Word for 2012 in Review

Mine: adj.  That which belongs to me.  This was my word for 2012.

It's one of the first words we learn to say.  Spend time with most toddlers & you'll hear this word spoken with passion.  Parents work hard to teach the concept of "sharing" because no one likes to be around a selfish brat.

So why did I choose such a selfish word for myself?  It comes from Deuteronomy 29:29-- "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever."

The past several years I've picked words that did little for me.  So I'm pleased and somewhat surprised that this year's word had such an impact on me.  Perhaps the power of this word came from the fact that it wasn't a "motivational" word like the previous words I chose.  Those words had the power of New Year's resolutions--they were my efforts to change or improve some area of my life that was lacking.

The word "mine" was rooted in a quest for revelation.  I wanted to learn what God has given to me--what is mine.

If I wrote out everything God revealed to me I would bore you all and take more time than I can give.  But the word that sums it up for me is "grace".  I've known the concept & doctrine of grace as written in the Bible.  I've studied it and taught about it.  I believe in salvation through grace by faith.  But knowing and possessing are two different things.

Knowing grace didn't keep me from feeling like I need to do good things & religious things to earn God's favor.  Knowing grace meant that when I fall short of good I felt unworthy to talk to God.  Knowing grace was better than not knowing grace, but it fell way short of possessing grace.

The Holy Spirit talked to me about grace through the parable of the prodigal son.  What I realized was that neither son truly knew the grace of his father.  The younger thought he'd have to be demoted to a servant to come back home.  The older thought that his faithful service earned him favor.

 What the father said to both his sons was, "Everything I have is yours."  Somewhere along the line of going through this year I learned to possess this promise.  It is grace.

List Making & Getting Sidetracked Anyway

Brenda is a list maker. She likes the feeling of checking things off her list. And if she does a task not on her list she likes to add it to the list and then check it off. Today was our first full day of working on our house and so Brenda was working on her list last night when she stopped and asked if I had a list of things I wanted to accomplish for the day.

Now, I've had an on and off relationship with lists. Brenda has convinced me of their value in keeping my mind focused on the task to be completed. But my natural state is to flow through the day and take what comes. On most days I can blissfully ignore whatever list I've got and work on things that seem to be more interesting. But the fact that I have a list helps me answer Brenda when she asks what I plan to accomplish.

So when I said, “I'm keeping the list in my head,” I could see she wasn't too pleased. But when I explained that I only had one item on my list, she settled down and listened. My one item for today was to get water working in the house.

Not counting the water meter, we had leaking pipes in 4 places. One leak was in the pipes going to the shower in the master bath—and everything in the master bath is changing. Another leak was for the bar sink in the family room. We can live without that for quite a while. But we had two leaks in the pipes going to the upstairs bathroom. This bathroom we will have to use while the rest of the house is torn up. These pipes had to be fixed.

We're planning to tear out the ceiling in the master bedroom and bath, so I didn't have to make holes we could patch back in. I ripped down the biggest pieces I could. Two pipes had burst because of freezing. The bank must have winterized the house well after the first hard freeze. Once I found the pipes it was a simple job to patch them.

And Brenda ignored her list. She worked on the garage. The dirt and cobwebs bugged her so she vacuumed it out. As she looked at the condition of the walls she decided that they should get a new coat of paint. And now was the best time to do it—before we fill it with our stuff. We talked briefly of going to find our scrapple paints in storage. But we instead opted for a miss-tint gallon from Home Depot—mixed with a gallon of cheap Glidden. As we were leaving the manager asked us what color we decided to paint the garage. I held up the cans and said, “Whatever color we get when we mix these 2 gallons together.” He just shook his head and laughed. We are well known in the Home Depot paint department.

The garage looks good and the water works. We're happy, tired and sore. We're going to have to develop our rehab & construction muscles.

We closed on our house yesterday--the Friday before Memorial Weekend. We were pushing hard to get closed so we could have the weekend to start work on the house. Jackie White, from Accurate Title, worked hard to make this happen. Also, the hand of God was present to line up the timing of events and contacts we had to make. Jackie said there were 4 title companies involved on the seller's side--and one of them appears to be run from a call center in India.

Our first order of business is to get the mold out of the house. We got a dumpster ordered & went Friday night to turn on the water and get started. I knew there was one place I had to fix because the water line that supplies the ice maker was crimped with a pair of vice-grip pliers. I cut and capped that line. But when I turned the main valve a thin spray of water came from the water meter. The bank must have been slow in getting the house winterized and so water froze and broke the meter.

We decided we could live with the small leak for the time we checked out the rest of the house. We turned on the second valve and heard the ringing tone of water flowing through the pipes. We worked quickly through the house checking for flow in each of the sinks. Those on the main level and in the basement were doing fine so I increased the flow and we kept watching to see how they would handle the full flow. But when I checked the upstairs bath, we had nothing getting there. A few minutes later we discovered why--all of the water was going into the master bedroom and bath ceiling. Short video HERE.

