This New Life

1. I turned on PBS last night thinking I’d be watching another episode of “Miss Scarlet & the Duke.” Instead, they aired a program called “Dolly Parton & Friends: 50 Years at the Opry.” I’m not a huge country music fan, but one can admire the career that Parton has had in a cut-throat business. She’s also had some good tunes over the years. “I Will Always Love You” is one of her best (although no one can sing it quite like Whitney). I also liked her duet with Kenny Rogers, “Islands in the Stream.” Her best line of the night, referring to her many surgeries, was, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Ha! What struck me is how much of the show was taken up by PBS asking for money, even though they get millions of dollars from the government. And people have the audacity to say, “All the church wants is your money.” I’ve never seen any of my colleagues in ministry haranguing people so frequently or intensely to fork it over as PBS did last night.

2. I got to fill in for a colleague last week at the Ephrata ICL. (I totally love being with that bunch—spiritually vibrant lovers of Jesus who want to go deeper in their understanding of Scripture and theology.) We reflected the whole time on the doctrine of the Trinity. I structured our material as follows:

Old Testament Seeds
New Testament Flowers
Early Church Petals
Church Wedding Bouquets
Missional Flowers Delivered
The Ultimate Rose Parade

The Holy Trinity is not a math puzzle to be solved (1 + 1 + 1 = 1); it’s a clue to the relational heart of the universe. That clue is precious to believers because the prime reality of existence is not matter. It’s not energy. It’s not quarks. It’s a divine relationship. Specifically, it’s an eternal reciprocating relationship of personal diversity and unbreakable unity. As the well-known hymn puts it, “God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.” Key to my presentation was the ancient rabbinic belief in “The Two Powers in Heaven” (cf. Alan Segal), easily demonstrated from the Hebrew Bible. That’s why the early Christians, who were true monotheists, found it both natural and noncontradictory to declare without reservation, “Jesus [not Caesar] is Lord and God and High Priest.” They regarded Christ as truly “Emmanuel,” the embodied “I AM” of the Old Testament.

3. I turn three years older at the end of this month. (That sentence may require some explanation, no?) Because of the confusion surrounding my delivery, legal abandonment, and conveyance to an orphanage on day one of my postpartum life, I actually came with three birth certificates, all of which had a different date. One had March 30, one had March 31, and one had April 1. So, I have three birthdays! My adoptive parents were given the authority to choose one of the three for the official record. They quickly eliminated April 1 to spare me the teasing that may have come with that one, and they eventually settled on the middle date, March 31. They figured that if they were wrong, they were only off by a day, not two days. But who knows—I may have been an April fool’s joke from the beginning! The procedure is quite different today, but back then—in some hospitals where there was a pending adoption or conveyance to a foster home (or orphanage)—the newborn was never given to the mother to hold. And that was the case in my case. I was never held by my birth mother. Seeds of rejection were thus planted early in my life, and it would take decades for me to overcome them. Being adopted twice helped—once by my earthly father and once by my heavenly Father.

4. Here’s a provocative article from the Huffington Post: “I Tracked Down the Girls Who Bullied Me as a Kid; Here’s What They Had To Say” by Simone Ellin, a guest writer. “Being able to zoom out and get some perspective…underscored that we can never really know what’s going on in other people’s lives.” It seems like many of us were insecure and easily intimidated back in the day.

5. Now that the virus numbers are dropping, I can get back in the pool. It will be good to move around again, though I’m sure I’ll be a bit grumpy from waking up the muscles I haven’t used for months. Praying I still remember how to swim.

6. They say that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. History is just the opposite. Jesus comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion.

7. Finally, here’s a fun comic that may or may not hit too close to home: