Posted on November 4th, 2009 by Administrator
Fourth and last in a series on “Who’s packing your parachute?” Who sharpens you?
On Good Friday three and a half years ago, my dad took his own life. He was a man of faith who got sucked into alcohol and promiscuity in his mid-40’s through a series of professional disappointments. He was also without any accountability: no iron to sharpen him, no permissions given to speak the truth. At first he couldn’t forgive God for his career nose-dive; later, he couldn’t forgive himself for what he had done in his frustration. And so the spiral of descent had begun; he had drunkenly and sloppily packed his own parachute.
His anger, aloofness and bitterness had gone unchecked since my parents’ divorce because he thought too little of himself to accept counsel. When the call came about his suicide, the hardest thing by far was having to tell my kids. My daughters knew him as isolated and grouchy, but not ruinous. It was a very emotional time when I had to tell them what his outrage had driven him to do.
My oldest daughter, Catherine, was 13 at the time. After she absorbed the initial shock of the news, her only question was this: if he was so upset and depressed, why didn’t he talk to someone? Why did he keep to himself? And then through tear-filled eyes she got angry and said, “I would have made him talk to me. I would have stood there until he told me what was wrong.”
What difference would a Jonathan have made? Perhaps the difference between life and death.
A favorite story of mine was told on the TV series, “The West Wing.” A guy is walking down the street and falls in a hole. The sides are so steep that he can’t get out. A priest walks by and the man says, “Father, can you help me?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down to the man, and keeps walking. Then a doctor walks by. “Doc, can you help me?” the voice came. The doctor writes out a prescription, throws it down, and keeps walking.
Finally a friend of this guy walks by. “Hey Joe,” the guys says, “I’m stuck down here. Can you help me?” His friend looks down, and then jumps in the hole with him. The guy says, “Are you crazy? Now we’re both stuck down here!” And his friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.”
Who packs your parachute? For whom would you jump in a hole? ”He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When others are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.” (II Cor. 1.4)
Tags: friend, Jonathan, loneliness
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Posted on October 16th, 2009 by Administrator
My last two blogs have asked: who packs your parachute? Who builds into your life?
Last week we observed that it’s not if you’re influenced, but how and when. We also observed the (sometimes desperate) lengths to which people will go to be in a community. This week, another thought:
2. Building into people’s lives is hard work.
As tempered metal meets forged iron…as resistance is encountered in a loving community, that’s when people grow. The Scriptures tell us:
The blacksmith stands at his forge to make a sharp tool, pounding and shaping it with all his might. His work makes him hungry and thirsty, weak and faint. (Isa. 44:12, NLT)
Since a dull ax requires great strength, sharpen the blade. That’s the value of wisdom; it helps you succeed. (Eccl. 10:10)
My good friend Lew Lambert is an artist. He is a master craftsman building intricate, inlaid jewelry boxes, for which he won first place in an international competition in Seattle a couple of years ago. He knows a thing or two about blades. He has saws and planes that shave wood so thin you can read through it; so he doesn’t just know about blades, he knows about sharpening them. According to Lew, smooth surfaces do not sharpen. What’s required to sharpen is an abrasive. He has a series of stones that range from very coarse to very fine, and only through those abrasive surfaces can a fine edge be developed. He said the coarse stones are necessary at first to remove debris, corrosion and oxidation from the blade, and only after the initial removal of the imperfections is it possible to begin to finely sharpen the instrument for use.
So the question remains: Who packs your parachute? Who removes your debris, corrosion and oxidation? In Proverbs 17, Solomon says it’s not through flattery that we are sharpened, but by the abrasive of a caring brother:
Wounds from a friend can be trusted. (v. 6)
The pleasantness of one’s friend springs from his earnest counsel. (v. 9)
Being a Jonathan is hard work. It requires us to speak words of truth as well as words of comfort – one moment an abrasive to sharpen a friend’s focus, the next moment a touch of compassion to comfort and heal. But it’s always hard work. Abraham Lincoln said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.”
Lew also told me about the master temple builders in Japan who, only after 30 or 40 years of experience, are honored to work on temple construction. Because they consider their work on the temples so holy, before they use their tools, they will completely disassemble a plane and sharpen it to a surgical edge. After putting it back together, they make one pass down the length of a wooden beam, stop, disassemble the plane, and re-sharpen it again for the next pass. Their reasoning is that their work is so holy, it would be a sacrilege to use anything less than a perfectly sharpened blade for a divine purpose
So the second question is this: How often should we be sharpened by our caring community? The answer is: before every use. Before we go out into the world each day, let’s sharpen ourselves through prayer, time in God’s word, and a friend with permission to speak the truth. That will make us temple builders – temples not built with human hands, but craftsmen and women that build into the body of Christ, the temple of the Spirit.
