Author / Michael

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Posts by Michael

I am a husband, father, minister, and writer.
by Michael

Lent Approaches

Lent is a church-designated time frame that’s historically meant as a forty-day reminder to Christians, and it is approaching. Lent is a time of returning to God’s view, being reminded of an old scene, focusing on an old story, listening to the same truth. Often it’s angled at sin but I’m a theologian of dismal and wonderful experience.

A lot of experience right now is dismal. I’m angling for the wonderful this Lent. I’m examining possibility this Lent. When God looks at you, gazes at you might be more fitting, God sees beauty. Not the ugliness you’ve been convinced is there. Beauty. I think seasons like Lent are times of returning to that view.

God sees you as wonderful. What about that sin? Wonderful. What about that misguided decision? Wonderful. Rather than focusing on the error or the terrible, a Lenten focus brings another view.

Lent is a time to returning who you are. Notice that. Not so much returning to who you are. Returning who you are. I’m implying a gift in that wording.

Lent is a time to listen to the truths you’ve so often ignored. You are many things. Attend to what God gazes at in you. Examine that. There will be time for the dismal. That will come ten minutes later.

Finally, I’m grateful to say that my latest book of meditations is available on Amazon. It’s designed for Lent and other seasons of prayer. Learn more here.

by Michael

On-The-Job Training

Last month and this month Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks sat before respective Senate committees for interviews. It occurred to me that I’ve assumed that certain qualifications attach themselves to certain roles. I’ve thought this way about pastors and leaders in churches, hospitals, and graduate schools. These are the places where I spend my time, where I work. But I also believe that when it comes to other roles.

I realized as I turned off the news that I think there is massive room for growth any time a person takes a position. But, at the same time, there are some lessons that should be learned before accepting a role. There are some things you really should know. There are some classes one should have mastered before surrendering to a leading place of those same classrooms.

I believe in the experience of on-the-job training. I’ve lived it. For instance, I wasn’t an executive pastor before Sweet Holy Spirit made me one. I had no concept for restructuring loans and managing payroll and developing oversight committees from the membership for the health of that church. While providing pastoral care and teaching formation. While standing in when the pastor traveled 50% of the week. While maturing as a very young adult.

Sweet Holy Spirit, the context, cast those particular needs into view and called those new learnings forth from me. But I had completed graduate school. I had been in seminary while working there. I had been the closest student of the senior pastor for most of my remembered life. I had been through experiences that set me up to live with integrity in that learning and serving environment.

I wasn’t brand new. I was continuing in my on-the-job training after having been trained in other spheres. It’s true that where we’ve been stations us for what we’re doing and for where we’re headed. But when we take roles that are out of step with “where we’re headed,” the path is destructive; the process is painful; and the product is usually whatever you imagine as bad.

by Michael

Prayer of the Week

How do you do it? How do you see all your children dying and still keep seeing?

I’m sure you don’t look. I’m sure you turn away, close your eyes, cover your head. I’m sure you don’t look but still see. Tell me how you do it.

Tell me how I can change my vision, how I can see farther, how I can accept a world that’s so distant from the city that I love.

Tell me how you walk down the streets where I was raised, how you see the neighborhood where I learned what manhood meant.

Tell me how you notice what I remember and how you still keep noticing where all that love still sits.

Tell me how you keep your heart soft when the images across every screen fundamentally harden my grip on my sons’ necks for fear that what I see is all there is.

Tell me how you do it.

Tell me how you stay with it, present to it, unflinching in divine love, how you posture yourself on the pavement of the undefended.

Tell me how you’re so at home on the floors of 79th and 63rd and up north where NBC-5 doesn’t report on all the same pains that happen on the west side.

Tell me how you do it. Tell me how you see this. Tell me how you do it even if you don’t look.

Tell me how to see.

by Michael

Lamentation

A guttural cry

A low throbbing

An increasing urge to yell

An emptiness previously unknown

A sharp, intense plunging

A penetrating silence

An identification with the past

A wrecked soul

An image of what God didn’t intend

A fullness of extremes

A numbing of it all

A deep seeing of reality

A wordless suffering

A breaking that doesn’t end

A desire to destroy

A scratching at hope unfelt

A splurge of pain

A hollowness that’s hard to hold

A descending into depths

Another splurge of pain

An unutterable scene within

A weird desire to die

A corresponding desire to live

An eventual opening

A difference in everything

A new world

by Michael

Prayer of the Week

I’m thinking of people of who feel especially disinherited. I want you to think of them the way you always do.

Grant them the light of your company in the midst of this present darkness.

Give them the lift of love when the weight of their world feels depressing.

Replace their burden with the yoke of grace, the weight of glory, the heaviness of splendor.

There is so much in the way right now, so much that makes loving hard.

Make it a touch easier today, this week.

Make love among us possible so that justice rolls and runs like raging waters.

by Michael

Unafraid of Vulnerability

Leaders who show experience are relatable leaders. That goes for spiritual leaders, business and political leaders, department directors, and so on.

A part of experience is weakness. There are other parts and it’s showing less glamorous elements of our lives that tell how vulnerable we are with others.

Being vulnerable is sharing when you’ve been last in the race not first. And leaders need to be vulnerable. I think people want that in leaders.

And then there’s the qualifications of being a good, moral leader. Don’t you want to know that the person ahead of you (alongside, behind, or around you) knows the territory? Leaders who know the territory are unafraid of vulnerability because vulnerability–which is expressing your lived experience–is what makes you credible. It’s what makes you worth following.

If the test of your leadership at home or at work was your communication of your credibility, how’d you do? How’d you rate at exposing your experience relating to the troubles and triumphs facing your family or your colleagues? I think your answer identifies your level of vulnerability. It may also open you up to a way forward if you’re interested in developing relationships with people.

by Michael

Prayer of the Week

The litter of the week frames my prayers. Garbage phrases, unconsidered decisions, poorly chosen statements. They’re all in my mind as I pray.

I know you’ve seen these things, heard them the way I have. I wonder what you’re saying. I wonder if we’re listening.

Make us listeners. Better listeners. Listeners period. Help us to hear you. Help us to hear ourselves. And then each other.

Perhaps we can surrender some of our words when we hear. Perhaps there’s room in our listening for you to work.

by Michael

Starting Over

There are a host of feelings that come with starting something. And then there’s that slightly nuanced feeling with starting over.

Starting over almost always comes with a note of judgment. Somewhere–and this is not necessarily the predominant note–we say to ourselves that we did something wrong.

Starting over implies a wrong turn, a mistake, a veering off course. Starting over is what happens when you didn’t end the right way, whatever that is.

I’m learning to get curious about that that. I’m learning that it’s worth me mining my judgments about myself.

Maybe I didn’t do what I could have done. Maybe I did everything right. Maybe starting over is the opposite of judgment. Perhaps this is the beginning of grace.

Perhaps what I was up to before was what was itself the wrong course. Maybe I’m exactly where I should be at this starting line. Maybe gratitude is the antidote to judgment.

by Michael

Questions and Comments

I prefer questions to comments. I’ve always had this preference.

Questions entice me, interest me, and get me engaged. Comments bore me.

When I’m with someone who’s a clear comment person, it takes a lot of work to stay with them. And even when I try, I find it easier to leave them, to disengage, to go elsewhere mentally.

If there is a question on the table, there’s something I can focus on, something I can turn to, something that is, by it’s nature, agitating a part of me.

There’s nothing wrong with being a comments person. It’s just that I’m a questions person. I’m closer to people when questions are involved. I’m more distant when things are simply said.

We’re different and it’s worth knowing as much as possible where we fall along such life lines.