A Voice In Ramah

“I am about the do a new thing,now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert…”

Isaiah 43:19

Sometimes, we all need to start over. Fresh. New. Begin Again!

A friend of mine sent this little piece to me years ago. It is a wonderful piece that lays out what we need to do to get a fresh start – forgive ourselves, forgive others, let go of the baggage and move on with new insight. Seasoned soldiers in the game of life understand this (most do, anyway!) But this is also good news for young people. So often, young people’s dreams are stifled and snuffed out because they are led to believe that they have messed up so horribly — all is lost!

All is never lost. We may be thrown off course. We may even have to get a new course, a new plan, a new dream. But as God does not give up on us and ever calls us toward a new day, so must we not give up on God’s ability to make all things new!

I press toward the mark…

You are never to old for a fresh start.

For that matter, you are never to young. either.

Begin again! Begin anew! Morning breaks with fresh insight when you decide within yourself to let go of the night.

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Leaving the City of Regret

by Larry Harp

I had not really planned on taking a trip this time of year, and yet I found myself packing rather hurriedly. This trip was going to be unpleasant, and I knew in advance that no real good would come of it. I’m talking about my annual “Guilt Trip.”

I got tickets to fly there on Wish I Had airlines. It was an extremely short flight.

I got my baggage, which I could not check. I chose to carry it myself all the way. It was weighted down with a thousand memories of what might have been.

No one greeted me as I entered the terminal to the Regret City International Airport. I say international because people from all over the world come to this dismal town.

As I checked into the Last Resort Hotel, I noticed that they would be hosting the year’s most important event, the Annual Pity Party. I wasn’t going to miss that great social occasion. Many of the town’s leading citizens would be there.

First, there would be the Done family, you know, Should Have, Would Have and Could Have.

Then came the I Had family. You probably know ol‘ Wish and his clan.

Of course, the Opportunities would be present, Missed and Lost.

The biggest family would be the Yesterday’s. There are far too many of them to count, but each one would have a very sad story to share.

Then Shattered Dreams would surely make an appearance. And It’s Their Fault would regale us with stories (excuses) about how things had failed in his life, and each story would be loudly applauded by Don’t Blame Me and I Couldn’t Help It.

Well, to make a long story short, I went to this depressing party knowing that there would be no real benefit in doing so. And, as usual, I became very depressed.

But as I thought about all of the stories of failures brought back from the past, it occurred to me that all of this trip and subsequent “pity party” could be cancelled by ME!

I started to truly realize that I did not have to be there. I didn’t have to be depressed. One thing kept going through my mind, I CAN’T CHANGE YESTERDAY, BUT I DO HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE TODAY A WONDERFUL DAY.

I can be happy, joyous, fulfilled, encouraged, as well as encouraging. Knowing this, I left the City of Regret immediately and left no forwarding address.

Am I sorry for mistakes I’ve made in the past? YES! But there is no physical way to undo them.

So, if you’re planning a trip back to the City of Regret, please cancel all your reservations now.

Instead, take a trip to a place called, Starting Again. I liked it so much that I have now taken up permanent residence there.

My neighbors, the I Forgive Myselfs and the New Starts are so very helpful. By the way, you don’t have to carry around heavy baggage because the load is lifted from your shoulders upon arrival.

God bless you in finding this great town. If you can find it, it’s in your own heart.

Please look me up. I live on I Can Do It Street.

“I know how men in exile
feed on dreams of hope.”
Aeschylus
(525 BC – 456 BC),
Agamemnon

What are you hungry for? What do you reach for to feed your soul?

Forty Five years ago today, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. shared with the world a very simple yet profound dream. He made it clear that after so many marches, so many nights in jail, so many threats against his life…so many times when it was clear that he would stand alone in his convictions, what his soul longed for most was just for America to be America for us all.

Yes, America is the place that stole the dreams and the land of Native Americans, stole Africans from our native lands to thrust us into slavery, and yes, America is still the place that struggles to accept the full humanity of women.

But America is also the place that inspires dreams.

The key is to teach our children to dream the kind of dreams that don’t require someone else to live a nightmare. My dreams are not God-inspired if they cause or support your oppression. Unchecked materialism — a bigger house, more bank, more cars, more clothes, more stuff, more, more, more…that’s not the substance of dreams. That is the nightmare in the making. Those dreams require the oppression of someone — more for me and less for you. Those dreams feed cynicism because they always come crashing down — if not for me while I’m living high, then for the next generation when the bill comes “due.”

