Notes from my Knapsack 9-23-21

Notes from my Knapsack 9-23-21

Jeff Gill

Fear divides us, love brings us together

___

You can call it a cliche and I won't argue with you. Fear divides, love unites. Anxiety and worry and fear split us apart, while love and compassion and respect bring us together.

Why?

The cliche can be challenged. There are groups at work with mutually shared fears as their unifying force. Fear of others, fear of the unknown, fear of what they see as changing what's familiar for that which is different. Fear can, in truth, bring people together.

For a while.

My general impression is that coalitions of the anxious or the merely opposed tend to splinter and divide and fall apart. Maybe not until after they've done some damage, but fall apart they always do.

On the other hand, love is not the easiest way to create collaboration. You can put ten people in a room who all love the same thing: the Beatles, the Civil War, French cooking, and end up with fourteen factions or more. How to align love and loves for a common, shared purpose isn't as simple as shouting "Who loves broccoli salad? Come stand with me!"

Because immediately there's "but not with raisins!" Or the infamous "ramen noodle faction" tries to take over. Ewwww.

Love can also hold in tension a certain desire to remake the object of love, to improve on the ideal. Few of us are Olympian enough to love something on the order of statuary, where we love it exactly as it is and greet any change as a lessening of what we love, a reduction of love itself. We want to dust the sculpture, restore the paint, enhance the balance and the tone on the recording so it sounds even more lovely.

So it might be that the form of love which is a living thing, what we call a relationship in the modern terminology, that best speaks to the love which unites and connects. Not how we love a car or cottage, but loving a person. People in groups can be hard to love: the author James Joyce liked to observe that this was the great proof of the divinity of Jesus, that he looked upon the multitudes and loved them. He was an ironic guy, James Joyce (and usually called himself an agnostic at that), but he has a point. People in groups are often quite unloveable.

And the challenge of love, of a relationship over time, is that to love one person means we have to come to terms with what it means to love someone who loves us, the harshest mirror of all. If we harbor a dislike for ourselves, it can poison our love for someone who has chosen to love us. So we have to work on both at the same time, which is that living aspect of a relationship, the respiration and heartbeat of love, the back and forth of being in relation to each other.

To love is to know ourselves as loved, and back and forth it goes. To fear, and to cooperate with other fearful people, actually makes sense insofar as it appeals to our deepest doubts, usually about ourselves. So fear based collaboration works, but in the worst possible way. To work based on love can be scary, but the growth potential of that path is immense.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in love with someone for forty years this week, and it's made him a better person. Tell him how love has helped you grow at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 9-25-21

Faith Works 9-25-21

Jeff Gill

Merry Christmas, yeah I said it.

___


On social media back around August 25th, I posted something about it being four months until Christmas.

It was interesting to see how some welcomed this news, and quite a few others (you know who you are) responded with moans and groans. "Ah, don't go there, Gill! I'm not ready…"

Well, I'm going there. And with a practical yet theological motive at heart.

We are entering solicitation season. It's the time of year when everyone, and I do mean everyone ramps up their pitches to ask you to send them money. The holiday season from the outbreak of Halloween candy at the stores to the last of the Christmas decorations coming down after New Year's is a time we're all well disposed to giving, vulnerable to appeals for children and the weaker or injured or outcast, and less likely to stop to count the cost because we probably stopped counting a few weeks earlier.

Granted, solicitation season which used to be late November through mid-December has now opened up online and through cable to twelve months of the year. And as many of you know, I'm now regularly in the home of an elderly person who has been accustomed to sending the stray check to some fairly typical causes of the last half-century. 

Even with limited hearing and constrained perception, he's aware that his former torrent of Christmas season envelopes and mailers has become a constant waterfall of Niagara proportions ("twenty three requests this week: can you believe it?"), and he's asked me "how do some of these groups get my name?" I try to explain direct mail marketing to him and the sales of mailing lists, and he just shakes his head.

Blessedly, he can't answer his phone. Sometimes, waiting on a repair tech, I have to over a two or three hour period, and the line between scammers and charitable pitches is thin one as I hear their various openings. Scams are not my subject today, but it's always on my mind. Plus I hang up pretty quickly after a muttered "I'm expecting a call."

What I want to say to anyone reading this today, effectively three months before Christmas, is the same thing I'd say in stewardship terms about purchasing and buying and spending about your giving. Don't do it out of guilt. In the name of a good and gracious God whom I honor, if guilt is making you think about making a donation, stop and interrogate that impulse, please! These folks are artists in guilt, Hendrixes on your heartstrings, Picassos of pulling at your motivations. Do not trust guilt.

