and do something about it, or get involved in any way. I don’t know if anyone even figured out what we were doing at all.
But we took a stand, and peacefully made our point, and if only one person asks a question as a result then that’s a good thing.
My anger was channeled to a higher purpose, and I was more effective doing this than I would have been following my own instincts and dragging a trafficker into a back alley, as is my preference.
I am not really a “cause” kind of guy, and I don’t recall ever really being this openly adamant about anything before. I don’t know that I have ever felt the combination of anger, sorrow, and fear at the same time before. Somehow I just find this one impossible to walk away from.
Most of you who read this will not feel the same passion as I do over this issue simply because you have other worthy causes you have chosen to devote yourself to, and I would not want to distract you from them. But I would ask this: Just take a look. See if there’s some area you can contribute to. Chances are that you know someone, who knows someone who has been affected by this thing.

For in the end you are not as far removed from it as you would like to think.
©Dan Bode 2010

ChabDai
www.chabdai.org/home.html

With More Than Purpose
www.morethanpurpose.org

California Against Slavery
www.californiaagainstslavery.org

Courage to Be You
www.couragetobeyou.org

Treasures

2010-10-02T18:48:00.000-07:00

We all have treasures that we wish to hold on to with all of our strength. We treasure more what we have worked harder to obtain, or what someone else has worked to obtain for us. When I think of treasures I first think of my initial understanding of the concept which I got from my brother Bill.

My relationship with Bill was a special one that takes some explanation. Bill is 15 years older than I am, he is the oldest of six children and I am the youngest. By Bill’s own admission it took him a while to think of me in kindly terms when I was born. He thought it was rather disgusting that my mother would have another child at her age (about 35). Then he was forced to baby-sit me, and he discovered all the neat things I could do, like rolling a piece of tape into a circle so the sticky part was on the outside and watching me try to get it off my hands. He probably watched me pass it from hand to hand for quite a while. Anyway, Bill and I became closer as time went on and I came to depend on him for many things. Most notably to answer all my questions as I was growing up.
Bill was, and is, a smart guy. I figured he knew everything, because he always had an answer for all of my questions. It didn’t matter what the question was he always had an answer. He never said “I don’t know” to me until I was about nine and then I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know whom to ask. I actually had to use the encyclopedia. It was the heaviest book I had lifted up to that point in life.
Bill was the guy who did everything right. I never saw his mistakes because he was always there taking care of mine. It was as though he would do anything for me. I remember when all of us kids were still living at home. We lived in a three-bedroom house. My two sisters were in bunkbeds in one room and us four boys were in bunkbeds in our room. Bill and I were in one set and Mike and Dave in the other. I had the lower bunk since I tended to be very active whilst I slept, and a five foot drop while your sleeping is not a pleasant experience for anyone, especially with a crybaby like me for a little brother.
One night in particular I woke up about 1:00 AM. I don’t really know what time it was, but it was dark and everyone was sleeping so 1:00 AM sounds good. I saw something on the wall next to the bed which I was convinced was a spider. For a little kid late at night a spider on the wall is nothing to take lightly. Everyone knows spiders are more harmful at night ‘cuz they have more time to suck all your blood out and then they spin all their webbing around you so you can’t move and then they kill you with their poison and….well you get the picture. I couldn’t get out of bed to get away from the spider either, because it’s just as bad being awake and out from under the mysterious protection provided by your blankets, which by the way, provided absolute impervious protection against any and all monsters that stalked the night. My solution was to poke the bottom of Bill’s mattress and wake him up.
“Bill!” I whispered.
No answer. I poked again.
“Bill!”
I saw movement from the bed above me, and then Bill leaned his head over the side.
“What’s wrong?” He wasn’t upset at all.
“I think there’s a spider on the wall beside me.”
“Hang on.” He said as he climbed down.
It should also be noted here that the monsters I feared so desperately never seem to attack big brothers and grown ups, so I had no qualms about asking Bill to leave the protection of his blankets.
He leaned over my bed and looked closely at the wall.
“I can’t tell if it’s a spider or not.” He whispered. “It’s too dark. I’ll have to go get the flashlight.” We only owned one flashlight, and it was in the glove compartment of the car in the driveway. Bill got the car keys and went out to the car to get the flashlight. I was amazed at the way he fearlessly walked through the house with no thought of his own safety. I was even more amazed when he walked outside in his pajamas! All the monster rules in the house were null and void the minute you walked out the front door. Even if you took your blanket with you, it offered no protection from the Outside Night Monsters. If you had a flashlight when you went out there, you might have a fighting chance, because they didn’t like the light one bit, but Bill was unarmed. So it is only reasonable that my estimation of my big brother’s powers increased exponentially when he returned to our bedroom with the flashlight completely unscathed.
Wow. They didn’t even try to get him!
He walked back into our room and leaned over the bed again, shining the flashlight at the spider on the wall, which by the way had not moved an inch since I first spied it. Do spiders sleep?
The beam of light finally found it’s goal and I saw captured within the circle not a spider, but just a little mark on the wall that I had accidentally put there with a crayon the day before. I never said anything about it because we weren’t supposed to write on the walls. If anyone asked it just showed up one day while I was gone, I don’t know anything about it.
“It’s just a mark on the wall” Bill said, “nothing to be afraid of.”
“Oh. OK. Thanks.”
“It’s OK. Can you get back to sleep ok?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Ok, goodnight.”
He climbed back into his bed, and went back to sleep. I fell asleep pretty fast too, because I knew then there was nothing that could get past my big brother Bill.

When Bill joined the Air Force he was gone for long periods of time, but he always wrote to me faithfully. He always addressed his letters to “Master Daniel Bode”. I had no idea why he put the “master” on there but it sounded good.
When he came home to visit he always brought me a gift. One thing he would get me that was my favorite thing was called a Treasure Ball. It was nothing more than a big ball of layers of tissue. Wrapped within each layer was a small Cracker Jack sized toy, and then at the center there was a slightly larger toy. I would set each prize aside in a special pile as I came to each one. I kept the tissue for a while too. I would play with all of the prizes and save each one. Even though I had other, more substantial toys, these would hold my attention for the longest time. There were two reasons for this. First, they were from Bill. Second, I had to work for them.
The way they came to me added to their value, and determined how I treated them. I esteemed, loved and respected the giver, and so the gift as well.
It is said that we pattern our concept of God after the example of our father, and for a long time I certainly did that. But as I came to know God more personally, I realized that the better example of God’s action in my life was Bill. He was my protector and the one who had the answers. I could depend on him to accept me in spite of all the pranks I pulled and trouble I got into.
God is like that too, but with the exception of one major thing. The treasure I sought in the Treasure Ball was something I had to work for, but the treasure God gave me was something He had done all the work for. I am often reminded that I don’t treat the treasure from Him, which has infinite value, as well as I treat the treasures I have gained on my own, which have no lasting value at all.
©Dan Bode 1998

God Calling

2010-09-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

This one's a little old, but I needed to hear the lesson again.

God is calling.
He will keep calling until He gets an answer.
What exactly is God’s calling?
I used to think it meant becoming a sequestered monk and taking on a vow of silence, or being a missionary to the remotest part of Africa where I would have to drink fermented goats milk and eat roasted beetles (crunchy on the outside, creamy on the inside).
None of those options sound remotely appealing to me, but when God calls it isn’t usually done with my convenience in mind. God’s calling is based on His desires not mine, but keep in mind that His calling always benefits us when we heed that call. That does not necessarily mean that we will consider the benefits we gain as desirable. We may not want the reward we get.
Take Jonah for example. Jonah is the classic example of the human response to the call of God. God called him to go to the Ninevites, a people whom Jonah happened to harbor a strong dislike for, and tell them they would be destroyed if they didn’t turn from their evil lives. He refused God’s call and went the other direction, because, quite frankly, he was not the most likeable person around and he wanted the Ninevites to die. He gets on a boat going the other way and ends up in the belly of a fish for 3 days to think about it. Then he is literally thrown-up on the shore and goes to preach to the Ninevites, who actually repent and are saved from the wrath of God.
Most preachers would be thrilled to have an audience respond so well to their message, but since Jonah didn’t like them in the first place he was really hoping they wouldn’t change. That way he wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore. In the end God calls Jonah on the carpet for his attitude.
The Ninevite’s salvation was not the benefit that Jonah wanted, but it was what was best in God’s eyes.
And there’s the rub.
We don’t look at the details of God’s call through God’s eyes. We look through our own. And let me tell you our vision is pretty myopic. In fact our vision is so limited that it actually goes against our nature to even consider that another viewpoint might exist. So God gives us the tools to make the necessary decisions to fulfill His call. He prepares us for obedience rather than complete control. He is there working behind the scenes as we approach times of significant impact in our lives. He desires our total willingness to follow Him rather than the threat of a forced march in front of an unforgiving master. It is for the love of Him that we do what He asks despite our fears and misgivings. Our knowledge and vision are so limited that we easily surpass our boundaries when we trust Him to know what we do not, or what we refuse to know.
The call overshadows everything in our lives. There is nothing more basic to our existence than the need for the love of God to reside within us, and it is His love within us that allows us to go beyond our own abilities to fulfill His call. And it is the fulfillment of His call that brings us a greater joy.
The call of God provides us with both a starting point and a destination. To reach the destination He provides us with a vision, and the gifts necessary to attain it. The vision has something beneficial for each of us individually, and the Body of believers as a whole, and like everything God gives us, it cannot be contained within the limitations of one person. Everything God does seems to be made to overflow any boundaries placed upon it. The things of God are no more containable than He is. He gives us gifts that we are compelled to use in the manner and place where He finds it useful rather than where and when we find it convenient. As another case in point consider the story of Queen Esther. She discovers that someone has deviously set out to destroy the entire race of her people the Jews. Esther is asked by her uncle to intercede for her people with the king, but she is reluctant. If she approaches the king when he has not first called her there is a distinct possibility that she could be put to death. As she struggles with the need of her people and the possibility of losing her own life her uncle injects this thought into her deliberations: “And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?'' (Esther 4:14b Italics mine)
In that moment the gifts and vision provided by God had just overflowed the boundaries of the vessel in which they resided. Esther responded as the Queen whom God had made her to be and risked her life to save her entire race. While the gifts God gave her were indeed hers, they were only effective when used in the manner in which He needed them to be used.
God is not surprised by the situations we find ourselves faced with. He does not lose sight of where we are or what we are going through. He doesn’t turn around and suddenly say, “Oh no! Where did he go?” as though He has misplaced us somehow. The Shepherd’s eye is always upon us.
We are not called to be ministers, missionaries, kings, queens, policemen, firemen, or computer nerds, but to be lights in the darkness. We are His wherever we go, and He calls us to be his representatives in the world according to the gifts and skills He has given us. It is not for me to do whatever I wish to do and then arrogantly say to God, “Please bless me as I do what I want.” One of the truest forms of worship I can engage in is to ask God first what He wants me to do, and then willingly go simply because it is God who asks even if I don’t necessarily agree. As in Jonah’s case the call of God does not require my agreement, but it does require, and depends on, my love for God and my understanding of His love for me. That is the basis of our obedience.
In Jeremiah 29:11 we are told, “For I know the plans that I have for you,' declares the LORD, "plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.” I am humbled by the fact that He takes notice of me to have a place in His plan at all, and awed by the love it requires to invite me to participate. When I willingly follow His prompting, and respond to the restless longing He has placed in my heart, my step is surer as the wind of His spirit clears the dust and debris from the path I have often ignored. It is a path I often shy away from. The trailhead is sometimes hidden beneath the layers of my self-indulgence, but it cannot be ignored forever. The beginning of that path is marked by a rough hewn cross, whose surface is marred by nail holes and blood stains. On one side awaits His love, and on the other His justice. It is my choice to live in obedience or disobedience, and my choice to enjoy the blessings or suffer the consequences.
We tend to think pretty highly of ourselves at times. We often assume we know the outcome of certain events, and in our assumption we think we have control. But we presume far too much. We have as much chance of directing God with our preferences as a feather has of standing still in a hurricane.
The past few years have been fairly tumultuous for our family. We have felt many blows in both the physical and spiritual sense. At the beginning of this period we tended to look at things expecting the worst to happen, but then God took us in hand and showed us the futility of our anxiety. There was always more to see than we could spy from our vantage point, and with each new event there was a new means of dealing with it. And in dealing with each one a new aspect of the personality of God was revealed that we never would have otherwise understood. We do still worry about things, we aren’t perfect, but we look for God’s hand more readily than we ever did before. It is in His hand that we find the greatest peace, and in obedience to Him that we find the greatest purpose. We know that His plans are "plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.”
And that is what the call of God will always be about.
©Dan Bode 2000

