"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."
I got Covid. It was pretty mild, but since then I’ve had some issues that have led me to decide to set aside the blog for a bit. Publishing things publicly when your brain isn’t at its best just doesn’t seem wise. :-)
So let’s see what happens. I’ll be around.
This post will be of more interest to people associated with Bob Jones University than to others.
Last week was the annual Bible Conference at Bob Jones University. It occurred to me that it was my 50th Bible Conference, and that milestone led to some reminiscing.
There are cherished memories that I will never experience again—
As years go by, things change. That’s a universal principle. But another principle is Providence, by which God’s hand continues to direct in our affairs, for our good and his glory.
As I reflected on the Conference, it struck me that this one was more refreshing—yeah, that’s the word—than any other I remember. Drinking from a firehose is profitable and invigorating, but no one would describe it as “refreshing.” This one left me spiritually stronger, more joyous, more at peace, than before it started. It heightened my appreciation of God’s grace and my sense of his presence—an answer to a specific prayer from a week ago.
May God give us more such times until He comes.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
I’ve noted before that popular posts tend to be ones that incite. There’s a place for pushing people’s buttons if you want to encourage them to change their thinking or behavior, but I don’t think muckraking or demagoguery is healthy for either the writer or the reader, and there’s no shortage of bloggers these days eager to do that sort of thing for the clicks. That’s not me.
But I’ve found the personal discipline of writing 2 posts every week to be good for me—for my thinking processes, for my communication skills, for my character, for my soul. And I’ll confess that there have been some posts along the way that were good for me, and, I hope, good for the readers. Occasionally writers have the delightful experience of writing something that seemed to turn out better than they intended, or even better than they felt capable of.
Here are 10 of mine that I like, for various reasons, in no particular order.
Photo by HENCE THE BOOM on Unsplash
Here at year’s end, it’s customary to list the year’s top ten blog posts. Here are mine:
And here are the top ten for all time (since July 20, 2017):
In my final post of the year, I’ll list my favorites. My readers and I, it seems, have divergent tastes.
Photo by HENCE THE BOOM on Unsplash
I had an impactful experience recently that I’d like to share.
I’ve had a hearing problem since I was a boy and had a disagreement with a calf on the family farm; I wanted to ride him, and he disagreed. I landed on the right side of my head and heard something pop. That ear has been significantly impaired since then.
In recent years, with aging, the other ear has been declining as well. This summer I decided to get hearing aids, and I’ve been delighted with the experience; I should have done that long ago.
Six weeks later, one morning I woke up deaf. The “bad ear” was its normal self, but the “good ear” was just gone; it was now by far the “bad ear.” (I came to that realization when I flushed the toilet and heard absolutely nothing.)
Popped in the hearing aids—I’m glad I had them to fall back on—and found that when I cranked them all the way up, I could hear juuuust a little bit.
This was the first day of meetings for the returning faculty to start the school year, and I really needed to be able to hear at least some of what was going on. Made it a matter of prayer and headed off to work.
I managed to get through the day hearing enough to fulfill my responsibilities, but any of you with hearing aids knows that having them turned all the way up means that all the ambient noise is screaming inside your head all day, so it was fairly unpleasant. In fact, a colleague took me aside at one point and asked if I was feeling OK. I was surprised that my distress was noticeable and tried to make it less so for the rest of the day. :-\
That night I tinkered around with possible solutions, to no apparent effect, and went to bed.
Next morning, still deaf.
I did my usual personal devotional time, and in my prayer time I asked the Lord, if he was willing, to clear up the problem. I presented him with a couple of reasons why I thought my being able to hear would be better than the current situation—
So I asked him to intervene.
And then.
I thought for a minute, and I told him something else.
“Father, if you don’t enable me to hear ever again, I’m going to serve you the best I can, without complaint. You have been unfailingly good to me for 60 years as a believer, and for several years before that. I trust you, and I will still trust you and serve you for every tomorrow. I’m with you.
No matter what.”
And I meant it.
That was a deeply significant moment.
I finished my devotional procedure and then, as was my custom, I took a shower. And during the shower, my hearing came back. I don’t want to get all TMI here—the queasy can look away—but the problem was a simple mechanical blockage by earwax.
So it was really no significant problem at all.
But I didn’t know that when I was praying, and I meant what I said. I will always remember the volitional significance of that experience.
And here’s what occurred to me then.
It was my ignorance that made the moment powerful. If I had known that this was just wax, and that the (completely nonsupernatural) solution was just moments away, I would never have faced the opportunity to make that significant choice.