All day today, I have been thinking about the fact that in the year that I was born into a situation where my family could see no hope — there was a young man who shared a dream filled with hope. It was a dream that started with his own children, but included me, too!

I was too young to hear it.

For years, I did not understand it because it just did not seem real.

But today — his dream feeds me.

The idea that we can create a world where our children will not be judged by their skin color, gender, family circumstance….that’s still heady stuff for me. You will never understand this kind of dream if you don’t know how to dream it for others.

On this 45th Anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream Speech” — I hope that you will be horrified by the nightmares we have inherited: nightmares where where 9.4 million children go without health insurance; nightmares where little Black and Latino boys are guaranteed jail cells instead of a decent education; nightmares where we see mothers and fathers working full-time jobs (sometimes two jobs), with no reasonable hope of escaping poverty.

I pray that you will be horrified by the buildings that pretend to be schools, but in reality, serve as prison training grounds for poor children.

I hope that you will be horrified by the growth of HIV AIDS rates in poor communities across the country, across the world.

I hope that you will be horrified by how little our children really know of the God who created them, loves them, aches for them to come home, and will hold us all accountable for passing on to them the” faintest of impressions” of faith.

The best thing to do when you are having a nightmare is to wake up!

While we have breath, let’s get up and work for a different ending to the story. Faith fed by hope that includes us all can only inspire big dreams, and believe it or not, even in the land of nightmares…dreams can come true.

Sam Cooke sang, “A Change is Gonna Come” with incredible power.

It reflected what he believed to be true: it was the 1960’s and Jim Crow was alive and kicking. He couldn’t even hang out with his friends without getting arrested. Couldn’t stay in the hotels he headlined.

But he knew that change was coming.

So, the depth of his song was real. It was deep. It was hopeful.

Hopeful.

Nothing changes for the good without hope. To hope is to desire for something with the expectation of its fulfillment. Some people desire for a lot of things, but they stop giving themselves permission to expect fulfillment. Have you ever seen a child who has been so incredibly disappointed over and over again that the light has gone out of the eyes? Momma has promised so many times…Daddy has promised so many times…and neither have done anything but disappoint.

They desire…but they no longer expect to be fulfilled.

Desire that has no hope to end in fulfillment becomes bitterness, depression (rage turned inward) or senseless violence (rage turned outward).

I think that the genius of the civil rights movement, and its enduring lesson to us now, is that the most beloved leaders engaged the young people in such a special way. They honored their real struggles, pains, stories and potential and helped them take their hopes in hand and work toward fulfillment. Maybe they were able to do that because they were still close to their own real struggles. Maybe, because the struggle was a shared struggle.

Today — adults struggle on their own. Youth struggle on their own. We are so sadly disconnected, living in silos and vacuums — but we need each other.

Our fight is one, and we struggle not against each other but against “powers and principalities.”

Racism. Poverty. Militarism. Individualism. Consumerism….sin.

These powers have us, our families, our communities, our country in their grip. We need the grace of God, for sure, and we need each other.

So, what do we need for hope to end in fulfillment?

Sam wrote:

“Then I go to my brother, and I say, “Brother, help me please!”

But he winds up knocking me on my knees.”

It’s been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come.

For hope to end in fulfillment, for us to know with certainty that everything under the power of God will ultimately change for the good of them that love the Lord — we need a deep understanding that the God who love us has us, our enemies, our brothers and sisters – all of us — in God’s hand. The pain inflicted by a brother who knocks us when we are down is real. But so is God’s ability to love us toward restoration.

What does all of this mean for today’s young people — and you who walk with them? It means that in addition to teaching skills to survive and thrive, we must also model for them how to hope with expectation, hope with busy hands, hope with movable feet, hope with determination…hope with an open book, hope by helping someone else.

It means that one of the most important lessons we can teach our children is that they are required to participate in their own liberation (our liberation) and freedom means nothing outside of community.

It means that we don’t harbor hate against our brothers and sisters who “knock us.” That’s wasted energy, energy that only feeds bitterness.

There have been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long

But now I think I’m able to carry on.”

It’s been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come.

Feeling like we are at the end of our rope and unable to carry on another moment is real. But that moment changes, that moment is transformed because of God’s power, ability and will — and the collective testimonies of the people. Frayed and tattered ends of the rope represents nothing more than God’s changing station with hope. The end is God’s greatest starting place.

God’s change is coming.

“We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.” Romans 8:28

Who would ever imagine that the process of reaching the breaking point could work to your good?

Have you ever been to the breaking point before?

It’s not a pretty place.

One of the most important things we can ever do for a child is to live our lives before them so that we pass on the faith. Not religion — the faith. Religion thrives on doctrines, certainties and answers. Faith comes alive when it has walked through questions and doubt and not given up.

This world is a world filled with circumstances that call for questions and doubt — Darfur, Haiti…

How do you reconcile the idea of a loving God with a world that is so broken and incredibly unjust to the most vulnerable? How will children reconcile the teachings about a loving God when they don’t feel loved?

One of the things I struggle with is the degree to which I will allow my own children to witness my personal struggles with questions and doubt. Parents would love to pass “the faith” on to their children neatly wrapped like a gift. But the only way they will wear that gift is if it fits them, speaks to them, reflects something that they want to say about themselves to the world. So, instead of passing on the faith like a gift, we have to learn how to pass on to our children the confidence to ask questions about their experiences, express curiosity about the world, and to be circumspect with those who would offer quick, ready answers that might look good from a distance.

Quick, pat answers won’t stand the test of midnight. And every human being will have midnights. If we are careful, these midnights will teach us how to live in trust when the day breaks. When daybreak comes, we need to be able to “wear” the testimony rightly fit like a glove, naturally and gracefully.

I am grateful for every midnight and every daybreak. At midnight, I remember that the promise of a fresh morning is coming. And when the morning comes, with all of its hope and potential, I remember the One who held my hand when it was darkest.

Remembering those things together give me power to step back from the breaking point, power to take a breath, power to look once again to God who holds us through it all.

“And it came about that after three days, they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions.“ Matthew 2:46 (NASB)

They big questions we grapple with as children sometimes end up being the same questions that haunt us for the rest of our lives.

Matthew tells the story of 12 year old Jesus who ditches his family on a visit to Jerusalem, only to be found three days later, safe and sound in the Temple, questioning and being questioned by the teachers. I wish that I could have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. There is, of course, no record of it anywhere. But I would love to know what questions young Jesus posed to these teachers.

I wonder if those questions posed by this child who always had rumors about his parentage swirling around him, this child who was never really accepted as “Joseph’s child,” had anything to do with the kind of “questions” he tackled in his adult ministry?

“Let the children come to me…”
“If anyone harms one of these…”
“And he placed a child in the midst of them…”

I’ve spent some time in the last couple of weeks visiting juvenile detention centers, listening to young people’s questions.

I’ve got a question: are children poorer today than they were when I was a child?

I think the answer is a double YES! They are poorer in terms of cash resources. And they are much poorer in terms of “adult gold.”

What is “adult gold?” Poverty today is not just about not having shoes to wear to school, although that may be the case for some. Child poverty today is also about the wholesale abandonment of children by the only resource of value they should be able to count on: their parents, the adults in their families and in their communities.

Matthew’s account of Jesus’ visit to Jerusalem with his family give us the impression that Jesus is the one who “stayed behind” and his parents did not know where he was. His parent’s thought he was lost and it cost them much anguish.

I don’t think today’s children are lost. I think today’s adults are lost. And, it’s causing children much anguish.

How is it that children can have costly sneakers, costly jeans, a cap for every outfit and more technology than any one person would ever need — and not have one adult in their lives who will eat dinner with them, enforce curfew, insist on seeing homework, approve or disapprove of friends, get up early in the morning and jack them out of bed to make sure that they get to school on time, accept no excuses about behavior, insist on kindness as a mark of character and ask them about their dreams?

Adult Gold.

We are unwittingly conspiring with the failure of systems, with racism, inequity and injustice by also failing to provide the children in our own community with the kind of “wealth” that only we can give them. We can give them “us.”

From everything I’ve heard in my conversations, they want that more than jeans and sneakers.

Meeting with a group of boys in detention, I said to them, “I know that it is hard just to live in our city. It’s hard for parents to try to make ends meet and to care for their families.” Then I asked, “if there was one thing that we could do to help support your families so that they could better support you, what would that one thing be?” A young boy, who admitted that he had problems with anger management, said this: “Help my family learn how to show love. We don’t have that closeness (he said as he hugged himself), we don’t have that.” Another boy chimed in, “yeah, intimacy.” And yet another, “yes, that’s true, my family needs counseling.”

For all who are working with children:

1. Find the mental health and counseling resources in your community. Work with them to offer parent counseling and family support for the families of the children under your influence. They will be resistant. Keep trying, be creative, keep pushing….

