A Rosemary By Any Other Name...

I'm not above telling about the times I've done stupid stuff. An old post, Adventures in Yardwork, is a classic example of a story that might make you laugh at me and think about just how stupid I can be. Here's another (slightly longer than usual) story that may enable you get a chuckle at my expense.

My dad came up with an incredible pizza recipe many years ago; before I was born, I assume. When I was a kid I spied on him when he made pizza so I could steal the proverbial "secret sauce" recipe. Only it wasn't proverbial -- it actually was secret sauce -- and I didn't "spy," per se. I just asked him what he was putting in there.

Flash forward to the present, in which my wife and I are really getting into planting things and making food with fresh herbs, vegetables, and all that stuff. Not just because it's healthy (after all, chocolate chip ice cream with caramel topping is an evening staple for me), but food made that way tastes substantially better than it does when using dried spices or canned vegetables.

I was home alone the other night and had some work I needed to do on a project that's in the works. I decided to make a pizza so that my brain would be in a good mood for the job I had ahead of me. I went outside and clipped a couple of leafy stems off of the rosemary plant growing in a pot on our back deck. I sniffed the plant as if it were a really good-smelling herb, which it is. I took the stems inside, pulled the leaves off, and in gourmet style chopped them up to put into my sauce (and now I've just blown part of the secret sauce recipe).

Unfortunately I had to use dried spices for a couple of other ingredients because our plants aren't grown-up enough for me to go treating them like adults and pulling off their leaves. That was okay, because rosemary is the key spice.

Over the next 20 minutes or so I prepared what was to be an awesome dinner. I got my laptop set up in the living room and when the pizza was finally ready I cut two slices, sat down to start typing, thanked God for the food, and took my first bite.

Almost immediately I started Googling the term "sweet rosemary," because something was hosed up with my pizza. It tasted like I'd poured a cup (okay, maybe 1/3 cup) of sugar into the sauce. I wasn't able to find anything about a rosemary plant variety with the quality of "super-sweet."

Then, a minute or two later, I remembered pulling the little tag out of the plant when I transplanted it from its original pot into our pot on the deck. I remembered making a mental note that someone had apparently switched tags and put a "lavender" tag in the rosemary plant we'd purchased.

So I Googled "rosemary lavender" and found something interesting. Here's a photo I made this morning that may give you an idea of what I discovered:

It's a photo of a lavender plant and a rosemary plant together in the same pot. Can you tell which is which? I obviously couldn't. And to be honest, I can only barely tell by looking, even now that I have this awesome new botanical wisdom. But I do know that using lavender instead of rosemary in your pizza sauce makes for one nasty pizza.

In the process of making my culinary masterpiece nothing indicated that I wouldn't have great results. I made it the same way I'd always done, used a delicious, healthy-looking, fresh spice, tons of cheese, fresh mushrooms, and more, but I discovered that looks can be terribly misleading sometimes.

One of the first things that popped into my mind after finding out how Mother Nature had fiendishly deceived me was this shocking statement Jesus made to the scribes and the Pharisees -- people in charge of keeping up with the law and preserving religious tradition: "“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness." (Matthew 23:27-28, NLT)

Jesus said it far better (and much more concisely) than I have here. No matter how my efforts and good work look on the outside, if my intentions and motives are corrupt or wrong, the efforts are not just tasteless to my Father, but are repulsive to Him (just like a lavender pizza was to me). Along these lines, Francis Chan once explained Revelation 3:16-17 in a way that hit home for me. If you've ever picked up a cup of coffee, sipped it, and discovered that it wasn't hot but was room temperature, your reaction would likely be, "Gah!" (or something like that) and you'd want to spit it out immediately.

May the life we live and the way we serve and love in Jesus' name always be made of pure, genuine ingredients; not just sweet-smelling and with the proper appearance, but with a fresh, delicious, honest-to-goodness rosemary-flavored result.

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A Time To Say, "No"?

