Happy Anniversary

Thirty years ago I met this tall,slender, quiet brunette in the post office of my college. To be honest, that was about all I noticed about her at the time. She was very, very quiet. She also embarrassed easily, as I found out a short while later when I did my very best Elvis "Happy Birthday" impersonation to her in the student center.

That would have probably been the end of things if it weren't for the efforts of another girl that I met that day. She encouraged me to ask the brunette out, which I did, and then encouraged me to ask her out a second time.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Today marks the twenty-sixth anniversary of the day that brunette said "I do." Twenty-six years is a long time for just about anything. If we were a car we'd qualify for one of those "antique" tags....But for us, well, me at least, things still seem fresh and new. We've never had a lot of anything, except for kids, and probably never will. That used to bother me, but I've learned that there are some things that are far more important than stuff. My wife is the one that taught me that. And that's just one of the things she's taught me.

There has been lots and lots of laughter along the way and more than a few tears, but through it all she has been central to my life. A friend from college tells me that many of our friends knew that we belonged together from the start. "She completes you" another of our friends says. I think that puts it well...."she completes you." I cannot imagine my life without her. She has become my best friend, my running buddy, my strength and compass. She's not perfect, that's my department (haha!), but she's perfectly suited for me.

She has never been able to see herself the way that I do. Her strength, creativity, and ingenuity are lacking in her sight, but amazing to me and to others who know her. She's raising six kids and a husband (I'm sure the last one is the hardest)and somehow doing it without losing her sanity. Now THAT'S impressive.

The world may not think that today is a very important day, but to me it is of supreme importance. When that young woman said "I do" twenty-six years ago today she set me on a course far greater than any I could have ever imagined for myself. Thank you Lyndra, for twenty-six exciting, adventurous, fun filled years. Here's to many, many more.

I Love YOU!

The Long and Winding Road

This is the last day of 2010, and to be honest with you, I won't be sorry to see it go. In so many ways this year has been the hardest and most difficult of my life, especially from a health standpoint. In case you are unaware let me recap...

I woke up the morning of August 1st with blood pressure that was dangerously high. Nothing, not my meds or my other methods or rest brought my blood pressure down from its dangerously high level. When the second day of dangerously high pressure came I chose the smart option of going to the doctor. He put me in the hospital for tests. After spending the night in the hospital I had a lower blood pressure but no firm answers. The tests on my heart and blood work showed no obvious problems.

Things would have probably ended there had it not been for the fact that my doctor was not willingly to let that be the end of it. Minor abnormalities on two tests convinced him that there indeed was a problem there. He ordered a nuclear stress test.

We had to wait approximately three weeks for the results of that test. My wife and I were having lunch after seeing the doctor that morning when her cell phone rang. It was the doctor with the results of the stress test. He used words like "blockages" and "heart damage" and told me that he had made an appointment for me that afternoon to see a local cardiologist. When I balked at going he told me that the results were so serious that he didn't feel that I had time to go anywhere else.

I went to see the cardiologist.

The cardiologist was not very encouraging either. He told me three things: 1) I needed a heart catheterization to determine the exact damage to my heart and 2) I had a 40 percent chance of having an "incident" before being able to obtain a second opinion, and 3) My heart was only functioning at about 40 percent of capacity (the exact phrase is "ejection fraction"). The procedure was scheduled for two days later.

There are four possible outcomes to a heart catheter procedure: 1) they find no damage, 2) they find damage that is treatable with medication alone, 3) they find damage that they can correct with stents, or 4) they find damage that can only be corrected with bypass surgery. If you know me at all you know that I have never been one to take the easy way....

The cardiologist told my wife that I had five blockages. Two of the blockages were on the back of the heart and would not be treated. The three on the front of the heart were very dangerous. The most open artery was the main artery that feeds the heart. That artery is called the "widow maker" because the vast majority of folks who have a heart attack based on a blockage of this artery don't survive. The other two blockages were 90 and 95 percent. I have since been told that if I had suffered a heart attack during this time that I would most likely not have survived.

Bypass surgery was scheduled.

The surgery went very well and I was home again in four days. I vigorously attacked the rehabilitation process with the intention of restoring what I had lost. I looked forward to the follow up with the cardiologist to see how well I was recuperating.

That visit did not go as expected.

The echocardiogram revealed that my heart function (ejection fraction) had not improved, but had actually gotten a little worse. I was further diagnosed with congestive heart failure and needed a defibrillator inserted into my chest as a preventive measure because of the weakness of my remaining heart muscle.

