Lovingkindness with a Limp by Wil Triggs

Pastor Stringer is in the process of packing up his office for the move to Georgia. I don’t like goodbyes.

Even though we will both continue to labor for the good news, it won’t be the same. I’ve been a little wistful, revisiting sweet memories over the course of the last ten years . . .

Sharing Josh’s enthusiasm for books during his resident stint with the bookstall

Talking with old and new friends over south campus dinners when we met at Edison Middle School

Having a resident butcher who helped me know what to do with a tenderloin or how to brine a turkey

Heeding the call for 500 cinnamon rolls on Easter Sunday (that was Josh’s idea)

Laughing, almost crying and praying with him and other men at Men’s Bible Study. (I know; he’s not taking our Bible study with him, but we will miss him.)

Watching Lorraine and his daughter, Annie, share an air hug at the end of a recent Wednesday night

This week, Josh offered some books to the pastors and directors. Looking through the stack, I took one: Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology by Dr. Walter Elwell.

In February 2019, I wrote a Saturday Musing about the word lovingkindness and William Tyndale, the Bible translator who created the English word. This word has stuck in my head and heart since then.

So when I got to my office with my new used treasure, I immediately opened to the word "lovingkindness" to see what the author had to say about it. The entry runs a full column. Here is a bit of what it says.

“The translation of the Hebrew word hesed in the KJV,” the entry begins.“…The nature of the God of Israel is love. Even when Israel has sinned, they are assured that Jehovah is full of lovingkindness. …The God of the covenant shows his covenantal faithfulness by his loving commitment to his people, regardless of their responsiveness or righteousness.”

As I have ruminated on the word over time, it seems as if this loving impulse of God is so opposite of my human impulses. That distinct otherness of God, manifested most obviously and fully in Jesus. I want unconditional love from God, and I’m getting it, but I’m not so sure I want to extend that love personally to others.

Nevertheless, Elwell’s entry continues to a place I'm not sure I want to go:

“The God who is love also expects his people to be sanctified by demonstrating lovingkindness to their covenant God and to others.”

So Josh is leaving, and even in his departure, God is using him (and his dictionary gift) to remind me of who God is and how he is calling me to live. I can be like Christ. I can walk in hesed, but it’s lovingkindness with a limp.

The nature of God, so antithetical to my natural human instincts, is more wonderful and right than anything I can manufacture in my humanity. Somehow, the Spirit works in and through us. We trust and rejoice and move forward.

God calls the Stringers to a new place. I pray God’s lovingkindness will be manifest in this move and in their church. In a post on his website, Michael Card, who wrote a whole book on hesed, shares a definition for the Hebrew word: “when the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.”

Thanks Josh, for your lovingkindness with a limp. Thank you for giving, well, not everything exactly, but a lot.

I Saw One Hanging on a Tree - hymn by John Newton

On the day between Good Friday and Easter, it would do our souls well to sit in front of the silent tomb and confront our sin that swirled in the bottom of the cup that Jesus drank.

I saw One hanging on a tree,

In agony and blood;

He fixed His loving eyes on me,

As near His cross I stood.

Sure, never to my latest breath,

Can I forget that look;

It seemed to charge me with His death,

Though not a word He spoke.

My conscience felt and owned the guilt,

And plunged me in despair:

I saw my sins His blood had spilt

And helped to nail Him there.

A second look He gave, which said,

"I freely all forgive:

This blood is for your ransom paid,

I die that you may live."

Chorus

O, can it be, upon a tree

The Savior died for me?

My soul is thrilled, my heart is filled,

To think He died for me!

The Secret Runners by Wil Triggs

The first thing I do when I wake up is walk my dog Pongo. Most days I listen to the daily Bible readings as I walk, listening better on some days than others.

On the morning Daylight Saving Time pushed clocks forward an hour, we were walking in the 5:45 pre-dawn darkness again. As the Scripture reader continued reading from Numbers, we rounded the corner on Cypress, and my mind wandered to Run for the STARS.

Last year, the disappointments of shut down were piling up. Still, I remember Julie sounding more excited than bummed when she told me that it was going to be a virtual 5K.