Sometimes we're presented with "ministry opportunities" that could more accurately be described as "busy work." Other times we have chances to engage in things that give us joy and enable us to share Jesus with people, help them, etc.

But what about activities or opportunities that fall into a gray area? By this I mean things that are generally "good" but are outside our calling or our area of passion. Or these could be activities that would help others in their areas of ministry, but we don't see eye to eye on the "how" or the "why" of the activity.

For instance, some people don't feel that the practice of door-to-door evangelism is a good thing. Would it be right for them to go with a friend to knock on doors in the neighborhood when, even though they love to share the Gospel, they genuinely disagree with the method?

What do you generally regard as a "ministry opportunity"? What criteria do you use for deciding whether or not to be a part of such an opportunity?

By the way, this post is NOT about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of door-to-door evangelism. That was only one example. Other examples might be keeping children for a special event or taking food to the homeless. Use your imagination.

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cold hands, warm heart?

In one of the men's bathrooms at Wall Highway Baptist Church's sanctuary building is a sink that will not dispense hot water. In the past I've turned the water on and let it run for a full minute (which is a pretty long time if you just want hot or warm water) without feeling so much as a slight increase in temperature. This is surely a discouragement from washing one's hands, but I always do that regardless. I promise.

Some time last year I heard the facilities maintenance guy comment that there is not a hot water line running to that sink. I immediately felt personal embarrassment that I'd never bothered to look underneath to see that there was only one pipe running from the wall to the sink.

No matter what I tried and no matter how long I let the water run, I would never have been able to get warm water from that spigot. On the surface, though, since there are two valves on each side of the faucet, one would think that one side would produce hot water and the other cold. Its appearance is completely deceptive.

What a cool (har har) parallel to Jesus' rhetorical question to His disciples in Matthew 7, "Can you pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?"

Have you ever wondered how Jesus could say, "Do not judge others and you will not be judged," and just a minute later say, "Just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions" (or maybe a faucet by its water)? This is far more harmonious than many people care to see, though the first phrase is used, often incorrectly, as ammunition by people who want to attack Christ-followers as hateful, vengeful, or unloving.

Any thoughts on the fact that those two statements are not mutually exclusive?

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guitar solos - why?

I used to be a pretty prolific songwriter. Actually, I was more of an instrumental-writer; I rarely wrote words to my songs, but I did record tons of instrumental music.

In almost every one of those songs I left space for a guitar solo, and although I'm not a lead guitar player and never have been, I'd put some sort of solo in them. When my wife and I took a weekend trip recently, we listened to some Elvis songs (she's a huge Elvis fan, and I like Elvis fine), and I noticed that on many of his songs there were guitar solos, and most of them were very similar to one another.

I've asked myself this before but never really thought much about it: why is it standard to put an instrumental solo in most "pop" songs? Many solos don't add much to the song other than offering a breather from the vocals. Is it to add variety to the song? To take a song that would have otherwise been two and a half minutes long and make it three or three and a half minutes?

I'm not losing sleep over it, but when I write another song you can bet I'll question whether or not a solo is a good fit for the song or if it's just something I have a tendency to do.

 The punch line: is it good for a Christ-follower to examine everything he or she does in light of Scripture? If not, when/where do you draw the line?

 Some things will be no-brainers: don't steal, don't gossip, don't be two-faced, etc. There are many, many Scriptures to reinforce those things, and hopefully we've hidden enough of the Word in our hearts to perfectly recall passages that relate to those things. I'm talking about the things we do that seem to be good but when you get down to it, there's not really a Biblical reason to do them.

Do you think that it's possible for everything we do to have a Christ-honoring purpose?

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When is it Okay to Withhold Information?

I'd like your input. I have to preface this post with the statement that there is not a situation I'm thinking about specifically. Nothing in the fellowship at Wall Highway, nothing in the national news media, no situations with friends -- nothing. This is all simply hypothetical. I promise.

