Homecoming

Yesterday,  my wife and I attended a significant “homecoming” at a significant church. In June of 1983 I was as despondent, discouraged and depressed as I had been in my life. I didn’t have a job or any job prospects. Two weeks prior I had not only walked away from my church, as far as I knew at that moment, I had walked away from the vocation that I had spent seven years in college and seminary preparing for.  Four years prior I had graduated with honors with a master of church music degree  and  then landed at the First Baptist Church of Rossville, Georgia as Minister of Music and Youth. While in my personal and vocational stupor, my phone rang and my friend, Reverend Gary Grogg, was on the other end of the line. Gary was then the pastor of the McFarland United Methodist Church in Rossville. The church is just across the street from Rossville First Baptist.  After a brief conversation, Gary asked me what my wife and I were going to do about going to church.  I told him that we had visited one church, but had made no definite plans.  He then said, “I was wondering if while you’re trying to figure out what you want to do, if you would come be our youth director”. I said, “Gary, I don’t think that I could be of much use to you right now.”  And then he said the words that would change the direction of my life. “David, I thought that we might be of some use to you.” So I took him up on his offer and got right to work as their part-time youth director.

I learned quickly that Baptists and Methodists do things a bit differently. At this time McFarland had both a Sunday morning service and an evening service, which was kind of unusual for a United Methodist church. It was not unusual for me as I had been going to church twice on Sunday my entire life (I think it was a former Southern Baptist who insisted that they have an evening service). So I did what I had always done and brought the youth group to the church service on Sunday evening.  After a time or two Gary asked me why I was bringing the youth group to church on Sunday night. I said, “Why wouldn’t I?” And he said, “That’s why we hired you as the youth director. Take them bowling.  Take them to the Pizza Hut. Do anything but come to church. They do that on Sunday morning.” For a while I felt like I was playing hooky, but we started doing all sorts on fun things on Sunday night.

It was around the issue of Sunday evening services that I learned another huge difference in Baptists and Methodists. As a staff member I was a member of a committee called The Council on Ministries. During one of those meetings the issue of Sunday night church came up. After some discussion the consensus was to discontinue the night service. Growing up as a Southern Baptist and having only served Baptist churches to that point, I was accustomed to monthly business meetings. Although any member of the church was welcome in those meetings, there was usually a small majority of members in attendance. But no matter how many showed up, this body could vote with a simple majority on various issues and that vote was binding for the whole church. Since the business meeting was open to the entire congregation, those in attendance were considered to be “the church.” Without a formal vote, the Council on Ministries decided to suspend Sunday night services. First of all it bothered me that there was not a showing of the hands majority vote and it bothered me more that these few people made this decision for the whole church.  I asked the group of about eight people, “Shouldn’t we take this decision to the church?”  Gary said, “We are the church“. In other words the congregation empowered its small committees to make decisions that were binding for the entire body of believers. The decisions didn’t have to go through the deacons or the business meeting.

As the weeks turned into months, I forgot how miserable I was and got into the business at hand with my youth group of about fifteen souls.  They were a great group and responded positively to the teaching and activities that I provided.  During my years of youth ministry as a Baptist it was not unusual for me to more or less manipulate the group to tears with an emotionally touching activity. During an informal meeting with Gary, as my pastor and overseer, he said, “I notice a lot of crying as your group leaves your meetings.”  I said, “Yes, it is not unusual for that to happen”.  Gary again made a comment that proved to be a lifetime teaching moment for me. He said, “David, isn’t laughter a valid emotion?” Point well taken.

After two years, which became my rehab assignment, I was tempted to accept a part-time music leadership position at a local Baptist church. This larger congregation gave me an opportunity to use my music skills. They also offered me a much larger salary.  I would not learn for several years how hurt this youth group was with me for leaving them in the middle of a meaningful ministry for us all.  I was to remain at that church, the Signal Mountain Baptist Church,  off and on for nearly twenty years.  After resigning that position, my wife and I took some much deserved time off from church and then a member of the McFarland UMC invited us to visit McFarland again. We did just that and stayed there for seven more years. The first three years I was just a member. Then after their music director left, I led the music there for another four years.  That was a marvelous time for all of us. I retired from music ministry from that church about four years ago.