God could have taught me that lesson by making me really deaf for the rest of my life—and that would have been fine, good even. But he knew he didn’t need to do that. All it would take was a little lump of earwax and a couple of days. And my limited knowledge. And so he did what it took.
He’s a gracious, merciful God, who brings good things even out of ignorance.
I’m all in.
No matter what.
Photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash
This weekend a great man and spiritual mentor passed to glory. In tribute, I recall a past post about how he changed my life.
Rest in peace, good doctor.
My wife and I were eating lunch in a restaurant yesterday when a girl walked by in a T-shirt that said “Lexington Soccer.” I caught her eye and asked, “Lexington where?” She said, “Massachusetts”—as I hoped she would. I smiled and said, “I graduated from Lexington Christian.” She said, “So did my Dad.”
Small world.
And that got me to thinking about all the places I’ve lived and people I’ve known—which leads me to recycle what follows, a minor reworking of something I posted on Facebook on September 4, 2016.
I spent the first half my youth in the Pacific Northwest (Spokane, to be precise), and the second half in greater Boston (Newton, mostly). (And when I say “half,” I’m being precise; we headed east 3 days after my 10th birthday.)
But I’ve spent well over 2/3 of my life in the American South. There are lots of things I like about the region:
I am blessed for having lived in multiple regions. It’s helped me realize that despite our differences, we are all more alike than we think–that there really is more that unites us than that divides us. That reaching across regional boundaries and disbelieving stereotypes is good for the soul. And for the country. And that as polarized as we are in this country, “e pluribus unum” really is possible. But it starts with us, one at a time.
Our leaders, and our journalists, and social media are united in their efforts to keep us ginned up, angry and hostile toward the “other side.” They’re doing it almost entirely for the ratings, for the money, for the power. They’re posturing; they don’t believe half the things they’re saying, and you shouldn’t either.
Don’t buy it. You’re in the image of God; you’re not a beast. Think for yourself. And reach across the unbreachable boundary. Because they’re in the image of God too.
Photo by Joey Csunyo on Unsplash
This post is going to be a little different. It’s about an experience I had this weekend. I just feel like telling somebody about it.
Every so often I do an internet search on my name, just to see if somebody’s saying something I ought to know about. Some years ago when I did that, I found a web page giving the history of a church. Well, I was interested right away, because I’m interested in churches, and it involved a fellow with my name, and surprisingly, it was a Black church in Hazard, Kentucky.
Apparently back in 1886 a preacher traveled from Virginia over the ridgeline into eastern Kentucky and did some circuit riding, accompanied by a teacher named Dan Olinger. A few years later some of the converts organized a church with 9 charter members, including a guy with my name, who I assume was the same person who had come from Virginia. (Perhaps he came up from Olinger, Virginia?)
Eventually a couple of former slaves gave the church a small piece of land just west of Hazard, up against the side of Town Mountain. The story on the web page stops in the 1990s, when one Dr. John Pray was the pastor. But that story resonates with me, not just because my family name is part of it, but because it tells of a handful of people who had experienced God’s gracious regeneration and who sought to gather regularly for worship in the face of considerable difficulty.
These are my people, in the most significant way possible.
Another family name that shows up repeatedly in the story is Combs. Back when I first encountered the web page, I emailed the address at the bottom of the page and asked about the history. The respondent gave me the name of a member of the Combs family and said, “He knows as much as anybody.” So I emailed him, and we began a brief exchange. My first question was whether the Dan Olinger mentioned in the story was Black. Mr. Combs said he was. I’ll admit to being a little worried at that point; I knew that some of my general line were substantial landowners in the area of Staunton, Virginia, before the Civil War, and I wondered if perhaps they had owned slaves. So I asked, “Do you know where the Black Olingers came from?” Mr. Combs said that he thought there had been an interracial relationship in North Carolina, and that Dan was descended from that.
I don’t know if there was any love involved—we all know that the rape of Black women by white men was not at all uncommon in those days—but it does seem to indicate that the relationship between the white and Black Olingers is biological, not just the legal fiction of a slave taking his owner’s last name.
Hazard isn’t a place you get to by accident; it’s not really on the way to anywhere. So I filed that story away in my memory, thinking, “Boy, I’d sure like to see that place someday.”
This past weekend I was asked to participate in the ordination of a former student in eastern Kentucky, about an hour or so from Hazard. I thought immediately of Town Mountain.
After the ordination service on Sunday morning, I got in the car and headed for Hazard. The trip was complicated by the fact that for most of the drive I had no cell service and thus no GPS; I had to stop at a convenience store and ask directions. (Yes, sometimes we men do that.) But around 2 pm, thanks to directions from a guy with an apricot-sized wad of tobacco in his cheek, I found US 451 heading west out of Hazard, crossed the steel bridge, and saw the road sign: “Dr. John Pray Memorial Highway.” This has to be the right road.