Acquired Tastes

2010-08-30T15:44:00.000-07:00

Occasionally I will hear someone use the phrase, “It’s an acquired taste.”
My usual question in response to this is, “Why acquire it?”
If it’s bad enough that you don’t initially like it then why would you go to the trouble of forcing yourself through the dislike into tolerance? There has to be some reward there.
This came to mind one day a while back when I read a story about a rare and expensive variety of coffee.
I must first digress and say that I am, in truth, a certifiable coffee snob. There is no better way to say it. The only coffee I have found worth drinking comes from Boulevard Coffee in Carmichael, California. Everything else is substandard. Cliff Miller owns the place and when he retires I think I’m just going to start roasting my own coffee. I will be at a total loss as to what to do at that time, and I have been thinking about it for quite a while believe me.
Anyway, I started drinking coffee seriously in college because I needed a stimulant other than illegal drugs to keep me awake so I could finish my homework and stay awake in all my classes. The thing about it was that I hated the taste of coffee at that time. Granted the stuff I was drinking came out of a can, which is the worst stuff you can get, but that was all I knew back then. I had drunk coffee occasionally as a child when my Danish grandmother told me that I wasn’t a real Dane unless I drank coffee. Not wanting to disappoint my grandmother, whom I loved very much, and in an effort to retain my Danehood, I learned to drink coffee her way. She gave me a sugar cube and told me to hold it between my teeth, and when I sipped the coffee to swill the coffee past the sugar cube. I went through a minimum of four sugar cubes per small cup. I already had a reputation as a hyper kid, but when you added caffeine and sugar to the mix I must have turned into a tornado. My recollections of those afternoons are rather blurred. All my baby teeth had fillings too so I doubt it was the healthiest practice. On the other hand, my grandmother’s diet consisted mainly of coffee, sugar, butter and red meat and she lived to be 102 so it can’t be all bad.
So, I acquired the taste for coffee out of necessity, and later learned to like it. Now I love it and consume it with what I would call an “intense regularity” and have no desire to live without it.
And Cliff, well he is my very good friend, but I often refer to him simply as my “Supplier”.
Then I heard about this rare coffee. My ears perked up when I heard about it because it costs an enormous amount of money. Hundreds of dollars a pound. I began to wonder what it was and what made it so special. I started to think about how I might score a few ounces.
So I did some research.
It is called “Civet” coffee.
I originally thought the name derived from the region in which the coffee bean was grown. Then I discovered that a Civet is really an animal that thrives in Indonesia. It is sometimes described as a “cat like” creature.
It’s basically a weasel.
I was confused as to why any variety of coffee would have an animal associated with it, particularly an animal as undignified a weasel, so I read further.
The Civet eats the berries of the coffee tree. The actual coffee bean is kind of like the pit of the berry itself. The Civet eats the whole berry. The Civet digests the berry. The Civet “expels” the coffee bean.
This seems a normal and natural process.
Then it gets bizarre.
Some enterprising, and I’m sure upstanding, member of Indonesian society must have been cleaning up Civet poop one day and saw the “processed” coffee beans. Being a coffee drinker himself, and not wanting to waste anything, he wonders what it would taste like. So carefully gathering up the beans (hopefully wearing gloves) he takes them home and (hopefully after washing them thoroughly), roasts them lightly. He then grinds them up and puts them in a sock (hopefully a clean one), ties it closed and throws it in a pot of boiling water.
He drinks his new brew and, because it took so much work to get the beans, he convinces himself that the flavor is indeed improved over the other coffee beans he uses. He calls a friend over to try some of the new brew.
“Before you taste this I want you to know that I put a lot of work into processing this coffee.”
“Well it must be good then! Let’s have a taste!” his friend replies eagerly.
His friend tries it.
“Hmmm. It has an odd aftertaste. I can’t quite place it. Where did you get these beans?”
“Over in the south field. But it is the processing that is unique my friend.”
“Really? What did you do? You could probably get a lot for these. The more unique it is the more people will pay for it.”
“Exactly what I was thinking!”
“So what did you do?” he asks as he takes another sip.
“Well, really all I did was pick the beans. The rest was already done! That’s the beauty of the whole thing!”
“What do you mean?” his bewildered friend replies.
“Well you know all the trouble we go through to get the seed out of the berry?”
“Of course.”
“And you know the Civets we keep chasing off?”
“Yes.”
“Well yesterday I was out cleaning up the Civet poop- “
“I’m getting a bad feeling about this.” He puts down his cup.
“ – and I found the beans in the poop and they were already out of the berry, and so I-“
“You gave me ROASTED CIVET POOP?! Are you NUTS?!”
He grabs his cane and starts beating his friend with it.
“What on earth made you do that? And why did you give it to ME?! I’m supposed to be your friend! Are you trying to poison me?! Is this because you married my cousin?! It’s not my fault she can’t cook! Heck, you’re drinking roasted weasel turds; you don’t have any taste anyway! Why are you taking it out on me?!”
As he rolls around on the floor with his arms up to protect his head from the cane that is being swung with increasing fervor the grower yells,
“NO, NO, I want you to be my partner! You said yourself it had a unique flavor! OW! If we sell it without telling people where it came – OW! - from they’ll pay extra for it! It doesn’t even have to be good!”
The cane stops in mid swing.
“Hmmm. You may have a point there. By the time they figure out what it really is they may be hooked.”
“Yes! Exactly!”
“Then we could start a Civet farm and feed them the bad beans so we could save the better ones for the regular crop.”
“Good idea!”
“Okay, I’m in. But what will we call it?”
“How about Civet Coffee?”
“Brilliant!”
“We’ll tell everyone it’s an ‘acquired taste’. That always gets ‘em.”
I doubt they ever drank any again themselves.
Eventually the idea took hold and now the stuff sells for, in some cases, $600 a pound. Recent studies have found that virtually no one can taste any significant difference between this coffee and any other, although I don’t know if the participants were told they were drinking roasted weasel turds. I suspect that if they knew this up front they would have refused to participate in the study.
Up to this point the consumption of poop was always limited to the animal kingdom. I know this because we have a dog and a cat. I like them both. I have observed that they have what I have come to think of as a “symbiotic” relationship. When we first got the cat we kept her indoors for several months and during this time we, of course, had a litter box.
Being the one who was automatically assumed to be the Litter Box Cleaner I had reason to observe some, what I considered to be, odd things.
The cat learned how to use the litter box fairly quickly, and she was pretty consistent about how many times in a day that she used it. It was a little irritating when she would get a little overenthusiastic in burying her “product” because she would kick the litter out of the box and then I would step on it. It felt like a bunch of little sharp pebbles. When I went to scoop her stuff out of the box I came to expect a certain number of “items” to be there, because she was, as I mentioned, consistent.
After a few weeks I began to notice there were fewer things in the box than there used to be. Now normally I wouldn’t consider this a problem, but since she was an indoor cat I started to wonder if I was going to start finding some of these little “markers” in unexpected places. I was on the lookout, but I never found any strays. I did, however, discover something else.
One day as I was walking through the room with the litter box I came upon our dog sniffing in the litter box and she came out with a piece of dried up cat poop in her mouth.
The litter box was her cookie jar.
“Oh man! What are doing that for? Do you have an iron deficiency or something?” It seems like any weird dietary practice is always explained by an iron deficiency. I’m sure she understood every word I said. Being part yellow Lab she looked up at me with those pathetic eyes and wagged her tail as if to say, “What? Did I do something wrong? Try one they’re tasty!” I chose to forego this offer.
The cat became an outside cat shortly after that. I have observed that there is a particular spot in the flower bed of our backyard that she prefers to use as her litter box. I have also observed that the dog has discovered this spot. I won’t give you anymore detail on that except to say the dog has never licked my face since the litter box incident. I have heard that in some countries (not the US) it is considered healthy to drink a glass of one’s own urine each day. No one who does this will be allowed to lick my face either. I’m pretty sure if I just started feeding the cat more food I wouldn’t have to feed the dog anymore. She’d have her own “natural” food supply.
So this is my proof that Civet coffee consumption is unnatural for humans and should at the very least come with a warning label of some kind. I’m not really sure what it should say. Maybe something as simple as,
“WARNING this is made from weasel turds! Drink at your own risk!”
Or maybe,
“WARNING! The consumption of Weasel Turd Coffee is an ACQUIRED TASTE! If you have not acquired the taste you risk death and/or chronic halitosis in the process of acquiring said taste. And it may destroy all your other tastes, and leave you friendless!”
Yeah, I think that one would do it.
You’ll save a lot of money for gas too.
©Dan Bode 2008

My Friend Ron

2010-06-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

In the neighborhood I grew up in there were quite a few kids my age, and we all played together, but I was close to just a few. One of those was a kid named Ronnie Bateman. I was a few years older than him, but we were both born while our families lived on that street and I suppose they must have gotten together as friends for Ron and I to have become so close. I don’t recall a time while I lived on that street that he and I weren’t friends. We were always hanging out together. His family became a surrogate to me when mine began to unravel. When my parents divorced he was there, we didn’t talk about it, but I knew I could express emotions over the situation without any reprimand. He was a good friend in a storm.
Later, when my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, I went to stay at his house when she went in for surgery. His mom made my lunch for school, and got me where I needed to go. Again, when my mother was dying from the cancer the surgeons were unable to get, Ron’s home was mine. There was a connection between us that was cemented in my pain, and one that I have never forgotten.
After my mother died I left the neighborhood I had grown up in to go live with my brother Bill. It was a parting that I had no means of comprehending. It was September 1973, and I was 12 years old. All of my stuff was packed, and I was getting ready to leave the house that I had lived in all my life. My brother Dave was going to live there for a while with his wife Heike. I had come up with every reason I could think of to stay there, but there were no other viable options. Living with my father was not a consideration due to his alcoholism, and Dave and Heike were just starting out in their marriage. Taking responsibility for a now troubled 12-year-old would have been too much to bear. So I had to leave the neighborhood. There were no other choices.
I had to leave home.
As I prepared to leave for the last time my friends all came around to say good-bye. I did ok with most of them, although some of that was because I was still simply stunned with all of the sudden changes that were taking place around me. My family had changed, my home had changed, my school had changed, and while there were so many friends and relatives offering their love and support I still felt profoundly and completely isolated. Not even the people or things that I had grown up with seemed the same anymore. Then Ron came over, and I went over to his house for the last time. His mom cried and hugged me and said good-bye as well as his sister Kathy and his dad. We sat around for a while and looked through all of the boxes full of parts from every electric toy we two had owned. We had been gathering all the materials to make a functional robot. No one ever thought to tell us we needed more than electric motors to do it. Finally, it was time for me to leave. We didn’t quite know what to say anymore. Good-bye was too simple for the kind of friendship we had. We were young, but we had gone through a great deal together. In the end we just said good-bye and hugged. That was something I generally didn’t do with other guys at that age, but there was no other way to communicate anything further. I left the neighborhood with promises from my friends to write to them and they to me. I don’t think any of us ever did, kids at that age are generally not the best at that kind of thing.

Quite a few years passed before I heard any more news from the neighborhood. Ron and his family came to my wedding, and Ron caught the garter belt. We didn’t get a chance to talk much then so there was no opportunity for any catching up. I had no contact with anyone there except for my brother Dave and he would occasionally pass on some news that he had heard. He and Heike had moved out of the house when it was sold, so he did not have as much direct contact as before. My wife Sue was pregnant with our second daughter Kaytie when Dave called me with the news that Ron Bateman had just gotten out of the hospital after having surgery for a brain tumor. I was pretty shocked. Ron was only about 23 years old. This wasn’t supposed to happen this young. Dave said that he had heard that he was doing ok, but he hadn’t talked to them directly. I still remembered Ron’s phone number, it was as indelibly etched in my memory as my own from those days. Mr. Bateman answered the phone. I told him who I was and he said,
“Well hello Danny! It’s good to hear from you. How are you doing?”
I told him I was fine and gave him a brief rundown on my life up to that point. I then told him I had heard about Ron’s situation and had called to see how he was doing. He had just come home from the hospital the day before I called.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hey Ron, this is Dan Bode.” I replied.
“Wow! How ya’ doin’ buddy? It’s been a long time!” He sounded tired.
“I’m doing pretty well, how about you?” I asked.
“I’m doing OK. I get tired real easy though. The doctor says that will get better with time. How did you hear about me?”
I told him about Dave and how he had told me about it all. We talked about all we had been doing over the many years we had missed in each other’s lives. He had become a Christian about the same time I had. Both of us had grown up in the church, but we never had an understanding about what it meant to have a personal relationship with Christ. After searching around for a few years we both wound up back at the Cross. It was good to know we had that level of spiritual fellowship to connect. We talked about getting together sometime and going sailing. He had joined a sailing club and would go out on the bay. He enjoyed the peace. We made no definite dates since we had no idea how his recovery would progress. I called him every few months after that to maintain contact, and he seemed to improve in his strength and general health for a while, but then things seemed to go down hill again. He told me that another tumor had developed. This time the doctors could do nothing for him. He was going to die.
His family settled in and waited with him. He was engaged at the time to a lovely young woman who chose to stay with him and become a part of his family.
I don’t remember how long it took for the tumor to develop to the point that it totally incapacitated him, but when he went into the hospital for the last time his mom called me and I came back to see him. I remember walking in to the hospital and finding the hall where his room was. His mom was just coming out when she saw me. She immediately put her arms out to hug me, and as I put my arms around her I remember saying “I love you.” It was the first thing out of my mouth. I didn’t think about it prior to that, it was simply the right thing to say. She had been my mother too for a while. She held me tighter and sobbed quietly for just a moment. She let me go and said “I love you too Danny”.
“How is he?” I asked.
I could tell the room was crowded, and there was a lot of noise going on in there.
“He’s actually doing pretty well. Several of our friends from church came to visit, and do you know he said he wanted to lead them in some hymns? Can you believe it?”
I had to believe it, because I heard a bunch of people singing hymns in his room. When I walked in they were just finishing the last one, and people were starting to file out of the room. They all smiled at me as they left with tears in their eyes. I walked closer to the bed and his sister Kathy, who had been sitting next to him, came over and hugged me.
“Ron guess who’s here? It’s Danny.”
“I was hoping you would make it out.” He said.
He didn’t look too much different from when I had seen him at my wedding a few years before. I don’t recall him looking emaciated or anything like that. He was, however, completely incapacitated. The tumor had grown to the point that it was actually shoving his brain to the side. All he could do was lay there with his head turned to the side. He could see and he could speak, but that was all. He would occasionally ask someone to turn his head for him. Because the pain was now so intense the doctor had put him on a continual morphine feed. There was nothing they could do now except ease his pain. We talked for a little while, but not too long. He fell asleep and I just sat by his bed for an hour or two praying for him and his family. When he was awake he was either singing, praising God, or telling a joke. He was the most positive person there.
Occasionally the morphine would intervene as he drifted in and out of a drug-induced fog, but something struck me very profoundly as I watched this happen to him. Most people are quite incoherent in this state, rambling on with jumbled thoughts or just basic nonsense, but not Ron. When the morphine took over and Ron lost conscious control of his senses, the only words that came out of his mouth were praises to God. He was totally oblivious to my presence, but not to his Creator. I almost felt as if I was intruding on a private conversation, so powerful was the presence of God in that moment. It struck me then that Ron had truly given himself completely over to God.
We all talk about doing that don’t we? We all talk about giving ourselves completely over to Christ, and living for Him. That is the goal of our existence. That is the one point in our life that every Christian strives for, to surrender completely to God and let Him do His work in and through us. Ron had reached that point. He was so completely immersed in the Holy Spirit that when he had no control over himself, God did. I asked myself then, if I were in the same condition as Ron what words would be coming out of my mouth? Would the pursuit of God be so ingrained in me that I would still praise Him if I had no control of my actions?
It has been 13 years since I asked myself these questions, and I have yet to answer them.
Ron was sent home to die in his own bed, in the same room we had always gone to play in when we were kids. One night in the middle of the night as his father was checking on him, he awoke briefly and asked his dad to cover him up. His dad covered him and checked the morphine flow on his way back to bed. He died peacefully a few hours later as he slept.
His mom called me the next day to tell me he was gone, and when the memorial service would be. I was there to see all of his friends and family say their good-byes and add my own.
It struck me as I sat and listened to everyone speak with such love about this man that I had known all my life, that I had watched a man die. I have indeed heard the words “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” more than I wanted to in my lifetime, but never had I been there to actually observe a death of someone I knew well. I had been there shortly after my mother died, but I was not there to see the process. Here I had actually talked to Ron about where he was going. We had talked about seeing each other again, and then he faded out and started praising God while he was not aware himself of what he was doing.
I had seen death before, but I realized then that I would never, in any other circumstance, consider it such an honor to watch a man die.
We are all appointed once to die, but Ron had taken his one life and used it to die well.
©Dan Bode 1998

Love Conquers All

2010-03-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

Love Conquers All.
I’ve heard that phrase for most of my life at one time or another, and I’m not sure I ever really understood it until now. I have no idea why it took so long.
It portrays love in the sense of the conquering hero.
The one whom no enemy can stand against.
The difference for me now is that I understand that the battlefield on which all this conflict takes place is in my own heart.
When I examine it realistically I have to admit that I always thought of it in terms of conquering someone else. I wanted love to conform others to my own expectations of what they should be. I wanted love to be at my command.
Imagine my surprise then, when the blade turned upon me instead.
Love will, if I let it, overcome my pain to grant forgiveness, or ask for it.
It will overcome my pride to extend my hand in friendship to my enemy.
It will overcome my anger to allow my faithfulness.
It will overcome me.
Love conquers all, but first, love conquers me. My walls must be overcome from within.
It is sometimes hard to love, but worth your whole life to reach just one moment of being completely known by another, and to know the other in turn. To reach out your hand unseen in the dark knowing the hand of another is already there in expectation to take it.
It is worth everything for just one moment of this. To be known, and not forgotten.
Living your life in pursuit of that first, and maybe only, all encompassing instant of perfection.
Because God is Love, He created us as an expression of Himself, hence we are created in His image. As an expression of God Himself we are inherently worthy of His sacrifice for us, and yet God on a cross seems so incongruous to our concept of love. That’s the problem with our interpretation of love. It’s so watered down we have no concept of what real love is. It’s as though in so many ways we have sanitized the true expression of love to be bloodless. It’s all butterflies and sunny days to our general way of thinking.
We seem to forget that love "endures all things"(1Cor 13:7), and the need for endurance implies conflict, distraction, and sometimes pain. We should love fiercely letting nothing come between us.
Love, when practiced honestly, becomes beauty incarnate.
Love influences the practice of my life. It gives everything I do different meaning.
Love truly is an action, and yet it is more. It becomes what we do, where we go, who we know and how we know them. Love cannot reach its full potential in our lives if we do not allow ourselves to live in complete surrender to it. If I am only capable of loving someone when things are all good, then I don’t really love at all.
Each of the qualities of love (1Cor 13) implies that there is a need for that quality because its opposite exists in the world. Patience is needed because the lack of it causes bitterness. Kindness is needed because cruelty exists. The difficult part of this is that we all know that we are capable of dealing out all the opposing forces of love. We focus on the positive aspects because we feel better when we actively pursue them as a lifestyle. There is healing in the practice of love.
“Love your enemies” (Lk 6:35), is the most difficult aspect of love, but Jesus gave us examples of it throughout His life. Judas was the most difficult enemy to deal with because he was already loved. His ability to cause pain was increased by the measure of love Christ gave him. There are times when the evidence of the love of God seems so profound to me that I actually understand why some people fear it rather than readily accept it.
Even the one who betrayed Christ was allowed at His table. Christ knew that Judas was His betrayer, and yet His love for him was such that He still desired Judas’ presence in the Passover meal; one of the most intimate of settings.
Judas didn’t deserve that and he knew it. Jesus knew this as well, and gave it to him anyway. All this made Judas’ betrayal that much more profound to Judas, for the greater the love we give when betrayed causes that much more pain for the betrayer.
And is it not one of the most important aspects of love that we should find the ability to love our enemies for the simple fact that when we sin we ourselves act as the most intimate of enemies to God, and He loves us still? Is He not the greatest example of loving one’s enemy simply by loving us for, “He loved us while we were yet sinners” (Romans 5:8), let alone the ones we condemn without authority?
It is the ability of love to not only conquer all things, but to remain after everything is done and over with. After all the blood has been shed, the ground churned, and with the vultures circling overhead to pick at the corpses of our discontent, Love walks among us to restore us after all the pain to a healed state ready to love again. It is self perpetuating by nature so that when we learn to love ourselves, as God loves us, we understand that we must do something to maintain it in ourselves in order to stay alive to share it with others.
His love makes us matter.
And so we are filled with possibilities.
Because of His love Jesus not only died, but He came back for us!
He. Came. Back.
It is this single, overwhelming act of love that inspires every other expression of true love that we can ever submit to or practice in the human experience.
Through His redemption we are alive with the potential to discover the worth of our very souls.
Live in love,
Do battle in love,
Rest in love,
Die in love,
Return in love.
God did.
It’s called Easter.
©Dan Bode 2010

The Right Thing

2010-01-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

"For such is the will of God, that by doing right we may silence the ignorance of foolish men." 1Peter 2:15.