Whatever that means, I thought. So I put duct tape across the bottom of my run yard sign, wrote “virtual run” on it with a thick permanent marker and pushed it into the grass feeling cheated. I love helping out at Run for the STARS—working at one of the water stations, being a course marshall, doing social media during the event, cheering everybody on. It’s all good and fun and totally impossible last year.

What a baby.

It was on one of the morning walks last year that I realized that there was one thing I could still do to help—and that was to actually run the 5K myself.

Absolutely not, I told myself.

I imagined myself running at a pace where four-year-olds to 94-year-olds would all be passing me by, all of them smiling and laughing. Meanwhile, something would happen to a foot or an ankle and I’d need to walk/limp the rest of the route. I knew everyone would be nice. But still. I didn’t want to come in first in my age-group, just not embarrass myself.

Or maybe I just prefer swimming.

I realize on a lot of levels, that the world isn’t about me and neither is a 5K. People think about their own running. Or their kids or parents or whatever. They don’t care about me in the 5K. That’s a good and normal thing.

So it was surprising when I came to realize that this kind of inner weirdness was going on in my head. I mean, do I really want to admit this to people? When I was in junior high, I gave up track for trumpet. I was good with that decision, but maybe there is something leftover from when I used to run sprints with the guy who stayed in track and won the all-city meet that year. I don’t know. It surprised me.

Here’s the thing. While walking with Pongo last year, I thought about how I could run the 5K whenever I wanted. No one would be running with me. I could time myself. I could run when I wanted, stop and walk for a bit, run again. It seemed about as low risk as could be. And it would help STARS. I realized that there was a part of me once that liked to run, and maybe that part of me might still be in there somewhere. Maybe I actually wanted to do this. It dawned on me that I could actually run/walk the 5K without an ounce of self-consciousness. I could just enjoy it and help STARS at the same time.

So that’s what I did.

I started by lengthening my walks with the dog. I figured out how many times round our neighborhood I needed to go to make a 5K. I actually ran on the scheduled race day. Early Saturday morning, I got up and ran. I was doing the Run for the STARS without being at the Run for the STARS. My dog ran/walked about two thirds of it with me and I was done before the 8:00 start time of the usual run. (By the way, online registration for this year's virtual run just opened.)

The pandemic shutdown made me do something I never thought I’d do.

There are all kinds of other examples I’ve heard about—taking up gardening, rearranging your sock drawer, writing actual letters, baking yeast breads, cooking more, putting together crossword puzzles, redoing a room in your house or apartment.

But those aren’t the only things people are doing. Some people are sneaking into services; they’re secretly running to churches. Even possibly College Church.

Like me and running, they don’t want anyone to see them. They don’t even want to admit it to themselves exactly. Or maybe they’ve never even thought about it before. Perhaps they’ve never been to a church, but they met someone who goes. Or they drive by on the way to work and they get curious. Maybe they have memories of church, good or bad, maybe mostly bad, and yes, Sunday morning rolls around and . . . click. Welcome to College Church. They can watch from bed, the couch, the deck, wherever.

Put yourself in their running shoes.

OK. No. Absolutely not. But what is it like?

You remember the thing that happened that made you not like church, or it’s not part of your tradition and it would just be too much for your family to take. Or you developed that mental objection or changed political parties, or the emotional hurt never quite healed, or life just got going in another direction until Sunday became a different kind of day than the day you go to church. You think Jesus is better than ok but you aren’t sure about the organized church.

I’ve thought this is such a great opportunity for people to turn to God.

Yet the church, well, self-inflicted wounds don’t necessarily make us seem like the most inviting and welcoming people on earth, which of course, we should be at some level. There shouldn’t be such a gulf between us and the God who loves us and the people we think of in our Jonah-like perceptions of our own personal Ninevites. Why doesn’t God get with our program?

Think about them in their homes. God is there. Jesus is alive. The Holy Spirit starts to get a little buggy. Leave me alone, you think.

We estimate that 1,845 viewers on 671 viewing devices joined the Sunday morning services through our livestream, YouTube and Facebook pages last week. And that was lower than usual. That’s a lot of people.

More and more I’m thinking about those Secret Runners like me who are clicking their way into church. How can they take the next step? What can we do to make it seem like a place worth going; are we as a people a group worth knowing? What about Jesus and forgiveness and this Easter thing coming up?

