The Ministry of Presence

"More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn't be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them."  
- Henri Nouwen

My mother died two weeks ago. I promise that I will not begin every blog from now on that way but today it seems appropriate. She had surgery on a Tuesday night and never really came back to us. For seven weeks she stayed in a hospital bed and we stayed beside her, my sister, my step-father, my wife and me. At first we all wanted to stay but then the economy of energy began to dictate that we take turns. We would work in shifts like factory workers passing in the courtyard. My step-father came faithfully every morning, though most mornings Mom did not know that he was there, or if she did, who he was. Chonda would come just after lunch and spend the afternoon and evening combing Mom’s hair, making the nurses laugh, cleaning soiled bed sheets, and playing Doris’s CD  for Mom. And I usually had the graveyard” shift. I would come sometime after my last appointment, 8 or 9 when the hospital was starting to get quiet and the rooms were dark. I would just sit, reading the Psalms to mom, talking to her about the Olympics playing out on the TV, or telling her what latest yard project Sammy was doing at their little home. I don’t know if she heard me much. Some times I would decide to leave at midnight if she was sound asleep, many times I stayed until Sammy came in the morning with a cup of coffee and a ham biscuit from  Hardee’s. We would spend a minute catching up and then start the process all over again.

During that time we came to appreciate the ministry of presence, those people who stopped their busy schedules for only a moment, entered the hospital room and just sat. Most did not do anything particularly memorable, some stayed too long and talked too much, others only flitted in and out with a mumbled prayer and a quick handing over of a casserole, like the Olympic relay team passing the baton on the flickering TV over our heads. Some seemed comfortable in this “visitation” role, others were very ill at ease and made me nervous. But they came. They came and sat and when they came they brought Christ with them. That’s the ministry of presence.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for every text, every FaceBook post, even every email and phone call. These people were making an effort to connect and I am thankful. But there is something about presence, physical presence, the warm bodied, looking you in the eyes, not sure what to say, presence that allows Jesus to enter the scene in a new way. That presence sustained us and encouraged us through seven grueling weeks. And even at Mom’s funeral, the ministry of presence is what ministered to us.

I have never been one to go to parties much, or sit long hours with elderly people on a Sunday afternoon, or take the time to drop in on a friend that is sick (or hurting.) For one thing, guys don’t do that. For another everybody is so busy, they are, I am, busy. We have modern conveniences to help us with that, texting, voicemail, FaceBook. I usually make sure I do that and send a nice card with a little check in it when the time is right….. I have missed it. If I get too busy doing the Lord’s work to BE the Lord in someone’s time of need then I have misunderstood the Gospel. Jesus always went to feasts and funerals. He never turned down an invitation to eat or mourn. That was where some of His best stuff happened. Water into wine. Loaves and fishes.” Little girl, get up.” “Lazarus, Come forth.”  Jesus was all about the ministry of presence.

I am determined to do better. A friend of mine was in the hospital last week, It was a busy day. Counseling all morning. I had two meetings in Lebanon in the afternoon. It was supper time when I was driving back to town but I decided to stop by the hospital. We sat and talked for 45 minutes. We told stories and laughed. We hugged and showed pictures of our kids. In a little while I prayed a not too profound prayer and left. Not much to it. It was the closest I was to Christ all day.      Mike

Holding On, Letting Go

It is one of the great challenges of life, how long do I hold on and when do I let go? A few years ago we were fishing and swimming and just chillin’ at the little lake on my sisters farm. The kids, including my two sons were swinging on an old rope swing and dropping with a kerplump into the middle of the lake. In between every jump they yelled over at me, “C’mon Dad, you try it.” Now I am a wise, mature, solid thinking older gentleman so of course I got up and gave it a whirl. Amazing, exhilarating, a real adrenalin rush. And that was just climbing up on the platform so I could reach the rope. I grabbed this wet, muddy object of so much activity, took a death-hold grip and sprang out like a gazelle into the upper atmosphere somewhere just above the water and under the leaves of the trees.

