State Missionary Rick Lance is executive director of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions.


Other Recent Blog Entries:

Thanks for Ten Years Together
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
One priority was on my mind, when I was called to this opportunity of ministry. It was the Great Commission.

Good News for Bad Times
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
During bad times, people look for some good news. For Christians, this is an opportunity for us to offer the very best of good news.

Your God and Your Tears
Friday, July 11, 2008
Your God has a tear bottle cellar. He has a bottle or bottles containing your tears. . . .

The Biggest Giver Ever
Monday, July 7, 2008
John 3:16 is perhaps the best text in the Bible for preaching on stewardship and the ministry of giving.

The Meaning of the Fourth in Three Words
Saturday, June 28, 2008
The fourth of July reminds us of our history, or at least it should. It is the day set aside as the punctual momen#givert in history . . .

Grieving with Hope
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Saying goodbye to someone you love . . . is not a happy experience.

From Hard Times to "Softly and Tenderly"
Saturday, June 15,, 2008
I will never hear the old hymn . . .without thinking of my mother.

A Tribute to a Father by a Famous Figure
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
For Father’s Day, I want to share with you a tribute to a father . . .

When a Barn Becomes a Church
Monday, May 19, 2008
The building has now become a place for worship of the Risen Lord.

America and the Middle East
Friday, May 9, 2008
[The] book is a historical journey through American history as it relates to this enchanting area of geography.
 

 

 

 

 


June 2008

The Meaning of the Fourth in Three Words

Submitted: Saturday, June 28, 2008; 11:15 p.m.
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A silly story is told about a little boy asking his father a question, "Dad, do they have the fourth of July in England?" "Yes, oh yes, son they do have a fourth of July in England. They just don't celebrate it." In a way, that apocryphal teasing exchange between a father and his son summarizes the uniqueness of the fourth of July for Americans. It is a uniquely American holiday.

The fourth of July in all other countries is a date on a calendar, just like any other. There is no reason at all for the British or French or Chinese or Russians or Brazilians to celebrate the fourth of July. But in America there are many reasons. I can think of at least three of them.

The fourth of July reminds us of our history, or at least it should. It is the day set aside as the punctual moment in history when the United States of America declared its independence from the British crown. It was not beginning of the story or the actual end of the relationship, but it is a point in time when Americans can celebrate their birth as a nation.

Every year in Charlottesville, Va., the largest number of people on single day, take the oath of allegiance as American citizens on the fourth of July. This must be a sight to behold, and it would have made the founders proud. They would nod and say, "Now that is America."

Our history is not a perfect story. There was a Civil War fought between the states over differing perspectives concerning what freedom means. Lincoln would call the nation back to the Declaration of Independence to remind Americans that all people are created equal by God.

In the twentieth century, following two world wars, America would examine itself the hard way and come to the conclusion that liberty and justice are for all people. There would be ugly scenes where some radicals would not accept this view as a vision of what the nation should become. Now that sentiment lingers in the minds and hearts of a fading number of citizens who cannot understand the true meaning of freedom.

The fourth of July has come to mean more than a day to celebrate a historical event. It is more than just about history; it is a focus on liberty. The American narrative, although not a perfect one, is really about liberty and freedom. With all of our outcries of dissent today and with the personalities literally shouting at each other on talk shows, we sometimes forget that we live in a country where this kind of expression can be offered.

One night recently, I was remoting through the channels on my television and parked a few minutes to listen to the debate between two rather animated guests on a talk show and found myself amused by the sparring between them. As the program was coming to a close for this particular segment, the host thanked the guests and they both smiled at each other and shook hands as if they had just played a round of golf together.

This is just one illustration of something people outside our nation sometimes cannot understand. In America, dissent is almost a sport. Most of the time, not all times for sure, it is good natured and a reflection of the citizens in a high-tech dialogue. The fourth of July underscores that freedom. It is precious indeed!

For Christians, true freedom is found in Christ Himself. "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." That is a higher and holier concept of freedom we should celebrate every day of our lives. But on the fourth of July, we can pause and thank God for liberty that comes from the laws of the land, no matter how imperfect they may be.

Yes, the fourth of July is about history, our history. It also about liberty, our liberty, but is also is about responsibility. Reportedly, following the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the irascible old Ben Franklin said, "We have given you a republic, if you can keep it." Our history and our liberty carry a heavy sense of responsibility. That is what "Ole Ben" was saying is that often quoted remark concerning the revolutionary movement in America.

Every generation has a price to pay for the liberty we enjoy. Sadly, for some it was the ultimate sacrifice of the giving of one's life, such as in World War II, in the Pacific or in Europe. For most Americans, the price is exercising responsible citizenship such as voting. I still have trouble understanding why some people never bother to register and vote. It is almost un-American.

