Mick's Minute

Imagine with me for a moment that you are spending a little time this Summer thinking about football season. As you are daydreaming, you start to wonder, “What is the very best play to run when it's third down and five and your team is down by two points in the third quarter?”

That seems like a tough question. Especially because I do not daydream about football. But no worries. In our imaginary world your buddy has just loaned you a copy of a book called the Ultimate Book of Football, and everyone agrees that it has all the answers. So you open up the Ultimate Book of Football to the page where somebody told you to look to find that particular information.

But instead of a simple answer to your question, what you get is a first-person account of the Chicago Bears entire history-making 1985 football season, written by Hall of Fame Head Coach Mike Ditka himself.

On the one hand that would be frustrating, because it's not a simple answer to your question. But if you’re paying attention, what you actually got was far more important than what you were even looking for.

Back here in the real world, I think that reading the Bible is something like that. The wonderful and frustrating thing about the Bible is that it is far more than we often want it to be. Most of the time what we seem to want the Bible to be is some sort of a basic rule book for life. A simple, well-organized list of rules to tell us what to do when we don’t know what to do. But instead, what the Bible is is the true story of God’s work in the universe all the way from the beginning of Creation to an eternal New Creation at some point in the future. And that story is told in a bunch of separate pieces in the midst of unfolding human history in a way that is directly from God but is also tied to the culture of the time when God spoke and the person through whom God spoke.

The Bible is, in a word, amazing. It is a work of divine art through human artists, given for the purpose of helping people to know who God is, who we are, how we can connect with Him, and how we can live the lives that He has planned for us.

As a result of all of that, what the Bible has to offer us is typically far more than what we are looking for.

If we can humble ourselves and simply allow the Bible to be what it is, then something amazing begins to happen. God's words in the Bible begin to challenge us, and encourage us, and impart wisdom to us, and change us. And rather than just learning a few rules for living, we learn the source and meaning of life itself.

One of my favorite mysteries is an old Sherlock Holmes story about a murdered man and a stolen horse. It's called The Adventure of Silver Blaze. One of the things I love about it is that the clue that Sherlock Holmes recognized that opened up the whole case for him was not something that happened, but rather something that didn’t happen. It's a fun detective story, you should check it out sometime.

Even if you don’t, the truth of life is that you will have more than your fair share of mysteries.

That is not an entirely bad thing. Mysteries are a sort of double-edged sword in life. Some can be a lot fun. They give us a chance to solve problems or find solutions or invent things, and that is all good stuff of life from where I’m sitting. But other mysteries in our lives aren’t so good. Especially the ones that never get solved. Especially especially the ones where we are left with pain and nagging, unanswered questions.

The mysteries of life can break you. But they can also make you.

In the true story that is our lives there is a mystery that is so big and so important that every other mystery of life is found somewhere inside of this one. Once upon a time, everything was perfect. Then a horrible thing happened, and things weren’t perfect anymore. In fact, it was kind of awful. So God did the one thing that could be done to make things perfect again. And right now in this moment—as we walk and talk and eat and sleep and laugh and cry and live and die—both the perfect and the awful are happening at the same time. And all of life is moving towards a final event in which that which is awful will be ended forever and perfection will be established for all of eternity.

It is certainly a double-edged sword, this mystery in which we live. But it is a glorious mystery in which you can find freedom that you have never known.

“This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.”

-Ephesians 3:6

Once upon a time wagon trains moved back and forth across the country and adventurers from the East Coast tried their hand at life in the Wild West. During that time it was a common scene in every town big enough to have a saloon to see a group of guys huddled around a table playing poker. And if you would have walked up to one of those poker tables, most likely you would have seen a big buck horn handled knife stuck in the table in front of one of those guys.

The players called that knife “the buck,” and they stuck it in the table in front of the dealer so that as the game progressed the buck would travel around the table in front of each player as it was his turn to deal the cards.

If ever one of the players did not want to deal the cards when his turn came and the knife was stuck into the table in front of him, he would "pass the buck" by taking the knife and sticking it into the table in front of the guy next to him.