We had planned to tear out ceilings in both rooms as well as all the walls of the master bath, but we didn't plan on this work being the first thing we did. But we're learning to roll with whatever comes along. I'm going to install shut-off valves so we can get water to some of the house. Brenda will proceed with her plan of scraping the popcorn texture off the ceilings in the upstairs bedrooms to get them ready for us to live in while we work on the rest of the house. Then I'll start tearing holes in the ceilings to find the broken pipes.

We didn't get the hydrogen peroxide ordered in time for this weekend, but Brenda read online that Borax will kill mold. We're going to do a surface treatment with a Borax solution for now & will use the peroxide when we start tearing into the places we know are saturated with mold.

The Full Monte

One of the pleasures of the BAK is listening to rider's stories of adventures on the road. Yesterday we had rain—lots of rain. We heard there was an inch & a half in less than an hour. All I know is that is rained hard. Jay Maske & I waited it out in a car wash in our overnight town. But a lot of folks left much earlier than we did and were caught in the deluge. Jay & I had our own misadventures and challenges yesterday, but nothing compared to some of the stories we heard on the road today.

One small group of riders took shelter on a farmer's porch, since no one was home when the knocked. The farmer and his wife came home to find the riders shivering in the cold and wet. They invited the riders in and offered to dry their riding clothes. They loaned the men overalls and the woman a robe.

Another group took shelter in a farmer's machine shed. They shivered in the dark until the farmer came home and hit the garage door opener and lights. The farmer got over his shock and offered the group towels and coffee. Other riders got under tractor trailer rigs or culverts.

But the story that took the prize is the group who made it to Stockton, our lunch stop. They spotted a laundry and decided to dry their clothes. A few had the creativity to buy boxers and towels at the Dollar General store. A few others covered themselves with a plastic trash bag. But one guy stripped bare, threw his clothes in the dryer then sat down and covered his privates with a magazine. I was glad to have merely heard this story rather than seeing the event in person.

For most BAK riders, modesty is relative to the amount of cover available when stopping for a bathroom break. Western Kansas doesn't offer many trees for cover, and there are no porta-potties on the roadside. You rely on your fellow riders to respect your situation and not look if the only cover you have is a telephone pole. But this guy reached new frontiers in BAK lore. I'm sure this story will survive for a long time.

The Holy Spirit is Weird

There's been an outpouring of the Holy Spirit at IHOP (International House of Prayer) in Grandview, MO. I heard that Bill Johnson was coming to visit along with other leaders who have been involved with various revivals in the past few decades. I really had hoped to see Bill Johnson speak in person. I've been listening to his podcasts for many months.

The IHOP was packed. They had to shuttle people from a satellite parking lot. The main sanctuary was standing room only. I made my way to the overflow room and found an empty spot on the back bleachers. I had picked up snippets of a conversation between friends talking about a third friend that had been "manifesting" earlier in the day. It had been a while since I heard the term, but I wasn't surprised by it. I'm familiar with some of the weirdness that comes with the moving of the Holy Spirit.

As I read about the history of revivals, there's always an undercurrent of weirdness going along with it: people falling down, shaking, rolling. In the revivals of the 1990s, people laughed and made animal noises. I don't know how far the IHOP revival will spread, but the manifestation I saw in several people was a "turkey walk". It's a twitch forward, a hunching of the shoulders and the neck being pulled down into the shoulders. But my assessment is only based on casual observation. The "turkey walk" may be only limited to a few and will not become the "signature" manifestation of this outpouring. I also saw a familiar manifestation of the back bend: leaning over backwards at the waist. This manifestation was one I've seen in a friend years ago.

I've witnessed these kinds of things before. I've experience being put on the floor by the Holy Spirit and the manifestation that came with one of those experiences is still with me. I twitch when I get in the presence of the Spirit. I wasn't there for curiosity or even out of a desperate need for a touch from God. I sensed that I was supposed to be there, and I was looking for what God had for me. Someone did pray for me and gave me a word from God. It was later confirmed by a prophet who came to our church this week. That's a different story.

What I've been thinking about is why God chooses to move in such strange ways. I even see suggestions of this in the Old Testament prophets. If you read carefully it seems that the prophesying was sometimes accompanied by weirdness. For example, when the Spirit of the Lord came on king Saul & he lay naked on the ground, prophesying. The wonder was in the recipient of the prophecy, not the process. It seems that the Holy Spirit has been putting people on the ground for a long time.

