Opening the Window.

Opening the Window.

The flood kept coming, the words on the page tell us.

I have difficulty keeping track of the numbers.

Verse 12 says the water fell for forty days and forty nights.

Twelve verses later were told the water flooded the earth for a hundred

and fifty days.

The flood kept coming.

Which is what floods often do.

They keep coming until your ark is

Lifted high above the earth.

The rain stops falling and the water recedes.

Somehow a piece of rock, high up, catches the boat and holds it fast.

When the tops of the mountains can be seen

The old man opens a window and sends out a raven.

We open windows and send out birds,

don't we,

when we wonder what is ahead

and whether dry ground is to be found?

We open windows and send out words

like ravens and doves,

Whose wings beat against the air

Words looking down for an olive tree, green and growing.

The old man waits at his open window

For the birds to return with some evidence

That God has remembered

And the floodgates of heaven have been closed.

So we look out, looking for what we cannot see,

Wondering what is beyond the here and now,

The known flood,

Sending out words like doves to find a starting place.

The Gap.

Is the Great Recession over?

That's the question business writers have been asking this week as the Dow Jones has tip-toed up over the 10,000 mark. Experts say the indicators show the economy is moving into the plus side of the ledger. Officially out of recession territory.

The word is that folks in the financial industry, especially around Wall Street, are paying stunning bonuses -again.

Yesterday I opened my quarterly pension report, and because of the rise in the stock market I'm doing much, much better than I was a year ago. As I smiled at this good news, I realized that younger folks -who have not yet had a chance to contribute to a pension system over a working life of 20 or more years- aren't in such good shape.

There is a growing gap between those who have and those who do not. That's not just true in our country. The New York Times this morning carried a column about the growing gap in Russia between the affluent world of Moscow and the crumbling economies of old, Soviet-era company towns out in the far regions of the country. People in some places are eating grass to stay alive.

The growing gap between haves and have nots is seen in other areas. Bob Herbert's most recent column recalls the days when a family of four could reasonably afford to attend an NFL or Major League Baseball game. He remembers going to NY Jets games with his Dad and watching Joe Namath throw passes to Don Maynard and George Sauer. Now, we have athletic palaces like the new Dallas Cowboys' stadium where ordinary people have been priced out of the game.

I don't think the growing gap between rich and poor, the employed and unemployed, is a good thing. I wouldn't even pretend to have the answer since our nation appears -to a layman- to be near broke and heading towards really broke every day.

Can a country be strong and healthy and whole if a few prosper and many are left behind?

Paul talks, in the New Testament, about how we are all connected. Like a body. Hands and legs and arms and hands and eyes and ears - all a part of one body. So what one part of the body experiences has an impact on the rest of the body.

I don't know exactly what that says to a nation and world economy where the gap seems to be growing, but I believe it means we are all in this together. And that somehow even when my pension numbers are jumping up each month, shoving cash in my pocket, things aren't good if the families down the street are still distressed and hopeless. When I was in high school our civics teachers reminded us that the strength of America was a strong and broad middle class. Where ordinary people could afford to buy a home, a new car, and send their children to college.

What will we do to close the gap?

You Can Do Your Best and Still Get It Wrong.

One of the first illusions to die, in middle age, is the youthful assumption that if you are bright enough, faithful enough, and wise enough - you'll avoid messing up.

We saw the previous generation doing their best, and we could see their blind spots. They made such foolish mistakes! They seemed so blind to injustice! We were going to do better. We would never send young men off to die in a military mistake. We would get this whole issue of racial injustice squared away in short order. Children in America -and the world- would never go to bed hungry at night when we got our chance to lead. The church, when we got the chance to lead, would be more creative...more faithful...and not so captive to traditional, middle class values. We would be more reckless, more radical for Jesus than those polite, white-glove-wearing, ushers decorated in suit-and-tie-and-white-shirt midwestern ushers of the 50's and early 60's.

There has been some progress made, but we still can get things so wrong.

Our church is in the middle of a major attempt to be radical for Jesus, and be more effective by doing fewer things better. People across the country talk about the church becoming "simple." This new emphasis is a good thing, I think. At Trinity we try so many things that sometimes we forget to focus on helping people grow in Christ.

A few months ago our staff talked about the request of an individual who wanted to lead an AA group in our church building. The man has no connection to the church, we didn't want to just provide a room to a disconnected group, and we wanted to do some sort of recovery ministry
- but we wanted to have that group connected to the church. So that people could, as they recovered, have the opportunity to follow Jesus. Not that they would be forced into being a United Methodists, or Christians, but that the group would be linked to the ministries of the larger church.

A friend heard about that decision and she -along with her husband- was furious. Puzzled. Hurt. Because they both have a heart of compassion, and understand that if the church isn't helping the least and the lost then it probably ought to take down the cross about the building.

We finally talked about all of this a week ago. She told me it was good we had waited to talk. "I would have been too angry if we had met earlier," she said, "and you would have been defensive. So this is good...I don't agree with the decision. But I feel heard."

I told her we may well have been wrong. I told her we tried to make the right decision for the right reasons -not to be high-handed or indifferent, but just wanted to make sure recovery ministries were connected to discipleship. We support hunger ministries, we have volunteers tutoring in the schools, we are working with folks out of work -we do a lot of good for God at Trinity but we may have blown this call. Missed this opportunity to do ministry.

We may have been wrong. I hate that. I hate that we make mistakes. As individuals and as a church and as followers of Jesus around the world. (And then, again, maybe it was the right call. If we said "yes" to every opportunity to do something good, in our large church, we would wreck ourselves.)

Wrong turns, missed opportunities, go with the territory, I fear. Make enough decisions, hang around and lead long enough, and you are going to make all kinds of mistakes. And I hate that. I would like to be able to bat 1,000 or hit every foul shot or sink every putt.

"Thanks for hanging with me...with us," I said. "Please keep praying with us...for us. That we'll do the right thing for God."

The whole conversation made me thing about an old Walter Wangerin story. Walter was a young pastor of an inner-city congregation down in Evansville more than 30 years ago. A prostitute was using the church's outside water source, after dark, to fill her own pails. Her water had been turned off so she used the church's water. Walter was outraged by this thievery and so he had the church turned off the outside water. A member of the church caught him. Shook her fingers at her pastor and told him he ought to be ashamed. Said that maybe the most important ministry the church had to that woman was letting her fill her buckets with the water the church had paid for. Jesus would have never turned that woman away, or turned that water off, the woman said.

Sometimes we get it wrong. And I am so thankful for all those lovers of Jesus who keep loving us, praying for us, and not giving up on us...or the church.

Glimmers.

When I've been on coasters at Cedar Point, there are times when you feel like the drop is never going to stop.

It's felt like that for the last few months in our community...and nation. Elkhart County has, as we long said, led the nation into financial recessions and we lead the way out to recovery. So things started to go bad in the middle of 2008, and now we are struggling with an actual unemployment rate of more than 20% in the city.

President Obama was sworn into the office, the government made some attempts to turn around the financial drop by solving the credit crisis, and the stock market kept heading south. In a series of spectacular dives.

All of this is going to take time.

Last week I told a friend that I thought it might be a good time to start buying stocks. This week the markets began heading in a positive direction. There have been a couple of articles in the paper about companies hiring...expanding. Retail numbers were up recently, and the supply of houses is down as existing units have been bought up.

Then, yesterday, I pulled into our front driveway, looked down, and saw crocuses beginning to poke through the soil.

Small things. Little slivers of light in a room that has been pretty dark. That is what I am seeing.