I Want To See Jesus!

While we are nearing the finishing line of the Lenten season, I find myself full of more questions than answers. The end is in view. We have had huge success in all the programs of the last few weeks, we have experienced the Holy Spirit catching fire, and people are responding to it. In the midst of the excitement, enthusiasm, and pageantry I find myself with many questions. As we approach Easter and Jesus approaches the cross, what do we want out of the experience? What is it that we want to experience as we go through Holy Week? When we choose to follow Christ what is it that we want out of this relationship? Is Easter a time of spiritual renewal, a time to reflect on your own life, and acquire strengthen to face the future? Do we have any expectations about Easter or is it just a Holy time of the year?
If you are like me and your life is like mine the answer is simple. I want to SEE Jesus! When it comes to looking at Jesus, what do we see? Here are a few possibilities. We might see Jesus as miracle worker, and then wonder why we don't see miracles in our own life. We might see Jesus as a teacher and try to hear what he teaches and try to follow his teachings. We might see Jesus as the best example of how to live and attempt to emulate his life. We might see him as the Savior who gives us eternal life. Or, we might see him as all of these things, and perhaps even more! No matter how we see Jesus we all yearn to be in His glory. When we see Jesus on the cross, witness the pain, observe the destruction, we fail to see God’s glory. We miss the victory. We miss God’s unconditional love He has for us. We overlook the need to lose our life in order to gain it. The cross as the example of God’s glory is the single place we find the hope needed to make it to tomorrow. I want to see Jesus! What do you want?
Shalom,
Tommy

Time

In reflecting on the events of the past week, I have been in somewhat in a reflective mood. I have witnessed first hand how death can steal from us the most valuable commodity we all hold: time. I have been pondering the thought of what if the tragedy at First Baptist Church in Maryville and Pastor Fred Winters happened here at FCC and to me. While I prayed for the church and all those involved, never worried about my own personal safety, but what would I want to leave behind. What message would I want my faith community, everyone I know and care about to, receive if the exact same thing happened to me? I found myself with clarity, without horrible images in my mind, without the fear of death, with time being a precious unrecyclable resource, writing down little ramblings that came to me this past week.

Not at all to be morbid here are a few.

• Don’t let the last few minutes of my life be the constant image you carry of me into the future. I pray my life was an example of the joy that comes with being in a relationship with Christ. Please laugh, joke, celebrate, have fun and remember me the way I lived life not the way I died.


• Don’t ever be afraid to be in the house of our Lord. God’s house has to be open, free, and inviting to all, no matter what. Don’t fear the stranger as they need Christ love also.
  God called me home from the place were I feel his holy presences the closest. Behind the pulpit, communion table, or a guitar for me is the serenity place I feel the warmth, strength, and comfort of God the most. I was taken into God’s kingdom from the exact place where I experienced and came to know as the most Holy place on earth.


• If I ever hurt you, disappointed you, or let you down please know it was not my intent and please forgive me.


• Pray and pray hard. Pray for my family, our church, and the one who was responsible for taking my life. Forgive them also. View it only for the reality of exactly what happened. A person in poor mental health reacted out of his illness, not out of clarity.


• Keep on truckin. Don’t spend much time and energy on mourning my death. Use that energy to help others connect to the love of Jesus Christ. That is my only passion, so use my memory only to motivate your self to connect others to Christ. Our church holds many special unique gifts, use them abundantly to serve, love, help, invite, and mentor others in their relationship with Jesus Christ.


• Root for the University of Memphis Tigers, love each other abundantly, be limitless in forgiving each other, and at every opportunity share what God, not me, has done for your life. Remember God is about love and reconciliation so we will meet again.
  Last but not least, use the time you have left wisely and never take it for granted.

My intent is not to glorify this horrible tragedy or use it for my own gain but wanted to share my message if time was ever robbed from us. I hope it will stir your thoughts as we experience Lent together, reflect on the time Christ spent on earth, cherish the time we have, and chose to use it wisely. Time is the precious commodity. Shalom, Tommy

Saving Grace

When does a gift become a present? We all give gifts to friends and family for all sorts of occasions. Weddings, births, deaths, anniversaries, birthdays, graduations, and special occasions are usually customary times to give a gift. There is a lot of thought, time, energy, and creativity that goes into picking out the perfect gift. Giving gifts are a way we express our love for one another. Many people express their love for another through giving of a gift, time, money or energy. The gift does not become a present until it is received by the recipient. The value is not complete until it has been accepted by person we love. We would not spend the time searching for the right gift, fight the crowds at the store, spend our hard earned money to purchase it, wrap it in a nice box for a wonderful presentation, and then place it on a closet, and never give it to anyone. We would not go up to a friend and say, “I bought you the best birthday present ever. You will really love it. It will make your life so much better. Every time you see it, it will remind you of my love for you and give you peace and joy as a reflection of our relationship. But, you can’t have it; I’m not going to give it to you. I decided to keep it for myself.”
We would not ever say that to someone we loved. What if those words were from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? In reality, Jesus through His life, death, and resurrection says the exact opposite. He declares to us that the gift he has for us is grace. He has prepared the gift for us, it reminds us of His love for us, and it can bring us peace, joy, love and comfort beyond our imagination. But it is up to us to receive that gift. God’s divine grace is an "unmerited favor" of God, given freely to us but we must accept and receive it for us to become complete. In theology, grace may be described as 'enabling power sufficient for progression'. We also must pass the grace on to others. We have wasted the gift of grace if we are not willing to share it with others. Grace draws unity, understanding, love, acceptance, power, and hope. Let us receive it, understand it, and share it with someone we love this time of Lent as it becomes our enabling power for progression. That is when our gift becomes a present.

