I can say that I am learning a lot about the divisions in the civil rights movement as I have been doing some side-by-side reading of MLK and Malcolm X.  Both men had unique and difficult visions for the future.  I encourage you to do some reading of your own.

Otherwise, I will link you to a post from two years ago, enjoy.

I am glad that this year I was able to continue my MLK Day tadition in listening to these two speeches.

“I have A Dream” 

“Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”

These stories are powerful for several reasons.  One, leprosy was a condition for which a person was immediately removed from your city.  All it took was a person pointing to something on your skin, someone else seconding the prognosis and you were kicked out of the city.  Two, anyone who touched you while you had the condition was likewise to be removed from the city because Jews believed the condition was contagious.  Therefore, anyone who touched an infected person was assumed to have contracted the condition as well.  Finally, these lepers had very little social contact with anyone except those who were likewise removed from society.  Lepers would start their own small camps outside the city walls where they would create unclean communities together.

These laws and sanctions against lepers come out of Leviticus:

5:3 “If a person touches human uncleanness—anything that would make him unclean—even though he is unaware, he is unclean.”

13:45 “A person with such an infectious disease must wear torn clothes and let his hair be unkempt, over the lower part of his face and cry out ‘unclean!’ As long as he has the infection he remains unclean; he must live outside of the camp.”

The idea here is obviously that clean is the least powerful of the two, because when clean comes in contact with unclean, then it becomes unclean.  This precipitates much of the law of the Jews and almost leads to the idea that darkness is stronger than light.

The leper walks up to Jesus the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).  Jesus had just finished laying out a whole new way of looking at the world.  In the sermon Jesus does away with the idea that darkness is stronger than light.  He says, “When you put salt in your food, the food doesn’t make the salt unsalty. And when you put a light in a dark room, the darkness doesn’t dim the light.  No, the salt makes food salty, and the light brightens the dark room.” (Matthew 5:13-16 CAT-Cole’s Awesome Translation)

So, when the leper walks up to Jesus, it’s a magic moment where Jesus has to put his money where his mouth is.  He reaches out and touches the leper, and immediately the leper is healed and clean.  The clean purified the unclean.  He showed that clean is stronger than unclean, light is stronger than darkness, good is stronger than evil.

This has far too many implications to flesh out in a 500-word blog post.  But just bare in mind when the odds are stacked against you,  when you are fighting for good against a world of evil, when you feel like the only candle in a sea of darkness–you are making a difference.  When you are confronted with sadness, loneliness, heart break or corruption; when you have a literal or figurative leper in front of you, your touch can scatter the darkness, help mend a heart and restore something broken.

The light in you is stronger than the darkness anywhere else.

The series covered everything from humor to evolution to how we know the Bible is inspired.  It was a cool way to hear the needs of the congregation and discuss them.

Another church I saw recently had a text-in Bible class where you texted in questions that popped up on the screen and the teachers discussed it.

Too often preaching happens in a vacuum.  Elders and ministers plan sermon series months ahead of time, often with little input from anyone else and sometimes without much thought about whether this is a message that the congregation is struggling with.

Paul, while he was rolling around the Med starting churches, was continually getting letters from his churches with questions about Jesus, God, Church, sex, meat, idols.  Then he would write them back with answers.  Most of the new testament is Paul’s letters to churches, answering their questions.

I think this is something that churches should do more often.  But I know that it creates issues that ministers might be concerned about:

One, it takes away predictability.  You might go from a question on evolution to a question about dating to how Christians should respond to environmental issues.

Two, it might expose your personal feelings about things.  When you can’t plan how to tactfully speak around issues you might have to tell someone how you feel about this question at hand.  This means the minister has to be transparent sometimes, and that is a scary thing.

Three, this might remove the illusion of where your congregation is.  I think often we assume our congregations are at a certain place spiritually, but in actuality they may be somewhere else entirely.  The quality of questions might reflect a different reality than we had assumed.  This might expose that your congregation needs something a little more basic than an expository six-week series on First Timothy.  Maybe they need to get back to basics with the sermon on the mount.

A practical story:

I started working with the teens at Awakenings Movement in September.  We did a small series about living out the story that God has made you for.  We discussed the story so far, looked at our role in the God story that was being played out around us, and about where the story is going.  We wrapped that up and I felt pretty good about it.

I wasn’t sure what the next series was going to be so I decided to open the floor for questions.  One of the first questions I got: “Why is it easier for white people to be Christians than black people?” Then: “When is violence okay?” “Does God still love you if you’re having sex [outside of marriage]?” “Why do Christians think they are right and everyone else is wrong?”

