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This past Sunday the elders of HPC interviewed people for membership. What we look for in those wishing to join is simply a credible profession of faith in Jesus Christ. To discern this can be one of the hardest things we do. But not today.

Today it was a delight. We were able to interview three adults and seven children, including my son Colin, no longer sporting his Rayhawk (which, by his mother’s orders, lasted no longer than about fifteen minutes). The children’s ages ranged from 7 to 12.

Can a child understand this process? We’ve wrestled with that and have concluded that at times a child can understand it better than some adults.

Each of these children gave evidence of understanding what it means to trust in Jesus Christ for salvation. But, you ask, will they still be committed at age 17? or 21? or 25? We can’t say that. But do we prevent access to membership and to the Lord’s table because we fear that one whose profession of faith today is tender and precious may prove to be spurious? Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me.” I’d hate to be on the other side of him on any issue, but especially that one.

If any come to us and demonstrate a love for Jesus, we receive them. If in time they reject the faith which they now profess, then their profession will be shown to have been false, regardless of the age they made that profession.

But this is the joy: I don’t expect that from these children. Yes, they may struggle. They may go through a period where they ‘experiment with unbelief’, a time where they look upon the Christianity of their upbringing from the ‘other side’, so to speak. It may be a scary time for their parents. But the faith they possess now, nurtured as it will be by faithful parents, by the church, by the preaching, by the sacraments, I expect to grow and deepen and to be preserved by the gospel. I believe this because I’ve been assured and have seen God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises.

The work of the parents, and the work of the covenant community of the church, has not changed. We are still charged with discipling these children to love and trust Jesus. We are still to be about guiding them to be faithful to the vows they take and will slowly come to understand as the years go on. But the God who claimed them as his from the womb will be the the God who preserves them through his faithfulness.

I am grateful to Him for his work among these young ones.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Miscellaneous travels of an ADD mind:

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In the technolust department… one of our enlightened HPC members came to church a week ago Sunday with one of these:

I’ve got to make mine last another two or three years. Sigh.

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Great advice here:

Clipped from this site. (I could not figure out how to link to the precise cartoon. So, risking copyright violation, I cut and pasted. Sorry!)

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This is pretty cool.

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Geoff sent me this picture.

I knew that Joe Maddon was a renaissance man, but acting?

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This will make you who travel both more irritated and less secure… so, I suppose not reading it is the best advice. But it is very interesting.

TSA has responded here.

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Something unusual for this time of year:

Michigan St. remains on course for share of Big Ten title

Whoa… what parallel dimension have I walked into?

Gus is an elder emeritus here at Hope Presbyterian Church. If you know him, you know that he is not a publicity hound. He is not after his own glory. He simply cares about Christ and his church.

However, Gus does have some notoriety. Some of you may know that he came to faith through the ministry of Jack Miller. If you are unfamiliar with that story, you can go here and read about it. The ‘Gus’ in this account is our Gus.

The book, by the way, is a book worth buying.

In the past 48 hours, we have seen history made. No matter what one thinks of Obama’s politics, his racial background makes this a memorable election. (Follow this link for a sober and sensible questioning of this assumption.)

Of all the reactions I have read (some quite off the wall) the one I appreciated the most came from a woman whom I deeply love and respect but who cannot often be persuaded to use her verbal gifts to say what is on her heart. (She is the good looking one in the picture currently used in my profile.) I reproduce her comments here with her permission. (I wouldn’t dare do otherwise!)

I’m glad that we’ve elected someone whose skin color is not pasty white. I just wish it could have been someone (male or female) from a more conservative persuasion!

It does still distress me that we are so hung up on ethnic background. In this whole debate everyone seems to forget that Mr. Obama is really biracial. Mr. Obama is proud of his ethnic background, both sides, as he well should, but by virtue of the fact that he is being touted by the media as the first black man to be elected president, not the first man of mixed racial ancestry to be elected just reinforces the old stereotypes. It really grieves me to think that mentally we’re not much different than when people were excluded from participating in the voting process because they were “1/8th” black ancestry so therefore were labeled as black.

I long for the day when people are viewed for who they are on the inside and not for what they look like on the outside. Sadly, that will probably not occur until Jesus comes again.

Well said, Barb. Maybe that day will come sooner than we can imagine.

There was a story a year or two ago about a child – I believe he was blood related to me, but I would not confess that in public – who picked up a gluestick thinking it was his mama’s lipstick, with predictably hilarious results.

When I think about that story, I think about all of those times when lipstick like that would have saved me from some awful verbal mistakes.

Quick to listen and slow to speak. How often I get that mixed up.

I am one person.

The voting precinct in which I live has 1800 registered voters. 1600 ballots were delivered to our precinct to cover the expected turnout.