Keeping Promises

“Promises everybody makes them and everybody breaks them.” That is a catchy little quote I can up with sometime ago. I'm probably not be the original philosopher and someone else might have created it before me but its true none the same. When my quote resurfaces in my conscious, I am usually speaking about myself. A promise to my children to take them somewhere, the phone rings, someone in the church needs my immediate pastoral care and I’m off. While the family understands, my promise is still broken, feelings are hurt, and disappointment sets in. The natural remedy is another promise to take them tomorrow or at a later date. With the first promise already broken, though unintentional and with understanding, the second promise already looses its validity because I have already not lived up to the original. It can quickly become a slippery slope. Promises are either kept or broken, there is no in between. All people in our lives make us promises and we judge their legitimacy by the past behavior of the one making the promise. It is in our human nature to want to keep our promises but sometimes we can not predict the unpredictable. People throughout or lives, either publicly or privately, will break some promise to us either with good intentions or bad. It is an essential criterion in which we all live out our lives.
The mistake we often make is to apply the same criteria on the promises of God. While we struggle to keep our promises God delivers on His even before we can witness the outcome. God promise to Abraham and Sarah caused both of them to laugh. While the thought of having a child at an older age than most, (Abraham 99 years old was and Sarah was 90 years old) this couple actually laughed at God’s promise to grant them a child and build a great nation from their descendants. Can you imagine the absurdity in those words? A great nation, a child, at our age, when we went all these years barren, without a child, unable to conceive. All these thought must have been running through their minds. Now, when we are near old age we will have a son, and we will be responsible for breeding an entire nation. Reviving our old church, at our age, when the economy is bad, God will use our faith community to do great things, now? God can use me, with my past to share the love of Christ with others? YES! Why? God fulfills His promises. While the timetable was not what Abraham and Sarah anticipated, God’s promise was kept, fulfilled, and lived out. Let us think this week about the promises we make, those we keep and those we don’t. Let us remember that God always keeps His promise to us and to our church. Recall that what may sound absurd to us and cause us to laugh could often be the reality of God’s promise.

Trying to keep my promises but until then take care of yourself and one another.

In Christ Love,

Tommy

Nine Life Principles

Here are Nine Principles in which I strongly agree with. Why I try not be political it seems our society has provided a climate in which one can not ignore. I can not understand the hate for one president and the refusal of criticism and silence of another. I can not comprehend the expediency to spend a unimaginable amount of money disguised as fear, uncertainty, and crisis. What about the speech on hope, President Obama? You criticized the auto makers for their jets but you flew two jets (Air Force One and the decoy) just so your and your wife could eat at your favorite restaurant in Chicago. Bush spent $597 Billion dollars on a six year war on terrorism and Obama spent $787 billion in one week. Makes one think there is little hope of change.
Here are nine principles I try to live my life by:

The Nine Principles
1. America is good.
2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.
3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me

Take care of yourself and one another.
Shalom,
Tommy

“The Key to Victory, Love”

I am reminded today of a famous statement made to me by one of my basketball coaches. He said, “Remember there is no I in Team.” In which I, in my competitive nature, responded passionately, “There is in WIN! Now get me the ball.” It was not that I held dissatisfaction with my teammates; it was not that I doubted their skills and abilities; it was the simple fact that I had confidence in my own actions. I had no doubt that I could score and win the game. I desperately wanted the ball in my hands. I wanted to control the outcome of the game. At that moment, I did not care about the relationships of my teammates. I wanted, needed, and urgently want to win. Winning is the goal of any competition and the common goal of our team. In my view, the way to victory meant giving me the ball, letting me score, win the game, and then we all celebrate. Losing was just not an option. It was nothing emotional or personal. That may or may not work on the basketball court but it definitely does not work in the church.
In his first letter to the struggling church in Corinth, Paul writes in Chapter 8:1-13, it is love that makes one victorious. It is not the knowledge we have, it is not the ministries we offer, or the way we worship, it is how we love each other and interact with each other that makes us attractive to others. The Corinth church was arguing about eating meat. While they quarreled and complained about the issue, Paul reminded them that others outside the church were watching the way they loved each other. Here at FCC, we have a unique gift to share with others in our community. The gift we hold is the ability to love and care for each other. Loving each other does not mean we have to always agree but it means we still cherish, respect, care, and love each other along the way. If we love each other the way Christ calls us to love each other, Christ’s love will be intoxicating for those outside our walls. We must be willing to invite others to share in Christ’s love that we display naturally in our faith family. By building and nurturing healthy Christ like relationships, we all win. Let us all share the ball and share the love as we do the work of our Lord.