Let’s leave our hero suspended in mid flight to discuss holding on. It’s not a bad idea. There are certainly some appropriate times and places to hold on. Walking along the rim of the Grand Canyon comes to mind. The handlebars of your sons Harley Sportster is another good place. I can think of a few more. When my grandson wants to get quickly from the car, across the parking lot to Toys-R-Us it is a good idea to hold on, tight. When my wife comes and sits on the couch next to me, even when it is the fourth quarter of the Titans and New York Jets, I have learned the hard way, that’s a good time to hold on.

In fact holding on is the stuff legends are made of. How many tales do you know of explorers that were ready to turn back but they held on a little longer? Or inventors that held on for one more experiment and then they broke through? War heroes held on against all odds. The rags to riches success models that we follow are all about holding on. Even scripture is full of admonitions to hold on. I Thessalonians 5:21 says to “Hold on to what is good.” Hebrews 10:23 says to “Hold unswervingly to the hope that is within us.” We grew up with Sunday School lessons and youth camp sermons about “holding on to Jesus.” And our favorite spiritual poster is that cat gripping desperately the end of a rope with some applicable Bible verse underneath and the caption, “When you get to the end of the rope, tie a knot and hold on.” You KNOW that is profound!

Holding on is just what we do. It is woven into our DNA. I give Jakson, my one year old grandson, a new toy and he holds on. Jon-Mical, the four year old plays in the evening outside in the tree house until he is so sleepy his eyes can barely stay open and his head drops, but he holds on. We hold on to jobs when they are less than fulfilling. We hold on to habits that we have promised to give up. We hold on to our kids long after they are out on their own. And we hold on to the false confidence that we can fix things when we know we can’t. My mother died this past week. I stood by her bed and held on probably long after I should have let go. On the other hand, she seemed to hold on until some special moment or circumstance that we can only guess, was in place. Holding on is as natural as breathing.

And speaking of holding on, what about the hero of our story suspended between earth and sky on the rope swing? We forgot about him. He (me) is still holding on. In fact that is exactly what I did. I held on while the swing made a glorious arc out over the beautiful, sundrenched lake. I held on as it paused for a moment, imperceptibly shifting directions, in that second free from the bonds of gravity. I held on as it started its rapidly increasing descent back towards the place from which it had come. And I held on while it whacked me against the muddy bank of the pond and then dropped me unceremoniously into the shallow, moss covered edge of the water. I lay there enveloped in slime, breath knocked out of me, hand throbbing (found out later it was broke), thinking to myself, “Self, you held on when you should have let go.” And there’s the rub. When do I let go?

Well the bad news is, I don’t know. The good news is you do. You know if you listen to the heartbeat of God, if you tune your desires to the Holy Spirit, if you take on the mind of Christ, you will know when it is time to let go. You will recognize that sometimes letting go is not only the best thing to do. It’s the only thing. You will understand that if I have any hope of holding on at all I am going to have to let go. There will come a time when you will see that holding on is going to cause more pain and letting go will bring freedom. Does that make sense?

Let me give you three times that come to mind when letting go is better than holding on. First, when you are holding on to hurt. We have all had those moments when we have been so wounded, so unjustly treated, so betrayed that the anger and hurt of that seems to hold on to us as much as we hold on to it. We process it, rehearse it, relive it, analyze it. We hold on to it, sometimes rightly so, to make sure it will never happen to us again. My wife speaks often to other wives who have been betrayed by their husbands. Doris will say to them, “You have to forgive but not today.” There is a benefit is holding on to hurt for awhile to help you establish boundaries and keep yourself safe. But….there comes a time, and you know it, when holding on to that thing is strangling you. The death grip you have on that perceived wound or unfair treatment is really a hold around your own heart. You HAVE to let it go. The situation may not be completely resolved. You might not feel fully vindicated. You may not have received the full apology that you desired. But it is time to let go and move on. Holding on any longer will only create more hurt and rob your life of joy.