We can do the “right thing” all of our lives and bad things will still happen to us. Doing the right thing does not save us from future circumstances. It is when we continue to do the “right thing” when life goes bad on us that our lives gain significance in the eyes of others.
Job is the perfect example of the man who did the “right thing” all the time, yet he suffered a great deal. The real significance of Jobs’ life is that he continued to do the right thing even as he suffered. I’m going to go out on a limb here, but when I really give it some thought I realize that if Job hadn’t acted as he did he wouldn’t even be in the Bible. If he hadn’t continued to live as he always had his faith would have no standing with the world. It wasn’t his suffering that set him apart, a lot of people suffer. What set Job apart, what made him worthy of our notice, was what he did in the midst of his suffering. He just continued doing what he had always done.
It is when we continue to do the “right thing” when bad things happen that the world takes notice. When trials occur in our lives our first question is often, “Why me?”. The more appropriate question should be, “Why not me?”. My faith does not exempt me from adverse circumstance. Trials happen to everyone at some point, but we as Christians are given the means to cope.
Prior to Jesus, Job was the epitome of suffering. Things that never happen to anyone happened to Job all at the same time. A lot of people get hung up on the whole idea that God allowed Job’s children to be killed. What most of us fail to do is to look at these events from God’s perspective. Granted this is a difficult proposition at any time, but we need to try it in order to understand this issue. God knew that Job’s children would be going to heaven, which is better than being on earth any day. So their deaths were not a bad thing from His view, and once they got there I know they were pretty happy with the outcome. The reason He knew where they were going, aside from the fact that He’s God, is that Job had raised them to know God. In fact, Job even made sacrifices for his own children just in case they forgot or sinned somehow. Just to make sure all the bases were covered. Job did the “right thing” even when no one else thought he needed to. Job was conscious of his relationship with God all the time. Because Job spent so much time in fellowship with God there were qualities in that relationship that most of us only dream of because we have chosen not to pursue God wholeheartedly.
God knew Job. He trusted Job.
When God pointed to Job He said, “Have you considered my servant Job?” He didn’t say “Here’s a long list of my followers that you should look at.” Of all the people on earth He could have mentioned He named only one. He did not name Job’s children, or his wife, or his friends.
Job was the only name that passed God’s lips.
To have faith is to be tested. I have to wonder if untested faith is real faith at all.
Let me clarify that statement: We all have faith in something. It may be a thing, a person, or even an activity. We tend to put our faith in people or things that have passed some test that has proven to us that it is worthy of our dependence on it. Sooner or later the object of our faith will be judged as to whether or not it is worthy of it. I can tell you with complete certainty that everything we have faith in on this earth will fail us. The reason for that is this; on earth we determine whether something or someone is worthy of our faith, but with God it is He who determines if we are worthy to have faith in Him. The quality of our faith in God is determined by its resistance to the influences of a dying world, and it becomes our own choice as to whether we allow our faith to be strengthened or weakened. To be tested is to go beyond our own limits to the point where only God’s strength can sustain us. It is when I reach the limits of all that I aspire to that I find that I alone am not enough.

So it is that Satan dares to come before God, and he can’t help but acknowledge God’s authority in saying that he can’t get past the protection that God has set around his servant. I think there was a lot more to this interaction between God and Satan than we realize. I think Satan came face to face with the reality of God as he never had before.
“Have you considered my servant Job?”
Satan already knew about Job. He was already aware of the protection God afforded him. "Have You not made a hedge about him and his house and all that he has, on every side ?" (Job 1:10) He had already tried to get past God’s defenses. That’s how he knew that God had surrounded Job with His protection.
I think God was pointing something out to Satan. I think He was sending a message to Satan that said, “Whatever you do to this man will never be enough to make him curse Me. There is nothing you could ever do to anyone or for anyone that will create in them that kind of loving devotion to you. I alone am the one who will have this, and I freely return that same devotion to those who give it to Me. You lost this war before it began just as I have always told you. Have you considered my servant Job? Your worst will never be enough to change his heart. I already know the truth of Job, but by testing him you will only be proving the truth to yourself. You will not win. Remember the name of Job whenever you think you have won an inch of ground, and remember that you have gained nothing! So consider my servant Job, Satan, and understand that you haven’t got a prayer.”

I think the truth is this: God did not choose Job to suffer. He chose Job to survive.
God knew what Satan intended, and He knew that Job would not give up. He also knew that others would, and they would go to hell if Satan tested them the same way.
There are days when we have grief upon grief. Tragedy hits and life falls apart. We are not strangers to this. When something tragic happens I lose the ability to understand the why or the wherefore. It is completely overshadowed by the pain. Sometimes we don’t want to see our wounds. Sometimes we cover it over rather than acknowledging the fact that faith and grace are often very bloody.
When God’s protection was in place Job apparently did not feel Satan’s attacks. When it was taken away Job felt the attacks, but still endured because he knew for a fact that God was still there. Job had no ability to understand why these things were happening, but he did know without a doubt that none of it affected the fact of God’s existence or His love for him.
By living his life as he had, Job ensured that his own faith was strong enough to maintain an unseen connection with God so when God withdrew His protection from Job their connection remained. And we see the truth of this in scripture when we read, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” (James 4:8) Once we are near God we are simply near Him. It doesn’t matter what side of the halfway mark you are on. To be in the presence of God is overwhelming no matter how far back in the balcony you think you are. All the seats are good.

After describing Job’s restoration the book of Job ends saying, “After this, Job lived 140 years, and saw his sons and his grandsons, four generations. And Job died, an old man and full of days.”
There is no further mention of Satan seeking to inflict anything further on him. He took his last shot and failed. I think Satan fled the halls of heaven chased by the voice of God echoing behind him saying, “Remember my servant Job.” Satan is a failure, and God considers us the jewel of His creation.
Satan’s failure is our success by God’s proxy. There is no better claim to God’s love than this. He proved it to us at the Crucifixion.
We will suffer,
and we will have joy,
and God will welcome us Home.
©Dan Bode 2010

What Did the Shepherds Think?

2009-12-17T08:21:00.000-08:00

What did the shepherds think?
Their part in the life of Christ did not end on the night of His birth.
How did they feel when the angels told them of Christ’s birth?
Certainly they were awestruck. They were most likely quite shocked to be chosen to receive this announcement. They were, after all, fairly low on the social scale even though they were the guardians of the main resource of the towns’ primary industry. They were perhaps not well known for their social skills. They were out in the hills by themselves for long periods of time, and human interaction seldom occurred. The appearance of angels announcing a birth would be shocking enough, but they must have wondered at the significance of their inclusion in it at all. They were, as a matter of course, avoided by the general population.
Perhaps it was later that they began to understand the significance of their role in Jesus’ life. Perhaps even years later, when Jesus’ ministry was in full swing, and if they realized that this Jesus was the same babe they once honored, when John the Baptist announced Him as the Lamb of God, maybe it was then that they began to see the implication of their presence in the stable. For the reality of their job, their vocation, one that was often passed on from father to son for generations, was to raise these lambs for sacrifice in the Temple at Jerusalem. This was the industry of this little town of Bethlehem. They were raised to be laid across the altar as atonement for the sins of the people. The perfect lamb was chosen and killed from the flocks they raised! Not since Abraham had stretched his own son Isaac across the stones had a human ever laid upon the altar, and he had been spared. Simply taking the title of The Lamb told the world who He was, for those who had ears to hear.
Did they perhaps hear of this and cover their mouths as they gasped in surprise? This babe, this Man, the Lamb?
How could this be?
And again, how did they feel when this same man who called himself the Son of God, also named Himself the Good Shepherd? Did they straighten their spines with the implication of the honor He gave them? Did they plant their shepherd’s staffs and let the light of pride shine in their eyes? Did they smile and think, “I knew Him! I was there when He was born!”?
Would they not also bow their heads in sorrow, and let a tear roll down a weathered cheek when they new the final destination of the unblemished lamb?

And how is it that He was both lamb and shepherd?
As the Lamb He knew He needed a caring and watchful eye on Him to insure His safety and fulfill His needs.
As a Shepherd He knew exactly what a lamb needed when He took them to the still waters, He knew how best to protect them; by laying down His life for them on the altar where they were meant to lie.
As a man He knows our needs.
As our God He knows our needs.
But all of this must have come later to the minds of the shepherds. They could not have known all that He was as they beheld Him in the manger. All they knew was the joy His birth brought the world that day, overwhelming as it was. They saw and heard a heavenly host, and found a King in lowly circumstance.
And in so many ways and so many times I am left to wonder what it must have been like to be a shepherd, kneeling before that bed of hay bringing with me the only gift I had available to me and saying,
“I am but a lowly shepherd and I have so little, but here, I have brought for you this perfect lamb….”
©Dan Bode 2004

Papa Taught Me

2009-11-03T10:32:00.000-08:00

Recently I had the opportunity to watch my Grandchildren Kaya, five, and Oliver, one, for a few hours while their parents were busy. At some point during our time together Kaya asked if she could tie my shoe which was sitting on the floor next to me. I was under the impression that she didn’t know how to tie shoes yet so I wasn’t worried about it.
“Sure.”, I said.
She happily went to work tying my shoe. It occurred to me that she didn’t really have any shoes with laces. Hers have buckles or Velcro. Don’t get me wrong, I think Velcro is one of the greatest inventions of all time. It’s right up there with duct tape. The thing is that nowadays I’m pretty sure the only kids who know how to tie knots anymore are Boy Scouts. Knots can be pretty useful. They should have classes on knots in school.
“Ok Papa I’m done.”
She handed me back my shoe with a knot that I’m sure bore a remarkable resemblance to the Gordian knot that Alexander the Great had to contend with just before he went on to conquer Asia Minor. He used a sword to deal with his. I always appreciated his straightforward approach to that. I was afraid I might have to contend with this in a similar manner, although I could probably do it with scissors, even though I have a friend who collects real swords and has a few he would let me borrow.
For someone who didn’t know how to tie shoes she had done a pretty remarkable job. The laces looped under and around each other with knots tied randomly amongst them. Then they were looped haphazardly around the area where the laces are strung through the holes in the shoe and tied again. Have you ever seen a handful of earthworms all intertwined in a mass that looks like one big earthworm all wrapped up in itself?
That’s the best description of what it looked like.
She grabbed my other shoe and began to work on that one.
“Uh sweetie, that’s not really the way you tie a shoe.”
“Well I don’t really know how to tie a shoe. Would you show me?”
I was at one of those points in the day where I actually didn’t have anything that needed doing, and, after realizing that this was indeed the case and my time was actually free for a while, I said, “Sure”.
So I proceeded to show her how to make the first knot, which she had already proven pretty adept at, and then the first loop, and then wrapping the lace around the first loop and pulling it through. She then tried it herself and didn’t quite get it right, but it was a very good first attempt. I showed her again what needed to be done, telling her in the process, “I didn’t get it right the first time either. It took me a little while before I got it.”
Of course, immediately after I said that she got it.
I looked down at the shoe, and realized that it was tied correctly!
“Hey! You did it!” I said.
She looked at the shoe with eyes wide and her mouth open in surprise.
Then she looked at me and smiled.
“I did it!” she yelled and clapped her hands.
“Very good! It took me a lot longer than that! Good job!” I said. You’re supposed to make a big deal when kids do something right and act excited, but I was really excited about it! I’d forgotten how much fun it is to see a child’s face light up like that when they come to understand something good for the first time.
“I want to do it again! Can I do it again?”
“Sure!”
So she did it again, and again, and again. She got it right every time, refining her method a little more each time.
Then she turned it around on me.
“Ok, now let’s pretend that you don’t know how to tie a shoe.” She said, “You have to do it wrong and then I’ll teach you how to do it right. You have to get it wrong six times ok?” she said.
“Ok.”
So I pretended to mess up tying the shoe laces.
“That’s good but you didn’t get it quite right.” She said in her best teacher’s voice. “You need to make sure you put the loop through here like this.”
We went through six variations of messing up the tying of the laces until I was allowed to get it right.
“You did it! Good job!”
It occurred to me that the “Tying of the Shoes” is kind of a milestone in childhood. I’ve never really asked anyone else about this, but it turned out to be a big deal for me. To this day I remember the first time I tied my own shoe without any assistance. I was in kindergarten at the time so I was Kaya’s age when it happened. I remember being so surprised. I was almost afraid to untie it to try again for fear I would be stranded with flopping shoe laces. I practiced and practiced without success and then at some point for no apparent reason it all just came together at one specific moment, and there it was! A tied shoe lace! Will you look at that! One more step toward independence complete. I think it was about that time I started thinking about trying to ride a bicycle.
It wasn’t until the next morning that it really hit me about exactly what had happened.
I was getting ready for work brushing my teeth. I could hear Kaya in the living room showing her father how she could tie shoes.
“Good job Kaya! I’m so proud of you!” he said.
“Papa taught me!” she said.
When I heard those words it all crystallized for me. You see I know that my daughter had been working with her and teaching her how to do it before this, but it just hadn’t come to that final moment. I was given the privilege of seeing everyone else’s efforts come to the moment of fruition. I didn’t really teach her so much as she just came to that final stage of learning. I was just a witness to it.
In that moment I became acutely aware of the memories we give our children. There is no way to determine what will stick in their minds, or how they will interpret what we do or say with their child’s mentality. Every parent who loves their children wants them to remember them well, but still we have to discipline them at times, and this they will remember too. But with enough love they will see the balance when they are old enough to think it through. We parents have to wait a while for that reward though.
But here’s the kicker: just as I remember the first time I tied my shoes, I’m pretty sure she’ll remember it too. And the most precious thing for me is that I will be there in her memories of it, and she will remember that I love her long after I am gone.
I hope they still have shoes with shoe laces when she grows up.
I hope she’ll be able to smile at the memory when she teaches her children, and she will see my face and remember me with fondness.
©Dan Bode 2009

Peter and Telemachus - Men of Purpose

2009-10-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

A few years ago a friend of mine did a devotional at a men’s breakfast. In that message he asked two questions:
1. Who is God to you?
2. What will you do for Him?