Tags: church group, community, life group, love one another, sharpening your ax, small group ministry, small groups
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Posted on October 9th, 2009 by Administrator
Last time we asked, “Who’s packing your parachute?” Does a community surround you? More thoughts on our need for each other:
1. It’s not a matter of if you’re influenced, but how.
You can be as headstrong, independent and stubborn as you want, but in Proverbs 27, Solomon knows better:
As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. (v. 17)
Just as water reflects the face, so one human heart reflects another. (v. 19)
Without good direction, people lose their way; the more wise counsel you follow, the better your chances. (11:14, MSG)
A person who refuses correction will end up poor and disgraced, but the one who accepts correction will be honored. (13:18, NCV)
Plans go wrong for lack of advice; many counselors bring success. (15:22, NLT)
Over and over again, Solomon reminds us that no man is complete in and of himself. John Donne wrote:
“No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
It’s not a matter of if you’re influenced by someone, but how. There is a deep-seated need in all of us for partnership and companionship.
If you don’t believe me, consider two signs of our times:
Chuck Swindoll talks about a Kansas newspaper where someone took out a one-line ad that read, “I will listen to you talk for 30 minutes, without comment, for $5.00.” Swindoll said, “It wasn’t long before the person was receiving 10 to 20 calls a day. The pain of loneliness was so sharp that some were willing to try anything for a half hour of companionship.”
Here’s another example. A Japanese entrepreneur understood the need for community and decided to offer a service to bring relief to loneliness. For about $500 an hour, his company will provide three trained “stand-in family members” for up to three hours.
Not only does he have a booming business, he has a waiting list. “Rent-a-family” works like this: The hired actors play the roles of children, grandchildren, daughters, sons-in-law, whatever the clients require. Normally, says the founder, they just sit around and talk. That’s sad enough: perfect strangers pretending they’re family. But often, he has found, his clients rent a family for another purpose: to criticize and berate their “pretend” children for leaving them so alone and sad.
Just as the triune God is complete through His community, so we, his children, are only complete through our community with Him and with each other.
Tags: church community, church group, community, life group, small group ministry, small groups
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Posted on September 18th, 2009 by Administrator
Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After flying 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent six years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk! You were shot down!”
“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.
“I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!” Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”
That night, Plumb couldn’t sleep, thinking about that man. He said, “I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said ‘Good morning, how are you,’ not even given him the time of day because I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.” Plumb thought of the many hours the sailor had spent at a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands every day the fate of someone he didn’t know.
Now, as Plumb lectures, he asks his audience, “Who’s packing your parachute?” Everyone has a source, a supplier, a wellspring that feeds who they are becoming day after day.
Who do you listen to? What are your inputs? What feeds you? I know a guy who seems to be in a “terminally hacked-off” mode. The people who feed him are whoever happens to be the angriest person that day – whoever is on a rant, he’s on their side. People who pack his parachute always seem to be the ones pointing a finger of blame.
There’s another person I know who surrounds himself with people who are fed from the Spirit of God, whose constant message is one of peace and assurance; consequently, his message to others is always one of hope and trust.
Who’s packing your parachute?
Tags: church, community, life group, ministry, small group ministry, small groups
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Posted on August 31st, 2009 by Administrator
Community is central to the entire Bible. The community of the Trinity spoke the world into existence. The Old Testament describes God’s relentless, frustrating pursuit of the community of Israel. The New Testament graphically illustrates the price God was willing to pay to permanently betroth His Son to the community of the Church. And we’re promised a new, redeemed, glorified, eternal community at the final judgment. The Bible both begins and ends with community.
It’s no coincidence that we at UpperRoom feel so strongly about the community God intended His church to be: a nurturing, caring family that knows you and loves you just the same.
The church sometimes gathers for worship, sometimes for instruction and learning, and sometimes to celebrate. But we need to also meet just for the sake of meeting, just for the sake of being together, to draw strength and hope in a world where both are often in short supply. When we find ourselves in a selfless community, we find ourselves most like the community of God Himself.
Tags: church community, church group, community, home group, life group, lifegroups, small group ministry, small groups
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Posted on August 19th, 2009 by Administrator
My daughters were ages five and four when we took them to Disney World. Having grown up on a steady diet of Disney fables, their anticipation of this trip was overwhelming. Our first morning there, we boarded a bus to the Magic Kingdom – the first stop just had to be Cinderella’s castle. The only other people on board the bus was a group of senior citizens, all traveling together on a vacation. My girls were wide-eyed, and at the first glimpse of the spires of the castle, they let out a squeal that still reverberates in my ears more than a decade later.
For me, that was the best part of the trip, before we even got started: finding my joy through them. The group of seniors on the bus all laughed and shared the delight of the moment with us; I suspect they saw the faces of their own grandchildren in ours. I already had my reward before we even started.
On Christmas, as everyone gathers around the tree to open presents, we don’t distribute the gifts and then instruct each family member to go to their individual rooms, open their gifts, and meet back later to compare notes. As a child, my parents left strict instructions that we were not to sneak downstairs Christmas morning to see what Santa brought – we had to wake them up and all go downstairs together. The reason, of course, was that the greatest part of the experience for them was watching our faces, and finding their joy in ours.
