Quietly mind your own business

"Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you..." 1 Thessalonians 4:11

What version of church growth did the apostles use?  I've had some teaching which says if people aren't aggressively evangelizing, they are essentially disappointments to God's kingdom.  Granted, they are anticipated, as the 80%, give or take, who produce little or no fruit.  "How about Bob of Thessalonica?  Is he multiplying?"


In fact, the Thessalonians did have expansive impact. Their way of life was noteworthy:

" 6You became imitators of us and of the Lord; in spite of severe suffering, you welcomed the message with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. 7And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. 8The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia—your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it," 1 Th 1:6-8

Apparently there is less of a split between living a quiet, fairly normal life, and being effective for the Kingdom than might be assumed.  Yes, there are heroes living very unusual and sacrificial and effective lives focuse on "kingdom advance", but those stories are not meaningful for their drama.  Paul told the Corinthians as much in his great treatise on Love that there is something more than standing out as specially knowledgeable, gifted, sacrificial.  The issue is in love, which he exposits as a type of embodied shalom; contentedness.


not bragging.  not keeping score.  looking for good, for themselves and others.  


Living a quiet life, miniding one's own business essentially is the mission for all Christians.  The bridge between aggressive evangelism and private faith is not in tactics it is in treasures.  When our business is treasuring God, and those he has created and the world in fallen frustration looking forward to a day of freedom, then our big and small ways matter and are enough.

and then he wants Isaac

"and then he wants Isaac" wrote a friend working overseas.  I cannot get the challenge of impermanence out of my head.  I see it everywhere.  My friend describes it in light of sacrificially going to the unreached, leaving a dynamic career to do it, and being on his fourth major assignment, partly due to being punished by repressive governments forcing him out of where he really wanted to make a difference.  Now he serves faithfully, away from what was familiar when he started serving overseas but also away from the dramatic ideal of upg (unreached people group) that was the identifiable treasure he launched out to pursue.  Now, more ministry than 'm*i*s*s*i*o*n', the Isaac of clear significance is on the altar.

Trust and obey, there is no other way.  But trust and obey is not a threshold, unfortunately, to pass on through to the other side.  It is a moving challenge, it is a part of anicca, havel, impermanence in a fallen world of rebellion.  It is the burden of counter revolutionary loyalists.  It is the story we must live if we are to live well.  It is hard.

Christmas impermanence

We did it.  We shopped, cooked, pressed through traffic, went to a service, socialized; we Christmassed.  Now it is boxing day in a land without boxing day.  It's just the day after Christmas and a week before New Year.  Anicca (impermanence) is a teaching easily accessed on a day like this, and yes, it can lead to oppressive clouds of dukkha.

In Christian work there are missions and their are ministries.  Ministries are open ended, ongoing service efforts.  Missions are objective defined, an accomplishment to strive for.  The Christmas holiday time functions like a mission, but life is more of a ministry.  Today I want to find a mission to pursue, if for nothing else to elevate faith in something better than the present existing safely, even if it's harbor is beyond the next hill.  I don't want to be forced to feel that the mix of good and bad around me is more or less all there is.  I need to believe that the limitations of the good of the day and the impositions of the troubles of the day are what is temporary, and that a future reckoning will show a boon of goodness.

Pulling back to the broadest view, one of eschatological completion and grandeur, delivers that idea, but it is so difficult to access with feeling in tow.  Shorter cycles of deliverance through exodus and entrance in to abundance through conquering and holding are needed.  I need a mission, even if that mission is to get to where ministry ebbs and flows in unashamed contentment.

After _______ ....

I can detach.  I have had to at times.  I've lived in Spain, China, Thailand, England and a variety of US states.  Leaving has meant detaching from friends, not only during the days before facebook, or even e-mail.  Detaching is often necessary in order to free up focus to attach in a new place, with new relationships, tasks and experiences.

But detachment is never comprehensive.  There are always aspects of connection, all the more apparent since electronic social media expansion.  As years accumulate, so do partial detachments.  Midlife, then, is not just a rethink of what could have been etc., it is also a rethink of what needs to be more thoroughly detached vs. what has been neglected and needs attention.  My crisis of focus during my sabbatical is on this puzzle.