On about the 19th bend in the road there was a yellow diamond sign: “Church.”
I hadn’t been this excited in a long while.
Rounded the bend, and just past Fred Combs Road (paved) and Olinger Lane (not so much), there she was—a little red-brick church building, with two small white-sided extensions, and a parking lot and picnic area just beyond. She’s snuggled up alongside the road, the drop-off so steep that the entry door is six feet down from the road. Beside the front door is a plaque:
I’ll confess that I was hoping they had scheduled a dinner on the grounds for that day, so someone would be there to talk to. Afraid not. I left a business card and a brief note on the back.
The globe is covered with little groups of believers who gather and worship, who laugh and weep together, who care for one another through hard times, who celebrate weddings and mourn at funerals.
And we are all one. Often biologically, which should be expected in social communities, but more importantly, because we are united in a single body in Christ Jesus.
May it be so for as long as earth endures.
The Reformers were well known for their battle-cry, “Sola Scriptura!”—“The Scripture alone!” They were battling the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that Scripture and tradition—as defined in the statements of the ecumenical councils and the papal encyclicals—were equally authoritative.
I’m a sola scriptura guy too. And so is everybody I work with at my school.
So my students are sometimes surprised when I tell them that the Bible isn’t the only place where God speaks—and that the Bible itself tells us that.
God speaks to us through his Word, most certainly. But he also speaks in other ways.
Theologians have long recognized two classes of revelation: special revelation, or divinely inspired prophecy, which used to happen in different times and different ways (Heb 1.1) but today is confined to his Word (Heb 1.2); and general revelation, or what he shows us through his works—most notably in creation (Ps 19.1ff); in his direction of human affairs, or providence (Dan 2.21); and in human conscience (Gn 1.26-27). God is still speaking today in those ways.
We should note, as we always do when teaching this principle, that general revelation is not authoritative or inerrant in the way special revelation is, because the world and everything in it is broken by sin; what we’re seeing today is not exactly what God created. But the heavens still declare the glory of God, and humans at their worst are able to be informed and moved by what they see all around them.
Paul is a good example of someone putting this to work in ministry. When he’s introducing the gospel to members of a Jewish synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, he references primarily the Scripture, because they know and recognize it. His sermon (Ac 13.14-41) focuses on the metanarrative of Scripture and Jesus’ fulfillment of the messianic prophecies. But shortly later, when he’s addressing pagan Greeks in Athens, he takes an entirely different approach. Rather than quoting the Hebrew Scriptures, which would mean nothing to this audience, he cites their own poets—Epimenides and then Aratus (Ac 17.28)—because anyone in the image of God is eventually going to say something worthwhile. And he argues not from biblical authority but from logic—because even imperfect images of God can be logical.
Throughout history people have found spiritual meaning in the beauties of nature. One of my favorite examples of this, because it’s both observant and deftly rendered, is a poem written by Odell Shepard in 1917. Shepard was a professor of literature at Trinity College in Connecticut and then served a term as Lieutenant Governor. In 1938 he won the Pulitzer prize for biography for his work on Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father.
“Whence Cometh My Help”
Let me sleep among the shadows of the mountains when I die,
In the murmur of the pines and sliding streams,
Where the long day loiters by
Like a cloud across the sky
And the moon-drenched night is musical with dreams.
Lay me down within a canyon of the mountains, far away,
In a valley filled with dim and rosy light,
Where the flashing rivers play
Out across the golden day
And a noise of many waters brims the night.
Let me lie where glinting rivers ramble down the slanted glade
Under bending alders garrulous and cool,
Where they gather in the shade
To the dazzling, sheer cascade,
Where they plunge and sleep within the pebbled pool.
All the wisdom , all the beauty, I have lived for unaware
Came upon me by the rote of highland rills;
I have seen God walking there
In the solemn soundless air
When the morning wakened wonder in the hills.
I am what the mountains made me of their green and gold and gray,
Of the dawnlight and the moonlight and the foam.
Mighty mothers far away,
Ye who washed my soul in spray,
I am coming, mother mountains, coming home.
When I draw my dreams about me, when I leave the darkling plain
Where my soul forgets to soar and learns to plod,
I shall go back home again
To the kingdoms of the rain,
To the blue purlieus of heaven, nearer God.
Where the rose of dawn blooms earlier across the miles of mist,
Between the tides of sundown and moonrise,
I shall keep a lover’s tryst
With the gold and amethyst,
With the stars for my companions in the skies.
Photo by Steve Carter on Unsplash
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