Intro (Palm Sunday): President [fill in the blank] and King Jesus

March 20, 2016 Robert Pelfrey

[Note from Daniel: Yes, we are electing a president, and Jesus still reigns as King. This will be the theme in the weekly series beginning on Easter Sunday and continuing through Pentecost, as we focus on how Jesus reigns through the stories in the book of Acts. Robert Pelfrey and I will trade weeks writing the series, and I asked him to write this introduction for today, Palm Sunday.]

In this crazy political season there are three kinds of people showing up to the often out-of-control rallies. One person is absolutely sure this candidate is America’s only hope. This is my candidate who thinks just like I think, and therefore, this is God’s candidate. Another person is absolutely sure this same candidate is the worst thing that could ever happen to America. If this candidate is elected, all hope is lost. This candidate must be stopped! And the third person is at the rally because it’s a spectacle with TV cameras and celebrities. They’ll eventually move on to the next flavor of the month.

It’s funny how crowds don’t change. This also describes the people in the crowd on Palm Sunday—which, make no mistake, was very much a political rally.

Election Hope: President [fill in the blank] and King Jesus

March 15, 2016 Daniel Harris

If, as the New Testament claims, the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Jesus is now ruling our world as King, how can we make sense of what we see around us–in world politics, the U.S. presidential election, and otherwise?

From Easter through Pentecost, Robert Pelfrey and I will explore this through the lens of the book of Acts. We'll join many Christians who follow the traditional lectionary readings through Acts during the fifty days of the Easter season each year. I hope that you will join us as we read with the worldwide church through that season, seeking to allow its message to sink into us and shed light on our own souls and the events of our times.

Click here to receive these weekly posts from April 3 - May 15.

A Prayer for the Struggle to be Who I am With God

March 15, 2016 Daniel Harris

This is one of the prayers I had the privilege of contributing to a great book by one of my teachers and friends: Mere Spirituality: The Spiritual Life According to Henri Nouwen, by Wil Hernandez.

From Chapter Two: "Identity"

God, my Creator and Designer,

I have tried to live much of my life as somebody else. I have wished for other people's abilities, other people's successes, other people's relationships, and other people's influence. Yet when I am alone and quiet with you, the imaginary person that I have tried to invent for the sake of my own happiness fades away, and it begins to sink in that you never loved that person anyway – for that person never existed in your mind. The person you have loved as your treasured child is this me who sits here with nothing to bring to impress you. The person you love is the one I have been all along yet am only beginning to know.

The more I let you make me into me, the more everything else falls away, and your love becomes my way of life. May it be so, for the sake of the fulfillment of your love.

Amen.

A Prayer for the Struggle to be Alone With God

March 1, 2016 Daniel Harris

Abiding God,

The invitation to be with you is overwhelming yet resonates with my deepest and truest desires. I often don't pay enough attention to just how much I want to be with you. At the same time, I also resist going into solitude. I don't know what is there for us to do together. I am scared that I might find you to be boring or inaccessible. I am worried that the web of entanglements in which I live might unravel if I go away to be alone. I have parts of me that I like to hide––even from myself––and I am fearful that they might come to the surface if I am alone and quiet for long.

But you keep inviting me nonetheless. All of those fears eventually lose their energy as I sit in the quietness of your love. Your presence and your silence gently invite me to find my home in you and to discover that you are already dwelling in me. Here I find you, I find others, I find the world in which I live, and I find my own life hidden in yours.

The Mercy Desk

February 14, 2016 Daniel Harris

"...A few years after my dad died, my mom moved out of the house they had shared for more than forty years, and asked my brothers and me to go through the house and see if there were any of his things we wanted.

Only one really mattered to me: the desk. It’s where I sit as I type this now. It’s where I will turn around in a few minutes when my kids get home from school and hug them as they run into the room. It’s where the man who modeled God’s mercy for me taught me to hope in it, always."

Coming Soon to West Texas: The Way Retreat Center

February 1, 2016 Daniel Harris

"In the spiritual life, the word discipline means 'the effort to create some space in which God can act.' Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on."
– Henri Nouwen

I often joke [by telling the truth] that Kara discourages me from using the words "I'm excited" when I speak, because my face and gestures are completely unconvincing. That very well may be true, but sometimes I still have to use the word, and perhaps I can convey that excitement a bit more effectively by writing about it here than by telling you about it face-to-face.

Regardless of whether I can do so or not, the fact is that Kara and I are both thrilled about something coming soon to the Permian Basin. She and I have both been impacted deeply in retreat settings, and it is one of the ways in which we most enjoy finding some open space for God in our lives and helping others to do so, but the locations for retreats are pretty limited in our area. We are very grateful, though, to now be connected with a group of folks who have been working to provide such a place, and to see it become a reality.

The Way Retreat Center will be in northeast Midland, and will break ground in the summer of 2016. Kara is serving on the advisory board as plans continue, and we have both been able to be in on some of the conversations regarding the kind of space that is being created–and we are both thoroughly, excitedly, impressed by this and grateful for it.

"When there is no time to do it, that’s when you most need to unclutter the calendar and go apart to pray. When the gridlock in your schedule relentlessly forbids it is the time you most need retreat. That is when your heart beats against the prison walls of your enslavement and says, 'Yes, Lord, I want to spend time with you.'"
– Emilie Griffin

You can get a glimpse of what kind of place The Way will be through their website. You can see drawings of the plans, pictures and video of the location, and get a feel for the kind of place being created in order to give opportunities for people to encounter God. I hope that you will join our excitement.

Particularly if you are in west Texas, it would be a great help for you to consider showing support for this by making a donation and/or joining their email list.

The Twelfth Day of Christmas: Christmas to the World

January 5, 2016 Daniel Harris

I love this story from James Bryan Smith about John of Kronstadt: “He was a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox priest at a time when alcohol abuse was rampant. None of the priests ventured out of their churches to help the people. They waited for people to come to them. John, compelled by love, went out into the streets. People said he would lift the hungover, foul-smelling people from the gutter, cradle them in his arms and say to them, ‘This is beneath your dignity. You were meant to house the fullness of God.’”

That is incarnation.

The Word became flesh in Jesus, in whom "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell."
Because of this, we are ones in whom Christ dwells. We are meant to “be filled with all the fullness of God."
Therefore, as Christ’s body (the church), we do what John of Kronstadt did and carry the message to whatever part of the world in which we find ourselves: "You, too, were meant to house the fullness of God."

Jesus did not live in human flesh for his own sake. You are not one in whom Christ dwells for your own benefit. The church is not Christ’s body just so that we can have a good time together. Rather, we follow a Messiah who understood himself as sent from his Father in the heavens–he came in the flesh, lived, died, and rose again to show us what God is like and to give us the opportunity to "share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity."

The challenge of carrying a message like that into the world is the degree to which we must allow ourselves to be touched if the message is to go anywhere. It simply isn’t a message that can mean anything if shouted from a distance.