I want simplicity, but I'm not ruthless.  I hope that part of the reason is some degree of kindness and not just weakness.  I care about most of the interrupted projects and relationships I've left scattered.

What I do know is that part of my inability to achieve simplicity at this point is lack of clarity of what is next and how to pursue it.  My life is looking more like a bush than a tree.  Branches shoot up and out from the ground in every direction.  I want to be more like a tree with a trunk that raises the branches up; a central pillar of purpose and identity with diverse implications.

The next step toward that is too much like the last few steps.  I think about getting through whatever is current, either by determination or delight, but delaying definition.  After ________ I'll focus.

As Christmas becomes the _________, I've decided to decide.  I want to write.  Writing is like language learning, you have to go through poor fluency to get to good fluency.  And so, I will write and write and write.  I need it, and if it ends up being fluent, all the better.

say something.

This Sunday I get to speak at a church outside of Austin.   Leander: "The population was 7,596 at the 2000 census. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated the 2008 population at 25,424".  It sounds like a place that will have a mix of old timers who were living in a small town now swallowed up by newcomers. Transience; impermanence; change.  Very Buddhist concerns.


Currently I'm reading Karen Armstrong's BUDDHA.  She is very enjoyable to read, touching on facts with good insights, her own views shared but not stressed... she is helpful.  What I've gotten today is that there was massive shift going on towards urbanization and mercantilism with a focus on individualism, over and against agrarian traditional cycles.  The Upanishads were a reworking of Vedic thought to express the idea of the ethical life over and against ritual.  "How to live a good life, how to be a good person" sort of thing.  I keep coming back to that.

So Gotama is living on the edge of flux and was rather bold to launch off in this innovative pursuit.  That's the tone right now in the book.  I'm reading it because I'm wanting to keep refreshing my understanding of Buddhism and of questions of how to live well.

What are the questions that the folks in Leander are asking?  Not sure.  What do they want to hear from the guy who went of to Asia?  That every day in every way things are getting better and better?  Typically what I hear from other cross-cultural workers who speak is that they wrestled through the decision to leave home and go serve the Lord, it was a struggle coping with living one stop from the end of the world, but that God was generous and they had a couple of personal breakthroughs.  I've lived that, so I could go with that.  But I'm kinda wanting to do something more.

I have an odd way of using preaching not as a way to underline truth as much as a way to explore questions.  Like writing this obscure blog, I do slightly better thinking in front of others than just inside my own head.  There is some stabilizing effect by involving others (sometimes).

So the big question for me is how to contain the whole (unity) in the personal (diversity).  How do I live my own life in a way that does not presume to solve the over-arching questions of the world (delusion, that.), but does not simply avoid them and settle for amusement and personal happiness management (also helped greatly by cagey delusion).

The next big thing for me is to tidy up my understanding of the intrinsic limitation of knowledge.  That is then combined with the inescapable responsibility to go forward with acting in life in real time and space.  How do I bumper-sticker that?  "Ignorance is no excuse for inaction".  Too bad Nike has already taken the ultra-concise version.

BIBLICAL truth of limited epistemology.  I'll make that it's own post I suppose.

5 Columns site to be launched

The Easter Story Board is something I worked with "CStanley" to get an idea up and going.  It has since become "The 5 Columns" and "Crown Heart World".  Next week we are going to get together and try and give an adequate web presence from which to share the simple telling and some more intricate aspects of looking at the world through this little pictogram.

http://crownheartworld.com/

Mississippi Mud

Drove from Houston to Baton Rouge.  From Louisiana to Hernando, Mississippi.  Had a free day and drove to Memphis.  Drove over to Arkansas and back.  Drove to Lafayette.  Now in Houston.

Crossed the Mississippi a lot.  Walked beside it.  It was the same and different.  It was anicca; impermanence displayed.  Same old river as Huck Finn stories.  Same Same but Different.

Took a moment at this monument for a man who could not swim, but could pilot a boat.  He bravely rescued a bunch of people when a luxury boat sank.  He was black, so it was particularly noteworthy (apparently).  

I wondered if the folks in Memphis were at all uncomfortable with the wording of the monument.  Negro.  Worthy Negro.  A Very Worthy Negro.  Well done Zev.