Instead, friends, think mission. What is YOUR mission in this world? If you've never thought about it in those terms, huzzah and I've done my job for now. You, my dear readers, each have some purpose and meaning in your life that God is at work through you to accomplish. Do you know what it is? What is a delightful and mischievous God trying to nudge you into getting done? Think about this idea as your mission, your theme, your particular role with a certain cast of characters around you.

If you find your heart sings and your immediate sense of purpose fulfilled by sending a check to a cat sanctuary in Kabul, then God bless you. I don't get it, but the Lord bless you and keep you. You know your mission better than I do, or at least you should.

But if you sign up for a monthly automatic deposit because you saw a sad puppy late at night while you scraped the bottom of a carton of ice cream, I doubt you're fulfilling your purpose or living your heart. You're letting a skilled guiltshop sell you their mess of pottage in return for money you can't get back (it's a Biblical reference, let it go if it's over your head). Do not let guilt be your guide, because it doesn't work.

Give intentionally, give according to a plan, give in alignment with your purpose in being given those resources in the first place. You may or may not be a person of faith, but if you believe you might have a purpose, I want your giving to line up with and reinforce and affirm who God wants you to be, even if you're not so sure about God, or whether God cares about you. God knows I do! 

Give to celebrate the good you would honor. Let guilt go on by.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got more to say about scammers, but he has to edit that one for language. Tell him where you like to give of yourself at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 9-18-21

Faith Works 9-18-21

Jeff Gill

Mind, body, and spirit working together

___

Anybody feeling stressed out there?

Hahahahaha. I'm a funny guy.

Yeah, stress and anxiety are the watchwords of 2021. I could get all up in your face with the Granville cholera outbreak of 1834, or typhoid in Newark around 1900, or the ongoing tuberculosis plague that pressed Licking County so strongly as to build its own sanitarium in the 1930s, up on Price Road and now the offices of the county health department. 

76 years ago, people were waiting for loved ones, mostly young men but not a few young women included, to return from World War II; those watchful families still were haunted in 1945, and were their whole lives, by the memory of bank failures and national unemployment and CCC camps during the Great Depression.

Stress is, according to the biologists, a characteristic of life. Some stress helps organisms grow, and even to get stronger; in the lab, there have been experiments on plants and simple animals that show a completely stress-free environment produces a weaker, more vulnerable mature form.

Or as Nietzsche famously said, "that which does not kill me makes me stronger." As a Christian preacher, he's not really a guy I want to quote, but it's certainly a well-known expression of the principle. That's not even remotely Biblical, but neither is "God will never give us more than we can handle." In fact, many of us pray often "deliver us from evil" (or "save us from the time of trial") because Jesus knew we'd be tested. He even told us to take up our cross and follow his example, and we know where that goes even if that's not where the story ends.

In the time between promise and fulfillment, between already and not-yet, we are called to find our path of peace in a world filled with division. To seek holiness while sin still prevails for a season, to minister healing amidst brokenness. This can be . . . stressful.

But we've been given tools and resources to work through all this stress, whether it was medieval plague or historic conflict or contemporary media overload. I closed last week with a non-sarcastic reminder to check out Matthew, chapter 5. You could keep reading, too. The Sermon on the Mount has quite a bit to speak to our stress, and helping us reframe and even overcome it.

Jesus also takes naps in the Gospels (look it up, I'm not kidding), and went on retreat. He unplugged from Galilee sometimes, and got away from everyone even when no one could have been filming him with their phone. He shut off his devices and went up in the hills, or out on the lake, and chilled. Again, look it up if you think I'm pulling your leg.

If your prayer life is struggling in the wake of the last two years, that's perfectly normal, but it's also something you can do more about than I think we realize. First, make sure you put some prayer time on your schedule, in your habits, into your digital calendar. And when it reminds you it's time, shut it off to spend that time. God can shout, but do you really want to make God do that? Let the Holy One whisper, and find a quiet place, your own upper room wherever.

If your spirit is in turmoil, and that's blocking you in your divine communication, perhaps that's simply God speaking to say "deal with that first, I'll be here when you're done." Somebody or something that you can cope with, which is do-able and finishable? Completion is, I firmly believe, a spiritual discipline of sorts if not exactly a prayer. Finish what needs finishing, then your thanks will rise up naturally as you sit or kneel to pray.

And if your body needs care, care for it. We are told in the Bible we are to expect redemption and resurrection as complete persons. We're not just disembodied spirits awaiting release. The body in a mysterious way is a part of creation which God has plans for. In the interim, that means we need to care for the temple into which our soul is housed, and that maintenance work is indeed a form of prayer. If you can pray while walking, I think you can pray exercising, too. Push ups and planks included.

