Tombstone

 

Do you have the kind of friends who would face the Clantons with you?

Recently, I was watching the Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer movie “Tombstone” for about the 800th time, and looking forward to all the great lines from the movie, like when Curly Bill sees the Earps’ leaving and delivers his farewell in just two words, but the way he delivers the line says so much more: “Well … bye!” Then there is the scene at the train station when Wyatt yells, “You called down the thunder. Well, now you got it!” which is followed by the classic “Tell ‘em I’m coming – and hell’s coming with me!”

There is another scene where Doc Holliday is joining in with Wyatt and the others to go to war with the Clantons, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson says to Doc, whose health has visibly gotten worse, “What the hell you doin’ this for anyway?”

There is another scene where Doc Holliday is joining in with Wyatt and the others to go to war with the Clantons, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson says to Doc, whose health has visibly gotten worse, “What the hell you doin’ this for anyway?”Doc says, “Wyatt Earp is my friend.”

Johnson responds, “Hell, I got lots of friends.”

And Doc says, “Well, I don’t.”

That got me thinking about friendships. Not social media friends, “friends” whose request I have accepted on Facebook but who I’m not sure I actually know. Some I know for certain I’ve never met. I fear we’ve cheapened the definition of “friends” that way.

Most guys have some really close friendships when we were younger – in school, or on the playground or ballfield. I know I had fraternity brothers that I’d do stupid things with without even thinking (and ultimately paid the price for that!).

As I got out on my own, working, most of my friendships were people I worked with or around – other sportswriters, or coaches or athletes, those kinds of people. Some became, for a time, really good friends beyond just the profession.

When I got married, my number of really good friendships dropped even further. Life became all about my wife, my job, then my kids, and taking care of things. I didn’t really have time – or at least didn’t feel like I had the time – to cultivate really strong friendships.

Ultimately, I think of the movie “Tombstone” as being about friendship. I don’t think Wyatt Earp ever had to ask Doc Holliday for help. In fact, he probably would never dream of doing that. Doc had just made up his mind he’d be there for Wyatt no matter what.

It is important who our friends are. I think the Biblical concept of not being “unequally yoked” applies to friends as well. We need friends who believe as we do, who share the same Biblical values, who encourage us in our walk to be the person God wants us to be.

That’s not to say we don’t have non-Christian friends. We should. But remember what Paul wrote in I Corinthains (15:33): “Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.” I have had friends that I thought I could influence to be better but sometimes found out I was becoming more like them than the other way around. My language, my humor, my view of the world slowly became more like theirs than their views became like mine.

You see some examples of close friendships in the Bible. One story that really stands out to me is from Mark 2, where a paralyzed man can’t get into the room to see Jesus because it’s so crowded, and four of his friends take him to the roof, tear a whole in the ceiling, and lower their friend down so he can see Jesus. That’s really a remarkable act of friendship.

In the last chapter of Romans, Paul lists out a number of people who appear to have been far more than just friends, a real support system; people that were there for him through anything.

And of course there are Job’s three friends, who apparently hear about the catastrophe that has befallen him and drop everything, travelling a great distance just to sit beside Job for a full week without saying a word; just letting him know they are there for him.

However, even Job’s friends, after a week of silence, turn on him with all sorts of accusations. They no doubt think they are providing wise counsel, but we – the reader – know they are wrong (God even says so at the end of the book). And Paul, even with that long list of friends at the end of Romans, writes about being abandoned and betrayed (2 Timothy).

We like friends who always support us, unconditionally. But that makes me think of Peter, one of Jesus’ closest friends, who upon being told that Jesus was going to die said, “Far be it from you, Lord! This won’t ever happen to you!” Peter thought he was being loyal and didn’t realize his statement was going against God’s will. Jesus had to say to his friend Peter, “Get behind me Satan! You are a hindrance to me!” What Peter thought was loyalty, Jesus saw as Satanic.

That demonstrates a vital component of true friendship. We’d think we’d rather have friends who always tell us what we want to hear, who show us grace in excusing our shortcomings. But we can’t really afford to have those kinds of truly “close” friends.

A really smart older guy who has become a good friend in recent years told me, “The friendships you have in life really can define you. You know the saying about ‘iron sharpening iron?’ You can be sharpening in a negative way, too. The influences you have around you, the perspective that people have that are outside what might be the value system you grew up with or you want to have – those people can have an influence in shaping your thinking if you allow yourself to be unduly influenced by other people’s opinions.”