History, liberty and responsibility are the three words which come to my mind as we celebrate the Fourth of July. Americans aren't better than any other people in the world but for providential reasons, we have been blessed with a history that tells our story, a story of liberty and responsibility. Perhaps Viktor Frankl was right when he said, "Americans need a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast to balance the Statue of Liberty on the east coast." That was one European who may have understood us better than we understand ourselves.
 

Grieving with Hope

Submitted: Tuesday, June 24, 2008; 3:45 p.m.
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Saying goodbye to someone you love and who has always been a part of your life is not a happy experience. It can cause your emotional equilibrium to be out of balance for a long time. Every grief experience is a different one. Grief, by definition, is losing someone or something significant in your life.

When I lost a much loved pet as a child and even as an adult, it saddened me. But such a loss was a bump in the road compared to the life-changing experience of losing a father at age 18 and now the passing of my mother as an older adult.

For almost 30 years as a pastor, I stood by the graveside of church members I loved and admired and walked with them through grief. I felt like I knew something of the experience because I became acquainted with grief at such an early age.

Yet, with the passing of my mother and in reflecting over her life as it interconnected with mine, I have come to believe I am still in preschool in the sad business of grieving.

In the first century, Paul spoke to the early Christians about grief, knowing that they had little background with the Christian faith and how to face the loss of loved ones. This generation of believers felt Jesus would return in their lifetimes as every generation should believe. Now, they were watching their loved ones pass from the scene and wondering how to respond.

In I Thessalonians 4:13, Paul, the mentor to young Christians and pastor to the grieving church family, declared, "We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, concerning those who are asleep (those who have died), so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope."

As I reread that verse this week in the Holman Christian Standard Bible, the words ". . . grieve like the rest, who have no hope . . ." leaped off the page and grabbed my aching heart. Paul was making several statements in the brief but beautiful verse.

First, he was saying it is okay to grieve. There is nothing wrong with grieving. In fact, the apostle was assuring the young believers that grieving was good and healthy. We must grieve just like we must breathe. In times of loss, grieving is emotional breathing. It sustains life!

Additionally, the apostle Paul was setting forth the context of grief. He was magnifying the role and blessing of hope in the experience of our grieving. Jesus Christ is One who keeps His promises. Just as certainly as He walked on this earth and lived in human form, He will return and reunite all who believe in Him.

This is an eternal hope! It is the kind of hope on which you can build your life. The hymn writer gave voice to this hope with the words of assurance, "My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness . . . On Christ the solid rock I stand."

Unbelievers grieve with a sense of finality and fatalism. They walk away from the cemetery with a void. There is no hope in their lives, and without hope they cannot grieve well. They need the hope found in Christ because it is the oxygen of souls. This hope gives them the power to breathe emotionally. Without it, they are panting for every emotional breath.

I am not particularly fond of acrostics. Some people, like my pastor, can do them well with artful dignity. When I attempt the exercise, I feel the outcome is cheesy and cheap. But today I am going to try my hand at this form of communication. I want to help you grieve with hope.

Therefore, I am using the word GRIEF acrostically for the purpose of offering some valuable lessons on grieving with hope in Christ.

G. Guilt feelings have to be handled appropriately in times of grief. There are always moments when you say to yourself, "I could have done more. I should have been there more often for her. I would do some things differently, if given the opportunity."

I believe this is a natural emotion and to some extent it can be healthy. We always have an idealistic view of life. Situations should be perfect and people ought to be perfect, especially at the time of the passing of a loved one. Well, that makes for good 1950s television, like Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver, but in reality all families have less than ideal relationships which become exacerbated during the time of grief.

The blame game can be played between siblings and within yourself. But what good is such an effort? You can't deal with all your negative emotions in one volcanic moment and expect to feel good about yourself later. It only makes things worse.

Guilty feelings come in times of grief. That is a reality. Some have only a few of them, others are plagued with a heavy load of them. However, in time one must process them and sift through them and say to oneself, "Okay, life has not been perfect. I have made some mistakes. Others have made some mistakes. Even my loved one has made some mistakes."

But now the healing of damaged emotions must be metabolized through a sense of hope in Christ -- a hope which is grounded on Romans 8:28, a hope in the One who can work with the good and bad experiences of life and make His masterpiece out of it.

R. Reflecting over your life with the loved one is both natural and necessary for grieving with hope. To say life is brief is to state the obvious in the most trite way. Although it may be trite, it is also true. Life is short, even in its longest span of years.