The second time to let go is in a relationship that has become toxic. Listen, there are people that I have loved that in the long run were so unhealthy for me I had to let them go. We’ve all had those, an abusive father, a controlling mother, a legalistic church, a wayward child. Now I don’t mean for any of those that we desert or abandon them. God is a God of reconciliation and Paul says He has given us “the ministry of reconciliation.” We never stop loving. Never stop praying. Never stop believing that God can make things right. But there comes a time when we do that from a distance. When that connection with a sick person is beginning to make me sick too it is time for me to let go. God hates divorce. Our kids will always be our kids. We are to honor our parents. I don’t know exactly how all of this plays out but I do know that in some relationships there comes a time when the right thing to do is to let go. (And trust God!)

Which leads me to the third time of letting go. We did it this week. It was not easy. Still isn’t. As my family stood by the hospital bed of my mother who had battled for so long, it became apparent that the time had come for us to let go. My sister whispered to her, “Mom, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” In one way or another Mom had given each one of us that last smile and tender goodbye. She was ready and we, as much as we would like to have had one more day, or one more minute, knew it was time to let her go. And you know what? When we did God reached down to her and said, “Here Nanny, Take my hand and hold on.”

Subscribe to more of Mike's blogs at www.branchesblog.com.

She's There Now

Got this text conversation from my son, Josh with his 4 year old son, Jon-Mical last Tuesday, the evening my mother died.

I told Jon-Mical that Nanny died. He immediately asked if she was flying now.
"Flying?" I asked.
"Yes. Is she flying up to heaven?" he responded.
I told him she was.
He looked up and asked, "How far is she?"
"She's already there." I said.

God Far Away

I need God and He is far away. That desolate, desperate cry is not some philosophical, poetic metaphor from ancient literature or the pitiful plea of the fundamentally fearful. It is my testimony for right now. The words from my lips. The echo of my heart. It is the true, simple, unadorned and undeniable condition of my spirit in this stage of my existence. I NEED GOD AND HE IS FAR AWAY. And interestingly enough, (to me at least) I can speak it without trembling emotion or paralyzing fear. To coin a phrase (again) it is what it is. I need God, simple enough. And He is far away, maybe not simple but certainly understandable.

For one thing, the panic is removed from that conditional announcement when I remember that I am not the first. Moses wandered and wondered on the “back side of the desert” before he had a close encounter with a burning bush. I do not know where the back side of the desert is but I have been there often in the last 2 months. Abraham may have felt that as he led the donkey full of firewood, and his son Isaac up the mountain to prepare a sacrifice. Have you ever felt like you were being asked to give up or let go of something so precious to you that sure God could only ask you by shouting from a far, far distance away? Of course, King David is the poster-child for abandonment issues and reactive attachment disorder. Listen to a few of his familiar laments. “How long, O  Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide Your face from me?” Ps. 13:1. “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me?” Ps. 22:1. In fact those words remind me that even Jesus felt this eternal, fraternal separation when on the cross He quoted David, “Elohim, Elohim, lama sabachthani.” My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Come on tell the truth, have you ever felt that? Maybe sometime in the last 24 hours? When the police call and say we have your son in custody? Or worse, you’d better come to the hospital? When the boss walks in with a cardboard box and a security guard and says, “Sorry, there have been budget cuts?” When the couple that lives next door that loved your kids and ate your barbecue pulls up in a U-Haul van and tells you they have taken a job in Alabama? When you’re cut from the football squad? Left off of the guest list? Given the cold shoulder at church? Unfriended on FaceBook? All of us at one time or another have known the pain of personal rejection and made the leap from the loss of a comfortable situation to the abandonment of God. Even if only for a moment.