Then it was discovered that I was anemic, which is dangerous condition for anyone, but especially for someone with heart failure. Tests to determine the cause of the anemia have revealed that I have an ulcer and a number of spots that are on their way to becoming ulcers. These are bleeding, which causes the anemia.

I am not asking you for sympathy...but I share this to share with you the lessons I am learning through this long and winding road. Those lessons are....

God is not to blame, but rather to be praised. Did God cause my heart failure? Let me state unequivocally NO! My poor health choices are the reasons for my heart failure. God knew that this was going to happen and has given me the strength to endure so far. I can give Him praise for these moments and the opportunities they have given me with my family and with the different patients, doctors and nurses who lives have intersected with mine. Not to mention the wonderful graciousness of our church. I praise Him for the blessing of this illness.

God has a purpose in all things. I am used to toughing things out, to wrestling life into what I want it to be. God has used my illness to make me lean on him more than ever before. This has been a year harder on more levels than any other I have ever experienced. Yet God has a purpose in all this, and these events are all a part of that purpose. I don't have to understand the why behind all of this, but I do know that He has a purpose.

Life is life. Being a child of God is not an free pass in life. There will be pain and sorrow, hurt and disappointment. Those who teach the fallacy that Christians will never have pain or suffering are ignorant or uninformed. God does not deliver us from life, He gives us life. I can overcome all of this because I know that God fills it all with His purposes and that there is coming a day when I shall exchange this reality for the greatest reality of all...His presence. In that moment I will no longer worry about the why of all this.

Those are just a few of the things that God has been teaching, or in some cases reinforcing, me through this process. I don't know what 2011 holds, and that's okay, but I know that God's purposes will be worked out in my life.

For His glory.

Reflections on Life....and Death

The e-mail was heartbreaking. The cancer was spreading and they are now talking about months, not years. My friend and his wife had decided to forgo some treatments while continuing others. Their emphasis had shifted from "quantity" of life to "quality" of life. I respect their decision, it's one that I would make. My prayers and hopes go with them.

I've been thinking during the last two days about the whole "quantity" versus "quality" thing....The sad thing in all of our lives is that we've been playing out that debate at all. We pick and choose between so many things that in the end nothing gets either quality or quantity time. When did we lose the wonder and the joy of life? Now our lives are filled with things that are, quite frankly, not important....The tyranny of the urgent rules our lives with an iron fist, and the urgent is seldom important. The TV, the internet, baseball, soccer, whatever, these things have taken us away from the things that are most important. God, family, and friends are all cast aside for the sake of chasing whatever happens to have captured our attention at the moment. My oldest daughter (who struggles with serious health issues of her own) jokes that those types of things are "shiny" and they cannot be ignored.

But that's exactly what we need to do: ignore them. It's time that we quit worrying about the quantity of the things that fill our lives and begin to focus on the quality of our lives. Things like family, friends and God deserve more than the scraps of our time. We'd be better off without most of that other stuff anyway. But doing that will require discipline and discomfort and we don't like either one of those concepts. As a child, and even through college, I could accurately be described as being carefree, happy go lucky. At heart I'm still that way, but somewhere along the way I crowded my life with so many less important things that I lost that part of myself. I've decided that I don't like my life in its current configuration and have spent the last few years sorting through and cleaning out my life, bringing it down to those things that matter most. I'd like to think that its made me a better husband, father, and friend.

It's sad, really, that so many of us have to face a serious tragedy or situation to begin to consider these things. My wish for my friend is that he would be healed, but my greater wish for him is that God would grant him genuine peace and joy, regardless of how many days he may or may not have left.

With Apologies to Clement Moore

Twas the night before Christmas...

and all through my house not a creature was silent, not even my spouse...

There is no doubt that the Christmas season is hectic. Shopping, partying, shopping, special church services, shopping, cooking, eating, shopping, more eating, and even more shopping. It's no wonder that the days leading up to Christmas are among the most stressful of the year. How telling the comparison between our never slowing pace of life and the gentle simplicity of that night in Bethlehem so long ago. We all would benefit from such a simplicity in our own lives.

the children were nestled in front of the tube, where holiday specials turned them into boobs...

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, but do we know Jesus? My heart breaks over the absence of Jesus in our Christmas observances. Santa Claus has replaced the Savior and the only star we know anything about seems to be the one on the top of the tree. Is it any wonder that Jesus has become an afterthought in our culture when he's not even the center of our lives and homes?

And mom with the checkbook and I with some chicken had just settled down to count money with Quicken....

All I want for Christmas is the mantra for the holiday, and not just for children. Christmas has become a time of greed. But all our stuff won't make us any happier or solve any of our problems. We spend our lives in pursuit of things that won't give us true fulfillment while we ignore the one who can meet our deepest needs. What would happen if we used our wealth to help others rather than wasting it on ourselves?