These were questions totally outside of the realm of teaching that I was doing.  They didn’t need stupid series about the story we are in.  They needed practical advice for what was going on in their lives right now. I was way off base from what they really needed.  Additionally, some of those questions took me just being real with them about sex, violence, issues of race and the exclusive claims of Christianity.

In the end the practical lessons, conversations and transparency that came from those talks were much more formational and important to them than any 5 week series I could have written.

One of the books however is a book called Barefoot in the Church.  You probably haven’t heard of it, and as of this writing if you google it, you will only find one link on the first pages that has anything to do with this book at all.

Barefoot was written by Donald R. Allen.  It is the story of a house church that started in the late 1950s, written nostalgically from 1972.  Allen not only examines this specific community, but discusses aspects of many intentional communities and house churches that he visited across the country while researching this book.

His community, Trinity, was started by a local established church in hopes that a new expression of church would draw in people who were otherwise uncomfortable with established churches, and it seems to have worked.  Barefoot speaks to the need to have a variety of church styles to reach a variety of people.  This means we need big church, small church, old church, young church, seeker church, scholar church, house church, organized church spontaneous church, etc to reach people who respond best to those genres of community.

This is, of course, at odds with most “house church” movements I have seen or been involved in.  Typically they are much less interested in reaching new people and just more interested in coming over to a friends house in their pajamas to bitch about church and think they are cool because they call it church.  Real house churches don’t see themselves at odds with larger churches, they see themselves as a different expression of the same reality.

I will leave you with one of the early quotes from the book about the unique challenges of house churches today”

“Ancient house churches sought to grow in virgin soil, the house church of today must rediscover roots in an overworked ground.”

But that isn’t what I am writing about here.

In it, Stearns drops in one of my favorite books from another book I love, Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright.  In this section, Wright is talking about the verse from 1 Corinthians 15:58–”Your labor is not in vain…”  I leave you with his thoughts

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“You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that is about to roll over a cliff.  You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire.  You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site.  You are–strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself–accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world.  Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every mintue spent teaching a severly handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world–all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into new creation that God will one day make.”

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If that doesn’t encourage you to be nicer to your waiters and waitresses, more cheerful at the DMV, kinder to your co-workers I don’t know what will.

Sometimes I even start, but for every start there is a stop. Sometimes that is ten pages in, other times it is eighty or ninety.
 

Usually it is something spiritual.  Typically it is some sort of between-the-eyes commentary on how Christians should be acting, but this presents some problems. For starters, a lot of times I am not living the life I recommend in my books—that wouldn’t go over well.  Secondly, I fear I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been said better by guys like Bonheoffer, then rehashed in unoriginal fashion since then.  In truth, even if I wrote that book, I would tell people not to read it. “Get a second hand copy of Cost of Discipleship instead.  Surely they are one cent on Amazon.  Don’t pay twelve dollars for my modern-day knock off! At least that guy was living the things he was writing.”

Sometimes I go the other direction and try to write something in the fantasy realm.  But then again, at this point, what isn’t a cheap knock off of Lord Of the Rings?  Even Harry Potter seems eerily similar at times (So he doesn’t die because his soul is wrapped up in an inanimate object that he put himself in, and to destroy him you have to destroy the object?)

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Sometimes I would rather just write a blog post of broken up thoughts that are loosely arranged around a common topic.  This is, of course, just a style-point of Chuck Klosterman’s that I liked.  Not of my own doing for sure.

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I remember being a kid and writing a story on the first laptop my dad gave me.  It was really old.  Texas Instruments.  It had a screen that was shades of blue—that’s it—just different blues.  It didn’t matter I was going to be a writer.

I wrote a story that was about three pages long.  It was about a brother and sister on Halloween.  They answered the phone and heard a guy breathing heavily.  The man announced that he was coming to kill them, but being as it was Halloween, they assumed it was a prank.  That was until they saw a man in a Jason mask, holding a machete standing down the street as they began trick-or-treating.

I showed it to my mom.  She acted amused.  “Is it scary?” I asked.  “Scarier than Stephen King?”

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This story is a perfect example of what I am talking about.  The breathing and threatening phone call was obviously something I probably picked up from Scream, which would have come out around then (1996).  The Jason mask and machete were of course from Friday the 13^th which I must have heard of when I was a kid.  And I was blatantly comparing myself to Stephen King, who at that point I had only heard was creepy because I sure hadn’t read any of his books.