We need friends who pray bigger things for us than we pray for ourselves; who believe in us when our faith is struggling; who make space for us when life seems like it is about to fall apart. We need friends who rejoice when things go well. And – most importantly – they remind us in every aspect of our lives what is really important, what our focus should be on.

Proverbs 18:24 says, “One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother.”

That took me back to Tombstone, and Wyatt Earp having to face the Clantons at the OK Corral. Earp knows it is probably not going to end well, that it will be dangerous. In the scene before the OK Corral battle, Wyatt tries to talk Doc out of going with him because Doc is so sick., Doc is truly offended, saying to Wyatt: “That’s a hell of a thing to say to me.”

It made me wonder, if I had to go face the mythical Clantons in my life, do I have friends who would go with me?

I was thinking about this out loud with one of my truly good friends, and before I could even get the question framed, he looked at me and said, “I’d go.”

I knew he would, and said, “I’d go for you, too.”

To which he replied, “You already have.”

That’s the essence of friendship.

I hope none of us ever have to see who is willing to go with us to face the Clantons that may pop up in our lives. But even more, I hope that if we ever do have to make that walk to the OK Corral and see the townspeople scattering to get behind the safety of closed doors, we look to our left and right and see we have a few friends walking down that dusty main street with us.

The loudest voice

 

God whispers in pleasure; Satan shouts in pain

"No pain, no gain."

It has to be one of the most cliched, trite, banal, oft-repeated throw-away (pick your synonym) maxims of the healthy, or those trying to be.

Nobody wants pain. Yet anytime I have overworked whatever muscles I have left in this old body of mine and get that soreness that inevitably comes the day after, down deep I am pleased. I know what it means: I’m better for it. If I do it enough, I’m getting stronger. I’ll look better, feel better, move better, just be better. And, unfortunately, to get “in shape,” such pain is inevitable.

If you ask the random guy on the street if he wants to endure some pain, he’s probably going to say, “absolutely not.”

But if you can talk to that same person for a while, you’ll probably find out that the periods of most growth – physically, or mentally, or professionally, or personally, or whatever – came during or after periods of some sort of pain.

Pain tells us when something is wrong. Pain tells us we’re getting better. Pain can encourage us to keep going.

Pain can also tell us we’re failures, that God doesn’t love us, that we might even wish we were dead.

Ironic – if I’m using that word correctly.

Lately, I’ve been asked a couple of times to speak about suffering. Not because I’ve personally suffered that much or even that extensively, but because I have some experience being with people who have or are going through some incredible times of suffering; in some cases, over a decade of intense suffering. I’ve had a front row seat to people I love who have had to deal with constant, almost unbearable pain; curl up on the floor and wish you were dead pain.

And one of the constant messages I have heard is that pain is the loudest voice you’ll ever hear.

It’s there, in the middle of the night, screaming at you that you’re unloved, that you’ve been rejected, that you’re all alone and nobody understands and nobody can help and this is the way it will always be and is as good as it’s going to get.

Those of us who have never really experienced this type of pain – and, thankfully, I am one of them – can conjure up all kinds of noble thoughts about dealing with pain. It’s easy to theorize about pain when it’s not my own. It becomes abstract, something to be endlessly discussed.

But those who endure this kind of pain know it is anything but abstract. It’s all-consuming, overwhelming, takes over all reality and looms like a dark shadow over every other thought.

The Bible talks a lot about pain. Job (30:17) says, “The night racks my bones, and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest.” Jeremiah 15:18 says, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?”

King Hezekiah, a rare king of Israel who was described as following God and did “what was good and right and faithful before the Lord his God” (2 Chronicles 31:20), became sick to the point he was told he was going to die. In one of the most poignant descriptions of suffering, it says in 2 Kings 20 that Hezekiah “turned his face to the wall” and “wept bitterly.”

For all the encouragement and verses and platitudes that people who are hurting are told by loving, well-meaning friends and family, it is hard to hold rational, articulate opinions when you are curled up in the bed, or on the floor, or confined to a hospital room writhing in pain.

I am blessed to not have suffered like that myself, at least not for any extended period. So, I would never say to someone going through something like this, “I know how you feel.” I don’t know; I can’t know. I may take the pain I have felt and imagine what it would be like to multiply it by a hundred, by a thousand, but it’s not the same. I can’t really “know.”

The kind of pain that tells you that you have been forsaken – that’s the kind of pain Satan exploits. Someone I love very much, a person whose life reflects a faith and devotion to God far greater than my own, told me that in her worst pain, caused by an accident in which she probably should have died, she remembers hearing, “If God really loved you, he’d have taken you to heaven rather than leave you here to suffer like this.”