2. Figure out a way to send some key messages to parents through your programs that will support this truth: children need love, guidance, boundaries, discipline, love, love, love — so much more than they need caps and technology. You won’t be popular and it will be hard to be consistent, but that’s the definition of parenting.

3. Send the message and make it happen for parents and adults who are caring for children — parents need to talk with others who are there or who have been there. Children are supposed to cause adults “anguish and worry.” That is a part of their job description. They are supposed to push the envelope, try your patience, test the boundaries. That is what healthy, well-adjusted children do. However, parents and adults are not supposed to cause children “anguish and worry.” That is not a part of our job description. We are not special if we are being patient. That is our job. We don’t “deserve credit” if we establish boundaries and keep children from crossing them. That is our job. It’s hard and few of us can do it consistently without support. But it is our job.

4. Tell parents to stop thinking that a child is supposed to show you “gratitude” right now for all the things you do to “sacrifice” for them. Children learn to be grateful as they grow into maturity and that learning is a mark of maturity. They don’t learn to be grateful because we yell at them for not being grateful. Talking with professionals, with others will bring some of this into perspective and will keep us from causing our children “anguish and worry” over adult madness; from giving up on them because they can’t handle adult madness; for throwing them out of the house because in our “adult madness” we don’t have time to deal with children who make stupid, youthful decisions.

We are God’s children and we make incredibly stupid decisions everyday. And God does not throw us out. God doesn’t expect us to be God. God gives us a place to bring our questions, our doubts, our fears, our irrational thoughts — all the things that are truly a mark of our own spiritual immaturity. And God holds those things in trust and loves us enough to talk with us about them, loves us enough to walk us through them. In God’s presence we find forgiveness, grace, mercy, understanding, unconditional love and safety.

The question many of our young people are grappling with is indeed a very heavy one: does anybody love me enough to really parent me? My prayer is that our children will find the answer that the psalmist found:

“For my father and mother have forsaken me,
But the LORD will take me up.”
Psalm 27:10 (NASB)

Walking along the beach of Lake Galilee, Jesus saw two brothers: Simon (later called Peter) and Andrew. They were fishing, throwing their nets into the lake. It was their regular work.

Jesus said to them, “Come with me. I’ll make a new kind of fisherman out of you.” I’ll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass.” Mathew 4: 18 – 19 (The Message Translation)

There is something so amazing to me about the calling of Peter and Andrew. They were just doing their regular work — and Jesus came by.

“Vocation” is much like that. Coming from a Latin word (vocare), vocation is what we do with God’s call. It is the life we live that goes bigger and beyond ourselves — bigger and beyond what we were doing before Jesus came by.

What you “were” doing may have made a life for you. But what you “can” do after an encounter with Jesus and by yielding yourself to God can witness to new life bigger and beyond yourself.

What does that mean?

For me, it was 30 years ago when I was pulled, called to follow. Sure, I was already a believer for several years before that. I was a really good “believer.” And I was incredibly fortunate to have an adult in my life who took my young faith seriously. He challenged me to think, read, question, to listen to people as they asked the questions of faith, to look beyond….

One day as I was just doing what I did, nothing special, Jesus called.

“Don’t just believe me — follow me.”

I’ve never looked at what I did the same way again. Before I heard that voice, what I did was about how it made me feel, the gratification it brought me, and how it satisfied my needs. After hearing that voice, what I now do is not just about me, but about something so far beyond the smallness of my needs.

It is incredibly amazing to be used by God to “fish.” I don’t mean just getting people to join church. I mean using my life, which is really all I have — all the good, bad and ugly, all the insane comedy and madness of it — to share the power of the lifesaving, concrete gospel with people who are drowning.

I keep fresh in my mind what it felt like for me to be “drowning” — to be disconnected, feeling insignificant and empty.

Drowning.

I was a believer — and still drowning. It wasn’t until I committed myself to following…walking with Jesus through the crazy places that Jesus walks….that I found myself connected to something bigger and beyond myself. Jesus walks down some very interesting roads: never the places I would have chosen to walk myself. Jesus gets into battles and fights — conflicts I know that I could not face were I walking alone. And I have followed Jesus into some pretty good parties – celebrations I certainly would have missed on my own.

To get connected to this “bigger and beyond,” don’t think “I need to do something different.” In stead, think “I need to do what I am doing for a different reason.”

“I will make you a new kind of fisherman.”

Come on.

If the children in your life, in your care, don’t have a grandparent — find one for them.