LATEST PODCAST. Preachers are like manure. When you spread us out, we can do a lot of good. But when you pile us up all together it can be almost unbearable. On a preachers tour to Israel I found out why.
NEW PODCAST Cheap Preachers Trip to Israel
Category: Grace
Setting the Prisoner Free…
I have come to know Hector Guadalupe through our daughter, first as a cause she believed in and now as part of our family. Hector has an extraordinary story, coming from the rough streets of Brooklyn and the world of gangs and drugs to incarceration in his twenties, to trying to create an adult life after that. It is an extraordinary story of his overcoming that world, but also a remarkable program he has created to help others coming from similar stories.
It is a familiar story, all too familiar. The “war on drugs” is, it turns out, like so many wars that begin with apparent good intentions. It ended up incarcerating millions of young people, predominantly young men, and disproportionately the poor and minorities. The laws tended to punish more severely those who did not have the wherewithal to afford and negotiate the system. When people go to prison, sadly, they lose everything. And when they return, it is all too common that they lose hope.
I have worked with many people who have gone to jail or prison through the years—both church members (in every church I have served, I might add), and members of the community. The stigma of felony records strips away voting rights, employability, and social connection. So how then do we propose that people lead a productive life that is good for society?
If you have ever walked through the criminal justice system yourself or with someone, you already know what a boulder it lays on the shoulders of a person who made a wrong choice. Hector’s story, though, is not a rehearsal of those obstacles. He created an amazing organization, Second U, to train the formerly incarcerated to return to productive citizenship and life. This weekend, CNN is running his story as a part of its CNN Heroes series. Hector trains young men and women to become, like he did, personal trainers, have their own businesses and reestablish themselves in normal life.
You may view the story here. I encourage you to watch it. It’s short, but inspiring.
CNN Heroes: Hector Guadalupe
Years ago, I went to the prison here in Alabama where inmates are held just before release to meet with and help a man who had been writing me from prison to ask my help in returning to life. He’d served a one-year sentence and would soon receive a bus ticket and a small sum of cash as he left. For the next months and years, I, and several of our church members, served as guides and encouragers as he put his life back together. There were ups, downs, and stumbles along the way, but he did it. At that time, I remember thinking, “If every church in Alabama helped an inmate return to life, what would that do?” I still think about that. A lot. The people in prison are, first, people, from families, made in the image of God.
Of late I have worked along with the organization Faith in Action Alabama to advocate for a less onerous process of helping former inmates restore their voting rights. This made it to the House as SB 118. Sen. Jabo Waggoner was helpful to us in this process. If you can’t get a job, can’t vote, can’t rebuild your life, and give hack after you’ve paid your debt, how will you stay away from darker options?
I hope you will watch Hector’s story and think about the 25,000 + human beings currently held in our state system designed for 12,000 and ask yourself, “What can we do better for us all”” Yes, there are people whose crimes merit being removed from society, but many of these can be returned to life. The government and the prison system cannot do it all. It takes the former prisoner with a will to restore themselves and make amends, a community willing to welcome them back and a faith community that keeps sounding its own message, “There is a second chance.”
If you are interested in knowing more about SecondU foundation or contributing, go to
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Every Mother’s Day for the last dozen years of my ministry as a pastor, we’d combine Mother’s Day with Graduate Recognition. This is because our college students ended earlier than high school students and if we wanted to see them all before they went to Cancun or their senior trip, we’d better get it done.
So, oddly, we celebrated Mother’s Day (which is lauded above Father’s Day). For all of my childhood, I figured Mother’s Day was in the Bible and we often got a sermon on the woman described in Proverbs 31. This was the only time we heard a sermon on this text unless a woman over 75 died, in which case they had asked that it be read to describe them as a virtuous and industrious woman, whether their family had recognized it or not. By Mary and Martha, those unappreciative kin were going to hear it on her way out.
Graduate Recognition is a time when a church, well, marks the end of one phase of mothering, so to speak. As I told one son-in-law when they announced their marriage, “Son, I’ve done all I can do. She’s all yours.”
Now they move to the next phase, which in this most odd time is less clear. Will the moving be metaphorical (Online college? A virtual backpacking trip to Europe? A job, perchance?)? or will it be literal (huge carloads of stuff to cram into some undersized cubbyhole of a dorm room)?
Whatever comes next, the American Dream of parents is what I called in a sermon the “threefold test of maturity.” You are:
- Out of the house.
- Out of school.