I came away from there asking myself those questions, and I came to realize that, for me, one is dependant on the other.
Who God is to me will determine, in the end, what I will do for Him.
It also begs another question: Who am I to God?
This latter question seems the easiest one to answer. He is pretty clear in His word about my importance to Him.
To God, I am worth His presence at the beginning, during every moment of my life, and at the end. To God, I am worth allowing into His home, His heart, His plans. To God, I am someone worth dying for, and dying with. I really have no desire to question why this is so; I’m just glad it is.
So I come back to the original questions in this context, and find a much richer answer.
I must first acknowledge that I cannot hope to match the devotion of God. I am human, and a sinner. I am imperfect, and can only gain perfection through Him anyway. I am an unfinished work, not yet ready for the gallery of finished products.
I have to look at history for examples of others whose devotion to Him was evident in their lives. Jesus’ disciple Peter is one of my favorites. Always rebellious, a storm waiting to be unleashed, his pride and anger showing their faces all through his time with Christ. Yet, with all his faults, all of which Christ was keenly aware, this uneducated fisherman is the only human to know what it was like to walk on water. He was the one to leave the other 11 disciples behind in the boat on a stormy sea as they watched in dumbfounded fascination while He went to meet their Lord on the water. His actions that day came about as a result of who God was to him. He acknowledged, for a little while at least, that Christ had authority over nature. For Christ he was willing to say, “If He says I can, then I know it’s true that I can walk on water.”
Who God was to him, led Peter to do what we see as impossible.
But there is another that I’d like to tell you about. His name was Telemachus.
So take my hand, and let us go back in time. Rest with me as we sit on a grassy hill overlooking a small settlement of monks. Watch with me as we see his story unfold.
Telemachus was a monk who lived in the hills somewhere in Asia Minor. He was content to tend the needs of his monastery, living a quiet life. In fact, we come upon him tending the garden, on his knees, dirt on his robe and hands. His is the life of the ascetic, serving God in a simple life with few needs. We see him sit back and wipe his brow with the back of his hand. He looks heavenward with a startled look on his face and frowns. “Rome?” he says aloud, though we hear no one else speak nor do we see anyone else near. “I know not why, but I will go.” He says.
He goes to his small, spartan room and gathers a few things. He stops at the kitchen to take food for his journey, and walks away from the life he has known comfortably for years. His journey to Rome is long, but God supplies him, and he arrives in good health, still unsure of the reason for his presence there. It is a time of festival, for the Romans are celebrating their victory over the Goths, and there are entertainers for the crowds and free bread being distributed throughout the city. Telemachus is swept along toward the coliseum, possibly unaware of what he is about to see. He finds himself amidst a sea of people, and though he did not intend to go there, he finds himself in the stands of the coliseum. He is unsure of what is about to occur, but he can feel the malevolent hunger of the crowd, and it fills him with foreboding. Here, put your hand against his chest, feel his heart thudding with anxiety. He still does not know why he is here, only that he must be.
Out on the sand of the arena two men walk out to stand before the emperor’s box. Raising their swords they offer the gladiator’s salute, “We who are about to die salute thee!”
With that they turn to face each other.
It is here, with horrifying clarity, that Telemachus understands the purpose of this stadium, and his purpose for being here. Feel his heart again. It’s alright; he is unaware of our presence. It beats slow and steady now. He knows his purpose. He will fulfill his call.
“In the name of Christ forbear!” he cries.
His lone voice is drowned out by the noise of the boisterous crowd.
He begins to run down the steps to the arena, yelling frantically “In the name of Christ forbear!”
He remains unnoticed as the crowd continues to focus on the unfolding spectacle in the sand.
He leaps the barrier to land in the arena, and runs across the sand to stand between the gladiators as they circle each other. Raising his hands he cries again, “In the name of Christ forbear!”
The fighters shove him aside trying to continue their fight. We can see some confusion on the faces in the crowd. They are not sure if this is part of the game or not. Some laugh at the little man in the worn robe, but others do not share the humor. Cries of “Kill him!”, and “Get him out of the way!” are heard.
Telemachus knows his purpose. He will not be put aside. He jumps in between the two fighters once again and cries, “In the name of Christ forbear!”
The gladiators react in their frustration and one of them thrusts his gladius through Telemachus’ chest, piercing his heart. For some reason the crowd that seconds before had demanded his death now sits in stunned silence. As Telemachus’ body slides off the sword and falls to the sand we can here him whisper, “In the name of Christ forbear….”, and so he dies.
It is said that the crowd left the coliseum in silence, and that this was the last gladiator event in the Roman arena.
Another account says that Telemachus died instead when the crowd stoned him to death for interrupting their sport. Both accounts are consistent in saying that he died on the sands of the arena, and that his death there led to the ending of the games.
In either event, we have seen how he was only one man standing against an entire society because God called him to do it.
Because God was Telemachus’ king, he was willing to give his life for Him.
Who God was to Telemachus determined what he did for Him.
One person can change the world.
It does not always happen in big ways. Not all of us will have a wide audience. In fact, most of the time we each change just a small part of our world, but each of us builds on the influence of the other, and often unknowingly contribute to the greater effect. We become a small part in a huge intricate latticework that God is constructing. The importance of our place in it can not be diminished for the simple reason that it is God who put us there. We fit where we fit because God is who He is to each of us, and He has made us each uniquely suited to the need we fill. Even our faults are incorporated into the greater picture. One of the greatest testimonies to the love of God is that He is able and willing to use and love us despite our greatest flaws.
Does this mean that we are to find a sword to fall on in order to honor His call on each of us? No, He has not called us all to do this, although there are those who will. I am called to be known as His child wherever I am. At work I must do my job diligently and well. At home I must treat my wife and children in the way He would have me treat them, with all the love, tenderness and respect I know how to give. I must be the same person out in the world as I am in the comfort of my church.
If God is the loving God to me that I know He is, then I must determine to show that love to all who know me, by loving them and protecting them in every way possible. Whether they know Him or not, they must know Him through me.
Peter and Telemachus were just two simple men, but look what God did with them once they understood their Purpose!
©Dan Bode 2003

Not Just a Dog

2009-10-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

I had to have our dog put to sleep today.
I have been dreading this moment for a while now. We got her from friends several years ago, and they got her from the pound so we don’t know her exact age but she was somewhere around 16 years old. I watched her body fail gradually, and finally reached a point where I realized that she was still alive only because I didn’t want to let her go. I don’t think I really wanted to admit that I was that attached to her. I finally reached a point where watching her suffer was more than I could bear, and I finally gave up my selfishness.
Emma was with us for several years, and when we got her she fit right into our family. We had just gone through the loss of our previous dog when our friends, who had her then, moved to Texas. She filled the space left so empty from our loss, and gave us a connection to our now absent friends as well, providing more comfort than we had anticipated.
She was there to provide entertainment when she would do something that was probably a normal dog behavior, but left us laughing all the time. When we got our cat they would play together constantly and we would just sit back and watch the show. She was present when our grandchildren were in the house and walked the hall nervously when they would cry, much like a parent might do. She was always ready to play with anyone at anytime, and I never really did her justice in trying to keep up with her. She barked when there was something to bark at, but only then. She always insisted on checking in with me when I sat down in the living room as well. She would roam the floor first and look for any edible treasures the kids had dropped first, and then come over and rest her head on my leg until I petted her for a while.
I suppose it was a combination of all these things that helped to form my attachment for her. Unconditional love and loyalty is so hard to come by in people that we find it more easily in animals who, once they bond with us, remain devoted to the best of their abilities. They don’t take into consideration the greater social, political, and moral implications of a relationship. They just know we like to see them at the door when we come home so they do it happily.
I understand that animals don’t fit into the whole structure of salvation, but they are part of God’s wonderful creation of which we are stewards and caretakers. A job, incidentally, that I believe we are failing miserably at. Animals often fill a void created by lack of human relationships, because we can ascribe any given attribute to that relationship. We don’t have to rely on feedback from the animal to improve the relationship, as with a human, to give that relationship more or less value, but we do have to provide for all their needs. I was responsible for every aspect of the relationship, but Emma was just being herself which was what we desired. Her presence fulfilled the need with no demands or expectations. She was happy to be around us. I realize as well that the value of the relationship with my dog originates with me. It is as valuable as I make it. My friend Cliff says that I should, “Think about what you learned from your dog.” It’s a good point, because I’m beginning to think that I would be better off treating people more like my dog treated me. I think God used her to give me life lessons which I will be learning for some time.
Because of all this letting her go was harder than I had anticipated. I watched as she struggled more and more each day to simply stand up. I realized at the end that I was really hoping that she would go on her own. I didn’t want the responsibility for deciding her life. I understand that in the case of humanity the responsibility for that choice can only be reasonably borne by God Himself. I am thankfully not adequate to that task. I could not bear that pain, for it is not in my power to offer anyone Heaven.
She walked into the house and kept stumbling as she walked across the floor. She came over to where I sat in the chair as was her custom, and laid her head on my leg a little more heavily than usual, and I knew. She was tired. It was time.

Some will say that she was just a dog. Just a pet. But she was more than that.
She was a present friend, and an unconditional comforter.
She will be missed.
©Dan Bode 2009

Alligator Lizards

2009-09-17T14:36:00.001-07:00

There are incidents in my childhood that I have simply been unable to forget. Most of these are capitol letter “Incidents”.
Like the Dead Alligator Lizard Incident.
Had I been a few years older I probably could have gotten biology credit in school for this one. Most kids have a low tolerance for boredom, and I was no exception. My friend Ron and I were sitting around one summer day with nothing to do, desperately trying to think of something before our mothers realized we were victims of inactivity. We had already tried the traditional forms of boyhood entertainment like catching bugs and throwing them into a spider web. Watching the spiders mounting frustration as it tried to get through the roly-poly’s armor was particularly fun, but even that no longer held our attention.
Finally we hit on the idea of catching some alligator lizards.
This was traditionally considered a weekend activity in our neighborhood, I don’t really remember why. Usually a large group of the neighborhood kids would all go down to an old abandoned paper factory a few miles from our neighborhood. The entire lot was overgrown with tall grass and weeds. There were several old fifty-gallon drums lying around there as well.
This was the lair of the alligator lizards. I don’t know if this was the actual name of the lizard or not. We just called them that because they were obviously lizards and they looked like alligators. They usually grew to a length of 12 – 18 inches. I don’t know why they chose this parcel of land as a suitable habitat either, but they were there. The minute you stepped off the sidewalk into this lot you could hear the unmistakable rustle of their movements as they sensed your presence. You could feel their eyes on you the second you entered their domain.
There really is no suitable explanation as to why we considered this entertainment. We came to the lot with a burlap sack and caught several of them. We would bring them back to the neighborhood and put them all in a wooden crate for a few hours and sit there watching them watching us. Wow.
What can I say, I was eight.
Anyway, this day Ron and I decided to go catch some lizards on our own since no one else was around. We grabbed a sack and headed out. We had found in the past that the lizards sometimes enjoyed crawling under the drums so as we entered the lot we headed for one of them right away. We had determined since I was the biggest, that I would be the one to move the drum, and Ron would wait and catch them in the sack.
What happened next was unique in all the adventures of our childhood.
Reptiles had always fascinated us. Lizards in particular were considered high on the interest scale. Any animal that had a tail that would break off and still move just to occupy the predator was pretty cool. I must take a moment here to point out that we really had the lizard’s best interests in mind. We were going to hand feed them all the bugs we could catch, we were even going to give them meat stolen from our own refrigerators. They were going to be very comfortable lizards.
I took hold of the rim of the drum and leaned back rolling the drum off to the side. Sure enough, there on the ground were two of the biggest alligator lizards we had ever seen. They were probably the parents of every other lizard on that lot. We had assumed they would not appreciate being exposed in this way, and we were right. They took off in different directions. One ran off into the weeds on the right, and the other ran straight at Ron. I don’t know if it was attacking Ron or it just didn’t realize it was heading for a person. At any rate Ron put one foot forward so he could bring the bag down to the ground. The problem was he put his foot directly into the path of the fleeing lizard. The lizard, seeing the sack coming down, veered off to avoid it and found itself in contact with Ron’s foot. Maintaining its momentum it continued in its quest for freedom and found what it must have thought was a temporary haven in that dark space that happened to be the inside of Ron’s pants leg.
Most kids our age had pretty decent reflexes, and Ron was no exception. When he realized that a very large alligator lizard had indeed run up his pant leg he did what anyone would have done in his situation. He screamed.
Before the lizard had gotten very far Ron had grabbed his leg at the knee and started vigorously shaking his leg in an effort to dislodge the lizard. I could see the end of the tail sticking out from under the cuff of his pants which led me to believe the lizard was hanging on to the front of his shin for dear life. It did not appear to be inclined to let go.
It was at this point that Ron’s scream descended from the realm of mindless terror to the level of barely coherent thought. He began to yell, “GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!”
It was like a mantra. He kept repeating it over and over and over.
I began to realize that this was not an ideal situation. My mind was not working at the same speed as Ron’s since I was not under the influence of the fear induced adrenaline rush as he was. I turned my thoughts to the task at hand. In my mind there were basically two options for removing the offending lizard.
The first option required that I reach up into my friends pant leg and grab the lizard.
There were two problems with this option. The first was I didn’t know if the lizard would be able to turn around and bite my hand as I laid hold of it. It did have a good set of little teeth on it, after all.
The second problem with this scenario was that it simply wasn’t prudent to take the chance of being seen by someone I knew, while putting my hand up the pant leg of another boy.
So considering these factors I decided to follow through on my second option.
“Hold still!” I yelled. I needed him to stop shaking his leg.
Still holding his leg at the knee, he planted his foot firmly on the ground.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Just get it out!” he replied.
“OK, Here goes”
I kicked him in the shin.
His shin was well cushioned so he felt no pain from it. I can’t say the same for the lizard, although it was certainly a quick death. As the initial shock of what I had done wore off he said, “Eeeeewwwwww! Eeeeeeewwwww! Why did you do that?!”
“I didn’t want it to bite me.”
“Eeeeeeewwwww! It’s all wet! GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!”
He pulled his pants leg up as far as he could, almost to his knee, and I reached up and peeled the lizard off of his shin. He was right, it was wet.
To be honest I was impressed with the condition it was in. Considering what it had just been through it was, even so, an intact specimen. If my interests had taken a turn to taxidermy at that point this would have been a pretty good practice piece. After I got it off and started looking at it, Ron’s interest was piqued as well.
“Wow! Hey that’s pretty neat! You can see everything!” He said as he grabbed a handful of grass and started wiping off his leg.
We considered trying to keep it long enough to show our friends, but we couldn’t think of a good way to preserve it. No mother that we knew of would allow us to keep it in the freezer, and we thought it might start to smell if we took it home to just dry in the sun. In the end we opted to give it a simple burial there in it’s homeland. We dug a shallow grave in the dirt and made a pattern of a cross with rocks over the spot. We thought it was the right thing to do.
From then on we never went back to catch lizards by ourselves again. Large groups were the way to go because there were more people available to herd them. One “Incident” in this area was enough. There were other “Incidents” as well, and we learned a great many lessons from them like: don’t put a sealed soda can in an incinerator, don’t jump off the roof using a blanket as a parachute, or never put gas in a coffee can and light it and then try to put it out with water. Things that often ensured our survival in this world. And they kept us in good physical condition from running away from whatever we did. We were fortunate that we only had to learn our lessons once.
But hey, at least we learned.
©Dan Bode 2000