As we grow older, the childhood experiences that we tucked away in our minds as we were busy with the challenges of life come easily to us, especially when we grieve. During this last month, sitting in a hospital room and dealing with the passing of my mother, those early childhood recollections have come out of the attic of my mind. I can remember the tender moments when she took care of me when I was a sick child. I can recall her worrying about me when I was facing some struggle in life, trying to grow up.

I recall our standing side by side at the cemetery saying goodbye to my father. I can see her at my grandfather's funeral as she did her quiet grief work in dealing with his death.

Reflecting over the past helps process those guilt feelings in a healthy way. They remind you that life has been filled with the ups and downs, but through it all there was the power of God's sustaining presence. There was hope in the midst of grief.

I. Introspection is always a part of hopeful grieving. When you experience the recollections of the past, you then can begin to look within yourself and see how your loved one, however imperfectly, affected you in some positive ways. Introspection in the busy world of our time is a friend to us.

Grief over a loss is one of the stop signs in life when you come to a point of fully stopping for introspection. I have an ongoing argument with my wife and daughters about stop signs. They slow down, but they don't come to a full stop. My daughters have become acquainted with police officers who have given them written reminders that a stop sign means to stop, not just slow down.

The same is true in life. Grief is a stop sign, not a slow down sign. I am a Type A personality, which means I am an activist to get things done. I want to see results. I must confess to you that I am a Type A personality in a Model T body. This past month, when my mother fell and broke her hip, I slowed down. When she passed away, I slowed down but on Wednesday of this week I came to the stop sign. I felt the weight of the grief finally hit me, and I stopped long enough to acknowledge it as a time to grieve with hope.

E. Encouraging others is a positive by-product of grieving with hope. Again, the apostle Paul addressed that truth so forcefully in II Corinthians 1:4, "He comforts us in all our afflictions, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves have received from God" (HCSB).

That comfort comes from the God of all comfort. He is the One who provided Jesus Christ, our eternal hope. With that comfort from the very heart of God, we can be channels of His hope. There is no comfort to give unless there is hope in Christ!

F. Faith in the Lord can be deepened in a time of grief. When we grieve with hope, we exercise the muscles of our faith. We become toned up and fit for what life brings our way. Grief is a part of this imperfect life we live. Hope in Christ makes the difference. We can have FAITH in that HOPE!!!

One of the most popular bestselling books currently is The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. Randy is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2006, he was diagnosed with one of the worst forms of cancer: pancreatic cancer. Since then he has been taking all kinds of treatments, buying some time with his wife and three small children.

On September 18, 2007, Randy gave his last lecture to his students. It has been one of the popular viewings on YouTube since the lecture was offered. The book is essentially an expansion of the lecture. It is not a weighty existential presentation but rather a light-hearted perspective on achieving your childhood dreams.

Truthfully, I admire Randy Pausch. It takes intestinal fortitude to stand before people as a person known to be dying and tell what is on your mind and in your heart. For that Randy Pausch is to be applauded. However, there was very little hint in the lecture and in the book about faith.

Remember when the apostle Paul gave his last lecture in II Timothy 4. He said of himself, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith." Paul's testimony in his last lecture was that he had kept the faith. He is a stellar example for all of us who face the trials and troubles and tests of life.

Recently the storms that ravaged the Midwest served to remind us that material things are so, so temporary. Every time we have such episodes which capture the news, there are people who are interviewed following the disaster. They look stunned and devastated and rightly so.

There are a few times when some people offer a testimony similar to this, "Well this storm has destroyed almost everything, but we are still alive and we have hope in God. We will rebuild and we will overcome this tragedy."

That is grieving with hope, knowing that life is tough, even at its best. Yet there are some things death cannot take away. There some things that storms cannot destroy. There is HOPE in CHRIST!
 

From Hard Times to "Softly and Tenderly"

Submitted: Sunday, June 15, 2008; 10:45 p.m.
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I will never hear the old hymn "Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling" without thinking of my mother. It was among her favorite hymns and songs. Often she was humming the hymn while working around the house or while reading her Bible. In her earlier days, she and my father would sing in quartets at the church, and many times that hymn was one of the selections.

My mother's life was lived in two rather simple chapters, which covered more than eight decades through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The first chapter could be called "Hard Times." Mother was born two years before the stock market crash in 1929. She and her family lived on a farm and struggled to make a go of it during arguably the worst economic times in the history of our country.

My mother lost her mother when she was nine years old. It was a devastating loss for a large family during the Great Depression. It was especially problematic for my mother, who became one of the surrogate mother figures for her newborn sister. For the next eight years or more, Mother sought to balance doing housework, going to school and adjusting to a stepmother, who entered the picture later.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II, life took on another challenge for everyone, including my mother. She said goodbye to my Dad, who would return from the war and marry her. That marriage took place in 1945 at the end of the war.