Here are 15 things everyone should know about Fred Rogers

1. Even Koko the Gorilla loved him. Most people have heard of Koko, the Stanford-educated gorilla who could speak about 1000 words in American Sign Language, and understand about 2000 in English.
What most people don't know, however, is that Koko was an avid Mister Rogers' Neighborhood fan. As Esquire reported, when Fred Rogers took a trip out to meet Koko for his show, not only did she immediately wrap her arms around him and embrace him, she did what she'd always seen him do onscreen: she proceeded to take his shoes off!
2. He made thieves think twice. According to a TV Guide piece on him, Fred Rogers drove a plain old Impala for years. One day, however, the car was stolen from the street near the TV station. When Rogers filed a police report, the story was picked up by every newspaper, radio and media outlet around town.
Amazingly, within 48 hours the car was left in the exact spot where it was taken from, with an apology on the dashboard. It read, "If we'd known it was yours, we never would have taken it
3. He watched his figure to the pound. In covering Rogers' daily routine (waking up at 5 a.m.; praying for a few hours for all of his friends and family; studying; writing, making calls and reaching out to every fan who took the time to write him; going for a morning swim; getting on a scale; then really starting his day), writer Tom Junod explained that Mr. Rogers weighed in at exactly 143 pounds every day for the last 30 years of his life.
He didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't eat the flesh of any animals, and was extremely disciplined in his daily routine. And while I'm not sure if any of that was because he'd mostly grown up a chubby, single child, Junod points out that Rogers found beauty in the number 143.

According to the piece, Rogers came "to see that number as a gift... because, as he says, "the number 143 means 'I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you.' One hundred and forty-three."
4. He saved both public television and the VCR. Strange but true. When the government wanted to cut public television funds in 1969, the relatively unknown Mister Rogers went to Washington.
Almost straight out of a Frank Capra film, his 5-6 minute testimony on how TV had the potential to give kids hope and create more productive citizens was so simple but passionate that even the most gruff politicians were charmed. While the budget should have been cut, the funding instead jumped from $9 to $22 million.
Rogers also spoke to Congress, and swayed senators into voting to allow VCR's to record television shows from the home. It was a cantankerous debate at the time, but his argument was that recording a program like his allowed working parents to sit down with their children and watch shows as a family.
5. He might have been the most tolerant American ever. Mister Rogers seems to have been almost exactly the same off-screen as he was onscreen. As an ordained Presbyterian minister, and a man of tremendous faith, Mister Rogers preached tolerance first.
Whenever he was asked to castigate non-Christians or gays for their differing beliefs, he would instead face them and say, with sincerity, "God loves you just the way you are." Often this provoked ire from fundamentalists.
6. He was genuinely curious about others. Mister Rogers was known as one of the toughest interviews because he'd often befriend reporters, asking them tons of questions, taking pictures of them, compiling an album for them at the end of their time together, and calling them after to check in on them and hear about their families. He wasn't concerned with himself, and genuinely loved hearing the life stories of others.
And it wasn't just with reporters. Once, on a fancy trip up to a PBS exec's house, he heard the limo driver was going to wait outside for 2 hours, so he insisted the driver come in and join them (which flustered the host).
On the way back, Rogers sat up front, and when he learned that they were passing the driver's home on the way, he asked if they could stop in to meet his family. According to the driver, it was one of the best nights of his life the house supposedly lit up when Rogers arrived, and he played jazz piano and bantered with them late into the night. Further, like with the reporters, Rogers sent him notes and kept in touch with the driver for the rest of his life.
7. He was color-blind. Literally. He couldn't see the color blue. Of course, he was also figuratively color-blind, as you probably guessed. As were his parents, who took in a black foster child when Rogers was growing up.
8. He could make a subway car full of strangers sing. Once while rushing to a New York meeting, there were no cabs available, so Rogers and one of his colleagues hopped on the subway. Esquire reported that the car was filled with people, and they assumed they wouldn't be noticed.
But when the crowd spotted Rogers, they all simultaneously burst into song, chanting "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood." The result made Rogers smile wide.
9. He got into TV because he hated TV.. The first time he turned one on, he saw people angrily throwing pies in each other's faces. He immediately vowed to use the medium for better than that. Over the years he covered topics as varied as why kids shouldn't be scared of a haircut, or the bathroom drain (because you won't fit!), to divorce and war.
10. He was an Ivy League dropout. Rogers moved from Dartmouth to Rollins College to pursue his studies in music.
11. He composed all the songs on the show, and over 200 tunes.
12. He was a perfectionist, and disliked ad libbing. He felt he owed it to children to make sure every word on his show was thought out.
13. Michael Keaton got his start on the show as an assistant. He helped puppeteer and operate the trolley.
14. Several characters on the show are named for his family. Queen Sara is named after Rogers' wife, and the postman Mr. McFeely is named for his maternal grandfather who always talked to him like an adult, and reminded young Fred that he made every day special just by being himself. Sound familiar? It was the same way Mister Rogers closed every show.
15. The sweaters. Every one of the cardigans he wore on the show had been hand-knit by his mother.

Rock on Fred.. May we all learn from your example.

TJH