Good Reads

As four workman were working on my on my air conditioner, installing a new evaporator coil in the attic, I heard a knock at the door. When I got to the door there was no one there. What were there was two packages.The first one was a gratis copy of Spencer's Burke new book, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity. It is the pre-released, pre-proofed copy. Written across the cover are the words "UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS. NOT FOR SALE." I guess this is the copy that they send to a small group of people to read the book before its release and create buzz. Since the book has been out a while, I guess I won't be much good for pre-release buzz. What I can do is tell you all about it and encourage you to pick up a copy.

The second package contained the newest installment of THE VOICE Bible project entitled: The Dust Off Their Feet. Brian McLaren is the principle writer with great contributions from Chris Seay, Kerry Shook and many others.

You're gonna want to purchase every installment of THE VOICE. Every time I open the pages of the first few installments--The Last Eyewitnesses and The Dust Off Their Feet--I'm captivated by the beauty of the words, thoughts, and images. It really is a project that is recapturing the grandness of Scripture.

Thursday Morning

Thursday mornings are hard at my house. On Thursdays my wife leaves for work about the time I wake up so I have to wake, feed, and dress both myself and my daughter for school and work. Then we have to fight 20+ miles of Houston traffic to get to pre-school--which is also in the building where I work--before the 2-year-old teacher looks at me with great disdain for showing up late. Often I find myself dreading Thursday mornings. But this morning, when I got to work I read again a post I placed on this blog in May 2004 and remembered the beauty of being a father.
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Don't you hate mornings? I do! I have never understood those people who jolt out of bed and bound around the house before 6:00 am each morning. Are they crazy? Do they not have good dreams? My wife works with a woman who wakes up every day around 4:00 am. She practices her piano--which I'm sure her husband loves,--eats breakfast, reads the daily paper and gets to the office before 6:00. Why? Surely there must be some mental dysfunction going on there. But, I guess some folks are just morning people.

I am not one of those people! I am a night person. In my view the world is backward. We should sleep in the day and be up at night. I understand why our inner clocks work the way they do, but I'm not a farmer or a rancher. I don't need the daylight to get things done. The earliest anyone needs to get up is 10:00 am. Anything that needs to be done before that can wait. Right?

Well, that's how I used to feel.

Now our daughter, Malia, wakes up every morning between 7:30 and 8:00. From the living room we can hear her begin to stir. Turning, stretching, yawning and sighing are signs that her new day is about to begin. My first instinct is to race in to get her, but to do that would mean missing the magic. When she first stirs, she's not quite fully awake. The patient man is rewarded if he can wait for a few minutes until she is fully awake but she hasn't realized she is alone. If you go in her room then, you will see the glory of the sun in her eyes. Standing there, I watch her roll over when she senses the presence of someone in the room, her eyes blink as she recognizes a familiar and loving face and then a smile only given to angels inches across her face. It is magic!

Right then, a overwhelming feeling of joy and love floods from the heavens into my heart. My only response is to pick her up, kiss her and tell her how much she is loved. It's a feeling so far beyond words, that one feels silly even trying to describe it. No matter how difficult it was to put her to sleep the night before, or how much she fused the previous day, or how many diapers there were to change, the love greatly outweighs the pains (if those things can even be called pains).

There is something mysterious and magical about the morning, something glorious. Each day is a new beginning, a fresh start to revive our lives. Malia has taught me that mornings are God's perfect painting of renewal and blessedness.

Standing over her this morning, these words came to mind:"Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." (May 2004)
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Those are beautiful words if I say so myself. Here are some beautiful words Malia shared with me this morning as I went into her room: "Daddy, I'm poopy."

How things change! She is still glorious!

Ted Haggard

This weekend, while I was lying sick in my LA-Z-BOY, I wrote a brilliant, thoughtful and sensitive post for this blog about Rev. Ted Haggard. In the post I wrote about ways to think about all this if the allegations made by male prostitute, Mike Jones, concerning Haggard were true and ways to think if they were false. It ended discussing the nature of people to sometimes go to public battle about private issues--our way of taking a battle that we are fighting on the inside to others in the hopes that defeating it outside us would help us defeat it within us.

Since I started that post more information about Haggard has been exposed and to post that blog now, knowing what we think we know, would seem silly.

One thing I can say is that the Haggard situation, regardless of what you think of him or drug-use or homosexuality or politically involved evangelicals, is just sad. It's sad for Haggard, his wife, their five kids, their 14,000 member church, Mike Jones (a man who made a living as a male prostitute and drug procurer), the church, the witness of Jesus, and everybody else. Heck, I've felt sad about it all weekend and I don't know the man or anybody that he knows. It's all so terribly sad.

Out of Ur--a blog hosted by Christianity Today and one of my daily reads--has posted a thoughtful article about Haggard. Read it here.