If you have read my FaceBook Mom-Updates you will guess that my moments have come at 2am sitting beside the hospital bed in ICU. The night is anything but silent. It is punctuated by rattling bedpans, the incessant beeps of IV pumps, and the groans, the groans of a dozen people who perhaps deep in the recesses of their subconscious are asking, “Why have You forsaken me?” I have watched the spark of intelligence and acuity that was my mother flicker and almost go out over the last 2 months. I have felt her pat my hand and smile at me with the same smile she would give the waiter at Shoney’s or the boy who delivers her paper, asked her questions like my name only to have her turn away in embarrassed confusion. And I have asked God where He was in all of this. How far away? I need God and He is far away.

So what help is there in recognizing I am not alone in my dilemma. Is “misery loves company” enough to satisfy my detached heart? I don’t think so but I do find other solace in thinking through these examples of spiritual loneliness and isolation.

First, I recognize that sometimes the abandonment that I feel is a result of my own behavior and is necessary for my purification. Remember Moses. He rose up in anger and killed the Egyptian who was abusing a Hebrew slave. As noble as his motives may have been his action was wrong. Moses fled into the wilderness and spent 40 years letting God burn away the selfishness and control issues in him. Isn’t it possible that what was really burning in the middle of that bush were  what we call in CR character defects? Moses felt far from God so that some of his hurts, habits, and hang-ups could be placed under grace and he could emerge a leader for his people. So, there are times that my separation from God is for my own healing and my own good.

Secondly, as with Abraham, God often has another plan. Who knows? Maybe His plan is even better? Let’s see. Go up the mountain. Build a fire. Kill my only, my dearly loved son and place his lifeless body on the fire as a gift to God. Or…look up and see a ram that God has snared for me, long before He even asked me to come up onto the mountain. So he closes the door on that job only to give me one closer to home. He allows my relationship to end and suddenly a new person, the right person comes on the radar screen. He tears me away from the First Church of Comfort and plants me in a place where His fire burns brighter in the eyes of people that I have ever seen. Many times the isolation I feel from God is a result of Him working behind the scenes to make something different, better.

And finally, like David I remember that He is not far away at all. My emotions get the best of me. It’s just that time of the month or that time of my life. I am fragile and frazzled, over stressed and under appreciated. I am a legend in my own mind and no one else seems to acknowledge that and God seems so far away. I am an emotional creature. God made me that way. And the more I can express my emotions, be honest about my feelings, the healthier I will be. But my emotions are not the metrics for the way things are. In fact, most of the time my emotions bear little correlation to reality. I feel what I feel and that’s okay but that doesn’t mean it is true. Listen, I feel like I’m going to shoot a 70 every time I step on the golf course. I feel like this is the year for Ohio State to beat the SEC and win the National Championship. (every year) I feel like one more MacDonald’s Sundae won’t cause me to gain weight. I feel like I can afford that new BMW I’ve had my eyes on. All of these feelings are real but the facts they point to are not true. (Well, except the ice cream sundae thing.) God is not far away. He has not moved. He is as close as my next prayer. And even when I cannot feel it I know He says, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”

Which leads me to the last thing, Jesus on the cross, seeming to decry the abandonment of God. “My God, my God WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?” Jesus knew the whole story. He knew about the incomplete sacrificial system and the holiness of His Father. He knew the demands of the law and the plan of God. He knew about the crucifixion but also about the resurrection. He knew that after Friday, Sunday was coming. His cry was the reflex response of His mother’s side of the family. It was His human nature identifying with our human nature. We will cry. We will feel lost and alone. We will struggle with abandonment and question our faith. We are human. That’s what we do. But that is not who God is. HE IS THERE. Even in the hospital room at 2am, He is there. He loves us with an everlasting love. He knows the plans He has for us. He will never leave us or forsake us. He invites us to come to Him when we are weary and heavy laden. He is there.

I need God and He FEELS far away. But He is not. That’s good.

