Pea Eaters

For our surprise baby shower for Monica, we played a game of “baby food hot potato.” The baby food works its way around the circle and then stops on one unlucky participant who must then take two large bites of the strange substance we force feed our infants. During the first round of the game, the baby food making the rounds was peas. For those of you who have sampled baby food, cold mushed up peas would be suitable for Fear Factor it tastes so terrible. The peas made their way to several participants over the course of the game, and each one made horrible faces and even resorted to plugging their noses to get through the experience. For the next round, another jar of baby food worked its way around, but this time the contents were bananas. Baby food bananas are actually quite good. This makes for a relatively unfair second round to the game, as was pointed out by the pea eaters.

As we think about God’s grace, we look around and see people who have chosen not to live the way they should have, then they come to know God and receive forgiveness. Then we see other really good people who make good choices receive the same forgiveness. It just doesn’t seem fair! Shouldn’t people who have made bad choices have to work harder to receive God’s grace? But it doesn’t work that way. Because at the end of the day we all deserve peas. Cold, mushed up peas. No matter how good you have been we all fall short of God’s standard for holiness. But instead of the peas we have coming to us, God gives us bananas. Grace bananas.

Broken Candlesticks

For a middle school event one afternoon, we decided it would be fun to play Sardines. The whole church was fair game. If you haven’t played Sardines before, it’s sort of like hide and go seek, backwards. So one person goes and hides, and everyone else goes looking for them. If you find the hider, you get into the hiding spot with them, and this goes on until the whole group is crammed into one hiding spot. The best hiding spot of the day was the elevator (genius!) but the most memorable was the chapel.

In our chapel there is a wall toward the back of the room with a small space behind it, perfect for someone in need of a place to hide. One by one the middle schoolers crammed into the spot until the leaders were the only ones left looking. As we walked into the chapel we heard a few giggles come from within the dark room and we knew we must be getting closer. We flipped on the lights and as the youth climbed out from the spot, one of the chapel candle sticks tumbled over and broke. (Many thanks to Jane for her gracious reception of this news and her willingness to replace it for us).

Since then the chapel has been off limits for Sardines, which is a wise move, but I do find myself wondering if sometimes we do the same thing with our faith that we did with the chapel. We are okay with faith when it is safe, predictable, quiet. But then God interrupts our lives, the Holy Spirit moves in us to do something new, Jesus breaks into the daily routine and knocks something over and so we respond by quickly putting our lives back together and doing our best to prevent it from happening again. What would happen if when we felt God challenging us to do something, we did it? What would happen if we let Jesus be the radical, life altering Lord of our lives that he can be instead of a safe, boring churchey guy who likes to hold little lambs and pat small children on the head?

Pink Flamingos

Last month I went out for the evening. When I returned, I noticed several strange shapes in my yard that I couldn’t quite make out in the dark. As I got closer, I realized there was not one, but over fifty pink flamingos standing in the grass. Upon closer inspection I found that there were even a few flamingos that had nested in the trees. On the front porch was a note from the youth who had “redistributed” the flamingos from Monica’s garage onto my yard. The next morning we cleaned up the flamingos (and forks), with the exception of one flamingo who stood defiantly in the tree, refusing to come down. We didn’t have the heart to remove him, so he is still happily nested in the tree, with the spring flowers budding around him.

I admire the pink flamingo. What makes them so fantastic is that they are exactly who they are, with no apology. In their pink splendor they stand proudly on their metal poles in a way that the passerby cannot help but laugh (which, by the way, is what my neighbors did the next morning). The flamingo is not a normal, suburban lawn ornament, nor does it pretend to be. Pink flamingos belong in Florida at an attraction, not in an Ohio front lawn. The flamingo knows this is not its home, but it is here temporarily, and so does not attempt to blend in by hiding behind a tree or painting itself brown. Instead the flamingo exists in the Ohio lawn as it is, without conforming to its surroundings.

So it is with us as Christians. We are called to live in the world, to be with people, to reach out to those in need, and at the same time to not be conformed to the values of the world but instead to be, who we are called to be by God. We become pink flamingos that refuse to conform to the values of materialism, power and popularity, refuse to blend into our suburban surroundings and instead seek to follow the way of Christ, choosing generosity over materialism, humility over power, hospitality over popularity. We are pink. We are plastic. We are unashamed.