A lot has changed since those wild western days. Jet aircraft zip back and forth across the sky high above the old trails of the wagon trains, most of us don’t play much poker, and we hopefully keep sharps objects off the table when we do.

But passing the buck? That has been turned into an art form.

Once upon a time, passing the buck was a simple symbol that meant that you were passing up your turn to take the responsibility of being the dealer. But these days, passing the buck is more like a way of life. Responsibility is hard sometimes. Nobody likes to be wrong, nobody likes to fail, and passing the buck to the next guy when we do somehow feels better than taking ownership of the fact that sometimes we are wrong and sometimes, we do fail.

The reason for that goes back much farther than the days of the Wild West.

Long long before that there was a time when everything was literally perfect. The world and the universe were young, God had created everything from nothing, and it was exactly how He wanted it. He had made the first couple, Adam and Eve, He made them a perfect land in which to live, and every day He would come down and take an evening stroll with them. Adam and Eve had a perfect relationship with God, with each other, and with the world in which they lived. They even had a perfect relationship with themselves. No conflict or confusion or doubt or anything of the sort.

Then the unthinkable happened. They traded it all away in pursuit of a lie.

That evening when God came down to walk with them, they hid from Him. And when He talked with them about what they had done, they did the most fascinating thing... they passed the buck! Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed a snake. In a back-handed kind of way, Adam even blamed God.

That's right, folks. At ground zero of the first wrong thing ever done passing the buck was the immediate reaction.

Since then, not much has changed. We are all very different people with different skills, abilities and interests. And every one of us is a master of self-justification. But self-justification didn't do a thing to help Adam and Eve, and it's not doing a thing to help us either. Instead it locks us down into life-long patterns of guilt and shame.

So that gives me an idea.

Lets stop passing the buck.

Lets be like President Harry Truman, who had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that said "the buck stops here." Whatever you've got going on today, own it. If you need to do something, do it. If you need to stop something, stop it. And I know you need to be forgiven for something. So go to God and ask for it. Jesus took all of our bucks on Himself when He came and died for our sins. Lets stop passing them around and start accepting the new, free life that only He can give us.

The meadow was beautiful and so was the morning. The sun shined above me, to my left was a small pond created by an ingenious little beaver dam, and directly in front of me was a small, lively stream bubbling its way to a nearby creek. There were birds singing, ducks quacking, and the occasional turkey gobbling in the trees. It was like a little piece of Heaven on earth.

And as I sat there in the green grass of the meadow taking it all in, I glanced downwards just in time to see a huge hairy spider come crawling across the grass just inches away from me.

Fun fact about me--I love meadows and sunshine and beaver dams and little streams and wildlife. That's why I was there that day. But I hate spiders. With a passion. They scare me half to death. I can truthfully say that I would rather eat a worm than touch a spider. So when that spider showed up, my little taste of heaven on earth came to an immediate halt as I went scrambling backwards towards safety.

But after I regained my senses a little bit, something important occurred to me. It occurred to me that this is life.

In life, very often the good and the bad and the merry and the scary, they all tend to come right together in a mixed up and unpredictable jumble.

I think it's important to be honest about that.

So important, in fact, that I didn't even squish that big hairy spider. I just let him go on his hairy merry way. It was worth him wrecking my moment just for the life lesson.

Very few of us are strangers to hard times. And yet we always manage to be surprised when they come around, as if they are somehow out of place in the midst of our otherwise perfect lives. But as I think about it, living as if bad things are unexpected and perfection is expected is somewhat absurd.

It's like sitting in the wild grass of a spring-time meadow and expecting never to see a spider.

I think that if we're going to live our lives wisely (and i am all for that) then we need to learn to not live them as people who claim entitlement to impossible perfection. Instead we need to live them as people who claim something far more realistic, and far more powerful than that. We should live as people who cling to a hope that is bigger than the best and worst that life has to offer. A hope that is, in fact, bigger than life itself.

The story of those who expect only good things in life is always the story of disappointment. But the story of those who build their lives on hope in God is something else entirely.

