A Christian Worldview from Silicon Valley

I’ve been to some amazing places on this earth, some of them highly populated and some of them extraordinarily devoid of population. Some of those places have been startlingly beautiful, some of them have contained great works of art, and some of them have been sculpted into great works of art. I consider it a blessing to both see and appreciate all of that.

But the greatest joys of life — at least for me — involve people. So I was just a little sad this afternoon as I said goodbye (temporarily, but for a while) to Sterling Stuckey and his amazing wife, Harriette, who, in passing through the Bay Area for a season, came into my life and the life of PACC and made us all better for it.

Sterling is, in some circles, kind of a famous fellow, I suppose. He might say, with a wry smile, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” But he had stopped by the church today to give me a copy of the manuscript for his latest book, African Culture and Melville’s Art, a work that will be published this year by Oxford University Press, and anyone who can get a book like that published by a major house, let alone write it, has got something going for him.

The book’s subtitle is The Creative Process in “Benito Cereno” and “Moby-Dick.” Probably not what one would call “light reading,” but I’m looking very much forward to it.

Why? Not because the title itself interests me, although it does interest me very much, but because of Sterling.

By many of the world’s standards, one might not think that Sterling and I would have much in common. But he showed up one day at PACC, and in fairly short order we learned we had three important things in common: we love creativity and the artists who created; we love to think; and we love God.

As time went on we found out that we disagreed on a few things, too, and that enriched our friendship as much as our agreements. (See “love to think,” above.) But my point is this: my life is richer because Sterling and Harriette passed this way. I hope and expect to see them again, and look forward to it.

In the meantime, my goal is simply this: to enrich the lives of those I meet, even in places where I’m just passing through.

I have a confession to make.

I don’t like to sing. All that smiling, joyfulness, emotions dancing in my heart and escaping from my mouth. Eeww!

I can read music, play an instrument or two, carry a tune, make a loud noise, even wake up the dead if I put my mind to it. But, it’s not my first love nor my last. It’s not even on the list. I just do it. Nike would want me for a commercial.

But then I was asked to take part in the musical – THE SON. I came kicking and screaming, solely because I love the church (not the building), I love the Son, I love my friend, Lewis.

I determined I’d do my best with the part I was given. Being type casted as Satan helped. I have natural inclinations that I could tap into. Grr! (more…)

The worldview from Silicon Valley and the surrounding environs hasn’t always been about technology and money. Sometimes it has been about love, flowers, and very often it has been about music.

A little over three weeks ago, one person who was influenced by and influential in the world of music — and in the world of Jesus — died.

He was Larry Norman, and some at the Palo Alto Church of Christ had a “one degree of separation” relationship with Norman without even knowing it — he was the discoverer, early mentor, and friend of Randy Stonehill, who performed at PACC on December 2, 2007.

Larry Norman was, by all accounts, an amazing and powerful force. According to an obituary in the Guardian, he claimed to have had the idea of Jesus Rock in 1956 when he was just nine years old, “when he was as excited by the sound of Elvis Presley as he was by the words of Jesus Christ.”

But it was about 10 years later when he actually began the revolution that became Christian Rock.Behind and beyond the music, however, was Larry’s genuine love for the Lord and heart for the lost. According to his Gospel Music Hall of Fame biography, he started The Vineyard Church, which met in his living room in Los Angeles on Wednesdays. It is now comprised of more than 600 churches. He also led Susan Perlman to Christ, and with Moishe Rosen she founded Jews for Jesus.

(For a look at Larry at work, with a reference to the aforementioned Randy Stonehill, watch this YouTube video. Randy’s own memories of Larry are posted here.)

The Huffington Post obit included this paragraph:

While Christian Rock is sometimes assailed as formulaic and derivative, Norman was anything but and his admirers included Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, The Pixies, Van Morrison, John Mellencamp and Sammy Davis, Jr. among others.

Among Norman’s amazing list of songs is one that many Christians know, I Wish We’d All Been Ready. Based on what I know of the life, work, and death of this incredible artist, he most definitely was.Here is what he dictated to his friend the day before he died:

I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God’s hand reaching down to pick me up. I have been under medical care for months. My wounds are getting bigger. I have trouble breathing. I am ready to fly home.

My brother Charles is right, I won’t be here much longer. I can’t do anything about it. My heart is too weak. I want to say goodbye to everyone. In the past you have generously supported me with prayer and finance and we will probably still need financial help.