- Out of our money.
My daughter Erin said, grinning, “Two out of three isn’t so bad, Dad.”
But this “getting out on your own” has really flown into the Twilight Zone over the past year, and it isn’t over yet. I remember at the end of my freshman year of college packing up a Mustang Grande with my entire dormroom and driving to Denver, Colorado alone at age 18. No cell phone, no credit card, just a “gas card” and cash. That world actually existed.
Yet I WAS going “home.” My favorite definition of “maturity” isn’t that one above. It is this, given my by a counselor, and I have not been able to trace the author: “Maturity is to accept oneself and one’s origins as non-negotiable.” You won’t achieve that after high school graduation or even college, and certainly not in your twenties. You are likely to spend decades figuring out what the heck that means.
Let me just say that what you discover isn’t far from what the poets tell us, that there is something permanent and real right here in us, with us, next to us, in the people we’ve been given, but we cannot know that right away. Wendell Berry said it so beautifully in his short poem:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
(Wendell Berry, “The Real Work.”)
So out you go, but the prayer of a parent is you will find your way back home. If you have to stay a while until you get it back together or if you have to, as John Denver once sang of the Prodigal Son, make your “way back home again over many a rugged mile,” you will discover the way. And it will be familiar and deep. What you loathed and couldn’t wait to escape or the great treasure you seek isn’t out there anywhere. It is within.
This past year has had plenty that was terrible and depressing. But it has called forth from us something by necessity—to connect where we can with other humans. Loneliness and distance have caused us to dwell in the Far Country even as we didn’t leave home for months and months. And an ache for the people who mattered most and on whom we counted grew deep until we thought perhaps we might not take them for granted ever again.
On this Mother’s Day, just after my wife and I returned home from the embraces of grandchildren from whom we’d been separated for over a year, as we survived an invisible virus and the stupidity of our fears toward one another, something eternal has endured. And the stream that is bouncing off the stones is singing. Listen.
Blessings on you all. Stay connected to the people you love.
SONY DSC
Everything Happens for a Reason? Review
Review of Bowler, Kate. Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I Have Loved. Random House Publishing Group.
By Gary Furr
Kate Bowler begins her book in the doctor’s office. “I had lost almost thirty pounds by the time I was referred to a gastrointestinal surgeon at Duke University Hospital.” And then, the thud of reality.”
ONE MOMENT I WAS a regular person with regular problems. And the next, I was someone with cancer. Before my mind could apprehend it, it was there—swelling to take up every space my imagination could touch. A new and unwanted reality. There was a before, and now there was an after. Time slowed to a pulse. Am I breathing? I wondered. Do I want to? Every day I prayed the same prayer: God, save me. Save me. Save me.
There are plenty of books about the problem of suffering, but every now and then one 
comes along that makes us feel it. All humans eventually suffer in life somewhere along the way—but it is undeserved, unfair and untimely suffering that is the most crushing variety. Enter Kate Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School and church history. Bowler’s first book came from her dissertation, a study of the Prosperity Gospel, entitled Blessed: A History Of The American Prosperity Gospel. She befriended and studied the world of name it and claim it Christianity, embodied in the megachurch worlds of Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen.
This book, though, is a personal one, a wilderness wandering through the most difficult and intractable questions all religious people face: why suffering, why now, why me? She gets my vote for the most interesting title of the year and she does not disappoint. Kate is a wickedly funny writer but also gut-wrenchingly honest about her journey through Continue reading Everything Happens for a Reason? Review
Grace
I live in the vulnerability of my need for grace. Grace I ought to give, grace I hope someone else will extend to me. Undeserved kindness, mercy, love. Most of all, the grace of God. Pure, unmerited, unsettling grace.
Grace, finally, is not dependent on anything more than the nature and reality of God. It is not what this or that preacher says it is, or what some friend tells us that comes out of their own need.
God is love. This is the highest statement of the revelation of God’s being in the New 
testament. Count on that more than any other statement about the Christian gospel. It does not free us to live as we please. Damage comes from our refusal of grace, consequences to our self-destructive alienation. But if the gospels are right, grace can restore a prodigal who had wasted everything, a woman with five marriages, a tax collector who was a traitor to his people, a murderer like the apostle Paul, and a woman caught in utter shame of adultery by a group of lascivious onlookers. It can reclaim even a thief nailed next to Jesus who barely knew his name. And if this is so, then there is hope. Continue reading Grace
The Flatpickin' Pilgrim's Progress 