No doubt everybody is going to have hard times, and sometimes impossibly hard times. But people who put their hope in God get to experience those hard times differently. It is the difference between living life as a victim of uncontrollable circumstances and living life as a willing soldier in the army of the world's greatest general. There will be hard days. But victory is guaranteed and our cause is worth it.

Today you may be basking in the sun or balking at the spiders. In either case, my hope that you have the courage to hope. Specifically, I hope you have the courage to put your hope, your trust, in Jesus, who died for your sins and then came back to life so that He could give you new life.

He’s not going to make all the spiders go away. Not, immediately, anyway. But He is going to take care of you, and never let you go. And whatever happens, He’s worth it.

And so are you.

Many years ago I spent my summers traveling on a wheat harvest crew. We would take our equipment to exotic places (like Oklahoma) and we would cut wheat like crazy.

Except when we didn’t.

The name of the game in wheat harvest is hurry up and wait because you always have to be ready for the wheat, but the wheat is very often not ready for you. As a result, almost every morning after rushing to the field and preparing our equipment for the day we would have to wait for the sun to dry up all of the previous nights dew out of the wheat before we could begin harvesting for the day.

However, it was in those long and often frustrating moments of waiting that I discovered something that I would have never learned otherwise. As fields of ripe wheat dry down in the morning sun, the wheat very quietly crackles. It sounds something like rice krispies in milk.

If you’ve ever had a time-sensitive job to do, then you know the frustration of having to wait to do it. But nonetheless, one of my very favorite memories of those days in my life is of stretching out in the morning sun on top of the cab of my combine, waiting and listening as the wheat very quietly crackled all around me.

One of the things that I am learning about life is that it tends to be pretty complex. There always seems to be something going on that we don’t fully understand, and that can be really frustrating. But if we are willing to look for it, there is oftentimes much that is beautiful in the complexity of it all.

I think about the simple elegance of a ripe field of golden wheat blowing and crackling in a light morning breeze and I wonder how much of life happening all around us that we never even see. We’ve got stuff to do and places to be, there is no doubt about that. But I wonder about the things that we might be missing as we go. And I wonder what great truths of life we might stumble onto if we took a minute to slow down and look around.

In the hurry up and wait experiences of my life, I have often placed great value on the hurrying up and had very little patience for the waiting. But I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’ve got that wrong. I’m starting to wonder if some of the greatest things that life has to offer happen in the waiting.

Rather than being an unproductive bother, maybe there is a way of waiting that is the furthest thing from a waste of time. In fact, there has to be.

Dozens of times in the Bible people are called to wait on God. One good example is Psalm 130:5-6.

I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,

and in his word I put my hope.

I wait for the Lord

more than watchmen wait for the morning,

more than watchmen wait for the morning.

Today I’m thinking that maybe sometimes as we chase after life we do too much and we wait too little. But God is the one with the good plan and with the power to make it happen. Let's make a point together of slowing down, listening to the wheat crackle, and waiting on Him to do His thing. If we do that, I am confident that we will not be disappointed.

Once upon a time when I was a kid, I had a dream. Specifically, I wanted to be good at riding a skateboard. To be clear, I never lived in a town that had decent streets or sidewalks, and I have about enough natural athletic ability to fill a small thimble. But I had a skateboard and I had a dream, and man, did I try. 

My greatest accomplishment on that skateboard was teaching our dog to pull me down the sidewalk. And that was about it. Fast forward a few decades, and not long ago through a unique series of events, I found myself standing with one foot on the smooth concrete of a brand new skate park and the other foot on my very old skateboard. 

The dream came roaring back to life and for a few glorious minutes, I lived it. I was a not-very-young man with a very old skateboard cruising the ramps of that skate park like we were made for each other. It was a spectacular moment. At one point I literally yelled out with joy! But let's not kid ourselves. We all know how this is going to end, and pretty soon, it did. 

Very shortly after my joyful shout, gravity showed up and my moment of glory came to a crashing, painful, halt. As I lay there, flat on my back in the middle of the skate park, I pondered the cold hard reality of it all. Mostly I was just hoping that I was going to be able to find all of my skateboard, at least part of my dignity, and manage to get back to my car. But in addition to that, I did ponder, and a few things occurred to me. 

