We recently discovered where Macs are made: they grow on Apple trees, of course.
Intel and picture courtesy of Bruji.
Some background is necessary to understanding this post.
First, we have been traveling on a difficult journey with the family of a seven year old boy, a close friend of my son, who is, to all appearances, losing his battle against leukemia. His name is Joseph and he has spent the better part of the past two months in the hospital. Today is Joseph’s birthday, and that he lives to celebrate it with his family and friends is a wonderful thing. We will help him celebrate.
Secondly, my son and I have become enamored with an odd British sci-fi series called Dr. Who. (Watch the 2005 episode 1 and you’ll be hooked, too.) Dr. Who is a time traveler who travels in what looks like a phone booth but which is really a time-traveling spaceship called a ‘TARDIS‘.
Yesterday, he and I went to the hospital to see Joseph. In the hospital elevator, I said to him, “Hey, this is like a TARDIS. So, where do you want to go?”
Without a pause or a moment’s reflection, he said, “To a dimension where Joseph is not sick.”
A child’s longing is our own.
A longing fulfilled by our gospel hope.
Come, Lord Jesus.
Today, God added one more saint to his cloud of witnesses. And somehow, though I never met him, I feel a sense of loss. When asked to list those Christians living and dead who have had the most significant impact upon my ministry, the name of John R. W. Stott has always seemed to come up. If his name is unfamiliar to you, you can read an obituary here.
My first exposure to Stott came in college through his book Basic Christianity
In 1979, Barb and I had the privilege of attending the Inter-Varsity Urbana Missions Convention where John Stott lectured daily on the book of Romans. A rich theological and biblical foundation was being laid for me day after day. And though I cannot today tell you anything he said I can say that I ‘caught’ through that an attitude of respect for the Bible and a love for the importance of a Biblical theology. Stott modeled that.
Shortly thereafter I plunged into Stott’s Christian Mission in the Modern World
As a preacher I have long learned to depend upon a series of commentaries Stott championed and called The Bible Speaks Today
And several times I have read his book on preaching, Between Two Worlds
In 2004, NY Times columnist David Brooks penned a remarkable tribute to Stott. In an age when the news media would rush to find the most extreme examples of Christian thinking to comment on whatever issues were in the news, Brooks wondered why none ever thought to seek the insights and wisdom of a man who was the best representative of Christianity.
I came to Stott’s magnum opus, The Cross of Christ
All this could be said about the influence of any scholar and model pastor upon a younger generation, I suppose. But there is something more. I cried shortly after reading about Stott’s death. It’s not that I have lost a friend. I never met him; how can I call him that? It’s not that I feel the church on earth is weakened by his absence; his influence has been minimal in recent years. Rather, I think I cried because of these words written by his associate and biographer Timothy Dudley-Smith and quoted by Justin Taylor:
He thinks of himself, as all Christians should but few of us achieve, as simply a beloved child of a heavenly Father; an unworthy servant of his friend and master, Jesus Christ; a sinner saved by grace to the glory and praise of God.
He modeled that for which I long: to know myself primarily “as a beloved child of a heavenly father.”
To whatever degree I am in the least bit able to live my life to the glory and praise of God, John Stott has played a role in that. I thank God for the privilege of falling under his influence.
+ + + + +
UPDATE: A good tribute is this from Don Sweeting, president of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.
I once had a conversation with a seller of Christian books and Bibles who had tried to explain to a publisher why he thought the publisher should publish less ‘red letter’ editions of the Bible. The publisher was so puzzled by this sentiment that it seemed to him my friend had come from Mars.
I’m not certain of the history of the practice of highlighting the ‘words of Christ in red’ in our Bibles, but I have for some time been troubled by the practice. If Jesus is fully God (which he is), and if the whole Bible is the Word of God (which it is), then if we really wanted to put Christ’s words in red we should just highlight the whole thing. To do otherwise suggests that the words which Jesus spoke on earth were just somehow more important and weightier than those which he spoke through David or Moses. That is dangerous.