At homecoming yesterday, my wife and I took a seat on the pew behind one of my “youth.” Before the service she introduced us to her children and said, “David is my old youth director.”  I didn’t mean to embarrass her, but I did with my quip of “Yes, her very old youth director.” Her face turned a little red and I immediately regretted my unnecessary quip and tried to make up for it as best I could. The guest speaker for that service yesterday was none other than Reverend Gary Grogg. He brought a sermon on keeping “the main thing the main thing.” With controversy raging among United Methodists over the issue of gays in ministry, the “main thing” he concluded, is love and inclusion of all people. I’m sure he carefully considered taking a public stand on the issue at hand with United Methodists. The woman in front of us was not the only “youth” in attendance and it was so good to see them and talk about “old” times with them and their grown children.

The depression I was experiencing in 1983 was not to be diagnosed and treated for nine more years. It’s a wonder that I had done as well as I did in those two churches over all those years.  

Last thing. “Homecoming” took on a much deeper meaning yesterday when one of the saints of McFarland UMC passed away yesterday morning. That death put a pall on the service and it was a muted celebration. Who knew that when Gary told me, “We hoped that we could be of use to you” that all of it could mean so much for so many people. Rossville First Baptist Church closed its doors about three years ago. The Signal Mountain Baptist Church has since also closed its doors. But with the significant deaths of a person and two churches, life goes on. For that I’m deeply grateful to still be among the living.  And yes, tears are also a valid emotion.

In a Different Light

“I have said that I don’t know what I should have, and you probably don’t know what you should have. But I think one of the most powerful things we can do for one another is to tell our stories. This is what I have; this is what I give away; this is what I feel is right for me at this moment. But let me really tell you in detail. If we start telling these stories to one another, and if we listen to the stories, I believe healing will take place, and we will be given insight as to what is appropriate and what is right.”

–Gordon Cosby, “How Much is Enough?” in By Grace Transformed

Several years ago I hired a social media specialist to take a look at my Blogspot blog. Several years before that, when I started blogging here, my son helped me with its title--”In a Different Light”. “Light” can be looked at in so many different ways. There’s visible light that allows us to see. There’s ultraviolent light that would kill us except for the earth’s protective ozone layer. There’s the spectrum of light as seen in a prism or a rainbow. There’s light as it travels as a particle and a wave (thanks Albert Einstein). There’s “the speed of light”, 186,282 miles per second. There is the origin of light, our sun, that takes eight minutes to travel from itself to the earth. Then there is the metaphor, to see something in a different light.

The specialist read several of my blog posts and had this to say about them. He did not mean what he said as a compliment; he meant it as a criticism of my writing.  He said, “David, a blog needs a theme, a purpose. It needs to be a blog about dogs or cats. It needs to be a blog about science or photography. It needs a central theme. Your readers need to know what to expect when they open your blog. Your blog is just ‘a slice of life’ “.  After I paid him and after he left, I gave his comment a lot of thought. I considered to just stop writing altogether or to write and not post it to Facebook. And then it occurred to me that the theme of my blog, davidrhelms.blogspot.com, is in fact “a slice of life.”  That’s the way it started with the life and death of my beautiful mixed shepherd, Maggie, and that’s the way it continues today. The central them is me. My experiences past and present, my thoughts, my feelings, my hopes and dreams, my science, my music, my photography, my opinions, my, my, my. So am I a literary narcissist? Is my ego as big as the sun? Isn’t there something my blog could be about besides me, myself and I? Sure, it could be about hundreds of things, but it’s not. When you read “In a Different Light, “ you read about me.

Recently Blogspot changed something important. If its analytics are correct, my readership dropped from several hundred readers to less than twenty. As I stated a few weeks ago here, I again considered “What’s the point of writing if so few will read?” And then my counselor helped me to remember how it started with Maggie’s death.  I was not writing for you; I was writing for me. Isak Dinesen so wisely stated,  “Any sorrow can be borne if it can be made into a story”. Although I have tried to interject into this “slice of life” much joy and humor, a central theme has been my own pain, my own losses and grief.

There are plenty of blogs about dogs and cats, science and photography, children and grandchildren, but you can’t find my “slice of life” anywhere else but here. “But I think one of the most powerful things we can do for one another is to tell our stories.” I hope that at least every now and then reading my stories has been as powerful for you as it has been for me while writing my stories. When I posted recently that I was thinking about hanging it up, a reader from my high school days said after reading the next essay, “If you had stopped writing, then we could not have read that” (what I had just posted that apparently meant something to him).

In the quote above, Cosby said that as we tell our stories, healing takes place. I know that telling them has brought healing for me and I can only hope that my stories have encouraged you to tell your stories and that healing has taken place in you, as well. When we think about it in a different light, we realize that our memories, our stories are all we’ve got.