Tomorrow, as services begin, pray with me for those Secret Runners. Pray that this good news of Jesus would reach them and change their lives and ours.

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!

Behold, your king is coming to you;

righteous and having salvation is he,

humble and mounted on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Zechariah 9:9

Missing Out by Lorraine Triggs

At my high school in suburban Detroit, no one ever missed a Friday night home game--neither an October snow nor a Saturday morning SAT exam kept us home on a Friday night.

The only downside to the game for my church friends and I was the school dance. As pretty good Baptist kids, we obeyed our parents and didn't attend the dances, though we bemoaned the fun we were missing. No one went straight home after the fourth quarter ended.

Our ingenious high school pastor came up with the solution: Fifth Quarter. We no longer missed the fun. We had a place to go to after the game. At one point Fifth Quarter became more popular than the school dance among our school friends. I wish I could say it turned into a massive outreach event, but it didn't. Not that it mattered to us. We were happy that we were no longer missing the post-game fun.

That adolescent feeling of missing out still lingers after all these years. It surfaced earlier this month when I became eligible for the COVID vaccine. As a good resident of DuPage County, I registered on the DuPage Health Department website, the DuPage Medical Group’s app and the my.Walgreen’s app.

Meanwhile, my group of 1b peers kept posting, “Got dose one at Walgreen’s today.” All I got was the message, “No appointments available in your area for the next three days.” I was totally missing out of the vaccine. I upped my game and started checking emails from the health department and my.Walgreen’s app more frequently.

A good 1b friend said to try ZocDoc. It was the morning the United Center announced that it was a mass vaccination site. I clicked and clicked and clicked till I was no longer missing out. My first dose was scheduled at the United Center with the promise to cancel should I make another appointment. You would have thought I would be happy now.

Well, I was happy until I thought, The United Center? The traffic? The parking? The national guard checking me in? I want the vaccine at my Walgreen’s, the one I can walk to. I began missing out all over again.

One Saturday morning, just after six, my husband called out, "Quick. Open your Walgreen's app. It says appointments are available." I grabbed my iPad and saw those wonderful words on my screen: "appointments available in your area." In less than five minutes, I scheduled both doses. I was no longer missing out. I belonged to the insider's group.

That's the problem with missing out. We're either on the outside, complaining about what we don't have or on the inside, boasting about what we do have - and that can flip at any time. We end up a not so merry band of malcontents on our way to the kingdom, eyes fixed on each other, just in case we're missing out on anything.

It's like the disciples debating which one is the greatest. They were comparing themselves to each other, not wanting to miss out on a chance for greatness. And they were with Jesus. Stop looking at each other and look at who's with you! The all-saving, all-loving Good Shepherd.

When we look at ourselves instead of Christ, now that's missing out. When we take our eyes off ourselves to what's right in front of us, we see Jesus: image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, before all things, the one who holds all things together, head of the church. the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, preeminent, in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

We are not and never will miss out of anything. There is no room for anything else when we are in Christ on our way to the kingdom content in him.

The Author and Finisher of our Faith by Wendell C. Hawley

From his book, A Pastor Prays for His People.

Father God, author and finisher of our faith,

Source of every blessing we enjoy,

how great are our privileges in Christ Jesus.

Bountiful is your provision for all our needs -

our sin is that we do not appropriate what is available.

You are able to keep us from stumbling.

But as we review even this past week, we've stumbled so many times:

stumbled in relationships,

stumbled with wrong attitudes,

stumbled in temptation.

Forgive me for stumbling when I need not have.

Keep me from stumbling:

be my arm of support,

my strength,

my stability.

You have promised to present me blameless.

When I consider my faults - and think of being presented in glory, faultless -

I am overcome with gratitude to you, my Savior,

my Paraclete, my advocate - thank you, thank you.

You have said you will present me with great joy.

Oh Lord, help us to finish the race set before each one of us -

to persevere,

to walk in faith,

to love you supremely,

and like Abraham, to have an eye on that city

which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God,

that we might be presented with great joy.

Heaven rejoiced on the day of our repentance, and now you promise

rejoicing in our presentation!

All this is promised because you alone are our Savior -

we absolutely do not rely on anything or anyone but you.

So fulfill this promise to us today:

Unto him that is able to keep you from stumbling,

and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory,

with exceeding joy,

to the only God, our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power,

both now and ever.