When out on the lawn there arose such a noise that I thought someone was stealing my lawn toys.

But what to my wondering eyes did appear but a sky full of angels and light bright and clear.

They spoke out a message so simple and plain that it cut through the fog that clouded my brain...

Behold, I bring you good news of great joy...for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, Christ the Lord.

The greatest news of all is that God Himself became one of us. The greatest gift that we would ever receive, the Son of God came to bring us back into a right relationship with God the Father.

That's what Christmas is.

Merry Christmas from my home to yours.

Bah Humbug!?

I recently went with our church's children to see a Christmas pageant presented by a rather large church. This was the second year that I have been to this particular church to see their Christmas pageant. Throughout my years in ministry I have led numerous Christmas programs, some small, some not so small. I have been in large scale programs a number of times as well, so I feel that I can speak from an informed point of view. This particular pageant was visually and musically stunning. There can be no doubt about the talent and skill that was on display. They presented a wonderful program. But I was disturbed as I sat through the program and that feeling only increased as I considered what I saw and heard.

The program was divided into three sections: a choral opening was followed by a "traditional" program followed by a "spiritual" program. The opening portion featured a choral concert of traditional Christmas hymns such as "O Come, All Ye Faithful." This was a beautiful experience, although is was all too brief.

The "traditional" program featured what could best be described as vignettes built around secular Christmas songs such as "I'll be Home for Christmas" and "Here Comes Santa Claus." The amount of work that went into this portion of the pageant was obvious. This was the longest portion of the entire evening.

The third, "spiritual" portion of the pageant featured, for the most part, music that I was unfamiliar with. The centerpiece of this section was a recreation of the nativity. My son, who attended with my, noticed that the leadership took liberties with the biblical account by having the wise men come to worship at the manger. This was the shortest portion of the program.

Why was I disturbed by what I saw and heard during this performance? I have a very real problem with a church, which by definition is a body of believers who proclaim Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, placing a greater emphasis on Santa Claus and the secular than on the birth of our Savior. I am also disturbed that the leadership of the music ministry would be so disrespectful of the Word of God and present a decidedly unbiblical version of the events at the manger. These may seem like small things to be concerned about, but if you raise the water temperature one degree at a time you can boil a frog without him ever knowing about it. The church has lost its power and effectiveness one small step at a time through small compromises such as these.

What the world needs to hear at this time of year is not "Here Comes Santa Claus" or "Frosty the Snowman" but "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" and "What Child is This." Why would we sacrifice our message? We know the true reason for the season and we should be true to that message in all that we do.

May you know the very best of God's blessings this Christmas season.

The Things that Last

The last few weeks have been very difficult. October was filled with the flu (yes, the swine flu visited our house) and November was filled with getting back on our feet and tracking down a diagnosis for a child's ongoing medical problems. Nothing occupies your mind and time quite like the illness of a child. So I haven't blogged, or done much else other than what had to be done, in a long while. But a trip home for Thanksgiving has brought me back.

I hadn't been home in seven years and felt a strong need to go home again, so I arranged to take a week of vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday. One of the things that I wanted to do on this trip was to go back and revisit some of the places I had lived during my childhood. My rationalization for this was the opportunity to show my children those places that they had heard their dad talk about. But there was a greater desire, a desire to remind myself where I had come from, to reorient myself once again with my roots. I needed to see whether I'd gone beyond the obstacles that populated my past. Had I made anything of myself?

One of the most shocking things about the trip was my discovery that many of my childhood homes (I showed my kids eight of them) had been torn down. The most disturbing absence was the one house that I lived in for two consecutive summers. I realize that houses are torn down all the time, but in our minds there is something permanent about the houses we grow up in and the schools we attend. To see those houses no longer there shook me, reminding me of the transient nature of the life I have lived and the unsettled nature of all of our lives. I believe that it is a sad truth that we all lack a basic sense of security in our lives.

On Sunday of our visit with my parents we attended church with them. This is the church that I grew up in, attending from the time I was nine or ten until I left to go to college. The buildings were the same, but I only knew (not counting my parents) two other people who attended that morning. That only seemed appropriate considering all the lost houses I had seen.

Then one simple statement reminded me of the things that truly last. That morning my mother introduced me as her "son." That may not mean much to you, I mean, mothers introduce their sons all the time. But let me explain...My mother is not my birth mother...she and her family took me in when I was sixteen and had been abandoned by my biological parents. Since that day she has never ceased to introduce me as her son and to tell everyone that my children are her grandchildren.