“A slice of life”, a moving slice of me. All due respect to my social media specialist, but I believe my theme has been useful. It certainly has been useful for me.

Your God is Too Small

“I walk in a space of gratitude.” Jurnee Smollet-Bell

I read J.B. Phillips' Your God Is Too Small as a teenager so I remember little or nothing about it.  Just the title, though, still gives me pause.  No matter how big you think God is, S/He is much bigger than that. I use S/He just to make the point that She is not He and He is not She. God, as far as I can figure, is not a human being and therefore isn’t of either human gender.  Then what is S/He?  Who knows?

Pantheists believe that God is no more than “everything that was, is and is to come”. Then to a pantheist God is not a person, but an accumulation of more things than be counted(think atoms and galaxies).  Astronomers tell us that our known universe contains billions upon billions of galaxies each of which contain millions and billions of stars. But my dad once said to me, “Even if we could send a man or a probe to the farthest reach of the universe, its very edge, at a distance that can’t be comprehended, then what would be beyond that?” But since God, we believe, created everything that is from nothing, then doesn’t S/He have to be bigger than that? From the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 we see that God created everything. So then God pre-existed “His” creation and is bigger than that.

For eons humans and organizations have struggled with a name for God. To make the point that “God” can’t be contained with a name, “S/He” has been called thousands of things.  Alcoholics Anonymous, a secular organization, struggles with this and refers to God as “your Higher Power” (name “Him” whatever helps you). Eastern religions, instead of referring to the Christian “Trinity”, refer to the “Higher Power” as “the God of 10,000 things.” The native tribes who still practice their native religions tend to refer to the Christian God as “The Great Spirit”. Moses struggled with what to say to the Pharaoh as to Who sent Him and God said, “Tell him that ‘I Am’ sent you.”  Therefore, God Himself said “Just tell old Pharaoh that ‘I exist’!”

Biblical names for God include YHWH (Yahweh), Elohim, Jehovah and dozens of other names. Modern Jews sometimes refer to God as “the Name” or “G-d” to keep from spelling out a name that is too small. Taoism refers to this “Higher Power” as the Tao (pronounced dow). But this “religion” says that if you can name “the Tao” then it’s not “the Tao”. This “Entity” can’t be named or contained. In the Jewish creation story God says, “Let Us make man in ‘Our’ image.”  Even God struggled with what to call Himself so S/He just said “Our”.

Several years ago, to use a name larger than “God”, I adopted the Lakota Sioux name of Wakan Tanka. My prayers included an invocation to Wakan Tanka. However, recently I learned that the most famous of all of the Sioux, Sitting Bull, suggested that Wakan Tanka was the exclusive property of the Lakota Sioux and that other tribes shouldn’t use it. Then so much for that name! That God is very small.

So what does any of this matter to you? It should matter everything to you. When you bow your head in prayer, you need to be invoking the Presence of Something that is bigger than you. Otherwise, why bother to pray? If, “God” works for you then by all means pray to God. If your “God” is bigger than that, then you’re back to the problem I’m referencing. Even with its limitations, I still gravitate to Wakan Tanka, who is at least as big as the Universe, and that’s big enough for me.  I don’t think it’s all that important what you call “God” as long as you call this “Higher Power”, this “Great Mystery” something that is big enough to take care of you and those that you love.

There is a three year old boy in my life who, until recently, referred to himself as “here my am.” So I offer up  “Here My Am”  to be as good as any name for G-d and better than most. “Dear, Here My Am... Please hear my prayer today. In Your name I pray. Amen.”

What to do in case of time...

“Time is the measure in which events can be ordered from the past, through the present into the future, and also the measure of durations of events and the intervals between them.”  Internet sources.

Two weeks ago I gave up the last vestiges of a job.  Over the past few years my vocational life moved from full- time (40 hours) to part-time(32 hours) to more part-time (24 hours) to a commission job (with no set hours) to no job at all. People already are asking me, “Won’t you get tired of that?”