Amen.

My History with Earthworms by Lorraine Triggs

Oakland Elementary School was seven blocks from my home if one were inclined to walk the most direct route there. My sisters and I had no such inclinations, even on rainy spring mornings. Especially on rainy spring mornings.

That was the time of day the earthworms were most plentiful, squiggling their way through the ground to the edge between grass and sidewalk. Plump reddish-brown earthworms, begging for attention from schoolchildren. What followed was probably not one of the finest moments in my life. Closing our umbrellas, we used the pointy end of the handles to see how many worms we could stab at a time. The loser had to pull off the worms with her bare hands and toss them back in the grass.
 
Fortunately, my history with earthworms evolved when Wil and I discovered vermiculture, worm composting. We actually paid for red wigglers to be shipped to the house. “They look exactly like the ones I used to stab,” I declared delightedly to Wil.
 
These worms, however, were destined for a brighter future. Wil carefully drilled holes in the bottom of a Rubbermaid bin and lined the bottom with shredded black and white newspaper. He then soaked a brick of cocoa mulch in a bucket of water and added that to the bin. The worms were ready for their home and a diet of coffee grounds, vegetable and fruit scraps and eggshells.
 
Then we waited. We waited for the worms to devour the food scraps and turn them into nutrient-rich compost. Some of the worms loved cantaloupe rinds, and after feasting on one, left a rind that almost looked like lace. We were fascinated with our new self-contained, garbage-eating pets.
 
After what seemed like an eternity, all that remained of the food scraps was the lace-like rind and a few pieces of eggshell, and in its place was dark rich compost—black gold for our garden. We began to remove the compost with our bare hands, uncovering earthworms as we went.
 
We kept scooping; the red wigglers, well, kept wiggling, through our hands into the thin layer of compost now covering the bottom of the bin. We could read our pets well and quickly covered them with shredded newspaper, cocoa mulch and fresh food scraps.
 
As we scooped out the compost, we observed a few things. First, and most obvious, was the lack of smell. The food scraps we tossed in the bin didn’t smell like rotten trash, even though they sat there for several weeks. Second, one has to make a time commitment to vermiculture. Good compost doesn’t happen overnight. Third, when exposed to the sunlight, the worms would borough deeper into the compost. They needed the darkness and the rotting fruit to produce that black gold for the garden.

Along with considering birds of the air and lilies of the field, perhaps we ought to consider the red wiggler. It doesn’t fear the darkness or potential rotting food scraps. Instead, it slowly goes through the rot and darkness and turns it into rich compost that I feed my sun-loving tomatoes and roses.
 
I might adopt the red wiggler approach to the darkness of trials and suffering I encounter. Rather than my usual fix-it-fast-and-fix-it-now approach, I will sit in the darkness (note to self: darkness is not dark to our loving Father) and know that this trial produces a rich compost of endurance, character and hope that does not put us to shame.
 
This rich compost—a mix of suffering and trust in God--also produces lives that look less like us and more like Christ, lives ready to share this compost with other weary souls sitting in a golden darkness.

Chocolate Pudding and Jesus by Wil Triggs

I was scanning through headlines online Thursday morning when this one caught my eye:

“Chocolate Pudding is the Answer”
 
Sometimes a good headline is hard to resist, pleading with you to click and read more.
 
It was right there on the same screen with others like:

• Biden signals he’s flexible on immigration overhaul

• How does Bill Gates plan to solve the climate crisis?

• Opening a new musical in Tokyo in a pandemic

• What to know about avalanche safety in the backcountry

Chocolate pudding and I go way back. When I was little, my mother’s chocolate pudding was a favorite, provided it was still warm from the stove, and before the skin formed on top. Even though she made it with cornstarch, it never had lumps.

If chocolate pudding is the answer, I wanted to know what the question was.

As a Bible school teacher, I’m used to people joking about Jesus being the answer to almost any question. And it’s true. Usually Jesus is a pretty good guess. Even if the answer I’m looking for is Joseph or Moses or Peter, I can usually shift into biblical theology and find a way to affirm the answer. So that background came to the fore. I imagined myself on Sunday morning responding, “No, Jesse, the answer is not Jesus. Chocolate pudding is the answer.”

