STOP SO I CAN CATCH UP

Ever heard those words, stop so I can catch up? Ever heard them being said to you by you? This past weekend my family engaged in fall cleaning of the house, mainly because my mother-in-law is coming next week and my wife wants the house cleaned. We made some good progress; the problem is life does not stop to wait for cleaning. There was still all the other stuff that needed to be done. Meals still needed cooking, shopping still needed done, homework still needed done etc… The result, nothing really got done. The house actually looked worse on Monday then it did on Saturday morning. The result frustration. The problem is Monday brought a whole new bunch of stuff that needed accomplished. There were meetings, notice the s as in plural, there were practices to attend, there was dinner that needed cooked, again etc… As a result, the house even looked worse on Tuesday. The result of that and too many meetings, even more frustration. The result of that, the inner cry of stop so I can catch up or let me off this merry-go-round. As Regis Philbin used to say, “I am only one man!” The next question, when does the sheer exhaustion end? Or how can I make it end, and are the consequences of doing that bearable? I know I am not the only one in this crazy world that feels that way. When you get to that point I think that there are only three options.
One, you can continue on the road that you are on and eventually you will either crash and burn or just walk out of the door of life and disappear someday. You know one day you are stressed to the max and the next day you wake up and you are in another country washing dishes and speaking Portuguese to a bunch of people that call you Padrozah, which means, “Strange guy that wandered into village one day looking lost.” Makes for a good book or a movie but not exactly a very good life.
Two, you can totally change directions and avoid it all, which is some cases can be good, but in most cases results in disaster, because you are just avoiding the problems that you need to be dealing with. The result even more stress as you look back and realize you really messed things up by running away from your problems and now you spend all your time dealing with guilt and regret and the situation you are in is even worse than the one you wanted out of. Makes for a good setting to learn more about yourself and God, but is horrible on the central nervous system and family relationships. Not a good option.
Three, you can deal with reality and realize that you can only do what you can do, and most importantly you can take it to God and leave it at the foot of the cross. It means dealing with the reality of the situation and realizing some things are not going to get perfectly done. If the house is not perfectly clean when my mother-in-law gets here, well so be it. At the end of the day, kids need to be fed, homework needs to be done and jobs need to be accomplished, the rest is gravy. It is the same with any situation, the important stuff needs accomplish and the less important stuff will be done if there is time and if there is energy. As they say no one says on their death bed, “I wished I had spent more time at work.” Or, “I wish I had run another program, or had a cleaner house.” People talk about their relationships with their family and the important things that they did in their life. So in other words the best way to deal with a crazy out of control life, is exactly that, deal with it. Don’t walk away, don’t avoid, face it and prioritize it and deal with it and hand the stress over to God, and let the chips fall where they may. Sometimes you need to stop so you can catch up.

Pastor Fred

REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

When I was growing up I remember my parents talking about Pearl Harbor. For my parents born in the 1920’s Pearl Harbor and then the assassination of President John Kennedy were the defining moments of their lives. My parents could both tell you exactly where they were at and what they were doing when they heard about those horrible events. It was seared into their memory. I remember listening to their stories of how they reacted to it and what happened as a result of it in their lives. Pearl Harbor literally turned their lives upside down. My dad would end up joining the Navy and spending time in the Pacific and on the island of Okinawa. My mother would marry a man who would go into the Army and would learn to grow up fast. The results of World War II would remake our nation and my parents lives would be shaped forever by those events. Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination were unifying events for us as a nation. Everyone it seemed was affected in some way and everyone came together as one. After those events it seemed another event of great magnitude would never happen to us again as a nation. There was of course the Korean War and the Vietnam War but neither of them had a huge national event that unified the nation. There was also the landing on the moon but it didn’t really unify people or bring them together. There was the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan but he survived. There was the shuttle blowing up on takeoff in the mid 1980’s but nothing of the magnitude of Pearl Harbor or John Kennedy.
Then 911 happened. Like Pearl Harbor it felt like a punch in the gut to the nation as a whole. The vast majority of Americans were nowhere near the tragic events that unfolded that day and yet we all felt like it was in some way aimed at us. The real time coverage of the event made it even more so. I like you remember the events of that morning in very clear detail. It was a Tuesday morning and I was living in Fort Wayne Indiana. My wife had already gone to work and normally I would have been in my office at the time as well, but I woke up with a sore throat and decided to stay home for awhile. I had just sat down on the couch and turned on the TV. Katie Couric was about to sign off on the morning show when she announced that a plane had just crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York. They began to show live video of the smoke coming out of the building and starting talking about how it must have been a small cargo plane. Suddenly right over Couric’s shoulder on the video screen I watched live as the second plane crashed into the next tower. It was then that we all realized this was not an accident. I watched the TV for several more hours that morning as the nation went into panic mode, as another plane flew into the Pentagon and yet another went down in field in Pennsylvania and as both of the towers went down. I don’t think I even went to the bathroom that morning and at times wondered if what I was watching was actually real. Could such a horrendous thing as this actually be happening? I eventually went to work that day but there was no escaping it. The videos, the pictures were everywhere. I don’t think any of us knew what was going to happen, if this was the end of it or if there was more coming, but we did all know one thing, our lives would never be the same again. There was a bad wind blowing and we could feel it we just didn’t know what the ending result would be.
Ten years have now passed since that tragic day and how our country and our world has changed. Even if you were not close to the events of that day, and even if you didn’t know someone who died that day, in the last ten years you have been personally touched in some way by the events that followed. Around five thousand Americans have been killed in the war against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan and several other places, and many times that have been wounded. I think everyone in the country knows someone who has served in harm’s way in the last ten years. How we travel has drastically changed. I find now when I tell a story about travel by air I have to say this was before or after 911 because getting from point A to point B on a plane anymore is very different. Security for public events is also very different and how we view other people has changed. We are not as trusting as we once were. This Sunday at Family of Christ we want to recognize that and the sacrifices that have been made by so many over the past ten years. Therefore we are holding a special service at our regular time of 9:30 a.m. that will be a service of remembrance and also a service of worship of the God who has sustained us over these years. There will be special videos and our school kids will be singing God Bless America. So we invite you to join us this Sunday as we take a moment to think about those who have given so much.

Pastor Fred