Those simple words reveal a truth that our culture has forsaken. Real worth and value is not found in houses or blood, but in the sacrifice that love willingly gives. My mom and dad willingly gave of themselves to take me in and give me a home. There was nothing that I could have done that would have made me worthy of such love and sacrifice. God exemplifies that love and sacrifice....For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son....I don't care to debate the theological implications of those words, but we cannot escape their plain meaning: God loved the world (that's you and I) that He sacrificed his Son for us! We didn't earn it, don't deserve it, and cannot change those facts.

I can never thank AJ & Shirley Munnerlyn for the love and sacrifice they extended to me....and I see in their acts a true reflection of the love and sacrifice of God for us all. That's the only thing that makes life worthwhile and the source of all things to give thanks for.

Thanks Mom and Dad.

Thoughts on God and Pain

I recently celebrated a significant anniversary. You see, on my 16th birthday my father set me on a path that would lead to my independence. He threw me out of his house. Actually he told me that he wanted me gone before he woke up the next morning. My mother had left him just a few weeks before and I guess he decided that he didn't need me any more than he needed her. What did I do? I bought a plane ticket and flew from Phoenix, AZ back to Little Rock, AR. My mother was in Little Rock and my natural instinct was to go to her. Two weeks later she announced to me that she was going to California and she wasn't taking me with her. Those events took place 33 years ago.


Please allow me to backtrack and tell you that I wasn't a bad kid, in fact, I would like to think that most parents would have been glad to have me. I was a good student, went to church, and had never been in any trouble. I didn't smoke or drink or chew and didn't go with girls that did either. I was no saint, to be sure, but I wasn't trouble either.


I wish I could tell you that I was prepared for my abandonment and that I handled it like it was any other event in my life....But I didn't. To be honest, I wasn't surprised, but I still had a real hard time accepting that my parents didn't want me, and by extension didn't love me. My love for my parents was real, even though I knew that they weren't exactly Bob and Carol Brady. My home life was filled with violence and abuse of every kind. I learned very early on to discern the proper times to be at home and the times to be gone, which was often. I used to joke that I could spend a week on Oprah and not exhaust the stories, the problem is that it wasn't a joke. The safety net didn't catch me....and I paid a price. I grew up lonely and fearful. My parents drilled into me three primary lessons about who I was: 1. I was a mistake, 2) I was ugly, and 3) No one would ever love me. I carried those lessons for a long time and can even hear their whispers as I write these words.


Life was hard. But it was still life, and I'm grateful for those lessons, no matter how hard they were to learn. I only wish I had learned their lessons sooner. But I have and live with no regrets. I can, from this vantage point, look back and see the hand of God protecting, guiding, and strengthening me throughout those long and lonely years. I wish I could say that I was always aware of His presence, but my lack of understanding doesn't negate the work He did in my life all those years ago. His ways are seldom understandable to our minds.


I recently listened to a program for pastors on CD-Rom and I heard the statement "God doesn't wast pain." I was so profoundly impacted by that statement that I actually hit the back button three times to hear it again and again. God doesn't waste pain. God is with His children in every situation, whether we can see Him or not. There is nothing that takes Him by surprise or causes Him to alter His plan. God actually brings good out of the pain of our lives. I have come to a point in my life where I can truly thank God for those dark times in life. I have known abuse of every type, abandonment, death. I have been wrongly accused, fired, and been viciously attacked by those with nothing more that a dislike for me. And God has known about every situatin before they happene and has not wasted any of my pain.


In my pain God has taught me about love and faith. Fear and courage. True strength and the value of weakness. Through defeat and loss I have learned that God keeps a different type of score than I do. I have come to appreciate God's ways whether I like them or not, whether they make sense to me or leave me utterly confused. I have learned that I am not first and I've learned to be okay with that. Those thoughts are completely foreign to most believers today, but they weren't lost on the early church or the great saints of the past. Could it be that believers today are unaware of this truth? It is true that we don't hear much preaching today about self denial or dying to self, or is the issue one of unwillingness to sacrifice our desires and comfort for the sake of the cross?


One of my favorite men in the Bible learned that God doesn't waste pain. His name is Joseph. Joseph knew rejection by family, false accusations, deprivation, and loneliness. But Joseph learned that God used all of that pain to prepare him for something far more important than his personal happiness. Thanks, Joseph, for giving me an example. Thank you God for using my pain to make me more than I could be by myself. I fully realize that I've failed far more than I've succeeded, but even in my failures you've not wasted by pain. May you give me enough wisdom to learn from those lessons as well.