Prayer in mind, body, and spirit, brings peace. This is a true statement on which you can rely. Seek peace. Find shalom. God wants that for you.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher around central Ohio; he's around 60/40 at peace and working on it. Tell him how you find shalom at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 9-11-21

Faith Works 9-11-21

Jeff Gill

Prayers that need to continue

___

I am, when all is said and done, just a preacher.

My military experience is minimal, my global awareness is that of almost anyone else with access to cable TV and the internet, which is to say . . . minimal. I've not served in the State Department or with international relief agencies nor earned an advanced degree in geopolitical affairs.

Twenty years ago, I'd just turned forty, my family back again in Ohio after a sojourn in West Virginia. If you'd asked me what I thought I'd be doing or where I'd be in twenty years, I probably would have had an answer or two for you, and it all would have been wrong, as such confident predictions usually are.

Then 9-11 happened, and we watched the events of the day, and I led a community worship service that night, and at the end of September 11, 2002, I knew one thing for sure: things were not going to be the same in the future.

And it turns out much of what I thought that night and in the next week would change did not. I could make you a list. But many things that were true before 9-11 didn't change after an interim period of confusion and worry; some things that really should have changed continued in their unhealthy and unhelpful ways.

If there's anything that's worrisome and dispiriting on this twentieth anniversary of 9-11, it's what does not seem to have changed. Our national ability to stand up democracies overseas, our focus as a country on what our role can and should be on the international stage, and at home our consensus about where political divisions end and ideals and aspirations bring us together. Am I alone in feeling as if we're as muddled on those things now as we were then?

But as a person of faith, with some commitments and perspectives that go beyond the year or the era or even my nation, I can say with confidence, with clarity, and with some enduring hope that there are things that do not, and should not change. 

We've heard many calls through the years to keep our troops overseas in our prayers. Well, U.S. Central Command still needs our prayers; while they no longer have a presence within the borders of Afghanistan, their troops are on guard in the face of dangers in a wide assortment of places we might have forgotten about in the focus on the recent withdrawal.

And praying for our veterans? If you have people in and around your life who have served in the "Global War on Terror" or GWOT as it gets militarily referenced, reach out to them. Personally, as well as prayerfully. The spectacle of the last month has been profoundly wearing on all of them.

Within Afghanistan, it's more true than ever: Christians (and yes, there are Afghan Christians) and Christian aid workers have dealt with a wide array of challenges and threats and brutality and death all along. Truly, they need and deserve our prayer covering right now.

As a nation, we've said we still have a humanitarian interest in that nation, and the region. I've known folks who work with U.S. Agency for International Development; USAID will be heading back into Kabul soon, quietly, working on humanitarian assistance as they have for more than twenty years. Pray for them and that work.

I trust you all remember Malala, Malala Yousafzai. Her story continues, though she is no longer inside the country (she graduated from Oxford last year, in fact). The women and children in Afghanistan continue to need our prayers and support, in ways I trust we will see open up in coming days, if all too slowly. How can they learn and grow and find a path to peace? Can we help without becoming part of the problem? Something to pray about.

Then there's the hundreds of thousands of refugees coming out of Afghanistan, both in the well-publicized airlift, and also fleeing across the borders east, west, and north, all needing our prayers, as well as those who greet and host and help them. Not so much to the south, and the homeland of the Taliban movement.

Oh, and something else not changing? I should pray for the Taliban. That they find peace, and justice, and wisdom, and a saving faith. If you don't know why I would say we should pray for the Taliban on this twentieth anniversary, go read Matthew 5. It hasn't changed, either.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's trying to change where he should and stay faithful where he should endure. Tell him how that's working for you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 9-8-21

Notes from my Knapsack 9-8-21

Jeff Gill

Risk assessment is more than math

___

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that risk assessment in possession of common sense is something needing no further justification. (Apologies to Jane Austen.)

Seriously, we humans are notoriously terrible at doing risk assessment. I think of all the celebrities we know and relatives I have who would rather drive cross-country than fly.

The statistics are utterly unambiguous. Flying is much, much, much safer than driving hours across the interstates, let alone down the last fifteen miles of city streets to your destination. But fear, fear of flying, makes people do statistically improbable things.

People say "well, if something happens in a plane, you're 100% for sure to punch your ticket." Actually, even that's not quite true, but compared to any sort of accident in a vehicle fatal or injurious, you're still safer in a plane than an automobile getting from point A to point B.

We worry about relative risk without spending any real time doing the math when the odds and events are well known. I keep hearing from those opposed to masks or vaccines that you're more at risk from lightning than COVID.

Really? I happen to be a trained volunteer with Scouting, which requires along with youth protection training and various other certifications a basic understanding of outdoor risks. About fifty people a year on average over the last two decades are killed by lightning — it's actually more in the forties — and maybe a thousand are hit by lightning for every person who dies (the models and estimates vary); at most, call it 50,000 tops each year.