It occurred to me why everyone else at the skatepark that day was well under the age of 18. I get that now. It occurred to me that the smoothest concrete on Earth is still hard as a rock when you land on it. I had injuries for quite a while that reminded me about that. And most painfully of all, it occurred to me that some things in life are not for everybody. And that one still hurts. 

Not only can some people defy gravity on a skateboard while the rest of us can't, that fact is true in life in many other ways as well. Some people get to have their dream job. Some people get to live on the beach. Some people get to be healthy and a hundred and five. But the rest of us don't. 

The rest of us have jobs that pay the bills, hopefully. The rest of us live wherever we can afford to. The rest of us get sick, and sometimes we don't get well. The rest of us end up in a heap in the middle of a skate park, have to lay there for 10 minutes before we can even move, and then a child delivers our skateboard to us and we hobble back to our car while our crushed dreams stay lying on the concrete. 

OK, that last part may not be everybody, but you get the point. 

The point is that some things in life are not for everybody. And from here, that feels like really bad news. 

So now let's talk about the good news.

The good news is that just like some things in life are not for everybody, other things are. Don't take my word for it though. Let's not kid ourselves, I might still have a bit of a concussion. Take it instead from the mouth of an angel.

A long time ago, a baby was born into the world. His parents were so poor that the baby was born in a barn. But even laying there in a pile of straw, this was no ordinary kid. After he was born, this terrifying warrior angel showed up to some of the most beat-down and outcast people in town with an announcement. He said, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.”

The truth is that I'm never going to catch big air on a halfpipe. Or at least I'm not going to live to tell about it if I do. But I can live with that because I have something so very much greater. I love the fact that Jesus was born in a barn and that his first invited guests were the low-lifes of the town. I believe that God set that up on purpose so that for all time we could read that story in the Book of Luke, Chapter 2 in the Bible and know that Jesus is not like a dream job or a house on the beach. Jesus is for everybody. And that includes you.

Awesome!

Click on the confirmation email that just came to your inbox (or junk box), and we are good to go!

It has often been said that there are three little words that every person longs to hear—“I love you.” It is true that we all long to hear those words because we all need to be loved. But it is also true that there are four little words that every person longs to say at some time or other—four little words that feel like they bring justice to the world.

Those words are “I told you so.”

Doesn’t it feel great to be right? Being right may not be anywhere near as important in life as being loved, but being right sure feels like it's almost as important. So much so that the next time you hear a person say, “I hate to say I told you so but…” you can know that person is lying! They may not want to be a jerk about it, but they love to be right just as much as the next person does.

In fact, we love being right so much that we make it really hard for ourselves and other people to admit it when we are wrong. That’s a big problem because although it may never happen to you, the rest of us actually are wrong from time to time. And when we are wrong, there are four words that we definitely do not want to hear—and guess what they are—“I told you so.”

We so love to be right that we make it really hard for ourselves and other people to be wrong. 

What a pickle. We’re like a mom at dinner time who is mad at her kids for not eating their vegetables and says, “If you don’t want to eat your peas, that’s fine! But don’t come crying to me when you get scurvy.” 

As we process our situation there are two things that have to be said. First off, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, who gets scurvy? I mean, come on Mom, what are we, seventeenth century pirates? 

Secondly, and much more importantly, I have some good news on this whole “I told you so” situation. God is not like us. One of the characteristics of God is that He is righteous. That means that he doesn’t just know what is right, He is what is right. And because He is righteous, He is kind to us when we are ready to own the fact that sometimes we are wrong. 

In fact, throughout the Bible, God is always the hardest on people who are self-righteous. And rather than blasting out an “I told you so” speech, He is always compassionate towards people who are ready to accept their wrongs. 