Jesus in Aurora

     My youngest grandson Jakson is goofy cute. Jakson is 1. He has too many teeth for his little mouth. His hair is so blonde that you can see through it. And his head (to accommodate that powerful brain of his, I’m sure) is three sizes too big for his body. It looks like a pumpkin on a broomstick. But there is something about his smile that lights up a room. And when he waddles though the mall heads turn to enjoy him going by. I know I am anything but objective about this but Jakson has a beauty in the midst of all of his awkwardness that captures your attention. At least it seems that way to his PoppyC.

     This week I sat horrified in front of the TV as the news unfolded of the massacre in Aurora, Colorado. You know the story of a lone gunman walking into a crowded movie theater and opening fire. At least 70 people were shot with a dozen fatalities. Like most of America, I wept for the families of those senselessly slain young people. I prayed for the soul of one so depraved that he could unleash that kind of inhumanity on his fellow human beings. And I groaned for the brokenness of a fallen world that created the backdrop against which this all too familiar tragedy played out. A cafeteria in Texas, a high school in Columbine, a classroom building at Virginia Tech, over the last 30 years in our country alone we have rehearsed this gruesome and grotesque scene until we can describe the players almost before the gunfire ceases. Yet, as often as we have experienced it we are each time in utter shock that this would happen again. Horrible. Ugly. Terrifying.

     If I am not careful I can succumb to the horror and hopelessness of those stories. I begin to see only dark, demonic, destructive forces at work in my world. I recoil from the anger and awfulness that surely must possess an individual to drive him to such an act. I begin to look at everyone around me with suspicion and fear. And I only see the ugliness that we have become as a people, as a planet. The cruelty of one human being to another has been a theme of our reflection since Cain slew Able. We are no longer surprised at the capacity within our own kind to unleash damage and devastation on, well, on us. And it is no consolation to remember that this kind of nightmare is not exclusive to America. Mosques and churches, busses and embassies all around the world have witnessed such hellish moments. There seems to be no limit and no end to the atrocities that we commit. It is all I can see. If I am not careful I go there. But I can’t.

     For one thing, I don’t believe we can survive as a culture or as individuals if we allow ourselves to sink to that level of despair. King Solomon came close to that point when he wrote in Ecclesiastes 1, “Meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.” To begin to believe that this is all there is, that the world is now populated and permeated only with death and destruction, that all that is good about life is either gone or so overwhelmed by evil that it is irrelevant is to leave no space for hope or a willingness to work for change. I think the purpose of chaos is to cause us to quit and to only see the horror makes me want to do that.

     Secondly, more importantly, it just isn’t true. When I begin to only see the awful, terrible, ugliness I am seeing a false image. God is good. His creation is good. There is redemption still at work and “greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world.” The wanton wickedness that we see is the exception and not the rule. In fact the very shock and sadness that it brings up in us is proof that this is not who we are, this is not are nature. We are better than this as a people and as persons. The lie of the enemy is that what happened at that movie theater is symbolic of all of society today. Not true! Not true! Not true! Good not only still exists but it still reigns, and always will because the One who reigns is good. Like the goofy beauty of my grandson, there is still something good and right and noble about the world we live in. The positive still far outweighs the negative. We, the people of God, must, we must, proclaim there is still Good News and not surrender our message of redemption to the violent, viral You Tube clips, or the scandalous sound bytes if the evening news.

     So, how do we find hope in the hopeless? How do we avoid the doom and despair that screams at us from the headlines and from our hearts? Where is the beauty buried beneath the bloodbath of last week or the terrorism of tomorrow?