If you think fewer than 50,000 have died from COVID, you're working from a level of paranoia I can't really speak to effectively. But to say you're five times more likely to die from a lightning strike than coronavirus infection is quickly provable as false. Yet I keep hearing this foolish equation as a risk comparison that justifies opposition to masking in public spaces or vaccines as a workplace requirement.

My spouse is more risk averse than I am; as a female and a well educated person, that's statistically not surprising. Men are notoriously reckless, and book learning perhaps makes you overly cautious, or maybe you just know too much at a certain point. Our son looks at his careful father and his very circumspect mother, and has to make up his own mind how to manage risk and decide on actions.

For myself, I do not understand why mask requirements indoors with close contact is such a big deal. Inside Ross IGA or businesses along Broadway, if I'm inside where I'm passing near to people I don't know, haven't spent time with, whose vaccination status I can't know, I put on my mask. The cost/benefit equation seems to add up in my favor with precautions. Churches in the area have made that shift, and I think it's simply good stewardship, not excessive fear as some would snarkily say.

And why Granville Schools haven't called for masking inside their buildings for everyone, I do not understand one little bit. This won't last forever, but COVID is certainly not done. Let's manage risk and protect each other for a little while longer.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still got his masks handy, and you should too. Tell him why you think mask wearing is not a big hairy deal at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 9-4-21

Faith Works 9-4-21

Jeff Gill

Perverse incentives and faithful response

___

Dan Darling was a senior executive with a noted national evangelical organization when he spoke out loud and on the record about his decision to get the COVID vaccine. He didn't tell anyone, his fellow evangelical Christians included, to get the vaccine, but he did say his choice was to do so, and he encouraged people simply to talk to their doctor about the option and to work with them on making a good medical decision.

For doing that, he was accused and found guilty by his employer of having "taken a side" and was fired for not being non-partisan. 

He's offered some further perspective since his termination, and it's not to say what I'm thinking about his former bosses. It's a kind and generous and charitable assessment of how we got here, and he's a better Christian than me for being able to say that.

Dan did go on, in his USA Today essay, to note though that today "There are perverse incentives against unity among Christians, to fail to give the benefit of the doubt, to rush to judgment, to make a name for ourselves by hurting our fellow brothers and sisters."

Perverse incentives is a good phrase. I wish I'd said it first, but I can quote Dan Darling and give him credit while using it. There are perverse incentives out there to being perceived as strong, assertive, defiant, even angry. Maybe especially angry.

Does anger mean authenticity? Is passion a measure of accuracy? Could fury equal facts?

This will displease some of my progressive friends, but in my younger days I spent a fair amount of time and money on sharpshooting (there were awards involved as a youth, and the Marines have a thing about hitting targets which sergeants like to reinforce on the range). One thing that stuck with me is that the first step to hitting the target is not out there, but in here. Inside. As in getting control of your breath, and calming your breathing. Most instructors tell you to exhale and hold a beat before pulling the trigger; others say take in a half breath before final aim and firing, and there we have a long digression before us I'm not going to take.

The point is, even under the stress and strain of hunting or even combat, you can't expect to hit the mark when you're all upset and hyperventilating. If you plan to locate, aim, and hit a distant target, you need to take a deep breath, let it out, and HOLD. Calm down, focus, center.

And in fact, in New Testament terms, the word most often used in reference to sin and sinning is also used as a technical term for "missing the mark," whether in archery or spear throwing. To sin is to misfire, to veer off target, to go at a tangent and miss the point entirely of where your arrow-sharp focus as a faithful disciple should go.

Friends, I could write at length about the faithfulness of Dan Darling, or the wisdom of speaking to your own doctor about what will keep you healthy. What I do want to do with the space I have here this day is to push back against the world's current love (it changes, you know) for perverse incentives. The culture and politics of our day is ever more in love with vehemence and attitude and snark and emotion. A loud angry opinion has much more weight in public discourse, it seems, than calm sensible documented facts.

This is not good. Not good for you, not good for me, not good for the church, yours or mine.

If you have goals and aims and vision for your church, your faith community, your own family, I trust you can hear the passion with which I would calmly argue: everyone needs to calm down a bit. Take a deep breath, reflect over a couple of those, actually. Inhale, exhale, breathe deep, expel all the carbon dioxide you can, and continue taking in the breath of life, maybe even starting to give thanks for each one as you take it in.

You might even have a prayer you use, breathing in, breathing out, blessings and releases, hailing grace and letting go of sin and sorrow. While you do that, you might not attract any attention at all; when you speak up, softly, it might not seem anyone listens.

Someone is, though. Count on it.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on his own internal incentive system as we all must. Tell him how you keep centered at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.