Jesus told a story one time in the Book of Luke, Chapter 18, in which one guy that everybody thought of as a good guy and another guy who everybody thought of as a bad guy both showed up in the same place at the same time to pray. The good guy prays to God and says something like, “God, thank you that I’m not a rotten person like this bad guy over here.” And the bad guy prays to God and says, “God, forgive me, I’m a bad guy.” Then Jesus basically says to the crowd, “Guess who went home forgiven that day?”

You should look up that story and read it because it’s amazing, but I’ll tell you how it ends:

It was the bad guy that got forgiven that day.

When someone admits to us that they were wrong, we say, “I told you so.” But when someone admits to God that they were wrong, God says, “I forgive you.” Here’s what I’m thinking. Let’s all become people who have received forgiveness from God, and are really good at handing it out to other people.

Awesome!

Click on the confirmation email that just came to your inbox (or junk box), and we are good to go!

I have a brother-in-law named Matt. Matt is a good guy as far as brother-in-laws go, but in one pretty important way he has kind of destroyed my life. Here’s how it happened. If you know me, then you know that I like coffee. And it used to be that I liked all coffee. I first started drinking coffee when I was in Middle School and got a job on the clean up crew at our local sale barn. Whatever coffee was left over in the coffee pot from the sale a few days before, that’s what we drank. And from then until very recently, my standards for coffee never really changed. If it was black and preferably warm, I drank it.

But then my brother-in-law Matt went and started his very own coffee roasting company. Because he’s good at his job, he imports some of the best coffee in the world from all around the world and fresh roasts it for his customers. And because he’s a good brother-in-law, he sends me lots of coffee, and usually for free! But guess what happened after I started drinking my brother-in-laws coffee? After all that world-class, fresh-roasted coffee, when I would drink other coffee, it started to not taste very good. And then other coffee started to taste— just plain bad. My whole life, coffee was just coffee. But now that I’ve gotten a taste for good stuff, the good stuff is all I want to drink.

Here’s why we’re talking about this. In my experience in life and with God, we all tend to settle and settle hard. We get a taste for life that is quite frankly pretty bitter, and we accept it and settle in to it, because we believe that that is what life tastes like. And even when we see a few other people living lives that appear to be much sweeter than our own, still we just keep on in the midst of our own bitterness because one way or another we come to the conclusion that even if the sweet life is out there for somebody, it's not out there for us.

As it turns out, God has a little something to say about that. There is this old song in the Bible called Psalm 34. It's about how great God is and how he rescues people. In this song there is a line that says “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

When I think about that line, I smile. That is the line that comes to my mind when I think about my silly experience with coffee and all of our deadly series experiences with life. With coffee, once I got the good stuff, it was hard to go back because I had no idea what I was missing.

God's love is like that.

It may be the case that you are slogging through a pretty bitter life right now having never had a taste of real life with God. If so, my hope is that you will follow the advice of that song and taste and see that the Lord is good. Further, my hope is that He will destroy your life like my brother-in-law destroyed my coffee drinking. I hope that as you taste and see how great He is, life apart from Him will become more and more bitter and you won’t even want it anymore. You will just want Him. He loves you, He is powerful and amazing, and He is free.

You ought to try that.

I was raised in a house that had a complete set of big, blue, encyclopedias. They took up an entire book shelf full of space. But, these particular encyclopedias did not just take up space. I was raised to love knowledge, and we read those encyclopedias. In fact, when I was a child my dad would actually gather us up and read to us not from children's books, but from those big blue encyclopedias.

Fast forward a few decades to today and--fun fact about me--I do not own a set of encyclopedias. But it's not because I don’t love knowledge, I do. It's because the world has changed. Throughout most of human history, knowledge was a very difficult thing to come by. Even the very basic research of any given subject required great amounts of time, and expense, and travel. But things are different now. Primarily because of the development of the internet and other forms of information technology, knowledge is now an easy thing to come by. I don’t own a set of encyclopedias because I can access vastly more information than any set of encyclopedias can hold from my computer or even my phone in a matter of seconds. Oh, and when I read to my kids, guess what I read them?? Children’s books! (Come, on dad. I mean seriously…)