Of all the things that can turn a person from God, I wonder if pain is not Satan’s greatest weapon. I see that in the Cross, where the ultimate battle of God’s love vs. Satan’s evil was an unimaginable torture, where even the Son of God cried out “why have you forsaken me.”

I tend to think of Christians who suffer for God as those who are doing something that I consider significant for God’s kingdom: the martyrs, missionaries in foreign lands, those who are actively engaged every day in doing what we think of as “God’s work,’’ the noble stuff that we admire and share in sermons and Sunday School lessons.

But what if our idea of what is really “God’s work” is too limited?

My only explanation for pain, the only way I can begin to understand it, is to believe that there is something bigger going on than just what I believe to be my puny little life. The book of Job tells me that. There is some sort of cosmic, other-worldly battle between Satan, the Accuser, and God. Satan is, as the Bible tells us in multiple places, the “accuser” who stands before the throne accusing God’s people (Revelation 12:10, Zechariah 3:1-2 as examples). In Job, we learn that Satan says, “I can make people reject You” and God says, as he did of Job, “Do what you will (within the parameters I set) and let’s see who remains faithful.”

Does that conversation go on just about the ones we think of as righteous, like Job? And Paul and Peter and the martyrs? Or could it be about each of us, wherever we are in our faith?

I’m not entirely comfortable with that scenario. But I also understand that when those who are faithful praise and, as best they can, worship God in the midst of the most trying, mystifying, horrible circumstances, with the most excruciating pain - even when the rest of the world doesn’t know about it, when it seems from our perspective to serve no earthly purpose - Satan loses, again, and is forced to slink away in defeat.

When see friends suffering in pain they don’t seem to deserve, that there is no earthly reason for that I can see, I ask, “What in the world is going on here?” I may be missing the point, for what is going on “here” may not be of “this” world. Indeed, there is a good chance there is no “earthly” reason.

We’re called to live out our faith regardless, to be faithful, to trust. In return, we have the opportunity to be part of a great victory for God’s Glory, one in which that great cloud of witnesses’ shout in triumph while the Accuser, Satan, slinks away in defeat.

And pray we can cling to the promises of Scripture.

“Nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God.” Romans 8:39

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” – Romans 8:18

No pain. No gain.

God and GPS (Is this really the right way to go?)

 I have a love-hate relationship with my GPS.

Maybe you do, too.

I realized this while driving a friend’s car from Birmingham to Minneapolis, about a 15-hour drive which I broke up over two days. (The reason for the drive is another story, for another time).

I suppose it’s a cliché about men, that we don’t like to ask for directions. Because I have family in St. Louis, I know the various routes to get there from Birmingham. But even though I have made this drive to Minnesota three years in a row, I’m still not entirely confident in knowing the best way to get from St. Louis to Minneapolis.

However, I have made the drive enough to be somewhat familiar with the roads and landmarks along the way. So, I plugged in the address to my GPS, hit “start” and was following the directions just fine until …

Until I started to second-guess the GPS. As I said, I had made this drive twice before and recognized enough landmarks that were familiar, and so I had those moments in which I thought, “I wonder if the GPS is really on the best route.”

Again, maybe it’s a guy thing. Or maybe just me. My wife laughs at how I argue with the GPS just driving around town. I admit I’m a bit of a Luddite – someone who resists technology – and identify with John Henry in his ultimately futile fight against the steam-powered hammer.

The system I used for this trip is on my phone. But what I like and dislike about this particular system is often the same thing: communication.

Sometimes my GPS gives me random but very useful information, letting me know an accident had been reported ahead, or one lane is closing due to construction, or even there is a reported speed trap ahead; not to mention the usual “take the next exit” or “at the next traffic light, turn left.”

But then sometimes it goes silent. I’ll be driving along, passing exits, and nothing comes from my GPS system. Sometimes it goes on for so long that I begin to wonder if it has somehow disconnected. I check to make sure the system is on and I haven’t somehow lost the signal. Usually, it’s during a particularly long stretch of staying on the same highway.

Sometimes it talks to me almost too much, which becomes annoying, particularly offering instructions about what not to do, when I wasn’t even considering making that turn or following another highway.

Then sometimes it doesn’t talk to me enough. It doesn’t give me enough acknowledgement that I’m on the right road, doing a good job. A simple “attaboy” just to let me know it’s still there and knows what I’m doing would be appreciated.

But ultimately sometimes it tells me to go in one direction when I wonder if this other direction wouldn’t make more sense. It tells me to go straight when something makes me think turning on another road seems like the right way to go.

And it struck me that’s kind of like my relationship with God.