I was having a discussion with a friend the other day and this question came up: is it ever okay to selectively withhold information? We were speaking about matters in the Church, so that's the way I'm leaning in asking for input.

With children and parents, sometimes situations get to the point of answering,"Because I told you so," because eventually a parent just doesn't want to hear the child argue with him (again) and knows that it will happen if he presents the legitimate reason. Or sometimes we may withhold information either because it's not necessary for the child to know, or it would be harmful for him to know it.

That's a parallel that sounds very reasonable. But once we're all grown up and when we apply it to the Church, does it still hold water?

In what situations would it fall in line with Christ-like character to withhold information? And is there some sort of precedent or principle that we can typically apply to know when it's okay to do so?

If we reveal only bits and pieces of something because we think that someone wouldn't understand, isn't that making an assumption about them that we're often not qualified to make, and doesn't that make us place our own position or understanding higher than that of others?

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Craziness?

I'm not sure how best to phrase all this, so I'll just plunge in.

This morning I read the first thing in Francis Chan's book Crazy Love that I didn't like. In a section describing the personal sacrifices of many Christ-followers, he talked about Shane Claiborne's life at The Simple Way, a communal fellowship. Preston mention Claiborne and some other emergent church leaders yesterday and I ran out of time to chime in on the comments that I agree. I can't say that I dislike the guy personally; I don't know him. But from what I do know, I believe he misrepresents Christ.

So I read the section about Claiborne and thought, "Wow, bummer. That's kind of a notch down for ol' Francis in my book." He didn't paint Shane Claiborne as the end-all, be-all Christ-follower, but the inclusion of this part made me wonder about some of Chan's personal views.

But I continued reading. Here's the next part in that chapter, about those who sacrifice their own lives for others:

The Robynson Family
This family of five, with three kids under the age of ten, chooses to celebrate the birth of Christ in a unique way. On Christmas mornings, instead of focusing on the presents under the tree, they make pancakes, brew an urn of coffee, and head downtown. Once there, they load the coffee and food into the back of a red wagon. Then, with the eager help of their three-year-old, they pull the wagon around the mostly empty streets in search of homeless folks to offer a warm and filling breakfast on Christmas morning.

All three of the Robynson kids look forward to this time of giving a little bit of tangible love to people who otherwise would have been cold and probably without breakfast. Can you think of a better way to start the holiday that celebrates the God who is Love?

And all of a sudden Shane Claiborne was totally gone from my mind, and I wept in repentance of my own selfishness (I could say that I cried like a baby, but that wouldn't sound nearly as spiritual -- I like "spiritual vocabulary," don't you?).

It instantly hit me that deep down inside, I don't want to do anything like this. And that made me very sad.

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Tap Water Coffee

In an effort to save money yet maintain our addiction to coffee, my wife and I recently purchased a regular coffee maker. The pods for our single-cup maker wind up being expensive. Also, we recently removed the water purifier from our kitchen faucet for the sake of looks, and replaced it with a pitcher which filters water.

This morning I poured the last of the purified water into the coffee maker and, as a result of impatience, filled the coffee maker the rest of the way (about 7 cups' worth) with tap water. An eternity of minutes later (a drawback of a coffee maker), the morning haze was broken not by the taste of good, strong coffee, but of a nasty metallic sort of taste that came from the tap water.

The ingredients apparently make a difference.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks of the fact that seemingly bad ingredients can actually result in good. You all probably know about this. For example, "God blesses those who are humble, for they will inherit the whole earth." (Matthew 5:5, NLT)

But shortly after that, He says, "But I warn you—unless your righteousness is better than the righteousness of the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!" (Matthew 5:20, NLT)

All the good works (strong coffee grounds) in the whole world will not make up for selfish or grudging motivation (tap water).

I seem to always get back to obedience and surrender. This is not partial stuff we're to do. There are no shortcuts. "Lord, I freely surrender some of these bits and pieces of my life to You. As I hang onto these others for the time being, please be glorified in my life." Betcha that won't work.

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