Priorities

2009-08-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

John 12:8 “You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”
There are some things we will always have, both good and bad, but Jesus overcomes all things. He is more important than the best and the worst that we experience. We devote our time and energy to those things that have the greatest impact on our lives. We see sickness and health, wealth and poverty. All these things have a great impact on us for good or bad, and all of them can, by their impact, distract us from Christ. The essence of our relationship with Christ is that while all these things affect us at different levels we need to deal with Christ first and all other things through Him, not before or after Him.
The sequence of events in how we deal with any occasion in our lives determines the impact they have on us for Christ.
Occasionally, in some form or another the question is asked of me, “With all that you have been through why do you hold on to your faith?”
I think the answer to that question lies in what my priorities have become. I simply cannot bear to imagine my life without my faith. I’ve been there and done that. I have changed too much to go back and find satisfaction in a world without God. It would be barren and lifeless. I can no longer tolerate the world’s value system. I think about what offends God and I care about it. These things were once the furthest things from my mind. At the same time I have also reached a point where, while I love, fear and respect God, I have also come to understand that He allows questions. He allows challenges from us, for that is how we learn submission to Him. He can overcome any challenge. It is we who fear challenges to God, because we fear that He cannot meet them. We apply our own limits to God which automatically makes Him inadequate for our needs.
In his book “Reaching for the Invisible God.” Philip Yancey quotes Kathleen Norris.
“One so often hears people say, “I just can’t handle it”, when they reject a biblical image of God as Father, as Mother, as Lord or Judge; God as lover, as angry or jealous, God on a cross. I find this choice of words revealing, however real the pain they reflect: if we seek a God we can “handle”, that will be exactly what we get. A God we can manipulate, suspiciously like ourselves, the wideness of whose mercy we’ve cut down to size”.
In ancient times it was common practice for a farmer to worship gods that were representative of the things he had to deal with. Hence there were gods of the soil, of the sun, the rain, the harvest. He sacrificed to it in the way he saw fit and made up his own priestly rules. His god’s influence ended at his property line.
By cutting God down to a “manageable” size we attempt to make Him into someone who is our individual ideal of “enough” to satisfy our personal needs. Yet God, being limitless, is more than enough; our need, also being limitless, can never be filled by a god of our own making.
I don’t love God enough.
I don’t love my wife enough.
I don’t love my children enough.
It can never be “enough” when the source that satisfies your need is limitless.
A limitless source supplies a continuous need. A limitless source will also provide a limitless means of expression. There is always more available to give through Christ.
We are the Beloved of God. We must never desire less than He offers us. We must not maintain a minimal faith.
When our faith reaches a point where we have had “enough” then we have begun the slow and painful spiral down to death. A real faith recognizes that there is never “enough” to satisfy our thirst. True faith is never satisfied. It always searches for one more thing to believe, one more wonderful piece of evidence that proves for me once again that God loves me.
Sometimes that search takes us into areas of our lives that we would rather not go.
In the midst of my selfishness and pride I discover that my humility gives me value. In the midst of my anger I find that a peaceful heart will accomplish more.
In the midst of all my wonderful “Christian Activities/Ministries”, I find exhaustion that forces my dependence on Christ.
In the aftermath of a cruel and bloody crucifixion, I find the pearl of the Resurrection. The latter is not possible without the former.
Sometimes the greatest treasures are the ones left unused and forgotten in the corner of the attic, covered with dust. They are the things of my childhood that were left behind with the advent of “maturity” in my social lexicon.
Many times when I am helping to care for some of the children in our church nursery, I will attempt to get them interested in some of the toys in the arsenal. Sometimes they can be a pretty hard sell, but most of the time there is something that will catch their fancy. In the process of using a random toy to catch their attention I have to admit that it gets my attention instead. Sometimes I use a particular toy to get their attention because it’s a toy I want to play with. I keep thinking to myself, “Why didn’t we have toys like this when I was a kid?” (Although I have to admit that if Elmo doesn’t shut up soon he’s gonna get his batteries yanked.) And for a little while I give up the weightier theological/social/important matters that occupy my thoughts and try to pretend that I barely know how to walk. I try to learn all over again instead of rehashing the same old information. The “big” things will all still be there when I get back to myself, because “You will always have the (fill in the blank)…” But Christ is bigger.
My priority then is to become the child Christ called me to be. To regain some of the purity of spirit that I had before I was influenced by the rest of the world. When Christ called us to be like children, I don’t think he necessarily meant for us to be blindly trusting. He wants us to trust Him completely, but He wants us to come to Him with no regard for the limitations this world would place on our relationship to Him.
When the children wanted to be near Jesus the adults were trying to hold them back. He told the adults to let them come.
“Then little children were brought to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked those who brought them. Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." When he had placed his hands on them, he went on from there.” Matthew 19:13-15. If there was one sound that I had to think of that inspires joy in me I would have to say it is the sound of a child who is just learning that he or she has a voice. They have not yet learned to form words. Every sound they make is an experiment. Every sound is the embodiment of wonder. God knows what kids are like, and He enjoys it. Children are capable of understanding the intimacy that God desires to have with us while still acknowledging Him as the Creator of all things. Children first want to be loved. Christ first wants to love us.
Be like a child.
I want Him to enjoy my presence as well, and so I attempt to be the kind of person He is making me to be.
Our lives take on a weird cycle. We start out as children wanting to be adults so we can do more, and then we become adults who want to be children so someone else can take all the responsibility and we can go back to enjoying life.
Christ calls us to exactly that life, but the joy of life He desires for us is based on Him rather than the empty, selfish pursuits of the world. By the world’s standards we need “things” and “stuff” to be “happy”. We must be “visible” and “prominent”. And when we have bought all the “things”, and got all the “stuff”, and become “visible” and “prominent”, we find ourselves withered, dried up, and lifeless, dying for nothing.
The world wants me to have a relationship with Christ on its terms not on God’s terms. The world doesn’t want to actually know anything about our relationship with God. It’s enough for them to know I have that relationship as long as they don’t have to hear it. That’s enough for them.
It’s not enough for God. God is not silent about what He wants from us. “You will always have the …”, but you have God first. He wants you more than any need anyone else has, and your satisfaction in life will be greater when you seek out His desires for you before your own, or the world’s.
I don’t always want to do that though. Sometimes my desires are in direct opposition to my faith. Sometimes I collide with my faith, and it shakes me to my core. Because while I am fickle and flit to and fro amongst all the “things/stuff/values/…garbage” that the world offers, my faith being a gift of God, remains firmly fixed on God. I drift further and further from it at times, but I remain attached with this “spiritual rubber band” called my conscience that can only stretch so far before all of my justifications for doing the things I do can’t be stretched any further and I get yanked back to that rock hard and fast. I collide with my faith. After I have slammed into it and the stars have cleared from my eyes I finally get back on top and realize, “Wow! The view is so much better from here!”
It’s much easier to see the benefit of my faith in the aftermath of a crisis than in the midst of it, but it’s always what I hold on to the hardest in the difficult moments. Anything else would crumble beneath me. I know this from experience.
So now instead of trying to be a child of this world, I strive to be a child of the next sitting in the lap of the God of Wonder…
©Dan Bode 2004

Berserker Faith

2009-07-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

In Danish history the Vikings were known as a bloodthirsty lot. They were particularly adept at pillaging and plundering neighboring areas. They kidnapped whole villages for slaves when manual labor was necessary. They were not likely to top anyone’s list of “people to get to know better”. Yet, as bad as the reputation the Vikings had created for themselves was there are accounts of warriors among the Vikings who were even more highly feared. They fought in such a way that they could only be stopped at the cost of many enemy lives.
They were called Berserkers. They were given the name “Berserker”, which means “bear shirt”, because they wore shirts made from bear skin.
Shortly before, or during, battle Berserkers gave themselves over to a “battle rage” that allowed them to fight with such abandon that they were left surrounded by a field of enemies who had been pierced, hacked and bloodied to such a degree that the only sure thing about them was that they were, or soon would be, dead. The Berserker in his rage desired only one thing: to remove their threat. They were in his way and they had no place there. The only solution was their removal and the only way to accomplish that was with the battleaxe in his grip. Shields were split and limbs hewed until there was simply no one left. No sense of his surroundings remained to him; his only awareness was of the world within reach of his weapon. His fellow warriors always stayed clear of him in battle for he would recognize none of them when the red mist of his fury clouded his vision. His style of fighting was never described as graceful, nor did it reflect any sense of “finesse”. It did, however, get the job done.
But there was one thing about the Berserker that always struck me as his most effective trait in battle: The Berserker always fought with no thought to his own defense. He never actively parried an enemy’s weapon. If it happened to be in his way he merely batted it aside as he brought his own weapon into play. If he took a wound it went unnoticed until the battle was over and the rage had left him.
The Berserker, in his frenzy, was motivated by one thought: Move forward.
Clear a path. No defense. Attack is the only option. Never back up. There is no retreat.
It’s ironic that as long as there was an obstruction in front of him the Berserker refused to stop. He stopped only when the path was clear, and there was no one left to resist him.
The thought struck me one day, as odd as it sounds, that in many ways my faith should be characterized by some of the same properties that the Berserker displayed.
For instance; he fought with no thought to his own defense.
How often do I hesitate to share my faith out of fear of being attacked in response, or being asked a question that I can’t answer?
What if I practiced a defenseless faith?
The thing about being a Christian is that God is bigger than anything we can comprehend.
Most of our defenses are built to guard against attacks against our own integrity based on our own sins. God forgave us in order to neutralize their threat, to remove the need for self defense. His forgiveness is meant to complete us; for if His forgiveness is all that truly matters then the accusations of our fellow sinners are meaningless.
The other part of our defenses deal with our insufficient knowledge of God.
He does not require us to defend Him. He’s a big God; He can take care of Himself. He is able to answer the big questions. When we attempt to defend Him we tend to do it by judging the intent and motivations of those attacking Him, and yet He tells us “Judge not” because we are not qualified to judge.
The human standard of judgment cannot be overcome by a human standard of forgiveness. The capacity to forgive must be greater than the standard of judgment in order for justice to be complete. The one who judges must have the authority to either implement the punishment, or forgive the offense completely. The standard of judgment must also be consistent, which takes it completely beyond the ability of man, because every person judges by their own standard. Only He has the authority to apply the penalty of that judgment. And because He is capable of defending His judgments and actions we need not fear the attacks that come from those who are judged. Our only job here is to let them know they have an Advocate when their attacks have failed and they are left defenseless.
Only God has the capacity to truly forgive so only He is qualified to judge anyone, which is to my great benefit, because if all of my sins were known to my fellow man I highly doubt that I would be considered a Godly man by human standards.
I am extremely fortunate that the standard for being Godly is determined by God. It was the prophet Samuel who said of David, “...the Lord sought for Himself a man after His own heart.” (1Samuel 13:14) It was not a designation given by man to man. And when I look at the people God used to do such great and Godly things in this world in most cases I find myself completely unimpressed by their character. In fact, I find (surprise, surprise) that they are actually a lot like me; weak, inconsistent, and prone to failure requiring repentance. So while you might think that God’s standard is harder to live up to that man’s, I find that when Christ said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:30) it has a much greater meaning when I realize that while God’s standard is indeed higher than man’s, God Himself provides the means to reach it.
Man’s standard is like the Pharisees rule book for living in Jewish society; it requires a lot of work and produces no reward. You feel like you must be doing something, but you have nothing of value to show for all your efforts.
Another applicable trait is that anything blocking the Berserker’s path only motivated him further to overcome it.
When I find something that causes me to falter in my pursuit of a closer relationship with Him it seems I more often find myself sitting down and bemoaning the fact of the obstacle’s presence rather than finding a way to neutralize it.
When we are presented with an attack on God it does hurt us, because what hurts Him would hurt His children as well, but they should not leave us cowed. If I am asked a question I can’t answer, I simply find the answer and I am prepared for the next time. If it’s an answer I don’t like, but God said it, well that’s the answer, and I am back to letting God say what He’s always said. He’s pretty good about being consistent. We aren’t, but that’s a different issue. Part of our problem is that we keep trying to make God more “palatable” to the world at large, and this requires that we change His answers to be more “politically correct”. We start reinterpreting what He has clearly said about something so that it sounds entirely different.
This is unacceptable. God cannot be required to conform.
God gave us His word to apply to our lives not just theorize about how it should be used. The Pharisees of Jesus time took this to a higher level of mediocrity with a series of laws that attempted to control every minor function of the every day lives of the Jews.
This actually put the Pharisees in a position of complete dependence on the society they sought to control. They only dealt with “spiritual” things and lived off of the well being of their society. They became, in effect, parasites. They created more obstacles than they destroyed.
The Word of God is applicable to our lives. It has an impact on what we do and how we act when we actually listen to what He says, and then do it. So often in my own life I have found that I didn’t start honestly applying God’s word to my life until I had absolutely no answer of my own and no control over what happened, and those are the times that I learned most clearly that He has every intention of taking care of me despite my insistence that I can do it all by myself.
So having said all this and making all these really rather odd comparisons, I have to wonder where my faith is on the spectrum of strength. It seems to fluctuate quite a bit.
The grace of God is a wild, uncontrollable thing, and what I need is a faith to match it.
Imagine a faith which my enemies would fear simply for being the opposite of all they have been told by the world. For the world will believe anything that allows them to continue their inevitable slide toward death.
Dorothy Sayers, a great English writer and contemporary of C.S. Lewis once wrote: "In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die."
I need a faith with which they would fear I might kill them, but which ultimately would be the death of me in the end.
It would be a faith in which I would approach my enemy with the open arms of forgiveness knowing that he would not grant me the same. Knowing that once my forgiveness was offered I could easily be dead or injured, for this faith would require no defense. Knowing that as I approached him with the full armor of God that while the Breastplate of Righteousness would protect my soul, it might still be allowed to be pierced in order that my heart might bleed grace on his hands.
It would be a wild faith.
An uncontrollable faith.
A raging faith.
A Berserker Faith.
©Dan Bode 2006