It’s an impossible task anyway. Unfortunately for modern publishers, the Greek of the New Testament did not come with quotation marks. We will never in this life know for certain whether Jesus or John was responsible for saying, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son….’ but that does not stop publishers from printing the whole in red.
The practice, though, is most odd when the words of Christ back up against the words of his heavenly Father as illustrated here.
The words of the incarnate Son, I suppose we are to understand, are of greater value than those of the non-incarnate Father. Very odd.
I’m not suggesting we toss our red letter bibles. I would, though, be delighted to see the demand for them diminish. That would be a message even publishers could understand.
Written well before any modern controversy, British commentator Bruce Milne
So Jesus said to them, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.” When Jesus had said these things, he departed and hid himself from them. (John 12:35, 36)
To this Milne says:
There is an urgency in this last appeal of Jesus from which the modern church does well to learn. The days when sermons on hell and its conditions were the staple diet of the evangelical pulpit have long since departed. Their going is not wholly to be regretted. Fear of hell-fire is certainly not the primary motive for seeking Christ’s salvation. Besides, such preaching often concentrated on the damnation of the lost in a manner that left the saved smugly secure and unchallenged concerning the profound moral and ethical implications of living a ‘saved’ life. We would not turn back the clock in this respect even if we could.
Yet the warning note which Jesus strikes here is always relevant. The implications of turning away from the light of God are terrible in the extreme, and Jesus is concerned that people be clearly aware of them. We are certainly to draw men and women towards God’s salvation by all God-honouring inducements. We are certainly authorized to bear witness with full hearts to the completeness of the salvation which Christ has won for sinners, and the joys beyond compare which await those who cast themselves upon his mercy.
In addition, however, we dare not fail to warn them that the Redeemer is also a judge, that sin unrepented is sin condemned, and that it is, and will be, when the king returns, ‘a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ‘ (Hebrews 10:31). While people have opportunity, we are to speak, and plead, as did our Saviour….
from Bruce Milne, The Message of John (Bible Speaks Today)
I have found another Florida Afternoon Run Motivator. Perhaps not pushing for speed, but certainly invites one outside.
However, today was a bit unusual. 85º and 51% humidity is not the norm for Central Florida late afternoons, but it was wonderful today. Of course, it does come with a de-motivator, pictured below.
I’d really like to return to blogging. I really would. I’ve gotten as far as including on my weekly action list: “Schedule time slot for blogging.” But, alas, I’ve not gotten to that one yet. It will come.
So, here just a quick note on one dull area of my life. My running.
After the 5K run in April, I developed some knee soreness. I laid off the knee for a couple of months and have slowly returned to a regular routine. This was the first full week back at it.
(I’m feeling good enough that I’m fantasizing a 10K run. Someone please talk me out of it.)
The accompanying picture (blurry because snapped while running) is what I have chosen to call a F.A.R.M. That is, a Florida Afternoon Run Motivator.
It very nearly became a Florida Afternoon Run Terminator (the acronym is yours to imagine). I finished just before the lightning and rain.
I am out of the woods in a literal sense, but not by any means in the metaphorical sense.
The dearth of posts here has been in large measure due to the busy-ness of life and the press of my other responsibilities. Then we took our annual family camping trip, which puts us in the woods in the middle of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, about thirty miles from the nearest internet access. It was wonderful. But isolated.
So, now, I have emerged from the woods, but I am not out of the woods. Life is still busy, the mind is cluttered with lots of things. Many notes and drafts for posts are pending. By God’s grace I hope soon to be able to wrestle those to some tangible, readable, and helpful form.
Thanks to those of you encouraging this!
+++++
UPDATE: In posting this, I discovered that I had failed to renew my domain name, so that those of you accessing the blog through randygreenwald.com or randygreenwald.com were being told that it was no longer active. Oops. I think I’ve fixed that now. I’m sorry about this.
This post may seem to come out of left field.