My plan is to be buried in a simple pine box with some flowers inside. But still it will be costly because of funeral arrangement, transportation to the gravesite, entombment, coordination, legal papers etc. However money is not really what I need, I want to say I love you.I’d like to push back the darkness with my bravest effort. There will be a funeral posted here on the website, in case some of you want to attend. We are not sure of the date when I will die. Goodbye, farewell, we will meet again.

Goodbye, farewell, we’ll meet again
Somewhere beyond the sky.
I pray that you will stay with God
Goodbye, my friends, goodbye.

Larry

See you in heaven, Larry. Thanks for the music.

My sister’s house burned down, and I didn’t know it for a week.

I’d been camping-playing-hiking in Death Valley National Park with my son and his Boy Scout troop. We were having a sweet time out of cell phone range admiring God’s colorful handiwork on Artist’s Drive and Mosaic Canyon, golfing through salt formations, sniffing the Desert Gold flowers, tumbling down sand dunes, sliding over waterfall-polished stone, and checking out the dark night’s lunar eclipse and constellations. Meanwhile, my sister’s home was in ashes.

She lives with her family among people who are lost spiritually, socially, educationally, physically, and economically. Most of her community is illiterate. With no personal access to the religious literature that shapes their lives, they rely instead on the interpreted say-so of the local powerful person. Wife beating is an accepted and expected form of social behavior there, as is polygamy. Impoverished by a corrupt government, the people endure starvation and pain, unable at times to afford food or medication.

Although death is commonplace, these people are not apathetic about it. They work hard for the little they have. They make lots of babies, hoping a few will survive. They dance and sing, scraping up joy wherever they can. They have become friends with my sister, who doles out ibuprofen and vitamins to those who need it the most.

On Sunday, when they saw flames devouring my sister’s home, they rushed to help rescue her possessions. Many of them cried over her losses, and some even wailed and tossed dirt into the air to prove the depth of their sorrow. They returned hand-me-down clothing that my sister had previously passed on to them, and they shared food from their meager supplies.

The Old Testament book of Isaiah predicted what the messiah (God’s chosen one) would do in the “year of the Lord’s favor.” Besides preaching good news to the poor, binding up the brokenhearted, releasing prisoners from darkness, and comforting those who mourn, he would

bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.

It’s fascinating to me that while my sister has longed to help these people who are in desperate need, God has used her own newly humbled state to level the playing field between them. Now she can speak with them from a mutual sense of loss and need. Her need for the fundamental things is as great as any person’s, reflecting the deeper reality of their mutual need for grace.

In the coming weeks, months, years, I’ll be looking to see what beauty God will evoke from the ashes of a burned-up house and from the kindness of a malnourished community.

As we walked from the 10th green to the 11th tee, I asked my friend about his friend Pete. I had just met Pete a couple of hours earlier and liked him right away, but he was in one of the two foursomes behind us so I hadn’t had a chance to get to know him at all. Mostly I wondered if he was what we Christians call “a believer.”

My friend said that Pete was not a Christian, although he might think of himself as a Christian, that he was recently married, and that he was an excellent athlete and very competitive.

“Is there an opportunity to talk to him about his faith?” I wondered.

My friend thought about that and said he thought there probably would be an opportunity for that — or more specifically that Pete would be open to such a conversation — around the time that he and his wife started having children.

My friend, by the way, is a long-time and very mature Christian who has spoken to many people personally and publicly about their need for Jesus. So he wasn’t putting this off because of any sort of fear, but he was putting it off (at least for now) until a more opportune time.

I marveled at my friend’s patience, and told him so.

Most of us have a sense of urgency when it comes to this kind of thing and if someone doesn’t listen to us the first time, we keep after them and keep after them until we “get them in the water” or (too often) drive them away forever.

There is little question that patience (part of the fruit borne in us by God’s Spirit) is a good thing. And I don’t wonder whether or not I have it, I wonder where I should be using it. Perhaps with some patience, I’ll find out.

This morning, I awoke and turned to my lovely wife and asked her what time she got to bed last night and what she had been working on.

She said she was writing a BLOG. She was turned away from me when she said it was titled “Living in Color” I heard “Living in Clutter” and so after a short laugh at ourselves, I got the inspiration for my first ever blog post.

I get up this morning to gather the kids together and get them breakfast. Yes, this is my only day to sleep in, but my wife got to bed at 4:00 am after writing her blog and I’ll try to give her a few extra winks.

After clearing a small space in the junk mail, I consume my breakfast. Returning to my bedroom, I can’t find my computer to start my blog. I’ve got no idea where it is, and can’t even see it as my wife points to it on the love seat in the living room. It wasn’t even buried, just camouflaged with some other gear deposited there. (more…)

A fellow preacher asked me today about conversion, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t referring to weights and measures. Turns out I was right, he was talking about a person giving up a life without Christ for a life with Christ.

