I Never Want to Let a Sentence Go…

I have a comma, problem I am addicted to semicolons; not to mention ellipses…and dashes – I also put two spaces after each sentence (and don’t forget parenthetic comments).

But this is how I think.  My economy is “One Sentence = One Thought”.  I can’t let go of the sentence before I let go of the thought.  Commas, semicolons, ellipses, dashes and parentheses are all means of hanging onto the sentence until I’m done with the thought; two spaces at the end of the sentence are a staccato statement “Take! That!”.

My love for the sentence is second only to my love for words and barely precedes my devotion to paragraphs.  These three are the framework of thoughts; chapters are the containers of concepts and books the repository of ideas…which are to us as we are to God.

We are His books; and in our lives he assembles our chapters of growth from His words, sentences and paragraphs of Love.

A Prayer

Thank you God for our food
Give bread to those who hunger;
and a hunger for justice for those who have bread.

Birth…

Five puppies (two girls and three boys) were born to our Shih-Tzu this morning. Our next ten fourteen weeks will be very busy.  We’ve taken many photographs.

Defining Sin…

I was listening to a podcast from Stanford University available on iTunes U; a speech by Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas. He quoted what his grandfather considered the “Seven Deadly Sins”:

• Wealth without Work
• Pleasure without Conscience
• Science without Humanity
• Knowledge without Character
• Politics without Principle
• Commerce without Morality
• Worship without Sacrifice

As a follower of Jesus I understand that I’m not the definer of sin. I would however propose these seven statements as rather profound descriptors of fallen human traits which destroy culture and community.

Deciding to Become American…

From a post by myself over at Boar’s Head Tavern; a response to a racial discrimination conversation. 

Hi, my name is Kent. I’m an American guy from the state of Minnesota. My wife and I are trying to adopt a little girl from a place called China. We’re like a lot of other infertile couples; we just want a family. To some people we probably won’t look like a family because we won’t look alike. But we’ll be a family. I’m going to teach my daughter a lot about the country she came from, but mostly I’m going to teach her how to become an American. I’m pretty sure that sometime when I’m holding her we’ll compare the color of our skin; and I’m pretty sure hers will be darker than mine.

In what seems a long time from now we’re going to fly to China to pick her up. I’m planning to weep three times, but it might be more than that. I’m planning to weep when I first find her in my arms; I’m planning to weep when I’m standing on American soil in China getting her a passport and starting her on her journey to becoming an American; and I’m planning to weep when our plane lands in America.

I’m looking forward to all of this because it will remind me about what it means to be American; and because it will be a great story to tell my daughter so that she will know how she became an American. Some of us became Americans because we decided to, others because someone decided for us. I’m going to teach my daughter what it means to be an American so that she’ll understand why I’ll make this decision for her.

Painful News…

We’ve just received news from our adoption agency that the China Center for Adoption Affairs is continuing to increase the wait time (they have each month) because they can’t handle the demand for the number of referrals requested each month.  At this point, Kent and I won’t even receive a referral for a child until July of 2008 and that will likely increase by eight months or more before we get to our Log in Date of 11-6-06, going by the current increase in waiting times each month!

 We’re both deeply disappointed and (I for one am crying a lot today).  Basically, what this means for us is that we have to consider our options and possibly choose another country or something.  Kent’s age is becoming a bigger problem as we’ve hoped to adopt under 18 months and countries (on average) aren’t allowing more than a 45 year gap between child and parent.  (Kent is 47 this year.)  Even China has recently changed their standards in this area, but we were “grandfathered” in.  Not to mention the expenses are increasing each year and as the wait increases, more of our documents expire and have to be redone.

Please pray for us to understand God’s will and His direction.  We’re pretty heart broken right now.

The Sin of Relational Perfectionism…

I’m coming up on 2.5 years of being immersed in a missional Christian community and what’s more significant I’m soon surpassing my longest period of continuous employment since the mid 80’s.  I started to count in my head the number of employers I’ve worked for since my first job in 1977, and chose not to abuse myself by heading down such a discouraging quantification of my own dysfunction.

During the summer of 2004 I surpassed my father’s age at death, and found myself working a job that though honorable and a needed public service, was quite unchallenging.  I’d read Os Guinness’ The Call and Richard Boles’ What Color is Your Parachute in an effort to discern my own gifting and life’s direction…and the truth was that my vocation was opening up just around the next bend.