 

Years ago I was on a fishing trip with my dad. This was one of the many fishing experiences that I enjoyed with him either at my granddad's pond or in Florida. When we went to the family beach house at Laguna Beach, Florida (west of Panama City), he fished all day every day that we were there.  I always joined him for at least one of those days. This particular day instead of fishing for speckled trout, we were fishing for flounder on East Bay (near West Bay). Flounder fishing involved catching live bait (small fish) in a net and then heading to his favorite flounder “fishing hole”(a particular place on the bay). We took the boat above where we intended to catch the flounder, shut off the engine and drifted through the “fishing hole.” We repeated this process all day until we caught enough fish to take back for my mom to fry for the family. She always served the fresh fish with grits and plenty of sweet tea.  It was a day much like most days on East Bay; it was absolutely beautiful. While watching  my father fish and considering that he did that all day every single day that we were in Florida, I asked him, “Dad, don’t you ever get tired of this?”  He didn’t say a word.  He slowly reeled in his line, saw that his hook was empty, reached into the bait well and baited his hook, threw the line into the water, sat back in his seat, lit a Salem, took a couple of draws, slowly and deliberately looked all around at the water and  the sky, looked back at me, smiled  and asked, “Crockett, what’s there to get tired of?”

So to answer the question posed to me, “Won’t you get tired of that?” I say, “What’s there to get tired of?” I live less than three miles from the Catoosa County Library, less than five miles from Barnes and Noble, less than one atom from my computer that offers me Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Abebooks. This computer has a word processor that allows me to type letters, essays for my blog and books.  My synthesizer is in the next room. We(two people) have three televisions connected to a cable with a service that offers several hundred channels, On Demand movies and Netflix. We are less than six weeks to the MLB playoffs and three weeks to the college football season. There is enough music on YouTube and Spotify to satiate all my listening needs. So staying at home or driving within a five mile radius there is enough to keep me busy for the rest of my minutes, hours and days on planet Earth. And all that is before I drive to the airport less than eight miles from here and fly to anywhere in the United States or the world. I don’t expect to get bored of living anytime soon. All of a sudden with nothing better to do, there doesn’t seem to be enough time in a day to do not much of anything in particular. I just have too many good choices for how to spend my discretionary time(it’s all discretionary time).

But with all that said, the hardest question for me to answer these days is, “So what have you been up to lately?”

The Miracle of the Turnip Greens

From 1970 through about 1972, I  lived inside of a one person religion that I created. I thought, as all people who create a religion think, that I had stumbled into the ultimate relationship with God. I thought that I was on the path of personal righteousness and of ultimate truth. The actual truth is that I started down a path toward my own destruction.  With the encouragement of my youth director, I read the book In His Steps by Charles Sheldon. The book is fiction, but it reads like it could all have happened as recorded. After a dramatic encounter that changed his life, the pastor in this book admonished his flock that before every action they should ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?”  Or as we have come to know it, WWJD. On the surface this seems like such a good thing to do. This seems like the obvious thing a true follower of Jesus would do, i.e. if I want to know what to do next, just ask myself, “What would Jesus do?”  Nothing less. Nothing more. So that very day, I decided to do exactly that.

I dove in and was in over my head in a matter of days. When I asked myself “What would Jesus do?” and applied it to my life at the time, I found several problems right out of the gate. For starters, I was the lead singer in a local garage band. And we were pretty good as garage bands go.  When I asked myself if Jesus would sing rock songs in a band, the answer was a definite “no!”. My inner voice of Jesus told me to not only quit the band immediately, but to tell them why I was quitting. At the next rehearsal after we were all set up and ready to go, I got my friends’ attention and told them that God didn’t want me to sing in the band any longer.  They looked at me like I was from outer space. Dan, the organizer of the band asked me, "David, can't God use you through this band?" And I said, "No."  Billy, the drummer, looked at the others and said, “I told you he was going to do something like this.” As I got in my car to leave, I was on cloud nine! I had now rid my life of everything that Jesus wouldn’t want me to do. It was the official beginning of a life of eternal bliss in the "perfect will of God."

But by the time I got home I had thought of something else. I had the male lead in the school musical Annie Get Your Gun.  As Frank Butler, I was the hard living, gun slinging, whiskey guzzling hero of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The only person badder than me was my side kick Annie Oakley who could shoot circles around anybody. In one song, “I’m a Bad, Bad Man” I sang, “There’s a girl in Tennessee who’s sorry she met up with me. Can’t go back to Tennessee I’m a bad, bad man.”   I asked myself, “Would Jesus play this role and have this ‘testimony’ before His school and His community?”  Of course not?  What does a play like this and a role like this have to do with the Kingdom of God !!? Nothing.  All of a sudden it didn’t matter that the curtain would go up in just a few weeks. It didn’t matter that there was no one else in the school as musically qualified to sing that role, as gifted as I to act that part, that even if there was there was no time for him to learn the part.  All that mattered was that Jesus would not be Frank Butler and I needed to quit the play.

