"Popeye"

My first appointment was in central Illinois, where I served three smaller churches who had each seen their best days long ago (see “Requiem for a Church” elsewhere in this Blog). Their populations were simultaneously declining and aging, what with the majority of their young people heading off to college and not coming back, and so I had quite a few funerals during my three years there. I’d have to go back and count to be sure, but I believe the number was around fifty. They started during my second full month there with back to back to back funerals, three weeks in a row. One of those was Henrietta. If my memory serves me correctly, she was right around 100 years old.
By all accounts Henrietta was pretty deaf by the time I arrived, and our sound system didn’t work particularly well, so I doubt she heard much of what I said during worship. But she was from a time and generation when folks went to church, and so she was with us every Sunday, including the Sunday before she died. When she went it was sudden, despite her age. Her son found her, at home in bed. It appeared that she’d gone to sleep and just not woken up. And so we gathered for her funeral, and the ladies of the church prepared a fine meal for her friends and family, the latter of which included a bachelor son who was seventy years old. Everyone called him Popeye, because, well, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the cartoon character of the same name. Popeye had never really done too much with his life. If I recall correctly, he may have had a slight learning disability. He spent most of his time downtown at the bar where he earned a few dollars sweeping the floor. And unlike his elderly mother, he didn’t come to church. But during the lunch that followed the funeral one of the older ladies of the congregation suggested to him that with his mother gone now it was time for him to claim her pew.
Now, this was a town where the older church ladies commanded respect, and this friend of his mothers may have even been his Sunday School teacher sometime in the past. Whatever the reason, Popeye was in worship the next Sunday, sitting right there in his mother’s pew. Unfortunately, over the years Popeye’s clothing had become somewhat worn, and you didn’t really need to dress particularly well for the town bars, and so Popeye wore what he had available. This set a few tongues wagging, and Popeye, unlike his mother, was able to hear every word. That was his last Sunday in worship with us. He never came back, unwilling to subject himself to the judgment of the ladies of the church.
We do that sometimes in the Church - drive away the very people that Jesus would send us out to find and bring back home. Oh, we’ve relaxed our dress code substantially since this happened, but we can still be mighty quick to judge and reject the folks who’s lives bear silent witness to a lifetime of poor choices, or those who really don’t fit well within our social circles. Jesus once reminded the Pharisees that it was the sick who required a Physician, and not those who were well, but we too often forget that, expecting folks to have their lives all in order when they first come to the church, as if somehow that could be possible.
I’ve often thought about Popeye over the years, even though he died in 1992, five years and a few months after we had moved on to Minnesota. The obituary stated that he was survived by a nephew. I still grieve that it couldn’t add the words “and a loving church family.”

“Trusting the Hand on the Reins”

If you ride much – or if perhaps you used to ride a good bit in the past – than you already know that one the greatest risks in riding a young horse is over the way they tend to shy at things that frighten them. It might be a mailbox, or a piece of paper blowing by, or any number of things that spook them and cause them to behave in an unpredictable fashion.
A number of years ago, back when we were boarding our horses down the road, Susan and I had gone out for a ride on a nice fall afternoon. We had a pretty good ride that day - and by that I mean that we had lived through it - and were most of the way back down the ditch alongside the driveway leading into the yard, when my horse stepped on a cattle fence that someone had left in the high grass. Now that might not have been a problem, except that my horse had shoes on, and the back edge caught a corner of the fence so that as he raised his foot the fence both pulled on him and came up out of the grass - and I’m sure he thought it was going to eat him. He just “broke in two”, bucking up out of the ditch, across the driveway, and into the ditch on the other side. Frankly, I didn’t know he had it in him. Anyway, about that time I decided to get off - or at least that’s my story! Fear responses can simply be dangerous.
There are a couple approaches that you can take to try to overcome this sort of response. The first thing that you can do is de-sensitize your horse to as much as possible. By that I mean you expose your horse to as many different frightening things as you can - starting slowly with things that aren't too scary - and only reward your horse by removing the scary object when he finally stops moving and relaxes. By and large when you see someone advertise a horse as bomb-proof the seller means that this horse has been exposed to – and become accustomed to – pretty much everything you might encounter on a ride (cars, trucks, tractors, 4-wheelers, mailboxes, dogs, plastic bags, gun shots, etc.).
But there’s a second approach that you’ll often find some of the very best clinicians advocating – and I mean the people who seem to be able to look deeper inside a horse and recognize exactly where it is at and what it needs in that moment. These folks suggest that rather than working on the horse (de-sensitizing it) we should be working on the rider. What they mean is that if the horse trusts the rider – if the horse has come to understand that the rider knows what he or she is doing – if the horse believes that the rider cares for it and is it’s leader and protector, the horse will do pretty much anything the rider asks without fear because it knows it is in good hands!
And I can’t help but wonder, as we stand only a few days into a new year, whether or not our own response to God’s leading might not also depend upon how much we are willing to trust the One whose hands are on the reins in our lives?
Robert Sutton recalls a television program that preceded the Winter Olympics some years ago that featured blind skiers being trained for slalom skiing, as impossible as that may sound. Paired with sighted skiers, the blind skiers were taught on the flats how to make right and left turns. When that was mastered, they were taken to the slalom slope, where their sighted partners skied beside them shouting, "Left!" and "Right!" As they obeyed the commands, they were able to negotiate the course and cross the finish line, depending solely on the sighted skiers' word. It was either complete trust or catastrophe.
Sutton suggests that this is a vivid picture of the Christian life - except that we are the ones who are in reality blind and can only make our way to safety as we listen to, and heed, God’s guidance.
As you make your way through 2009, you really have two choices. You can buck & shy, fighting for your head as you plunge blindly in the darkness of the unknown. Or you can trust the hand on the reins of the One who loves you and who can see what you cannot.
(Excerpted from a Cowboy Church message on January 4th)