Baldness

2009-06-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

I’m bald. There’s just no two ways about it.
I came to accept the fact of my follicular barrenness many years ago. I had a lot of time to prepare since I had a receding hairline in high school. It is said that the gene for baldness is passed down through the mother’s side of the family, and my mother’s father was from all reports bald by the time he was 28. Although, I do have a few hairs left up there so I guess I should consider myself fortunate at 48 to have held out against the inevitable recession for a little while longer. My older brothers all still have hair on top, and I applaud their good fortune.
Now, I don’t want anyone to think that I am bitter about my hair loss. I learned to accept it long ago. I tend to grow hair on my body instead. My wife once said that the only places I don’t have hair are the top of my head and the bottom of my feet. That’s not to say I wouldn’t rather have hair up there simply because I don’t want to have to wear a hat whenever I go out in the sun. Sometimes I forget the hat and get sunburned anyway and then it starts to peel and people think I have a really bad case of dandruff. Oh well. Being bald has made me more aware of what other people think of it though. I have seen the lengths some men go to hide their baldness, and quite frankly, I am appalled.
The first method is, of course, the Combover. You know, letting the hair grow long on one side and then combing it over the top to try to make it look like there’s really hair there. Let me be frank here.
Guys – it looks dumb. Everyone who sees you knows you’re bald, and in a stiff breeze when the hair gets blown off it looks like a helmet standing on it’s side.
Then there’s the hairpiece. Every time my wife and I are out and about she can always tell if a guy is wearing a hairpiece, then she points it out to me and laughs. “That looks so phony!” she says. She’s right. I have yet to see one that looks truly natural.
There’s also Rogaine, which works for some, and not for others depending on what kind of baldness you are afflicted with. If you don’t mind forking out the monthly cost and then having to put the stuff on your head everyday I guess it’s ok.
Another solution is the hair transplant. I have seen the news shows that detail the lengths some people will go to replace their hair. It is in a word: horrifying. In one procedure they put water balloons under your scalp and fill them in order to stretch the skin of the scalp where you have hair growing. When the scalp is sufficiently stretched the balloons are removed and the excess folds with the active hair follicles are cut out and then sewn back on to the areas where there is no hair. Too much pain involved for me. And what if one of those balloons springs a leak? I don’t know how anyone else feels about it, but I wouldn’t want to be seen in public while all this was going on either. Can you imagine walking down the street with big bulges in the back of your head that sloshed when you moved? I suppose you could just put on a Star Trek uniform and tell everyone you were shooting a movie.
In another procedure they take little “plugs” of follicles from the hairy part of your scalp and sew them into the bald area. It looks like the aerial view of farmland. Nice neat little rows.
On top of all this after it’s all done there is no guarantee that it will work. The little follicles may not like the new spot and not grow. Or some may grow and some may not. Your growth pattern may then resemble the pattern of a waffle iron. What a pleasant thought.
All this is done because somehow some of us were convinced that the presence of hair determined whether people liked us or not. Let me be the first to let you know something: if they don’t like you without hair, they probably won’t like you with hair. Throw all the money at it you want to, but know that hair replacement does not equal personality adjustment.
Since I am bald I tend to notice when someone else is bald. It’s kind of an unspoken bond. It’s like when you get a new car and you start to notice other people driving the same kind of car. You never noticed how many there were until you got one.
So now we come to the heart of the matter.
I was in church a few weeks ago, and we were sitting towards the back. We usually sit in the back. It’s an old habit we developed when our daughters were babies. We wanted to be close to the door in case we needed to make a quick getaway to change a diaper or something. Anyway, as I was listening to the sermon, and I was listening, I noticed there are a lot of bald guys in church. Obviously they are secure in their baldness or I wouldn’t be able to see their shiny pates. I also noticed something else about them: a lot of them had sores on top of their heads from where they bumped there head on something. I noticed it because I had one too from when I was climbing the ladder in the garage and bumped my head on an exposed rafter.
But I realized something else too. I knew that just because I could see sores on the bald guy’s heads didn’t mean they were the only ones with sores on their heads. People with hair bump their heads too; they just have something there to cover up the sore. I noticed all of this because I had it in common with them. I recognized in them the same thing that was in me.
It is like that with our sins.
We often look at other peoples’ sins and shortcomings and we judge them accordingly. But we fail to recognize that the reason we can see their sins, and speak of them with such authority, is not that we are somehow better than they are as we like to think, but rather that we are guilty of the same sin. We recognize the same faults in them as in ourselves, and we seek to distance ourselves from them by seeming to be above them. Just like getting a hair transplant we seek to find a way to cover our flaws. We look for something to divert attention away from ourselves. We seek a way to look better on the outside rather than seek an internal change. Seldom do we hear a sermon and seek to apply it to ourselves first. It’s usually a good message for someone else to hear. “If only so-and-so were here. He really needs to hear this.” Never mind that we ourselves are guilty of what we accuse that person of.
When Christ said, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged.” (Matt. 7:1) He wasn’t kidding around. He’s the only one qualified to judge me or save me. My job on this earth as a Christian is not judgement, but reconciliation. I must show others that despite my flaws it is still possible for me to draw near to God because of His sacrifice, not my supposed superiority. I must show them that I am not greater than them, or higher up on some eternal ladder of performance. Because I am guilty of the same sins as them I am in need of the same remedy. Not the same method of covering up, but the same method of change.
There’s something else about bald heads: they are highly reflective. If you are walking towards someone with a bald head and he looks down, the glare can be somewhat blinding. The idea is that they reflect light, but they aren’t the source of it. And they are capable of reflecting that light even when they have a sore on their head. Despite our flaws, or hurts, or sins, God still uses us. Our effectiveness is in our willingness to be exposed and used.
So, next time you’re tempted to look down on someone, don’t look down your nose at him or her. Shave your head and look down and help to light their path.
©Dan Bode 2000

Tea Time

2009-05-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

“How about if you take me to tea?”
It was a response to an innocent question I had asked my wife. Little did I know what it would involve. We had asked each other what kind of activities we would most like to do, regardless of whether the other liked them or not, and then we each determined what we would be willing to do from each other’s list.
I wanted to go to a restaurant that served a lot of red meat.
My general disposition is: Meat, potatoes, Soda; don’t bother me: I’m eating.
My wife has daintier tastes. I chomp, she nibbles.
So we’re talkin’ tea, huh? I can do that.
“Sure I’ll take you out to tea. I know this great little neighborhood coffee shop that serves tea too. We can go there…..”
“No, no, no. Not just going and having tea anywhere. There is a special place to go for it. This is High Tea.”
This was beginning to sound ominous. High Tea? With Capitol Letters? Are there drugs involved? Do they spike it or something? Hey, is this legal?
“High Tea is a Victorian tradition.”
“Do I have to wear a tie?” I whined. I hate ties. I don’t even know where the last tie I bought about 10 years ago is anymore. I would have to clean the closet for that. Cleaning the closet could take weeks, maybe even months. Maybe there was a way out of this after all.
“No you don’t have to wear a tie.”
Curses! Foiled again.
“You go ahead and call the place. I think you have to make reservations.”
Reservations? To drink tea?
I called the place, and sure enough you had to make reservations.
“Do you have any openings for this Sunday?” I asked.
“Oh no. Our weekends are booked up for the next 4 months.”
What is going on here? We’re talkin’ tea, for cryin out loud!
“Uh, ok. Well, do you have anything available during the week?”
“Oh yes. We should have some available then.”
“Good. How about Tuesday?”
“Yes we do. We have tables available in all of our sessions that day.”
Sessions? Does this include psychoanalysis or something?
“What are your “sessions”?”
“We have eleven to one, one to three, and three to five.”
“Uh, ok. How about the three to five on Tuesday?”
Two hours? How much tea do they expect you to drink?
“All right. We have you on our books for Tuesday from three to five.”
I thanked her and hung up. This was getting curiouser and curiouser.
I told my wife, and she was very happy to be going. She had apparently wanted to do this for a long time.
The day finally came, and we arrived at the tea place. It was a Victorian kind of gift shop as well, and in the middle of the store was a large gazebo type garden setting. There was a mural painted on the back wall that showed a peaceful garden. Several tables were set up with china tea cups and saucers.
I felt like a bull in a china shop. I was afraid if I moved too suddenly I would bump a shelf that would fall over with a domino effect and destroy the store. However, the hostess saw us and asked us if we had reservations. We were the only ones in the place at that point so I didn’t really think it made much difference anyway. We were seated at a table for two and given menus. There were a lot of teas. Usually I just opted for whatever was available as long as it wasn’t herbal. Herbal tastes like last weeks lawn clippings. This time they had some that sounded ok, and it was different from the usual teabag. I ordered my tea and a cheese and fruit plate. Sue ordered her tea with a dessert plate.
The tea came first. They gave each of us our little tea pot. I almost started singing that teapot song I learned as kid, but it doesn’t really sound good in bass.
I have always laughed when I would see someone pickup a tea cup and stick their pinky out, but here I was faced with a dilemma. The handle on the teacup was too small for me to fit any of my fingers through. I tried, but there was just no way to force my finger through that handle without breaking it, and the china looked expensive. I am used to handling a coffee mug that has room for me to get at least two of my fingers through the handle. I found that if I held the handle of the cup between my thumb and forefinger I could manage it ok, but then I didn’t have any place to put my other fingers. And guess what happened to my pinky? It stuck out! Grrr. I was trying to figure out some way to drink this tea in a masculine style. I briefly toyed with the idea of just taking the lid off the pot and drinking straight out of that, but that would have embarrassed Sue. I found a solution when I realized that the teacup was well suited to the palm of my hand, so I just held the whole cup rather than the handle. It was hot and somewhat painful, but, by golly, my pinky didn’t stick out.
Then our food plates were served.
By this time I was getting used to the concept that this was a “dainty” event.
Sue’s “dessert plate” consisted of about four cookies, a chocolate candy, and a miniature turnover. It was very tastefully arranged and looked very nice, but in terms of actual food content there was probably about 2 ounces on the plate.
My plate consisted of several varieties of cheese, fruit and crackers. At least my plate was full. It actually wasn’t bad. There was only one cheese on there I didn’t like. It was brie. It just tastes too weird for me, and when it melts it looks like something the dog coughed up.
They had listed on the menu another item called “tea sandwiches”. I had been warned ahead of time by a friend that these were in no way to be considered “sandwiches” in the sense that I thought of them. They were “dainty”, and were not to be confused in any way with the normal deli sandwich that I was picturing. I saw the truth of this when I looked to see the waitress standing behind the counter duck down and stuff a whole sandwich in her mouth.
“Wow you got a lot more than I did.” Said Sue.
“Yeah. Guess I lucked out on that one.” I replied.
After we were done eating she asked, “So are you full?”
“Are you kidding?” I asked. It was only cheese and crackers after all. Not even any meat. How could that be filling? There is no such thing as a filling meal to me if it does not contain meat. I was ready for the main course, but that was all there was.
This presented a problem for which I had a quick solution.
“Let’s go to a restaurant for dinner.” It was 5:15.
“You just ate!”
“That was just an appetizer! I have to have more than that.” This is where my mom would have started telling me about all the starving kids in Africa when I was a kid. The last time she said that to me I took the rest of the sandwich that I didn’t want to eat and put it in an envelope addressed to “all the starving children in Africa”. I wasn’t joking either; I really wanted it to go to them. I doubt the mail man appreciated the sentiment when he opened the mailbox that I had dropped it in.
But before I could even think about going to a restaurant I had to figure out how to get out of the store. This was a challenge.
My wife has always loved the “Victorian” style of decoration, and since this was that kind of store there was no such thing as a straight line to the exit. They had specialty teas of course, and soaps and candles and stationary and utensils and flowers and china and clocks and baskets ….and…and… I forgot the rest. We brought some of it home (sigh). This was pretty expensive tea.
Well, we made it out of there a few minutes after they closed. They locked the door behind us.
Now it’s my turn. There’s a steakhouse in a neighboring town that I’ve been hearing about for years. All they serve is steak. Big steak. Nothing but steak. Really good steak. There’s sawdust on the floor. They don’t serve tea or anything remotely similar. They have big knives and forks. They have big mugs that I can hold with all my fingers!
Probably after that I’ll be ready to handle another High Tea.
©Dan Bode 2002

Commando Basketball

2009-04-14T14:26:00.001-07:00

I was watching a basketball game on TV the other day, and I saw a scene during that game which took me back many, many years to junior high.
One of the players jumped up for the slam-dunk and on his way up he swung an arm out and hit a player on the opposing team in the face. It looked like he got him right across the bridge of his nose. The stricken player went down holding his nose, and in all the close up slow motion shots afterwards you could see his eyes clearly watering. The look on his face seemed to say, “I will NOT cry on national television! I WON’T!” Apparently he was successful, because he didn’t. His eyes just watered and he went on playing.
Now generally speaking basketball is not meant to be a game in which blows are intentionally struck, although that does occasionally occur in all sports, except for tennis or golf. At least, I’ve never seen it in tennis or golf. It really is hard to imagine violence in a golf game. I can hardly stay awake when golf comes on. If I try really hard I can imagine a flare up during a golf game. The announcer doing the play by play (or maybe it should be the “short play long walk by short play long walk”) is always speaking in a voice barely above a whisper. “Okay here he comes. He has his ball all teed up, and he’s selected his driver. This is a new caddy for him Bob, but they seem to be doing pretty well together out here.”
Bob: “Yes they do seem to work well together Jack.”
Jack: “He is addressing the ball now. Wow the concentration on his face right now is impressive.”
Bob. “Okay here comes the swing, it looks good.”
Jack: “Ooooh! Look at the slice on that one! (Announcers voice rises as he talks) It’s going completely off the fairway Bob! It bounced off that oak tree! It’s way over in the high grass! He’ll never find it out there!”
Bob: (voice rising as well) “And he knows it too! Oh man is he mad! He’s going after the caddy! Jack it appears he blames the caddy for selecting the wrong driver! He’s running after him! The crowd is parting to let them through. Wow, are his knickers in a bunch or what?! Look at that! He’s wrapping the driver around the caddy’s neck! Jack I have never seen anything like this before!”
Jack: “The security people are just standing around! They don’t know what to do! They’ve never seen anything like this either! Oh boy, I don’t even want to think about the penalties on this one! He's gonna get at least four strokes added for this!”
Of course this would never happen in golf. I think golf players secretly want violence in the game. That’s why they wear such outrageous pants; they want to assault the eyes of the spectators.

Anyway as I said, this incident brought to mind an experience from junior high. Specifically gym class. Coach Gray was our instructor, and he definitely had some unique ideas about physical education. He tended toward the pugilistic school of thought, which is not bad, as long as you are the pugilist rather than the pugilee. Coach Gray introduced us to a new form of basketball that took the game to a completely new level. He called it Commando Basketball. In Commando Basketball the rules were essentially the same as regular basketball with three notable exceptions. One: there were no fouls. Two: every player had one hand free to dribble the ball, and on the other hand he wore a boxing glove. Three: the players of the opposing team were allowed to punch the player who had possession of the ball with their gloved hand.
These conditions tended to create some interesting situations. Many times there were guys on opposing teams who did not harbor warm feelings toward each other. In these cases it was not uncommon to see a player on one team purposely pass the ball to the player he didn’t like on the other team just so he would have the opportunity to hit him.
There were other rules designed to save us from serious injury as well. Headshots were not allowed, nor could you hit anyone below the belt. For the most part these rules were followed. To this day I am still amazed that we were even allowed to play this game, but no one ever complained about it so we all happily pummeled each other in the spirit of good sportsmanship.
One of the nice things about this game was that it seemed to equalize everyone in the class. Anyone could swing his arm in a general melee without a great degree of skill required. I was no exception to this rule. I was always considered tall for my age, and as a consequence people naturally assumed that I played basketball. The truth of the matter was that I avoided it at every opportunity. Basketball requires coordination. I don’t have any. Therefore, I hate to play basketball. Watching it is fine, but playing is a no-no. There were some guys in our class who were more athletically inclined than the rest of us, and they were typically classified as “jocks”. They were the ones who actually played on the school basketball team, as opposed to the rest of us who sat in the bleachers and watched. While there were a few of the jocks that thought more highly of themselves than they should have most of them were pretty nice guys. On this particular day during our commando basketball game things had been pretty intense on the court. We had played the game several times now, and we were all increasing in our skill level so we were able to actually “play” the game instead of “play at” the game. I never bothered to get the ball because I knew I’d lose it to the other side pretty easily, but being one of the bigger kids and having a pretty strong right arm I learned that I could be pretty effective against the actual possessor of the ball. I went out of my way to stay within the rules though, because it was no fun when someone got seriously hurt. One of the jocks had the ball and he was on the opposing team. He was a friend of mine so I usually would try to hit his arm or something to make him lose his grip on the ball rather than someplace where he might get more seriously hurt. I found myself right in the middle of the mass of players that always concentrated around the ball handler which meant I was right next to my friend on the other team. I had to swing. He was getting ready to take his shot and his arms were already raised to shoot the ball so I swung at his stomach. I knew he could take a stomach shot so I felt pretty safe except that at the last minute as I was swinging my arm toward his midsection he decided to jump to improve his shot. What this meant was that the swing that was already on its way was no longer going to hit his stomach. The perspective had suddenly changed. I was about to break the rules. I was now going to hit him BELOW THE BELT. I saw where my swing was going too late to stop it, and as the punch landed I heard my friend say, “Oooooff!” After which he promptly curled up in a little ball and lay on the ground, moaning.
Many in the group had actually turned away from us toward the basket to see if the ball made it through the hoop. The ball, of course, was rolling on the ground not far from my friend. This, and the fact that everyone in the general vicinity had been throwing punches, I realized contributed to the fact that no one but myself was aware that I had struck the offending blow. As I thought this I said, “Oh man! He’s hurt! What happened?” He hadn’t been looking at who hit him either. By unspoken agreement we all respectfully turned our backs on him surrounding him and blocking him from the view of the girls PE class across the field. In junior high school when a guy got hit below the belt it was considered bad form to stand around and watch him writhe in pain. It was REALY bad if a girl was there to see it. There was a certain etiquette even at that age. At this point Coach Gray began to wonder why everyone was standing around on the court facing outward while the ball rolled aimlessly away from us.
“Hey what’s the problem gentlemen? I did not call a time out!” He yelled as he approached the group. As he got closer he saw my friend on the ground, moaning.
“Oh. I see the problem. Okay Jeff why don’t you get up and walk it off and sit on the bench for a while? You’ll be back on the court in no time.”
Jeff just looked up at him for a moment before he started to move. When you’ve been hit below the belt with any serious force the last thing you want to do is walk. Coach Gray followed the Drill Sergeants philosophy that if you made someone hate you enough they would do as they were told.
I reached down to help him up and walk him over to the bench. As we walked I whispered, “Man, I’m sorry. It was me that hit you. It was supposed to be a stomach shot, but you jumped.”
“Why did you have to hit so hard?”
“I didn’t think I was. I was trying to go easy.”
“Try harder next time okay?”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“Okay.”
I went back to the game after that, and after a short while he got back in as well, but I definitely watched how hard I hit from that point on.
That was the last time we played Commando Basketball. We all missed it. We really missed it when it was raining and they made us do square dancing in the gym, although at least we got to dance with the girl’s PE class. Sadly Commando Basketball never came to be accepted as a regular sporting activity, and I have never heard of it being played anywhere else. That’s probably just as well, there would be too many guys standing around in outward facing circles if it did, and sooner or later I would have been the one on the ground moaning. I guess self-preservation still has its uses.
©Dan Bode 2000