Following the war, like many parents Mother and Dad sought to build a better life for their families. Eventually, they moved to Birmingham and joined the working class part of society seeking to be good parents and faithful Christians. This meant hard work by both of them and active church involvement.

In 1969, my father died suddenly following surgery. This was among the hardest of times for my mother and for me. At this point, I was a freshman at Samford, trying my best to make it financially and academically, and Mother was a widow in her early forties. We both were seeking to do our best to keep our spirits up and to look to the future with a sense of hope.

Three years following my father's death, my mother married again. This led to the "Good Times" chapter of her life. She and her new husband, Audie, enjoyed 36 good years of marriage. They traveled together and worked together, and they experienced a good life. I was happy for her and I was grateful to the Lord that she had found someone with whom she could spend the rest of her life. They were a happy couple, and it brought to me a sense of gratitude and joy that their lives blended so well together.

A month ago, mother fell and broke her hip. She had been slowing down for sometime, but that fall changed her life. Just days later, she developed pneumonia, and then she was placed in the Intensive Care Unit. Audie stood by her bedside talking to her and encouraging her to get better. By now, mother had been placed on a ventilator and a feeding tube. Then on June 6 her heart couldn't take the challenge of functioning any longer and she passed away.

Roger Willmore, our convention president, pastoral leader and friend to the family led in the graveside services on the following Monday. He offered words of comfort from God's Word and mentioned several things about mother, which brought encouragement to the family.

First, mother had a nickname, often used by Audie. It was "Mickey Mouse." Audie would call her "Mickey" or "Mouse" all the time. She earned that sweet nickname years ago. When Noelle, my oldest daughter, was little, she came to Audie and said, "Let's go call Granny 'Mickey Mouse'." The name stuck with her, and Audie used it lovingly from that point to the end of her life.

Among other salient observations Roger made was the fondness mother had for the hymn, "Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling." As he spoke concerning her love for the hymn, I could see my mother in her younger years singing in church. I could also visualize her the last time I spoke to her in the hospital. She had her Bible in her lap reading the New Testament when I entered the room. She smiled at me, and we talked a few minutes before she took a nap. At about nine o'clock on Friday, June 6 (the anniversary of D-Day in WW II) mother heard Jesus softly and tenderly calling her home. Mary Lois Argo went to be with Jesus.

This was a life lived in two major chapters. With faith in her Lord, she was able to endure the hard times and enjoy the good times.
 

A Tribute to a Father by a Famous Figure

Submitted: Wednesday, June 4, 2008; 4:11 p.m.
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Father’s Day is not in the pantheon of greatness as is Mother’s Day. Well, I guess that statement is debatable, but I think you understand what I mean. Mother’s Day garners much more commercial and cultural attention that the recognition of the dads on their special day.

For Father’s Day I want to share with you a tribute to a father, or more technically a grandfather. It is a book authored by Clarence Thomas. The book is about the famous Supreme Court justice, but it is also a recognition of how much influence this father figure had in his life.

My Grandfather's Son is one of the best biographical books I have ever read. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has written his memoirs as essentially a tribute to his grandfather whom he called "Daddy." Justice Thomas was born just a few years after World War II into a Jim Crow South, which was not at all an advantageous time for a young Black child.

His biological father abandoned him and the rest of the family. His mother was unable to care for the children alone, so Clarence and his brother were brought into the home of his grandparents. This was a huge turning point for the man who would become the second African-American to occupy a seat on the U.S Supreme Court.

"Daddy" was a strict disciplinarian who was always seeking to teach Clarence and his brother, Myers, the basics of making their way in life. In this home, Clarence Thomas learned the difference between entitlement and empowerment. From his grandfather, he learned that preparation to do a job and hard work in doing a good job made all the difference in the world.

Yes, the book does chronicle the brutal confirmation process and the controversy which was caused by the circus-type atmosphere which has become so common in the arena of the political process. However, Thomas does not dwell on this to the point of a diatribe. He reveals his agony and anguish concerning what he considered to be poor treatment, but he also admits that he was not the first to be subjected to such humiliation.

Throughout the memoirs, Clarence Thomas gives credit to the people who made a difference in his life. He freely admits the mistakes of espousing radical views early in life and to an attitude which did not always show respect to the "Daddy" who was responsible for supporting him at a crucial time. Yet, there is a sense of gratitude which pervades the whole story of his eventful and productive life.

How will history judge Clarence Thomas? That does not seem to be the question for this book. Rather, the thesis is best stated in the last words written, which constitute a prayer the justice uttered when he took his oath of office, "Lord, grant me the wisdom to know what is right and the courage to do it." I believe he learned this prayer from the man he called “Daddy.”