     First, we step in to look closely at the miracle moments of the event in front of us. Several years ago we had the widow of Todd Beamer speak at our church. Todd was one of the heroes of Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 who apparently charged the cabin of that doomed flight and caused the terrorists to divert in to a rural field rather than the supposed target of the White House. Last night I watched the stories of at least three young men in that Aurora theatre that used their own bodies to shield their girlfriends, giving their lives for others. Stephanie Davies stayed with her wounded friend and applied pressure to her bleeding neck the entire time the gunman was walking up and down the aisles of the smoky theatre. She saved her friends life. Jarell Brooks ran back to up the aisle to help a terrified mother and her two young children escape. Out of almost every story of murder and mayhem arises an even more powerful one of heroism and sacrifice. It is as if the good is saying, “You cannot win. I will use your blackness to illuminate the fact that people are still good, that love still triumphs.” In fact, in some ways the more atrocious the evil the more brightly shines the good. That’s what we hold on to in moments like these.

     Secondly, we step back to look carefully at the context of our faith. We live in a fallen, frightening world but it is undergoing the “birth pains of redemption” as Paul says in Romans. God is victorious over evil from the Garden to the Grave. At the fall of Adam and Eve God clothed them and gave them a promise. When Cain killed his brother God gave him a mark to protect him. All through Old Testament history God works for the redemption of His people. Until finally in the New Testament, at the Cross and that horrible, ugly moment when even His Son is the victim of evil, God raises Him from the Grave and gains the ultimate upper hand over the darkness. These awful moments in time remind us that this is the very reason Christ came. The wickedness of the world only serves to prove the significance of the Savior. The event in Aurora, and all the other mind numbing, hope shattering events of our day, focus our faith like a laser beam on to the only One who can make a difference. As someone said, “A messy world like ours obviously needs a messiah.”

     When it gets right down to it, we see in these horrific moments what we are looking for. If we are looking for hopelessness and despair, it is certainly there to be seen. But if we have our “eyes fixed on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith,” we see God still at work, still redeeming even in the darkest of nights. It’s like Jakson. You might see a goofy little fellow with head too big and teeth too many. I see the most beautiful little guy in the whole world. That is what I am looking for. And today, even in the horrible headlines and the numbing nightly news, I am choosing to look for Jesus.

Dancing The Soul Salsa

I grew up in a home that did not dance. Just the mere mention of the word was anathema. My mother called it foot fellowship. She taught us that dancing was the root of all evil and was the portal through which every other vice imaginable entered. “Don’t ever dance,” she said. “All of that closeness leads a boy and a girl to other wicked things like smoking and drinking beer.” We didn’t dance.

At the end of the school year when the area high school held the annual prom our tiny little church would plan a “prom alternative,” a miserable little affair when all 3 of the teens who went to my church would meet in the basement of the Sunday School area to celebrate the fact that we did not dance. There would be balloons, crepe paper tablecloths, and cardboard stars thumbtacked into the ceiling. A half-dozen matronly, old women would hover around us as we sat at the table, filling our plates with sweet potato casserole and baked ham. We tried to look excited about what was going on, and to ignore the 5^th graders that had been invited to make the room more full. We would listen to records of Gene Cotton and Andrae Crouch (the contemporary Christian musicians of that day) and at the end of the evening the preacher (usually my dad) would bring an inspiring devotional message about how much better off we were because we did not dance.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered one day that the Word of God is laced with invitations to dance. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is a time to dance. Psalm 30:11 says, “You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing.” And in II Samuel David danced before the Lord “with all of his might.” The most amazing dance note is in John 10:10. It is a very familiar verse where Jesus says, “My purpose is to give life in all its fullness.” The Greek word for fullness is orkaomi. It is the root word that gives us rejoice or dance. Jesus was saying “My purpose is to teach you to dance.”

I love John Ortberg. In his book The Life You Always Wanted  he says, “We will not understand God until we understand this about Him: ‘God is the happiest Being in the universe.’ God also knows sorrow. Jesus is remembered, among other things, as a ‘man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’ But the sorrow of God, like the anger of God, is His temporary response to a fallen world. That sorrow will be banished forever from His heart on the day the world is set right. Joy is His eternal destiny. God is the happiest being in the universe.”