I had learned about me through both books and through loving, professional counsel that I needed to find something that I could 1.) be passionate about; that 2.) would challenge and immerse me; and that 3.) touched people.  One of the three times that God has spoken directly to me was to say that my “call” was to “pastor people“; He made it clear that I was not to seek the role of Pastor, but that I was to care for, teach and shepherd others.

The twelve or so years between then and now was a painful “seminary” and I’ve learned the value of pain and suffering.  The final struggle of these past few years here at SCS has been to accept imperfectionism in others.  I had for so long been so relationally protective because of all of the relational hurt I’d experienced during my growing up years.  My protectionism was in essence a coping skill; a coping skill that induced deep loneliness, a coping skill that became sin.

My sin could only be confessed, addressed and relinquished in the context of close Christian community with the help of loving brothers and sisters.  I silently expected others to be what I could never be and harshly judged them for their failure to meet my unspoken expectations.  I rejected their humanity and demanded that they accept mine; I was unfair and harsh.  Deliverance from sin is a joy indeed.

I’m finally a fit product for human consumption. 

The Runge Adoption Journey…

Many of you already know that Kent and I are in the middle of adopting an infant girl from China, but some of you do not, so this is to officially let you all know and to share our journey with you. After we finish our “paper pregnancy” or “paper chase” as it is often called, we will wait approximately 14 months for a referral from Chinese officials and then fly to China, sometime in early 2008, to get our daughter!

We’ve experienced fear and frustration along the way, but have learned that if we keep our eyes and hearts on the goal, it helps our focus tremendously. The “paper chase” part of this journey takes some serious perseverance, patience, and commitment, but anything worth doing in life takes that, right? We sum up the “paper chase” with this phrase, “hurry up and wait”!

The following are the details of our journey so far, but it is not for the faint of heart nor those in a hurry, as I am extremely detail oriented and I can get pretty “wordy”, so it may take you awhile to read; consider yourself warned.

Capon on Left-Handed Power…

I was recently struck as I read this about how vital this approach to relationship is in our care community. By what means to we extend relationship to our clients?

There is one effect that cannot be the result of a direct application of force, and that is the maintenance of a relationship between free persons. If my child chooses not to cooperate with me, if my wife chooses not to live with me, there is no right-handed power on earth that can make them toe the line of relationship I have chosen to draw in the sand. I can dock my son’s allowance, for example, or chain him to a radiator; or in anger at my wife, I can punch holes in the Sheetrock or beat her senseless with a shovel. In short, I can use any force that comes to hand or mind, and yet I cannot cause either of them, at the core of their being, to stop their wrongs and conform to my right. The only power I have by which to do that is left-handed power – which for all practical purposes will be indistinguishable from weakness on my part. It is the power of my patience with them, of my letting their wrong be – even if that costs me my rightness or my life – so that they, for whose reconciliation I long, may live for a better day of their own choosing.

My point here is twofold. The power of God that saves the world was revealed in Jesus as left-handed power; and therefore any power that the church may use in its God-given role as the sacrament of Jesus must also be left-handed. Despite the fact that God’s Old Testament forays into the thicket of fallen human nature were decidedly right-handed (plagues, might acts, stretched-out-arm exercises, and thunderous threats) – and despite Jesus’ occasional use of similar tactics in the Gospels – the final act by which God reconciles the world to himself consists of his simply dropping dead on the cross and shutting up on the subject of sin. He declares the whole power game won by losing, and he invites the world just to believe that absurd proposition.

- Robert Farrar Capon, The Astonished Heart, pp. 62-63

Capon on Forgiveness & Repentance…

I’m going to quote a paragraph from Capon’s Exit 36; as his theology is generally served to the reader on a ‘bed of story’ as it were, I’ll have to set things a very little bit for the passage to make sense.

Anne is the wife of a man who killed himself, a priest who was having an affair with Pat.

And how about forgiveness as metaphysically identical with forgetting? Anne, presumably, doesn’t know about Pat yet. In a way, she is reconciled to her right now, both in time and in eternity. When she finds out, however, she’ll be unreconciled in time, and will have to work her way back to her present state. But then it will be a matter, not of involuntary ignorance, but of voluntary forgetting. Repentance, therefore, is a willingness to forget what Christ forgets when he sequesters evil in the eternal death of his human mind; an acceptance, as out of circulation, of what he has taken out of circulation; an agreement to stop insisting on what the word doesn’t want to talk about. Repentance as shutting up and putting on the wedding garment.