Once I was standing in the parking lot of a transmission shop in my hometown of Enterprise, Alabama. The man I was talking with asked me to pray for him.  So we both got down on our knees in the parking lot and prayed out loud as customers drove in and walked past us.  Jesus must have been proud of me. But  during my senior year at Enterprise High School, it got worse and worse. Would Jesus study American history? Would he study trigonometry?  No he wouldn’t. So I stopped studying and read my Bible instead. My grades suffered and my relationships with my classmates and teachers suffered. My mother went to my youth director and said, "I want the old David back." He told her that I was indeed on a "path of righteousness" and to not worry about it. I could  go on and on about the things I said and did during those years of WWJD. Some of it was very strange. All of it was very uncomfortable.  I descended into a private hell on earth. It was a spiritual black hole. Light went in but no light got out.  All in the name of Jesus.  I could go on and on with the things I said and did in the name of WWJD, but I think you get the idea.

The irony of my attempts at being Jesus is that Jesus never asked me to be Him. He asked me only to allow Him to be Him in me. I couldn’t do what Jesus did. Jesus healed the sick, turned the water into wine, raised the dead and walked on water. I couldn’t have done any of that. But there is one thing Jesus did every day that I could have done. On any given day, in every situation, Jesus did the loving thing. So instead of WWJD, the question becomes WDJD, What DID Jesus Do? He loved people. All I needed to have done through those horrible years was to love people. To always do the loving thing in every situation.

If you’re God and you love someone in agony of his own making trying to do the will of God, how do you get through to him?  Several things happened over a period of weeks, months and years, but the most dramatic occurrence involved a bowl of turnip greens at my kitchen table. My little sister sat at the end of the table (so was always asked to get the tea). My mother sat beside me. My brother sat across from me and my father sat beside him across from my mother. As usual in the summer, mother had prepared a dinner of meat from my grandfather's cattle farm out the New Brockton Highway and fresh vegetables from my Granny’s farm out the Damascus Road. Yes, the Damascus Road.  As Mom was passing the turnip greens to me, and I loved turnip greens, the thought occurred to me, “Do I know that it is God’s will for me  to eat turnip greens?” Since I wasn’t sure, I passed them across the table to my brother. My mother took note.  My brother was not as holy as I was. He was not on a path of WWJD, but was a college student mostly away from home doing things that college students away from home do. My mother asked me, “David, you don’t want any turnip greens?”  And I just said “No”.  As my brother passed the turnip greens to Dad, he said the most ridiculous thing that I had ever heard in my life. He said,  “Nah. God doesn’t want me to eat any.”  I thought, “Why would God care whether or not my unholy brother ate turnip greens?”  And then I thought, “Why would God care if I ate turnip greens?” I asked my Dad to pass me the turnip greens and I ate a huge helping. That day at my kitchen table with my family and that bowl of turnip greens was the beginning of an awareness and a healing that continues to this day. “What would Jesus do?”  If Martha had fixed turnip greens, he would have eaten them. It would have been the loving thing to do. Martha, Mary and Lazarus were his friends. Mary may have sat at His feet, but Martha had gone to a lot of trouble for Him. 

For reasons that I won’t get into, I stayed in that play.  I didn’t quit. But instead of enjoying the three performances, I was very concerned as I sang about not being in “the perfect will of God.” The next weekend I sang in a revival at a local Baptist church.  I sang “I’ll Tell the World that I’m a Christian.” During the “invitation” the student who had done my make up in Annie Get Your Gun “came forward” and “professed Christ as her Savior.” After the service she told me that it was because of my influence that she had “accepted Christ.” As much as that helped her and me at the time, now I don’t try to convert people to Jesus. I just try to love people and leave the rest to Him. As I read the gospels, Jesus didn’t try to convert people either. He just loved people and tried to help them. Jesus was a Jew. He never became a Christian. Why would Jesus need to be a Christian to do the things He did? He was Jesus.

That play was in 1970, 49 years ago and yet I’m still embarrassed for myself that I behaved the way I did.  I’m embarrassed that I caused the director so much agony and anxiety. I'm embarrassed for myself that I prayed on my knees at that transmission shop embarrassing people and making a fool of myself and my friend. I’m embarrassed about all of it.  But this is 2019 and nobody remembers any of that but me.  At a high school reunion years ago and years after I graduated, my classmates remembered me as a kind and loving person. I’m grateful for that  as I had feared the worst.

So you want to be “in the center of God’s will?” You want to “do what Jesus did?”  Then love and forgive the people who come across your path today. Don't try to be Jesus. He only wants you to be yourself. After all, He made you. And by all means, eat some turnip greens.