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Later, when I was probably 15, I started writing another book.  This one was about a kid who was in foster care.  He had been shuffled around after his parents had died in a car crash.  But the state workers had found that he had a relative in Alabama and arranged for him to move there with them. He felt strange that everyone knew who he was because his father had been a big deal in the small town.  This led to the discovery that his father had been part of a group of kids who raced their cars down old dirt road, using the rail road tracks as a finish line.  But, one night, a race was poorly timed and two kids died in a crash with the train.  The wrecked car was racing his father.  This precipitated his father leaving town and never coming back.

I don’t know why I didn’t work on that one any further than I did.  Probably because I was fifteen.  I am shocked I got 50 pages into that one.

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I have a love/hate relationship with people who make huge careers out of doing the same thing over and over again.  This is why I love/hate Hugh Grant and John Cusack.  They are really great at one thing, and they do that thing over and over again.  What is that thing?  Being themselves.  They make millions of dollars just reading their lines as themselves in about two films a year.  Its mind boggling and very frustrating for those of us who don’t do that.

I wish I could just write a book as myself.  It wouldn’t have a whole lot of plot.  The biggest suspense moment will be whether I am going to have enough money to pay for car insurance next month.  A real nail-biter.  It’s like Pursuit of Happiness except I am not homeless (yet) nor do I have a little kid in tow.  It will easily be shot down by reviewers who will write, “The suspense of this book can easily be diffused by a part-time job at McDonald’s.  But the reader is perpetually frustrated by the self-centeredness of the protagonist as he bitches and complains about a very resolvable problem.  This is why the one-percent hate the ninety-nine.”

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I feel the same way about certain writers, namely Nicholas Sparks.  About once a year Nicholas Sparks kicks out one of three story lines.  They all sell a million copies.  One becomes a movie.  It has a new Miley Cyrus hit on the soundtrack.  And then he wakes up and does it all again the next year.  He can keep doing this until the Chinese figure out how to make pre-formed fiction out of plastic.  Then and only then will he have any competition.

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The problem with my writing is that it will sound a lot or look a lot like the writing of others.  You can look at a piece of prose that I write and say, “This is a knock-off of Bonheoffer.” Or “His cadence reads like Rob Bell.” Or “His scattered thoughts on one topic are like Chuck Klosterman.”

This is essentially the same way I live though. My sense of humor is like that of my father.  My dry sarcasm is from my mother.  My mannerisms come from multiple friends I have had over the years.  My confused face comes from Shauna.  My drive to serve comes from my friends Ross and Dylan.  Many of my beliefs came from my friend Mac.

I have done what I guess most people do.  I have become a patchwork of qualities that I loved about others.  When you see a behavior you like you modify yours to become like that.  Everyone does it in big or small ways: mannerisms, the words we pick up, the way we describe or explain things, the value we put on certain things.  We are all trying to be better people, and the easiest way to be better versions of ourselves is to model after people we admire.

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Knowing now that nothing I do or that anyone else does is original, I think I might feel a bit more comfortable starting to write something.  I just need a good starting place…

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Once upon a time…

Comos has been nice enough to host us for the evening and give us 10% of the profits that night as well.

The party is from 6-10 on December 20th with an early visit from Santa that night for our families!  All are welcome, please come join us!

This left me stranded on the side of the Lodge for about 2 and a half hours. Luckily I have great friends. James and Craig came down and sat with me, Mike let me use his triple-A and a couple hours later we got the car back to my house.

I climbed in the cab of the tow truck. My mechanic was a small guy, dark complexion, balding with a scruffy beard. I introduced myself as Cole, he told me his name was Michael.

Michael, noting that my plates were from Arkansas, asked why I came to Detroit. I told him I came to work for a church, help people, etc. He nodded politely.

I asked where he was from.  “Dearborn,” he said.

For those of you who do not know, Dearborn is a Detroit suburb that has the highest concentration of Muslim-Americans in the United States. This is becoming somewhat of a specticle in a new television show called All-American Muslim. 

So, when he told me he was from Dearborn so I just decided to ask, “Are you a Muslim?”

“Yes,” he said.

This opened up a huge conversation between there and my house. We talked about everything from racism, his experience as an American Muslim, Muslim extremism and the KKK, the homeless and how we are to react to that, and important aspects of our Holy books: the things we have in common and the things we differ on. We talked Catholic vs. Protestant, Sunni vs. Shia. We laughed, agreed on a lot, learned a lot from each other about our lives and experiences and had a wonderful conversation about the way that God is working in our lives.