Well, technically it comes from the pitcher’s mound, the reflections of Dirk Hayhurst, a seasoned minor league baseball player, and the author of The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran
He recently wrote an article for The Bleacher Report cracking a window on the world of professional baseball.
There is swearing in professional baseball, not to mention fighting, drinking, drugs, cheating, affairs, pornography, gambling, abuse, lying, stealing and just about everything else that would make your mother weep if she found out you were doing it.
Naked.
For some players, professional baseball is the worst thing to ever happen to them.
And as much as I enjoyed this as a baseball fan, I wondered about what being thrust into church leadership, into church office, into the pulpit, can do to some of us. Perhaps this is why the Apostle Paul says that an elder is not to be a recent convert.
The weekend has been one of deep emotion which, I hope, none will mind my sharing in this space.
One year ago, today, I had the unexpected privilege of being installed as the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oviedo, Florida. This has been a wonderful placement for me, and I thank God repeatedly for the grace he has shown to me in giving me this call. It has been a wild year, one sprinkled with challenges, certainly, but as well one blessed with many precious new relationships.
The joy of this anniversary, though, is dampened by the somber reality that yesterday marked the final service of the congregation of Hope Presbyterian Church in Bradenton, Florida, the church I pastored for twenty-five years. My mind does not have a place for conceiving of Bradenton without HPC. And a lively debate could be held concerning the degree of my own culpability in its demise. I know. That debate rages in my mind often.
And yet I don’t want HPC to pass without a notice of its strength. The church was composed of men and women whose love for Jesus ran deep. Children were reared there who are continuing to serve Jesus around the world. Creative ways of bringing Jesus to the community were effected. The church had a genuine beauty that was an honor to Christ. The gospel was more than preached there, it was lived.
I am so grateful for the years that God gave me and my family there. Even now, the great longing of my ten-year old is for the friends and adult mentors he knew there. The impact, not just the memory, of Hope Church will live on in our lives and, we hope, in the lives of many others.
God in his mercy did not allow the impact of these corresponding events go without notice. On Saturday, as members of Covenant Church invested time in my son, playing basketball with him and forming new mentor relationships with him, we were blessed by a surprise visit from Andrea, a former member of Hope, now married and living in St. Louis, who through her years in Bradenton had been like a daughter to us. Both our worlds overlapped.
Then, on Sunday, we enjoyed a long and happy lunch with a few or our new friends from Covenant Church. Later that afternoon we headed off to help a friend from Bradenton, Doug, a med student moving to Orlando to finish his rotations, unload his U-Haul. We were joined in that by Tom and Sam and Pete and Sarah, all young people with Bradenton connections, some deep. Again, our worlds overlapped.
God was masterfully weaving the two parts of my life, the joy and the sorrow, the Bradenton and the Oviedo, together in a way designed to remind me that he is God and the he is good.
Each morning in Bradenton, while it was still dark, I would walk out of my east-facing front door to retrieve the newspaper. When the season was right and the sky was clear, I would look up and see bright and distinct the constellation Orion. That sight came to symbolize for me my life there, a life that has now past.
When I left, I saw it one last time from that place, and bid it farewell. It was hard, harder than I imagined.
I no longer see Orion on those clear and bright mornings. But what I cannot forget is that the God who put Orion in the sky is the God who put me in Bradenton for a time and and who has now put me in Oviedo. To grieve the past that is lost is normal and human. But I celebrate the God who is not lost, who is not past, who is ever present and loving and good, whose shepherdly instincts lead me, undeservedly, beside still waters and into green pastures, and has, beyond hope and imagination, placed me with another flock, who continue to bless me in ways that I will never completely understand.
My heart goes out to the now scattered flock that was Hope Presbyterian Church. I am comforted that we serve a God whose purposes never fail. Far more meaningful than greeting a constellation in the sky is this:
I greet thee, who my sure Redeemer art,
my only trust and Savior of my heart,
who pain didst undergo for my poor sake;
I pray thee from our hearts all cares to take.