In His Image

2009-03-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

In His Image.
What does it mean to be made in His image?
Are there scars upon my brow, or was it sculpted to don a crown of thorns? Was my side made to accept the spear? Were my hands created to receive the point of a nail? Or are there scars to show they were there?
No.
My wounds were healed before I had them. My sins forgiven without a memory of their occurrence. And yet I bear a cross daily. I still suffer a small portion for my responsibility in my sin. Yet He endured to insure my survival, my freedom.
What is the image of God?
He is perfect. Am I? No.
Can I be? Only when He perfects me. Perfection is a process.
Isn’t it odd how the crown of thorns, when we picture it on His head, seems to fit so well, even having been pushed down upon His head? As though the thorns were grown to fit His brow alone? As though, because of His great love for us, His very flesh knew He took it willingly?
Did the nails pierce His hands and feet and separate the tissues as though they were meant to be there?
I see His pain, and I wonder at His endurance, and then I find His peace.
Like Thomas I doubt Him, and I doubt what I see and what I touch. Every part of my life is a process of eliminating my doubt. I am shown repeatedly that I am loved, that I am cared for, and because of this I discover that while His crucifixion is a daily occurrence in my life, so is Easter, and all I can ever hope to be is His image.
A mere reflection.
A shadow.
For only Christ is Truth and Love Incarnate.
The sad fact of the matter is that even though God has done so much, I still try to take it back. While God’s word on the issue is final, because it is indeed “finished”, I keep trying to do it over until “I get it right” once and for all. I don’t want to be the cause of His pain because I am convinced that His sacrifice leaves me in His debt, and I can’t stand that! I hate debt! I hate obligation! Why? Because it forces me to admit my incredible, all consuming need for a Savior.
“by his wounds we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5
So do not come to me for comfort in your pain for I stand useless in shock, in horror, in awe and in love at His sacrifice. I have no words that would be adequate to match His actions on our behalf. Only His open wounds can fulfill our need, and He is waiting for us to touch them. The greatest joy in Easter is that He is greater than all the pain of my sins to kill him. Every wound He took is one more I don’t have to bear.
And what that proves, in the end, is that there is not enough blood in my veins to cover the sins of the world.
©Dan Bode 2004

True Beauty

2009-02-14T10:14:00.000-08:00

We come, and we go.
A simple statement of fact, yet a great deal occurs between those two words. We walk a great journey between the lines that mark the beginning and the end, start and finish. Whether our tread along the way is heavy or light, no step goes uncounted by Him who made us.
We are sometimes granted the honor of making the journey with someone, sometimes a longer portion, more commonly the shorter. More often than not the length of time we have together is the least important property of it. The presence is itself enough, for those of uncommon beauty bring us joy.
The joy is in the journey we live between the lines.
We live too often by accident when we should be living with intention.
How many times have I missed the joy in the journey by waiting for things to happen rather than pursuing what is clearly before me? How many times have I chosen complacency over action?
At some point in my life I innocently embraced the comfort of a “routine”, and in so doing somewhere, in the process of living, I became a man of sorrow. The loss of someone or something along the way caught me off guard. I began to concentrate more on what I’d lost than on all that I had gained in the presence of the beauty God provided in that relationship, however unfairly brief I thought it to be.
I think too much about what “might have been” if I’d said or done something just a little bit differently, but “might have been” never happened and never will and it would never have been as perfect as our imagination allows. Hindsight is a useless thing sometimes.
I feel sorrow at my loss, but I must always remember that there would be no sorrow had joy not been there first, but remembering as well that joy does not depend on sorrow for its existence. It is in the beauty of an uncommon nature that joy is inspired. It is not the youthful face and form that offers True Beauty, but the joy and love that is reflected from within and visible on the surface of whatever form we happen to have. Oh, the rest of the world would have us believe otherwise, but that is only their attempt at establishing standards that allow them to dictate the standard of our own worth. If the focus of beauty is maintained externally it can then be marketed and controlled. It becomes a commodity to be used to conform us to some random ideal, and at the same time rob us of our individual natures. I found that it was the presence and pursuit of True Beauty that brought me joy and gave me depth.

Far too often I am overcome by sorrow in my relationship with God because I think so much of all that He has had to forgive in me when I should be overcome by joy because He has forgiven me. Furthermore, He has forgiven me intentionally, by design, with a desire to bring me joy. That is True Beauty.
I became a man of sorrows unintentionally. I must become a man of joy intentionally. I must actively pursue that which does not come to me by nature. I must actively recognize uncommon beauty, and allow myself to be surprised, no – astonished-, by joy. In this I honor those who are lost to me by allowing their gift to me to be recognized.
In this I also honor my God, for this was His gift to me through them, and it is His astonishing Beauty that is reflected in them.
So here is the truth I have discovered:
True Beauty is the reflection of God in His creation.
I have a friend who was married to his wife for 59 years when she died. There was never a doubt of the depth of their love. As she lay dying he told her, “I fell in love with you all over again.”
They saw the Beauty of God reflected in each other. Beauty resides in their love, not their bodies. We are but mere reflections of the source of beauty. It is for us to reflect the beauty of God into the darker corners of the hearts of this world. And it should be said here that this kind of love is truly the stuff of legend. We look at famous relationships and exclaim how good they are without ever seeing anything beyond the superficial shell of the reality that leads to the breakdown of that same relationship. The romantic stories we have grown up on are usually tragic or artificial. We make a relationship important because of the celebrity involved, and at the same time we ignore the relationships that have existed longer than you or I have been alive. I know so many marriages that are the image of the example I want mine to be. They have lasted for a lifetime with an ever increasing love. We see little flashes of history and emphasize what we see in the briefest point that represents the climax of centuries of effort by all those who remain nameless. Henry Fabre once said, “History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings' bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly.”
In our relentless pursuit of our future we ignore what we see as the shackles of our past rather than a foundation on which to build it. We have taken a devastating turn for the worse when we ignore True Beauty in favor of the worthless and inconsistent imitation that this world has to offer.
Love is beauty, and God is Love, therefore He is also the source and definition of Beauty. The recognition of Beauty is the “calling to which you have been called.” (Ephesians 4:1) Love is the knowledge we are called to put into practice. Beauty is in the intangibles. It lies not in face and form, but in action, in relationship. It is not the person we love, or who loves us where beauty is found. No, it is in the love itself. The love we choose to take part in.
When we see beauty as something outside of ourselves we can be more confident in the beauty we have. We are each capable of reflecting True Beauty because we were all made in His image. We were not meant to hold anything in. We were made to overflow. When we choose to partake in the Beauty He supplies we become vessels of the Uncontainable. The flaws we perceive within ourselves are irrelevant to our ability to reflect True Beauty. Are you concerned that your hair is the wrong color, or that someone else’s is better than yours, or that someone else has hair? Is there a scar you’re ashamed of? Are you too thin or too fat? Is there a pimple on your face that is changing the course of your life somehow? Have you been abused or misused somewhere along the way?
I wonder; are we afraid to love beyond our own shame because we are afraid that others will be unable to as well, and thereby emphasize our own perceived shortcomings in the process of pointing out theirs? Have I not been guilty of this in my own life? Of course.
The problem lies in the fact that we perceive our flaws as limiting our potential for beauty, but we do not realize that we are not the source of the beauty we have. True Beauty is revealed in our flaws, because we have learned to express love to one another despite, or even through, the flaws. That is where the love and beauty of God are truly reflected in us. When Paul says “when I am weak then I am strong” (2Corinthians 12:10) I think he speaks of an aspect of this beauty, for it is in our own weakness that the strength of God is evident. When we reach the end of our resources, whether it is in the area of strength or beauty, God takes over so that whatever we cannot finish He does. But we must see the success of it through His eyes, not our own. It is the direct result of the touch of God. In the recognition of the Source of Beauty we come to that final threshold where a single step across will bring us into the presence of more than we could ever know, but all that we could not survive without.
You see God made True Beauty to be given and taken. He made it to be freely shared. No cost was attached for our sake, because the presence of True Beauty in us is the only way we will ever live beyond our deaths.
The day will come when we will all be sitting quietly together. We will gaze upon one another, and see gray hair, wrinkles, liver spots, and joints swollen and disfigured by arthritis. And given all that, we will at last realize that even then, each of us is still, and will always be, Truly Beautiful. For each of us is cast in the image of God Himself, and there is no Other worthy if imitation.
©Dan Bode 2003

Bread

2008-12-09T11:17:00.000-08:00

Bread is an essential element in every society. I read somewhere that in almost every culture ever discovered evidence of bread making existed in some form. There are breads for every occasion: breakfast, dessert, dinner, midnight snacks, you name it there’s a bread for it. When I was a kid I loved coming home to the smell of baking bread. My mom baked bread at least one day a week, and she always did several loaves at once. I would hang around and wait until she had finished mixing all the ingredients and emptied the dough onto the kneading board and then pick out all the little pieces of dough that were left behind. When that bread came out of the oven I was right there. As soon as it was barely cool enough to touch I had a piece cut and buttered. There just wasn’t any substitute for homemade bread. It was also really good for French toast, and dipping in hot chocolate. Bread made up a major part of my diet, but mainly I think the greatest impact it had on my life was the association it had with my concept of home. The smell of fresh baked bread always meant a nice, warm and welcoming place to be.
Mom died and I grew up and I didn’t get to have that same association anymore. I tried making it a few times, but it just wasn’t quite the same. My sister Diane always made a good loaf though, but it was a lot of work and she didn’t have time to do it very often. So it was with a great deal of hopeful anticipation that my wife and I decided to purchase the latest technological kitchen wonder: a bread maker.
Some of our friends had bread machines and loved them. From the day we brought it home I faithfully put the ingredients in, and a few hours later it dutifully gave me a hot fresh loaf of bread. The aroma reached every room in the house. I adapted my mom’s bread recipe to work in the bread maker and it was just like coming home from school when I walked through the door as a child. Perfect.
I became accustomed to being able to use our bread machine on a regular basis. We eventually relied on it for all of our bread needs. We no longer bought any bread at the store, except for an occasional bag of sourdough rolls.
Then one day the unthinkable happened. I opened up the bread maker and pulled out a bread brick. It was so hard and dense I could have used it to construct a wall.
SOMETHING was WRONG. My connection to my childhood was damaged. The bread smelled the same, but it was as dense as, well, a brick. I stared at it for a good long minute trying to figure out what went wrong. I had done everything exactly as I had done it so many times before. I repeated the process with two more loaves of bread with the same result.
I thought again about anything I might have done differently. Nothing. Then I realized who the true culprit was: the manufacturer of the machine. My anger began to rise as I thought of all the anguish this would cause me. I ran to find the receipt to find out if it was still under warranty. I found I had two weeks left. HA! They thought they could beat me on this one! Well they didn’t know whom they were dealing with! No one stands between fresh bread and me and survives.
I found a box big enough to hold the bread maker and packed it ever so carefully. I then sat down to write a very heartfelt letter to the manufacturer explaining the problem and kindly requesting their assistance. The package was sent, and the waiting began.
Several weeks later the package came back. I opened up the box and pulled out the machine. I eagerly set it up and loaded the ingredients in expectation of the wonderful aroma. Three hours later I opened it up and pulled out … a brick.
Now I was really torqued. I pulled out the invoice to see what repairs had actually been done. I read the following: “Plugged machine in. It ran fine.”
Was I supposed to be impressed with their diagnostic capabilities? Sadly, they did not achieve their goal.
Once again I sat down to write a letter of explanation to the manufacturer, only this time I was not quite as calm and collected. I questioned the quality of their work. I questioned the intelligence of their technicians. I questioned whether they had even bothered to bake a loaf of bread in the machine. I threatened to call the president of the company and report their shoddy workmanship, and lack of attention to detail. It could almost be described as venomously poetic.
Once again I repacked the machine and sent it off. I sat back to await its return several weeks later.
In the mean time I had to buy store bought bread. It was a truly humbling experience. I watched others in the store buying their bread with no idea of what they were missing. I lived a tortured existence until the day came when I received the machine back.
I quickly tore open the box and found the invoice. It read: “Replaced motor. Baked two (2) loaves of bread. They came out perfect.”
OK! Finally someone had listened with compassion to my plight! Once again I was on the path to a state of bliss as I loaded all the ingredients in the machine. I turned it on and waited for three hours. The smell was wonderful. It had been so long! The machine beeped, signaling the end of the baking cycle. I ran into the kitchen and opened the machine. Reaching in with my oven mitt covered hands I pulled out…. a brick.
First, my anger started to flare, but then I actually decided to think about the situation – quite a novel idea on my part. Okay, they said they baked two (2) loaves and they came out perfect. They get loaves, I get bricks. Hmmm. I looked at my ingredients. The flour looked fine, the sugar looked fine. I knew the water was ok, well as ok as tap water can be anyway. The only thing left was the yeast.
When I was in grade school I had done an experiment with yeast. I forget what the point of the experiment was, but it required mixing a spoonful of sugar into some warm water and then adding yeast to watch it grow. I, of course, couldn’t do exactly what directions said to do. If I was going to grow something I wanted it to grow more than anyone else’s did. To achieve that end I added extra sugar and extra yeast. The yeast grew and grew and grew. It grew right out of its container and all over the kitchen counter. The house smelled like a beer brewery. That was good yeast.
You know how you always asked your teacher the question: “When am I ever going to use this in real life?” Well, here’s a case in point. Of course, I usually asked this question in algebra, which I honestly don’t think I have actually used in real life yet but that’s beside the point.
Anyway, I readied my experiment. I got out a container and put some warm water mixed with sugar in it. I took a few spoonfuls of yeast and added it to the mix. The water turned a light brown. I waited a few minutes waiting for the telltale bubbles to form and fill the container. The water stayed brown. There were no bubbles.
I was a victim of bad yeast.
Now as I sat thinking of this it occurred to me that I had put a lot of effort into placing blame on the people that worked in the repair shop, and their apparent lack of ability.
Oops.
I thought about writing them a nice note of reconciliation and apologizing for my incorrect assumptions, and being a stand-up guy and taking the blame for my mistakes. I thought about it for quite a while, as a matter of fact. Then I forgot about it until just now.
I don’t have that bread maker anymore and it’s been several years now. I don’t think anyone there remembers me anymore, so for the sake of keeping the peace I think I’ll just let sleeping dogs lie, and pay tribute to their fortitude and technical skill with a silent prayer of thanks whenever I smell the aroma of fresh baked bread.
©Dan Bode 1998