The ride lasted the better part of an hour, arriving around eleven that night. We climbed out, got my car unloaded from his truck and settled up. I introduced him to my girlfriend Jenny and friend James. We settled up and I thanked him for everything.

“Cole,” he said. “You are my brother. Thank you, my friend.” He invited me to come visit him in Dearborn sometime. An offer that I will probably accept.

There are a lot of little things in this that I want to point out and appreciate:
1) I love that I am now in a place where people of differing faiths are the norm, not exception.
2) I am grateful daily for the education that I received at Harding, especially in Monte Cox’s Living World Religions class that educated me well enough to have informed conversations with guys like Mike that I meet daily.
3) I am thankful for my time overseas that gave me the small impression of what it is like to be a member of a minority culture that is perceived as hostile.
4) I am thankful that I didn’t have many interactions like this one with Michael or previous with Joseph while I was an annoying fundamentalist. I think they would have looked much different.

It was good to get to know Michael. I think he and I left with a greater appreciation for one another as people, but also as believers and practitioners of differing faiths. I think we really connected on a level that says we have more in common that we have dividing us. That is not a bad way to pass the time that your car is being towed.

This brings a long-time fight against Alzheimer’s to its only conclusion. She passed away in hospice care with my mother and cousin by her side. In true form I have some thoughts to put out there, few really connected, but worth thinking about anyway.

- My grandmother was kind of a rock star in her day.  She was the first woman to enlist in the Women’s Air Force in the state of Maine.  She raised three daughters and a grandchild, often while her husband was stationed elsewhere in the Air Force.  She was a killer card player.

- I don’t have a whole lot of memories of my grandmother before the disease. I know she was a cleaner. She liked rearranging the furniture in the house a lot. She was a card player. She didn’t let us win, even when we were kids. One summer when I was about nine, I stayed with my grandparents. When she caught me stealing gum from my cousin she called my mom and made me confess to my crime. These are just small memories. The first real memory I have of her was when I was sixteen. I sat down in the living room while she was watching her soaps. She turned to me and said, “Who are you?” “I am Coleman…Your grandson.” “Are you here to rob me?” “No, just watching tv with you.” “Okay, but I have my eye on you…”

- I think Alzheimer’s tends to bring out who you really are underneath. Some people I have met are genuinely sweet. My friend Megan says that her grandmother was very vain. “I think I need a wig or a nice expensive hat.” My grandmother, I feel, was a very worried or paranoid person. Hence the fear of robbery. She would say later that her nurses or care-takers were beating her or trying to kill her.

- Growing up I heard stories of my grandmothers anger. Destroying rooms of the house when she was unhappy about something. This also contributed to her burning some bridges, including with her own family. She had a sister who still lived in Presque Isle, Maine who she hadn’t spoken to in sixty years. As the disease progressed through her memories, starting in the recent and moving to the distant, she began to forget things. Of course grandchildren were early going, then her own children, but one day, so was the reason why she hated her sister. It was almost funny. She walked out one day and said, “I need to call my sister.” “Your sister?” we said out of confusion and disbelief. “Yes, Paige. My sister. I want to call her.” For some time they talked on the phone almost every day. As her mind began to move back in time, so too it did away with a lot of hurt and anger that those memories were associated with. Before she died, she was able to put away a 60-year grudge with her sister.

- I have talked to several friends and co-workers recently about a major illness in the family. One thing that a co-worker said was that major illness shows you who your family really is and who really cares. That has been true.

- I think one of the oft over-looked people in these situations are the care-takers. For the past ten years it has been my mother and cousin with my grandmother. They have switched off, made decisions, sat in hospitals, talked with nurses, done the research and been the people on-call for issues with my grandmother for years now. It is exhausting work. I have watched my mom do it for some time now, showing more fortitude than I think I could have done in the same situation.

- These things being the case, it is difficult to have one feeling about all of this. Obviously there is the first sad fact: my grandmother died. But then there are the other circumstances: the sadness and constant fear that my grandmother had been reduced to, the burden off of my mother, the grudges buried by my grandmother’s disease. These things add up and cloud what the “right” feeling is.

- If you know anyone who is a care-taker. Give them a hug. If you can bear it, offer to help. Let them have a night out. Go buy some groceries for them. See how you can help. It’s a draining and hard experience, and not one that should be done alone.