There are 139 precincts in our county, for the 207, 281 registered voters.

There are 67 counties in the state (along with 27 first magnitude springs, more than any other state, which has nothing to do with my point, but I find it interesting nevertheless).

There are 50 states in the country.

I am one person. Just 1/1800 of my precinct.

And yet, I felt important today.

When I voted, there was the thrill of being a part of something important and unique. Perhaps I’m naïve, but somehow I believe that it matters that I, and you, voted.

And then, in January, something more remarkable will happen. Power will transfer from one person to another, perhaps (and it seems likely) from one party to another, without bloodshed and without violence.

I am so frustrated by our political process. But I’m not sure I would want to trade it for anything.

Here is a song especially for today from one of my favorite groups.

Download it – it’s yours!

273. This is the number of trick or treaters we had at our house on Halloween.

That is nearly 300. That’s a bunch.

Fortunately, I was not the distributor this year. That job fell to my wife, whose precision measurement and distribution assures me that we did not have 272 visitors or 274 visitors, but 273.

There are not 273 children living in our neighborhood. There are hardly 273 PEOPLE in our neighborhood. We are something of an outpost, a safe place for families from less safe neighborhoods to take their children. We don’t mind.

While I was not distributing, I was accompanying my own little Boba Fett around the neighborhood, which was a joy itself. But the circuit was made all that more interesting and delightful as I walked with my neighbor from across the street – Ed (Faoud, actually), and his wife Malika. Our conversation ranged from globalization to the books we were reading to the upcoming election to, particularly, the anti-gay marriage amendment being proposed for the Florida constitution and the place of morality and moral restrictions in constitutional documents.

I respect those who take a different approach to how to ‘deal with’ the whole Halloween thing. I really do. But this ‘event’ gave me an opportunity to spend some great time with a neighbor, growing more comfortable with him and he with me. I’m glad to have had the opportunity.

The bummer of it all was that I had purchased, I thought, sufficient candy to have EXTRA for me when it was all done. That was not meant to be.

Tomorrow is election day, and the hope is, of course, that all of you who can vote will consider the issues and vote.

Notice that I did not say that I want all of you who can vote to vote. That would be silly. The important thing is that you give the issues some consideration and then based upon your best reasoned judgment, you vote. This is a tremendous privilege, one which we who have always assumed it really fail sufficiently to appreciate.

And then, once you have voted, realize that your hope does not rest on the outcome of the election. It does not rest in the king, the prince, the president, or the senator. We do not trust in military might or a political candidate’s orientation toward Christianity or toward our favored issue(s). Should our candidate win, we should not think that the messiah has come, and should he lose, we should not despair as if the end beckons.

Two perspectives have crossed my desk, from men often at odds in theological matters. And yet they are in this regard barking up the same tree.

It would be worthwhile for you to consider these wise biblical reflections of Scot McKnight. I by no means embrace everything that he says in this post or in his blog. But I stand with him in the overall wisdom of these words. I encourage you to read the whole. Here is an excerpt:

Where is our hope? To be sure, I hope our country solves its international conflicts and I hope we resolve poverty and dissolve our educational problems and racism. But where does my hope turn when I think of war or poverty or education or racism? Does it focus on November 4? Does it gain its energy from thinking that if we get the right candidate elected our problems will be dissolved? If so, I submit that our eschatology has become empire-shaped, Constantinian, and political. And it doesn’t matter to me if it is a right-wing evangelical wringing her fingers in hope that a Republican wins, or a left-wing evangelical wringing her fingers in hope that a Democrat wins. Each has a misguided eschatology.

Now before I take another step, it must be emphasized that I participate in the election; and I think it makes a difference which candidate wins; and I think from my own limited perspective one candidate is better than the other.

But, participation in the federal election dare not be seen as the lever that turns the eschatological designs God has for this world.

As well, I would commend careful pondering of the God-centered perspective of John Piper. Again read the whole, but let this entice, or encourage, you to think:

So it is with voting. There are losses. We mourn. But not as those who have no hope. We vote and we lose, or we vote and we win. In either case, we win or lose as if we were not winning or losing. Our expectations and frustrations are modest. The best this world can offer is short and small….

So it is with voting. There are joys. The very act of voting is a joyful statement that we are not under a tyrant. And there may be happy victories. But the best government we get is a foreshadowing. Peace and justice are approximated now. They will be perfect when Christ comes. So our joy is modest. Our triumphs are short-lived—and shot through with imperfection.

More to be desired are they [the Scriptures] than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:10)

Even allowing for a bit of poetic hyperbole, what would our lives look like if we really believed this?

I don’t mean that rhetorically. That is a real question. What would be different in our lives if we REALLY believed this?