As an introvert, it’s hard sometimes to welcome community when I’m wired to replenish myself through alone-time, downtime. And sometimes, an escape to solitude is just what the good Doctor ordered. But I’ve found when I go without community for even a short stretch, I miss the joy of connecting – not just because I need to, but because I’m most fulfilled by the joy of those I care for the most. I’ve found I miss the look on their faces when we get together, and seeing their smile is almost as important as seeing my daughters’ reaction to Disney World. We are all nourished in ways great and small through everyone else’s presence.
Paul said, “Make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.” (Phil. 2.2) His happiness, like ours, is greatest when vicariously experienced in our closest communities.
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Posted on August 10th, 2009 by Administrator
“God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.” (II Cor. 1.3-4)
My wife is a great cook, and I’ve found the better someone is at something, the better they appreciate good tools. Just as a craftsman spends heavily on precision saws, and a concert pianist appreciates a Bosendorfer, so a good cook appreciates the right instruments – in this case, copper-bottomed pans. Why? Because copper is an excellent conductor. Heat is transferred uniformly and without loss so the food cooks evenly and at the right temperature.
In the movie “Pay It Forward,” the unasked question between the lines is this: what kind of conductor are you? Do kindnesses tend to come to an end at your doorstep, or are they freely distributed to others, so that benefits accrue rather than depreciate?
Community blesses us not only as recipients, but also as donors, because in knowing and being known we are given opportunities to dispense the very comfort and grace we have been given. As John Rempel said in Communion as a Gathered Body, “[In Christ], autonomous individuals [do not] have parallel religious experiences. We do not come to Christ alone but with and through one another. The meaning of the term ‘priesthood of all believers’ is not that we can come to God privately but that we come to him on one another’s behalf: each of us is a priest for the other.”
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Posted on August 3rd, 2009 by Brad Tuggle
“There exists among us a fellowship, a friendliness, and an understanding which is indescribably wonderful. We are like the passengers of a great liner the moment after rescue from shipwreck when camaraderie, joyousness and democracy pervade the vessel. Unlike the feelings of the ship’s passengers, however, our joy in escape from disaster does not subside as we go our individual ways. The feeling of having shared in a common peril, and a common salvation, are elements in the powerful cement which binds us. The tremendous fact for every one of us is that we have discovered a common solution. We have a way out on which we can absolutely agree.”
This quote isn’t from a church mission statement or bulletin; it’s from the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook. The sharing of common perils and support through our trials become a powerful bonding agent. It’s one reason community matters so much. With whom do you share a common salvation…from sin, addiction, loneliness, or fear?
Here’s how much community matters: the AA handbook continues: “Our very lives depend upon our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs.” Solomon agrees: “Two people can accomplish more than twice as much as one; they get a better return for their labor. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But people who are alone when they fall are in real trouble. A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.” (Eccl. 4:9-10,12)
The need for dependence is often strongest when, as anyone who has failed at anything will tell you, weakness is conceded; when pride no longer becomes an issue and judgment is traded for mercy and compassion. And when we are braced by another’s strength, that shared deliverance becomes a common salvation, not only between you and your Samaritan, but later between you, now as a Good Samaritan yourself, and another who is failing fast. “God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.” (II Cor. 1.3-4)
This is why we do what we do – because community matters that much.
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Posted on July 23rd, 2009 by Brad Tuggle
Once upon a time, a mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package. “What food might this contain?” the mouse wondered. He was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap. Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning: “There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, “Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it.”
The mouse turned to the pig and told him, “There is a mousetrap in the house!” The pig sympathized, but said, “I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured you are in my prayers.”
The mouse turned to the cow and said “There is a mousetrap in the house!” The cow said, “Wow, Mr. Mouse. I’m sorry for you, but it’s no skin off my nose.”
So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer’s mousetrap alone. That very night a sound was heard throughout the house — like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what had been captured. In the darkness, she did not see the venomous snake whose tail had been caught by the trap. The snake bit the farmer’s wife, and the farmer rushed her to the hospital.
She returned home with a fever. Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient. His wife’s sickness continued, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig. Unfortunately, the farmer’s wife did not get well; she died. So many people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them. The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness.
So, the next time you hear someone is facing a problem and think it doesn’t concern you, remember — we are all connected. When one part is hurt, we all hurt. When one of us is threatened, we are all at risk.
This is why we’re so passionate about small groups: it’s where community happens.
Tags: church community, church group, community, groups, home group, life group, lifegroups, small group ministry, small groups
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Posted on July 17th, 2009 by Brad Tuggle
Since the launch of Groups Interactive’s new release, here are some comments coming our way:
“You guys know how to make technology warm and friendly.”
“We can see group demographics, when they’re meeting, and what they’re studying, so we know which ones to recommend to which families. The search feature even lets new families do this automatically.”
Simple.
“Everybody stays in touch instantly.”
“The GI system has enabled me as a large-church director to feel far more confident about the future of our small group community.”
“They have taken our church technology to the next level, doing so with patience, prayer and commitment.” - Max Lucado
Empowering Kingdom communities…it doesn’t get any better than that!
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