It is from Bill Johnson that I received an insight about all this weirdness. We are to seek the peace that passes understanding. But that means we have to let go of our need to always understand. The 12 disciples didn't understand Jesus sermon about eating his flesh and drinking his blood any more than the thousands who turned away. But they went beyond their understanding to recognize that there was life released to them that went beyond what they could comprehend.

I've come to believe that the Holy Spirit is weird so that we have to get past our intellectual offense and grasp a level of understanding that is spiritually grasped. That is what I'm chasing after. If I have to walk like a turkey to get it, so be it.

Life is What Happens To You When You're Making Other Plans

Life happened to me yesterday as I smoked a brisket on the grill. As I tended the fire and put packets of soaked wood chips over the burner, Michael came outside & we sat down and talked. The girls were grocery shopping. We guys were just hanging around the house--smoking a brisket.

The conversation was one that cannot be planned or orchestrated. I can't even remember the question that started it. But we spent the following half hour or so talking about what life had offered us or, more often, thrown at us in the past several years. We talked of lessons learned, God's grace and mercy, and wondered at the opportunities for which God is preparing us.

This morning I realized that this conversation was one of those moments that I've so often missed because I was distracted or doing something else. Whenever I write goals, one that always comes out is that I want to share the lessons God teaches me to my family. But whenever I try to create such an opportunity it never seems to work. A skilled writer would likely add a significant metaphor at this point to brilliantly illustrate his thesis, but alas, I can think of none. I know there's one out there, but right now it eludes me. Perhaps an elusive metaphor is the point I want to illustrate. I can't force it to appear. It alights as if unbidden and if I force it to come, it sits in the sentence stilted and awkward.

So it is with conversations of significance. They appear and offer their opportunity for a depth of connection that cannot be forced. I shared with Michael the lessons of the last 5 years that led up to a turning point in my life this August. He shared his own journey and what God was up to in his family. We don't know for sure what it is for which God is preparing us, but He's up to something, that's for sure.

It is telling that the value of such moments in our lives can only be seen in retrospect. Sometimes I've looked back and saw times I've missed opportunities. I'm glad that this time I didn't.

Why? Because it's there.

The Question sometimes comes as a statement that you're crazy. Sometimes it's just a subtle shake of the head in conversation. Sometimes it's just the tone of voice. But The Question is there and it lies beneath the other polite questions people ask about my trip. The Question: Why would you get on a bicycle and ride across the state of Kansas? Why face the heat, cold, rain, and wind and then end the day with a cold shower and a night of sleeping in tents or a gym floor? Even Brenda shakes her head in wonder that so many of us take on this quest every year.

I asked myself The Question on Day 4 when we had 75 miles of riding into a strong headwind. On most days we are able to coast down hills and get a break from pedaling. On this day, we pedaled almost every mile. We all looked shell-shocked as we slowly walked around Halstead. That night, as I updated my Facebook, I noticed a post from my friend, Dale: "I'm sitting on my boat watching my wife take a nap in the sun." I asked myself, "So why am I sitting on a bicycle struggling to pedal into the wind instead of being on a boat or a beach somewhere and sipping a cold beverage?" One advantage of traveling at 13.4 m.p.h. is that you have time to ponder such questions. By the end of the following day I had my answer.

The classic answer mountain climbers give is that they climb the mountain because it's there. I think there is a need inside all of us to overcome a challenge. Most of the time we do this vicariously through following the adventures of others or rooting for a sports player or team. But some of us are not content to sit on the sidelines. We need a real challenge to find out if we've got the stuff inside us to survive the difficulties and the danger. Most of us don't take on extreme challenges such as mountain climbing or trekking across Africa. But danger and difficulty are the essence of what we crave.

I spoke with a friend along the way and he pointed out that we always love the days of riding in mild, sunny weather and tailwinds. But we remember and talk about the days we struggled: running out of water, flat tires, killer hills and headwinds, and semi trucks that miss us by inches. Even though BAK has great support for us, we still have to pedal the miles. And the danger along the road is real. Riding along the white line at the side of the highway is a place where a half-second of inattention can lead to being crushed by a car on your left or dropping a wheel off of the pavement on your right. Either one can lead to a painful and quick end to the day's ride.

I came back from my week tired in body but refreshed in my soul. Could I have been a refreshed by a week on the beach? Perhaps, but I think not. Challenging myself and overcoming the difficulties of the week reaches deeper inside of me that just relaxing. And the challenges are new and different each year. The 75 miles of wind took more out of me than I realized. The following day my legs felt like wood. I wasn't alone. A lot of us struggled that day. I saw lots of bikes on the back of the SAG wagons--people who had to drop out. This year I challenged myself to ride a century--100 miles in a day. I'd attempted a century and failed last August.

I don't foresee mountain climbing in my future. But I'm going to keep looking for ways to challenge myself. Succeed or fail, I need ways to find out what I'm made of. It keeps my soul whole.