Sometimes those folks are referred to as “converts.” Anyway, I started to say, “I think conversion is a process” but I left it alone. Then my friend said, “I think conversion is [pause] a process.

And of course I said, “That’s exactly what I was going to say” following which we also agreed that most people think of conversion as an event rather than a process.

Unfortunately we didn’t have the opportunity to continue that discussion. Fortunately I can ask you what we think. Are my friend and I crazy, or are we right?

One of my favorite comic strips is Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes episode in which Calvin’s dad carefully explains how the world used to exist in black and white, but was flooded with color sometime in the 1930′s.

Do you recall experiencing such a watershed moment in which the after of your life was completely different from the before in at least one significant aspect?

A Significant Moment

I remember the exact day I became a feminist, and before you start getting all excited or huffy about that, you’d better ask me to define the term, because most people don’t know what it means. I didn’t either, but I do now. Yep, a watershed moment that impacted who I am today.

A Trivial Moment

Or how about a more trivial example? Just yesterday, I was complaining to Lewis about how some Web page banners have terrible word breaks in their titles. Sorry, it’s just the editor instinct in me. He could have told me to just GET OVER IT, but instead he kindly introduced me to a basic skill that I guess everyone else in the world already knows, and which I now use several times each day: On my Mac, I can raise or lower the resolution of a Web page by clicking Command-plus or Command-minus. You can, too! And I’ve also discovered that technique works in a variety of other desktop windows, too. My windows behavior will never be the same.

The Most Important Moment

I also remember the night I gave my life over to Jesus. Wow, a hard decision. I had spent months, years, privately wondering what he was really all about, weighing the pros and cons of casting my lot in with him, wishing to be done with the deal, agonizing over the procedure (water baptism in front of witnesses), pondering why it had to be done that way, twisting and turning and crazing over the whole thing. But then there was that night. And they sang that song — I’m sure you’ve heard Just As I Am, too — and almost at the end of the umpteenth verse, I gave up and turned myself in. My most important watershed moment, the moment that painted my world and my life with a depth of meaning that had escaped me before.

Here’s the funny thing: the colors that washed over my formerly gray perspective were initially rather faint pastels. However, at the time, they seemed almost overwhelmingly gorgeous — you know, like putting on a new pair of glasses and walking out of the optometrist’s office telling everyone, “Hey, this tree has leaves on it! And there are birds on that phone line! Who let these sidewalks get so cracked?” But over time, and with experience, the colors of my worldview have deepened, first the blue when I felt some peace, some relief from all the fretting earlier. Then the red as I began comprehending more fully who Jesus was and is to me. And the green is getting stronger every day that I realize what damage we — I! — am wreaking on this garden of Earth, and what I can do to minimize it.

A Question of Pushing the Envelope

When you live in a black and white world, it’s all you know, so you don’t miss the color. And when your world is pastel, it’s easy to be satisfied with the splendid difference it makes. But I want jewel tones to glow through every aspect of my life. Is there a way to push beyond satisfaction and status quo to the best God has to offer? (Click picture for last paragraph.)

A Toe in the Water

Many years ago the poet Burns wrote a poem to a mouse. He did so because he (Burns, not the mouse) was plowing a field when he accidentally ruined the nest of the field mouse, who (the mouse, not Burns) then ran away in terror. That poem gives us one of the most memorable and most quoted lines of all time:

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley…

A good English translation of those would have it:

The best laid schemes of mice and men, Go oft astray…

Whether in Scottish or English, I, being on the man and not the mouse side of the equation, experienced this very thing on Friday, December 22, and I have a question about it.

What was supposed to be a “hop on the plane and fly to Phoenix then get a ride to Mesa” morning turned into a “don’t get on the plane, have breakfast, get on a different plane going to Burbank, wander around, buy books at a used book store, take a taxi to Hollywood, watch a movie in a famous theater, look at the footprints at Grauman’s, talk to Freddie Kruger, get picked up by my brother-in-law and niece, pick up my niece’s recovering-from-major-surgery friend and her sister, drive to Phoenix (10 hours, because of traffic), go to the airport, rescue our luggage, borrow a car and drive to Mesa.

The original method would have taken us about 18 hours less than the method we used, but that scheme (plan) went, as Burns would say, agley.

Now here is the question: What did God have to do with that? And what about when your plans “gang agley?” What does God have to do with that?

P.S. Merry Christmas to all!!