Sometimes I’d like a little more confirmation from God about what I’m doing, what road I’m taking in my life. Sometimes I feel like I’m hearing from God enough to feel I’m right where He wants me.

Then sometimes I’m cruising along and suddenly feel like I haven’t heard from Him in a while, and I wonder if He’s still there. I wonder if He’s paying attention.

And then there are the times I wonder if I don’t know better what to do in a given situation.

Remember when God told Abraham, at the advanced age of 75 (and his wife Sarah was 65), that Abraham was going to have a son and be the father of a great nation? Abraham believed. But then nothing happened. God, as far as we know, went silent, like my GPS on a long stretch of Iowa state highway. And Abraham and Sarah decided that maybe God needed some help.

First, they decided that Abraham’s servant, Eliezer of Damascus, would be the heir. Then they decided to produce a son by Sarah’s slave, Hagar. It was like saying, “I know where we’re trying to get to, God, but I think this route would be faster.”

The result was worse than simply a wrong turn that cost time on an already long trip - particularly in the son conceived through Hagar. Abraham and Sarah’s idea produced Ishmael, whose descendants are the reason for so much of the conflict in the Middle East today. “He will live in hostility toward all his brothers,” is how the story goes. And so he has.

After 25 years, God did what He said He would do: Sarah conceived a son by Abraham. Abraham was 99. If Abraham had only believed and been patient, he’d have saved himself – and the world – a lot of trouble.

That’s a lot more serious than doubting my GPS, I know. And it’s a lot easier to correct the mistakes I make by sometimes deciding I know better than by GPS which way to go.

If only I could trust, and be patient, and wait … on my GPS, and on God.

But sometimes I just can’t help but think that maybe God needs some help, or maybe God is expecting me to do something about my situation, or maybe God just doesn’t really understand what’s going on.

It reminds me of the story of the guy who was out hiking in the mountains. He slips, and goes over a steep cliff, but about 20 feet down he manages to grab a bush that is sticking out of the side of the cliff face.

He’s hanging there, looking up at the top with no idea of how to get back there, and looking down at the bottom, some 75 feet to rocks and certain death.

So finally, he calls out, “Is anybody up there? Can somebody save me? Hello! Anybody there? Somebody – anybody – help!”

And he hears a voice. “Yes. This is God. Trust me. Let go of the bush and I’ll save you.”

The man looks down at the rock far below. He considers where he is. He calls out, “Do you understand where I am right now? Are you sure about this?”

God says, “Just trust me.”

The man thinks for a minute, looks down at the rock below, and then says, “Hey - is there anybody else up there?”

Sometimes, like the GPS says, we all have to recalibrate.

Adios and vaya con Dios

 

Listening to “Toes” by the Zac Brown Band. I didn’t realize the title of the song was “Toes,” but it fits. Maybe you know the premise:

“Got my toes in the water, ass in the sand

Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand

Life is good today, life is good today”

I loved Jimmy Buffett music in the 1970s (still do), and the whole Caribbean beach vibe, kind of carefree, hedonistic attitude of his songs, an attitude that I’ve never really had but like the idea of. For that matter, I really don’t like the beach (although I do love the Caribbean). But Buffett kind of begat Kenny Chesney (at least his stuff from the last 20 years or so) which led to songs like this one by Zac Brown, and I’m drawn to those.

And for some reason, in my warped brain, as I listened to “Toes” I couldn’t help but think of the story of the Prodigal Son.

Who doesn’t like the story of the prodigal son?

It may be one of the most used parables from Jesus. The younger son demanded his share of his inheritance from his father. He uses what he’s given to go live the high life. The money runs out, so does the fun (as Zac Brown sings in “Toes” – “The señoritas don’t care-o when there’s no dinero, yeah I got no money to stay”). He decides there is nothing left to do but tuck his tail between his legs and go back and see if his father will take him on as a servant, knowing he doesn’t deserve to be treated like a son.

But the father has apparently been looking, hoping every day for the son’s return, and when he sees him coming, drops everything and runs out to welcome him home. The son gives his “I am unworthy” speech but the father cuts him off, cleans him up and puts him in fine clothes, and throws a party to celebrate his return.

Then the story takes a dark turn. The older brother is coming in from a long day in the fields, doing what he had been doing every day since long before his worthless little brother ran off. He’s been working while the other brother has been playing. And when he sees the party going on and finds out why, he’s bitter. He doesn’t think it’s fair.

“‘My son,’’ the father says to the older son, “you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” (Luke 15).

