worthless religion

How often have I been in small groups, in Sunday morning services, even in staff meetings and proved how utterly worthless religion was to me at that given time?

I don’t mean that religion is worthless and am not talking about religiosity. I mean, how often have I defiled true religion, as James relates it in James 1:26?

“If you claim to be religious but don’t control your tongue, you are just fooling yourself, and your religion is worthless.”

He’s not talking about “cussing”, employing four letter words that earned our mouths a bar of Dove soap, and he’s not giving “religion” a black eye. In fact, he says that religion is good.

What makes religion worthless are not the words we mutter when something stressful happens or the “profanity” that comes out when your engine seizes up. What devalues the religion that we so often claim is the poisonous speech with which we regard another human, the words I whisper out of the hearing of their subject, the gossip that ruins relationships and assassinates character.

And all this before I leave the church service on Sunday.

How have we, as followers of Jesus, gotten this far off track? You know what I mean: the thinly-veiled tidbits of gossip that we pass off as prayer requests, the preaching we do in our audible prayers, the “concerns” we “share” with other “concerned Christians” that only further alienates the subject of our concern.

James has advice for us today:

“Pure and lasting religion in the sight of God our Father means that we must…refuse to let the world corrupt us.”

I think he’s telling us to keep our mouths shut.

power, love, judgment

Psalm 62:11b-12

“Power, O God, belongs to you;

unfailing love, O Lord, is yours.

Surely you judge all people

according to what they have done.”

Hope filled my reading this morning: the God who holds all power also holds unfailing love; the God who judges all according to what they have done judges with that same unfailing love.

We can do no better than as sinners to fall into the hands of a loving God; we could do much worse: living our lives in fear of a God of all Power, afraid of the One who judges us according to our deeds.

But the God of Power, and the Judge of all, is Love – unfailing love (the only of its kind). And unfailing love is God’s alone. It, above all else, is the ground of being for his power and judgment. Because of this, we can rest knowing that God’s power is extended through love; indeed, that love is his power! And our judgment – yes, even that of the world – is channeled through and directed by nothing less than Love.

3.5 weeks

It’s now less than three and a half weeks before our family makes its biggest move yet. Our new home and job take us back to the sunny state of Florida (yay!), back to the turquoise waters of southern paradise that I wrote about in my first post.

3.5 weeks. It’s still hard to believe. Harder to leave friends who have become family, church that has become home. To top it off, we’re moving two kids, two dogs and a cat diagonally across the United States.

Yes, a Chevy Venture rolling ark.

OK, that’s not completely honest. My mother is flying up to pick up our daughter for the week, so we’ll have one kid, two dogs and a cat. We couldn’t convince her to leave Colette with us and take the animals home with her. Can’t quite understand why…

So, the grand adventure awaits: campgrounds and national parks. Yep, camping with a near newborn, two dogs and a cat.

Kinda sounds like the National Lampoons Vacation.

bad day for male heilmans

A couple weeks back two dearly loved family members went in for surgery. At 8am, Seamus went in; at 2pm, Nathan entered.

Seamus (our Collie) got neutered.

Nathan got circumcised.

When Niki and I arrived at the clinic for Nathan’s procedure, the nurses asked if we wanted to watch the circumcision, or at least be in the same room.

Of course we did.  Nathan is amazing and we wanted to “be there” for him.  Both of us have an aversion to much blood and I can’t stand the sight of sharp objects puncturing flesh other than a good juicy steak or grilled chicken breast, but hey, I can handle watching a circumcision!

I must say, I did well.

For the first 3 minutes.

For those of you who do not know what goes on during that interminable time, the boy gets swathed in iodine to prevent infection and then injected with three doses of anesthetic. Interestingly enough, the doctor and nurse kept asking me if I was doing ok. Nathan is screaming his head off, mad as a hornet, I’m holding his hand watching anesthesia being injected into my son, Niki is sitting down near me and they ask me how I’m doing!

“I’m fine, thank you very much.”

“You doing ok?”, she asked again?

“I’m doing okay,” I say, trying to mean it.

This goes on a few more times until I needed I need to sit down next to Niki and say something to that effect. I sit down, perfectly in control of all my processes. I’m doing fantastic.

A whopping 30 seconds later, I inform the nurse that I should probably go back to the waiting area. She agrees and begins walking me down the corridor to our room. I got weaker and weaker and probably made it an impressive 7 feet down the hallway before I went blind.

Yes, blind. I remember it all so well.

I was still walking upright, talking with the nurse, listening to the other nurses ask what I was doing, but as I turned to my helper, it all went black. As I could see absolutely nothing, I matter-of-factly understated, “I’m about to go.” I then got a giant bear hug from this nurse much smaller than me (and I’m not a large man), who then laid me down, half in the nearest room and half in the hallway (these rooms were made for children, not perfectly fine adults in need of a little rest).

Lessons learned?

#1. The best place to black out is in a doctor’s office (they have juice and cheese and crackers when you wake up).

#2. Sympathize with people – heck, empathize with them – but don’t ask to see their war wounds.

And Nathan? Came through like a champ. Niki? She’s much smarter than me – she didn’t watch.