How could that be?

So, yes, I fell for it. And clicked.

The two questions in the article were: “How are you?” and “What to cook?”

The writer told of a woman who gave trash collectors bags of home-baked cookies. Besides the pudding, it provided links to recipes for macaroni and beef casserole, kimchi fried rice, braised porkall’arrabbiataand more, then went on to describe daring to cook without a recipe at all, or only giving a description of how to cook chicken thighs with lemon, garlic and other ingredients.

Feeding people makes the world a little bit better.

“I think it’s more important than ever” says the chocolate pudding writer, “that we try to believe that people are operating mostly from a position of good faith rather than bad, and to respond to the stimuli the pandemic offers us accordingly.”

In some ways, the writer had me at chocolate, but I wasn’t so sure about that good faith thing. Most of the time I want to be nice to people, but we have been restraining ourselves in this season of sickness. We didn’t give our annual ice cream sauce Christmas gifts this year, and it’s still bothering me. Nevertheless, we kept our possibly tainted jars away from people during the holidays even though we’ve discovered a really good butterscotch recipe.

Good faith, I don’t know, doesn’t seem to fit the food we feed people or give away or don’t. But the thought of chocolate pudding was appealing.

Just an hour after reading this story, I read another that kind of spoiled the mood. Thoughts of comfort foods in this snowy pandemic February gave way to something else. Here is the brief report:

“Iranian Christian convert Ebrahim Firouzi was summoned from internal exile in early February 2021 to a court hearing, after which he was re-arrested. Ebrahim had already spent nearly seven years in prison and was completing a three-year internal exile 1,000 miles from home. He was summoned to court to respond to accusations of propaganda against the Islamic Republic in favor of hostile groups. In September 2020, Ebrahim received an unexpected package at the post office that contained Bibles. The Ministry of Intelligence was watching his mail, and when Ebrahim went to collect his package, they were waiting. They accompanied him to his house, where they confiscated laptops, cell phones and theology textbooks without a warrant. They also wanted to confiscate the Bibles, but Ebrahim told them he had been officially recognized as a Christian by the judiciary, and that he had a right to keep the Bibles.”

The article concluded “Before his court appearance, Ebrahim said, ‘I ask Christians to pray not for my acquittal, but for the great name of God to be glorified.’”

I checked some other sources and discovered that Ebrahim began a hunger strike on February 13, saying that he would not eat until charges were dropped.

Negotiating for the Bibles with authorities is something that I did in a totally different time and context, not for myself, but for Christians I was hoping to visit in a country whose authorities only wanted Bibles for profit in their black market.

So here's a third question. Not how are you. Not what to cook.

What food fills you?

Comfort food one fork or a plate at a time.

Or food that gives life with its invitation to taste and see, take and eat. Bread of life. This is my body.

And he said to me, “Son of man, eat whatever you find here. Eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me this scroll to eat. And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey. (Ezekiel 3:1-3)

Let this food comfort Ebrahim in the middle of his hunger strike.

Jesus, let me draw deep from the well of your water. Refresh and revive. Bring life through the food of your Word. May the nations fighting your Word break their souls’ hunger strike, see the truth of Jesus, and eat the food that nourishes and satisfies forever.

Pray with me and Ebrahim for the great name of God to be glorified.

Lover of Our Souls by Wendell C. Hawley

from A Pastor Prays for His People

Everlasting God, Lover of our souls,
Open our eyes to see your love for us—
your love which was established before creation
and continues unfailing and unending, even unto this very hour.
Your Word tells us that you had a plan for us a long, long time ago.
A love for us not based on 
performance,
or beauty,
or inherent value.
A love which sent a Savior to the unlovely,
the destitute,
the helpless,
the condemned.
A Savior whose love prompted him to say:
"Come unto me all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Lord, may you this day be the present help of all who turn to you,
whether hurt or ashamed,
whether sick or disheartened,
whether afraid or defeated,
whether troubled or angry.
You have come to change the human condition drastically, totally . . .
the sinful heart,
the stony heart,
the rebellious heart.

Holy physician, divine surgeon . . . work in our lives that our souls might prosper in spiritual health and vitality.
Thank you, Lord,
for hearing,
for answering,
for meeting every need.

Amen.