More to the point, When it comes to knowledge, the world has changed drastically. But, interestingly, it also hasn’t. When the internet was developing, it was commonly predicted that as readily available knowledge swept around the world, the result would be a grand liberalization of thought. The idea was that as people knew more and more about what other people thought and believed, then we would all find common ground and areas of agreement and the world would become a more peaceful and moderate place. At this point, we are going to call that prediction a huge failure because what really happened was the exact opposite of that. Rather than a mass liberalization or moderation, the world has experienced a great polarization. Rarely in human history have people been more divided and distrustful of one another than they are today. The reason for that is a little concept that psychologists like to call confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias means that when confronted with a bunch of information, people tend to pick out the stuff that they already agree with and ignore the stuff that challenges what they think.

News Flash— people love to be right. Because of that, when we go looking for information we usually don’t look for information that broadens or corrects our views on anything. Mostly we are looking for information that confirms what they already believe. Hence the term confirmation bias. As it turns out, all this time in human history as people have been hating and hurting one another, lack of information has not been the primary problem. Arrogance has been. And if we are ever going to solve this problem, it's not going to be through some new technology. It's going to happen through an old piece of wisdom.

Three different times the Bible tells us that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And I confess that for a long time I never really understood that. Why do you have to fear God to be smart? But I think I’m finally beginning to understand a little bit of why that is true. When people fear God, we begin to understand the universe in its proper order. Namely, we understand that He is big, and powerful, and right, and we aren’t necessarily any of those things. And, therefore, He is exalted and we are humbled. And that, I think, is the key. From that place of humility instead of arrogantly pursuing and defending our own rightness, we can seek out that which is actually true. I think that is how the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and my hope for all of us is that we can start together from that single point of truth and see God and life for what they actually are.

I’m thinking about this day that we call Good Friday, the Friday before Easter.

Good Friday is the anniversary of the day that Jesus was executed by being nailed to a big wooden cross and hanging there until he died. This form of execution, called crucifixion, was the ancient world’s most brutal, painful, and humiliating form of the death penalty. And on this day not quite 2,000 years ago, it was done to Jesus.

But Jesus was the last person on earth who deserved to die like that.

He was amazing. Everything about Him was amazing. He was the Son of God come from Heaven to save us from our sins. He said things that no one had ever said before and performed miracles that defied the laws of nature, physics, and medicine. He was kind and loving and caring to people who nobody else in the world cared about. And He was challenging and even threatening to people who nobody else in the world dared to challenge. In a nutshell, He was perfect.

So if this form of execution they called crucifixion was so terrible, and this Savior we call Jesus was so wonderful, why do we call the anniversary of the day that Jesus was crucified “Good” Friday?

The short answer to that question is because it was good for us. Good Friday is the anniversary of what is arguably the most important day in human history. On this day, when Jesus died, He died as a sacrifice for our sins. In His death, the punishment that we all deserve for all the ways that we have rejected God and gone our own way, is paid for. Because of Jesus’ death on the cross, all that stuff that separates people from God doesn’t have to be there anymore. It can be forgiven. That is good news! And that is why we call the Friday before Easter Good Friday.

Good Friday says some amazing things about Jesus— it says that He has the power and authority to die as a sacrifice for our sins, and the love and compassion and courage to actually do it. And Good Friday also says something about you. It says that at the worst of your worst, in the depth of your sinfulness, when Jesus looks at you He sees someone worth dying for.

Isn’t that amazing? We waste so much of our lives trying to invent a way to somehow be good enough for God. But from the beginning that is not how it works. God brings all the goodness to our salvation. All we bring is the need for it. And yet, at the worst of our worst, when Jesus looks at us He sees someone worth dying for.

As I think about how great of a gift that is, and how Jesus’ death has the power to bring us new life forever, there is a part of me that wants to wish you a happy Good Friday. But I just can’t do it. For me, Good Friday is far too emotionally complicated of a day to say that. So instead, I wish you a thoughtful Good Friday. I wish you a day in which you have the courage to remember that Jesus gave His life for you, and the humility to respond to that historical fact by choosing to give your life to Him.

Good Friday. What a day.