There are so many applications to this story. We love the lost son returning and being forgiven and welcomed back into the family. We love that because many of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in a tough situation, feeling deserted, maybe close to being broken, with nowhere to turn.

If the younger son still had money, would he have come back? No, he had to be brought to a place of abandonment – like the Zac Brown song: he was no longer welcome when there was no more money. His friends disappeared when the credit card was declined.

In that situation, what the younger son realized was he needed a real relationship with someone, the kind of relationship that survives hard times and difficulties, that isn’t built on ‘what can you do for me.’

So the younger son goes from “I don’t need anybody” to “I’m don’t have anybody.” I think a lot of us have, at times, been there.

Then we have the older brother. If you read the story in Luke, you realize Jesus was really talking to the “Pharisees and teachers of the law,” the “older brothers” of the Jewish culture. They would have been the ones who would have seen God (in the physical form of Jesus) embracing “the tax collectors and sinners” as it says, welcoming them back into the family. And they don’t think its fair.

It reminds me of those of us who have grown up in the Church and don’t have a previous life of chasing “tequila and pretty señoritas” (to quote Zac Brown again). We’re the ones who have remained faithful, doing our duty, trying to make Dad proud of us.

It’s easy to have this uneasy feeling that as hard as we have worked, as much sacrifice we have made to be faithful, have we really pleased God? And in this story that we know as “the Prodigal Son,’’ there is a suggestion that, while the father loves both sons, he seems really pleased with the younger son. That’s the one he throws the party for, while the older son says, “You never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.”

There is a lot to unpack; I know that. But here is what “the restless brain of an ordinary guy, wondering about an extraordinary God” (as I explain my reasons for these writings) started wondering about.

We know God loves us. Of course He does. He loves everybody! And that means He loves even the people that will reject Him and wind up in Hell. He doesn’t want them to make that choice (with apologies to the predestination folks). It breaks His heart.

But what I sometimes struggle with is the question, not does God love me – again, he loves everybody - but does God approve of me? Am I really pleasing Him?

Can I picture the Lord – God – the Father – running to me, throwing His arms around me, killing the fatted calf and calling everyone to a big party celebrating me!

Maybe I think too much, but I can’t help but feel sometimes – no, very often – that what I do is not enough. That I do it for the wrong reasons. Perhaps like the older brother, I can’t help but go through my life of attempted loyalty and somewhat obedience wondering, “When do I get my party?”

Thinking that, somehow, God owes me!

That’s when the mask comes off. That’s when I see myself as I really am.

And I realize that I am as lost as the younger brother. It doesn’t look the same. But then, are there degrees of sin? In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5), Jesus mentions two sins that we’d consider “big” – murder and adultery – and equates them with unjustified anger and lust. Going back to the story of the Prodigal Son, the younger son may well have committed one or both of those “big” sins; but there is an equal chance the older brother committed both of what we’d consider the “lesser” ones. And Jesus seems to say they are, in God’s eyes, equal.

That is hard for us self-righteous types to recognize and admit.

But when I do, when I recognize and confess … remember what the younger brother said when he saw his father? “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” Just as the younger brother confessed, so too must the older brother recognize his own pride, his own sin, and repent.

Sometimes we pass over what the father told the older son: “Everything I have is yours.” When you really look at the story, even though it doesn’t say the father ran to get the older brother as he did the younger, it does say that the father came out and went to the older son. He didn’t send a servant to go get him; he didn’t yell out to him to come on inside. The father wasn’t so caught up the welcoming party for the younger son that he forgot about the older one. The father pursued both the one who chased harlots as well as the hypocrite.

If God accepts us at all, He accepts us completely. Wholeheartedly. No half measures.

Then it hit me: the Apostle Paul was the older brother. Paul – when he was Saul – was the law-keeper, the pharisee, the one who faithfully kept all the rules and did everything to “earn” God’s favor. Saul saw God as the command-giver, and Saul was the command-keeper. If anyone deserved the party with the fatted calf, it was Saul.

Until one day, on the Damascus Road, God came out and met Saul. And suddenly Saul – now Paul - recognized his own hypocrisy. From then on, Paul dedicated his life to going after the younger brothers, the wayward sons.

Paul rejected his own self-righteousness.

I want “the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith” (Phillippians 3:9). I want what was said of Abraham in Romans, “If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. What does Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’” In other words, as Paul writes later in that same chapter, “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed.”

In this story, the wandering prodigal came home, while the homebound prodigal did not.

I can hear the younger brother now.

“Adiós and vaya con Dios. Going home now to stay.” (Zac Brown, “Toes,” 2008)

Now that’s a party.