You see, life is Christ is to be ­enjoyed not endured.

Life is Christ is a party not a pity.

Life in Christ is a dance not a drudgery.

Now I don’t know how to dance but if I did, I would dance the salsa. I got the idea from Leonard Sweet.He says of the salsa, "it is fire and ice, precision and passion, delicate beauty and dominating athleticism all at the same time. The salsa comes from the Caribbean where it finds its African roots and its Spanish rhythm. It embraces the majesty of the royal court and the grit of the street. It has strains in Harlem in New York and in Mexico City. In short, the salsa is the dance of the whole world." And the soul salsa, well that’s the dance of the universe.

I am in a season of my life where dancing the salsa doesn’t seem to be very likely. For one thing my knees are creaky and my back is out of wack. When I stand up it takes me a minute to get my balance and to get my joints all moving in the right direction. Let’s face it the salsa is a young man’s dance with zest and zeal that we old folks gave up a long time ago. But that’s not what makes the salsa, or dancing in general, hard. Right now it’s hard to dance because life is happening. There is sickness to contend with, the economy is tight, I’m a little worried about the state of the nation, and the check engine light has come on in my car. Stuff just builds up all around me and I forget to dance.

In fact, I am coming to believe that this is the time when dancing is most important. Dancing, spiritual dancing, rejoicing in Jesus, enjoying the Spirit, soul salsa dancing brings life back into the heart of those of us who have been beaten down. The ability to dance is fights back the fears and frustrations of the foe and defeats the difficulties and destruction of the devil. Dancing is not only allowed us who call ourselves Christ followers, it is mandatory. While it is not exactly a dancing verse I am thinking of the prophet Joel quoted in Acts 2:17, “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams.” That sounds to me like somebody is going to bust a move. Dancing is getting ready to break out.

So, the next time you find yourself in the basement of life, eating sweet potato casserole and baked ham, the next time your problems are telling you that you can’t dance, forget that. You crank up some Gene Cotton, hang out a few stars, and salsa your way into the life that God has designed for you.

Mike

FOLLOW ME

Here is a flagrant, no-holds-barred, begging on my knees plea for help. In fact I have two pleas. The first is very small. The second....it's a doozy. I have been reading a book, Platform, by Michael Hyatt. It's a good one. It deals with the social-media culture of the day and the tools necessary to use that modern day media for good. I am not so much about advancing me (though I certainly have my moments) but I am recognizing the stewardship involved in promoting the Branches story and using my gifts (such as they are) to further the Kingdom of God.

With that in mind I plan to become much more intentional about things like blogging, writing, mentoring, etc. So, here's the first little favor. If you have followed me on this blog will you follow me over to my new blog site and subscribe there. The new site is www.branchesblog.com. It was put together by my good friend Jody Webster at websterville.com and hopes to be simple, straight forward, and helpful. I don't know that I see myself as a mentor type person but I seem to have gotten old and with that comes some wisdom on how to live life better. I plan a weekly post on lessons about faith, practical ways to stay connected to the Vine. We will try to find balance in life, look for ways to engage the world and each other, and hopefully recognize the grace of God in all of life, even the "yukky" parts.

Now for the biggie, flagrant self-promotion. This change to a new blog is a great excuse to ask, will you help me by sharing my blog with as many people as you can. Put it on lists. Refer to it in your postings. Just help me kick-start this by getting the word out. To the person who does the best job there will be a huge cash reward. (That is not true! I just got desperate in trying to motivate you.) Actually there is nothing in this for you except my deep appreciation and the satisfaction that you have shared some things that may have been meaningful to you along the way. In return you have my commitment that I will work consistently and with integrity to present a "product" that you can be proud of and God will be glorified in.

Well, enough grovelling. You are probably here because you are a friend. Be sure I am grateful for that. Now "follow me, as I follow Christ." Let's see where He takes us.
Mike