Fears

2008-12-04T10:14:00.000-08:00

It has been said that if you name your fears they are easier to deal with.
I fear electrical work, so I named it Beelzebub.
I do love the benefits of having electricity in my home, and pretty much everywhere I go, but I’d really much rather leave having to work with it to the experts. The problem with that is every time I’ve needed someone to work on an electrical problem I can’t afford to pay the experts to do it. And every time (and I do mean EVERY time) that I have done any remodeling work in my home, when I encounter any portion of the electrical system that needs to be worked on, it just doesn’t look right.
Our house was built in 1952. It’s not big, but it has always served our purposes. On the other hand it had some properties that, when viewed with kindness, are described as contributing to the “character” of the house. When viewed by my eyes the description that came to mind was “demo project”.
My wife insists that I am having fun when I swing the hammer or crowbar to break through the drywall. Probably because of the maniacal grin that appears on my face while I’m doing it. I have to admit there is some satisfaction in the release of destructive force; however, it is tempered by the thought of what I will find on the other side of that drywall. It can be like opening a time capsule sometimes. This is a space that hasn’t seen the light of day in 56 years after all. The phrase “they don’t make them like they used to” always comes to mind when I start one if these projects.
Several years ago we remodeled our kitchen. I had some friends helping me on that one, and I learned a lot from them in doing that.
Things like “measure twice cut once”. I’ve modified that to “measure 10 times, cut once an inch more than measured, and then trim down by 1 millimeter at a time until you get the right length, and then when it’s still a millimeter too long, force it in to the desired space.”
Or, “Plan out your project ahead of time”. I revised this one to “plan it out in general terms and then run to the big box hardware store 20 times in the course of the project for other materials and always, always make sure you buy a new tool before you leave”.
A little while after we finished the kitchen I started on one of our bathrooms. It wasn’t in bad shape or anything, but our house is short on cabinet space and this bathroom had no cabinets whatsoever. So we ordered cabinets and I started pulling everything out of the bathroom.
I also needed to replace the shower walls as well so I was ripping out tiles that were made of aluminum. I had never seen anything like that before.
In order to put the new cabinets in I had to relocate the light switch. I was also installing a fan and another set of outlets.
I read all the books on wiring your own house. They had great pictures.
I like pictures. Just show me what it’s supposed to look like in the end and I’m good.
So I tore out the drywall to get to the wiring.
It didn’t look anything like the pictures.
I got a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach, and things inside of me started to seize up, but I had unfortunately already torn out the toilet.
I looked at the pictures again.
I held the book up to the wall and tried to identify what I saw.
No luck.
So I turned off the light and shut the door to the bathroom and went to bed.
Surprisingly, it was all still there the next morning.
I looked at the book and found that the pictures were still the same too.
I had no choices left to me so I went out to the electrical box in the back yard and I turned off the electricity to the bathroom. Then I went in and cut a couple of wires.
No sparks, no fires.
That’s one of the things about electricity that I don’t like: if there’s not a little light attached to whatever you’re working on you never know if it’s there or not. It’s an invisible menace waiting to jump out and grab you just as you get comfortable in its presence.
As I got more comfortable with it I cut a few more wires until there was basically nothing left of the original wiring in the bathroom. Then I got out my picture book and put in new wiring to make it look like the pictures. Then came the moment of truth: it was time to turn the electricity back on.
So I went out to the box in the back and flipped the switch.
I was gratified that there were no explosions, and that the electricity did indeed stay on for the rest of the west coast. I was worried about that.
I went back inside to see what was happening.
Everything looked ok.
I approached the light switch that I installed and very cautiously flipped it on.
Both the light and the fan came on. I only wanted the light to come on.
I turned that switch off and flipped the fan switch on.
The fan and the light in the hallway came on.
Beelzebub.
I went into the hallway and flipped the hallway light switch (which, by the way, I hadn’t even touched) and the hallway light and the bathroom fan went off.
So I went back outside and turned off the electricity, and then I cut some more wires and started over again. Eventually I got it right. Or at least as right as I had a right to expect it to be right.
It has been a few years since that happened and the time came when the other bathroom had to be torn apart. I approached it with more confidence than the last time for the simple fact that I now had more experience, and the pictures in the book still hadn’t changed.
I got out the hammer and the crowbar and started in again.
I knew what I thought should be there, but when I stepped back and let the dust settle I found that I was looking at the same nightmare as before.
Beelzebub.
It didn’t match the pictures!
I really hate it when that happens.
There was extra stuff. Why do you need extra stuff in a bathroom?
So I did what I always do.
I shut the door and went to bed. I knew without a doubt that it would still be there when I woke up.
The next day I called my good friend Dave Nelson.
Dave is an electrical genius.
He is the high priest of electrical knowledge.
He is the one with all the electrical answers.
Dave is also one of those guys who are always on a quest for knowledge. When he wants to know about something he just jumps right in and finds out what is needed and does it. He is always working on something at his house. I can pretty much guarantee that if you walk into his house at any given time there is a project being worked on. I expect that the worst form of torture you could inflict on Dave would be to tell him that he had to sit down and relax and never visit another hardware store again.
So I called Dave and sent him a picture of what I was looking at. He looked at the picture and we talked about it, and he concluded that in this case everything appeared to be the way it was supposed to be.
He concluded his remarks with, “I don’t really see a problem. I think you’ll do fine with it.”
That’s another thing about Dave; he’s an eternal optimist.
In my head I was saying, “YOU don’t see a problem? I still see a problem! This is BEELZEBUB we’re talking about here!”
With my mouth I was saying, “Yeah, I think I understand it now. I should be ok.”
So I turned the electricity off and cut some wires. No explosions.
I finally got it finished and went on to finish the drywall, install the sink and paint everything.
Now that it’s done I have a new issue.
When we were deciding on the color my wife wanted yellow.
I did not want yellow.
We compromised on a kind of golden brownish color that seemed to fit the room. So we got the paint and I finished the job.
Then the paint dried.
It’s yellow.
In fact it’s actually YELLOW!
It’s so YELLOW! that you don’t even have to turn on the light to see at night because it pretty much glows in the dark! And if you turn on the light you're gonna go blind.
YELLOW! does not belong in a bathroom. It’s too strongly associated with something else that you will find in a bathroom that is also yellow which I shall not name here to save those of sensitive dispositions. It is also often associated with the number 1.
After having to sit in the YELLOW! room for a while I have now discovered that I truly hate YELLOW!
On the other hand, the light switch only turns on the light in the bathroom so maybe I’ll just leave it that for now.
©Dan Bode 2008

Stand Firm

2008-10-16T15:27:00.000-07:00

061111 Stand Firm

You’re beaten.
Your body is bruised and bloody beyond recognition.
Your only sensation is merciless, unceasing pain.
You can barely see the ground you lie on because your eyes are all but swollen shut.
You are alone in your circumstance as well as your emotions.

Despite all that works against you, despite the repeated assaults, despite everything you’ve suffered through at the hands of another, you draw your arms in and push yourself up. Your joints that once moved easily bring your pain to a new crescendo as you bend your knees and stand again.
Your enemies who encircle you shake their heads at your folly, for you all know you will only be knocked to the ground again. All you have to do is stay down. Don’t get up. Let your defiance of their desires fight another day. But you’ve already decided you’ve had enough, and that voice has already told you, “Stand firm.”
At the words that leave your mouth their eyes widen in surprise, and maybe even fear and some awe, “I forgive you.”
As they cruelly laugh and taunt you that voice whispers again, “Vengeance is mine.”
You reply, “They do not know what they do.”
The sorrow comes through in the quiet response, “I know. Believe Me I know. Stand firm. They are not yet ready for heaven so you cannot kill them.” And you know this is true for you can feel the power to do that easily within your reach, and you discover that the truth of strength is not using the power at your disposal in the normal human response.

Forgiveness is one of the most difficult attributes of the Christian faith. For while there is violence in the Christian faith the Biblical depiction of that violence in the New Testament is that which is done to us rather than by us, hence the requirement that we “turn the other cheek”. This is all the more difficult for me, because I am anything but a pacifist. If there is something in my way I would much rather blow it up, or punch my way through it and be done with it than have to think it through, and apply my faith.
There are seasons in our lives. Some are painful beyond comprehension, and some are the sweetest satisfaction of our deepest longings. Some, the most valuable ones, are an exquisite combination of both for they are often the result of the healing of a wound. We do not desire the wound, yet having been wounded we desire to be healed, and once healed we are left with something so valuable that we would never give it up.
But we would never have received it if we had never been hurt. This is where faith is applied, where faith meets reality.

We are in a time in this very nation where we value freedom above all, where we as Christians are coming under fire for our beliefs. Government and civil organizations are actively trying to curb our rights even to express our beliefs publicly. Christians are being branded as fascists in many publications. While this is a relatively minor variety of persecution when compared to what is faced in the rest of the world it must be noted that persecution always starts out with the little things.
It will get worse.
It will get worse because the world does not wish to be confronted with the truth of its failures, and if we refuse to conform to the world’s idea of what a Christian should be then we must be silenced somehow. There will come a day when we will feel beaten as I described, in a spiritual sense at least, and that is when the words will come to you telling you to “Stand firm”.
Many decisions are being made by our lawmakers that are antithetical to Christian beliefs. They are wrong and should not be condoned by believing Christians, however, I believe that we Christians need to be reminded of a few things.

First, scripture states that “God is not mocked.” This is a simple statement of fact. It is not just some emotional statement made to inspire. It is very simply impossible to mock God. Many will say the words and take the actions that mock their conception of Him, but that doesn’t mean it has any effect on Him. Mockery is only effective insofar as it can actually hurt someone. No mockery by man will ever have any effect on God.

Second, there are laws of man, and there is the Law of God. We as Christians are to follow the Law of God to the exclusion of the law of man. If man makes a law contrary to His will it is quite simply not valid. There may be consequences to us in our daily lives if we do not follow man’s law, however we will know the Truth of the matter and the true consequences of what we do and how we live.

Third, God is not registered to a political party. Christians will not always agree on political issues, but that does not make them less Christian. If I go to another country I may be disliked for my American politics, but welcomed as a brother and well loved because of a common love of Christ. We are all human, therefore we will all make mistakes in our actions and in our beliefs. God knows the truth of our hearts. I know Christians who actually registered in another party, and much to my surprise, they are not condemned to hell for it! We are held in thrall to a two party political system, and neither of the two sides adequately reflects a Christian ethic. We are not, unfortunately, living in a theocracy (ruled directly by God).
We are giving too much authority to our political system.
Too many churches have put their political goals ahead of their faith.
When this occurs you find politicians stumping from the pulpit.
Politics is not worship, nor should it be mistaken for an expression of faith.
In every election no matter which side of the party lines you fall on, all the candidates insist that what we need is change. We must do something different than what has been done up to this point. The problem is that man, in this area, is painfully consistent. No matter what change we are told we need, the only real change that occurs is the face of the one who wins the election. After that it becomes business as usual. Committees are formed, hearings are held, and there are so many talking heads no one knows what anyone is really saying.
We insist that we must have committed Christians in political office, but what we see is someone who claims to follow Christ getting caught up in the same scandals that all the others are facing. We have to face the fact that either they were not Christians in the first place, or, heaven forbid, they are just as human as the rest of us and subject to the same temptations and weaknesses as all Christians are. And we must further realize that as Christians we are not qualified to judge anyone. Judgement is reserved for God alone and always has been. We are judged as readily as the next person whether they be saint or sinner.
There is a saying that has been used and overused ad nauseum that states “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.”
This is a true statement, however, I believe it is woefully incomplete. What it doesn’t say is this: that while we are truly forgiven of our sins, we are not in any way excused.
While God forgets our sin, we cannot. We were not made to forget. We need to remember what He has forgiven in order to turn away from it. We need to remember what we did in order to avoid it in the future while at the same time accepting His forgiveness to keep from repeatedly condemning ourselves. His forgiveness negates Satan’s attempts to bring us down when he reminds us of our failures.
We must admit that we are forgiven. The guilt is lifted in order to allow us to DO. Unforgiveness leads us into inactive faith. We stagnate and become ill equipped to deal with reality in spiritual terms.
Be forgiven, but live with the knowledge that you have been saved from His justice.
Pretending does nothing for you. We often claim that we are forgiven, but approach a relationship with God in fear and trepidation rather than love and joy.
We cannot dilute this message: With His forgiveness comes His love. Without it you die in condemnation, and you will wind up in hell. There are no two ways about it.
The idea is to work through the sin to receive forgiveness not ignore it or rename the sin to avoid dealing with its very real effects on our lives. My sin is forgiven, but I must still deal with the consequences of my actions. The way that I deal with it will in itself reflect the grace of my God to the rest of the world.
So all this being said, I will say one more thing.
We need change.
In fact, I DEMAND change!
If I am to demand a change then it must begin at a fundamental level.
Change must first begin within me.
The only place I have any power to effect any change is within myself. It has never been the right of any person to demand change in any other. Change is left to God and the individual. Only God can know someone’s truest heart, and I was never made to bear the responsibility for someone else’s soul.
The world is not made any different from the political system down. It starts with you and me. It starts with each of us taking responsibility for what we have done. The only way we can bring any effective change to our world is to first invite Christ to make the change within us, and then act on that change. I refuse to give any politician the responsibility to improve my world, or determine my worth. Because by giving them the responsibility I also give them the control that should be in God’s hands. That is the point at which I have sold myself.
Change within me will be seen by others, and may effect some change in them.
Changes in them will affect their relationships with others, etc.
This is how we change the world.
Politicians come and go.
Causes are only temporary.
And nations always fall from within.

Oswald Chambers wrote this:
“ ‘Jesus did not commit Himself to them … for He knew what was in man’ (John 2:24–25).
Put Trust in God First. Our Lord never put His trust in any person. Yet He was never suspicious, never bitter, and never lost hope for anyone, because He put His trust in God first. He trusted absolutely in what God’s grace could do for others. If I put my trust in human beings first, the end result will be my despair and hopelessness toward everyone. I will become bitter because I have insisted that people be what no person can ever be—absolutely perfect and right. Never trust anything in yourself or in anyone else, except the grace of God.”
Oswald Chambers “My Utmost for His Highest” May 31st

The only one who deserves our trust and devotion is Christ alone, and he asks us to sacrifice ourselves in His name for His purpose.

Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends
John 15:13

We Americans have made the Unites States a major player in the Biblical world picture, but I have serious doubts that God gives us the same level of importance that we give ourselves. Not even a nation as great as ours can have more importance in our own eyes than what Christ calls us to.
The simple fact is this; when I die I will not go to an "American" heaven.
When I pray it is not to an American, or even a human leader.
When I accept the gift of my eternal salvation it is not given by the hand of the president.
My God is my life and the hope of my death.
I will have it no other way.
Make no mistake; I am proud and glad to be an American. Despite what I have written I do enjoy the freedom others have fought and died for that allows me to write these things. But neither will I support any political or idealogical worldview that opposes the stated will of God.
The American Dream is not the Dream of God.
We are children of a greater Nation – The Family of God – if we so choose.
If we put aside all others.
If we forsake the false and embrace the Truth.
If we choose to be in the world, but not of it.
We have better things to do than to support the schemes of men. We are called to a higher purpose.
Answer the call.
Stand ready.
Stand firm.
©Dan Bode 2008