That thought came up in the context of church-related youth activity planning. Personally, I don’t think he would. But it’s no fun to just state that and shut a door to a exploratory learning opportunity. And just because I believe Jesus might not, does not mean it should be forbidden.

Playing Paintball (which I have not done myself, my childhood was in the Cowboys-and-Indians days – I played Indian – and before capture the flag, which I have done once) is basically combat play, like checkers, chess, cards, and many video games and lots of activities in between. Paintball, from what I understand from my own offspring who are well versed on it and many virtual combat methods, is about as close as you can get to actual warfare without death or propelled-metal-projectile injury. As such, it is a game in which one can feel very alive. There is nothing like the nearness of immanent death to make you feel vividly the living moment you are in now. The thrill of the danger, the excitement of coming so close to having the power of death over “the enemy” or the enemy having it over you makes it all very very exciting. It remains fun because the kills are not “real.” However, be aware that the feelings, the passions, are real. And those feelings, and the desperation they bring out, and the things that desperation get you to do in order to win, or to “live” on in the game are the teachable moment of the contest.

Where Jesus once said something like “look at the flowers and birds, they don’t fret or compete, they just exist, appreciating the Creator’s care for them” if he were talking with paintballers I can readily imagine him saying to them, after they come out all splattered with near-death experiences “Why do you find such a thrill in playing at killing? What does that thrill do to you? Where does it take you? Does it make you more human and humane, or something else? Would you have played differently if the power of death was real?” And I imagine much more, and I imagine what I would ask, and what I would point out. The fact is — and this was proven in experiments done long ago which would be unethical now — that most people, given slight but consistent encouragement, would in fact “take it to the limit” much quicker than they believe they would. I might talk about how the thrill is part of “the flesh” and how Jesus was all about getting us to see how it is the passions of the flesh, exercised in this way, that take us to committing acts of inter-human destruction, whether they be flesh wounds or heart wounds.

Jesus knows. He’s seen it happen. Up close and personal! Ordinary people who considered themselves properly religious were incited to call for a death by infuriated and threatened religious leadership. And it happened.

Which is why it was so striking, that in the conversation about Paintball I was privy to, another story came up, a story about an ordinary man who was deeply moved when he was simply constructing a cross to be put up as a symbol in a Christian camp, and he had chills to think that someone in Jesus’ time had actually done that, and now he was repeating it. And he felt he was contributing to a death all over again. Wow! He had learned to pay attention!

All of this is to say that by all means let Christian youth paintball! But then let them explore what they’ve learned about themselves afterward. To simply go to black-and-white, right/wrong thinking and forbid it would be to lose a chance to learn about the real power of the latent desire to win and kill and survive. This is the power Jesus gave up for us, so we could learn something about ourselves.  And reflecting on that part of Painball, or video gaming, they can begin to recognize how we tick, and how our natural way is likely not the way of Jesus.

Phase “next” in my journey has opened up. Oh how I love (misguidedly) to try figure out what God is doing with me! I really don’t know, but I am called to trust and travel the journey opened up for me.

So now I will be the camp chaplain at MooreCroft Camp starting June 15th. See Moorecroft.net for a bit of an idea of what the camp is about. The pictures do not give you the full sense of the place. You have to come see!  The buildings are authentic heritage camp habitations! The natural setting is amazing, with a sheltered-from-the ocean bay so the campers can swim and kayak, and some not so far away Islands for the more skilled to venture out to and explore. From the shoreline I could hear sea-lions barking the first time I visited! The pond has beavers! Deer are abundant… and so on. I’ll insert a few pictures I took here and then continue the post:

The boat and swim launch area by the bay

The Office

Just one typical rustic oceanside cabin

Looks like this is a place of burning many calories and creating blisters

This tree is by the waterfront. I was struck by it’s textured trunk!

(if you click on the picture you get a bigger version)

My role is, as far as I understand at this time, to be a spiritual support for campers and staff, to provide morning devotionals that mesh with the theme of the particular camp edition happening that week. Beyond that I don’t know exactly how the position has traction yet, but I’m eager to learn and connect with the obviously energetic and eager and enthusiastic staff.

I’ll be living in the camp, in a house on the property. I’ll eat there as well. Handy! Sunday afternoon, when I went to meet the board there, a youth group was cooking steak, and gave me one! It was simply meat flavoured butter with some spices! Awesome.

The position runs to the end of August. Beyond then I’m hoping for something to have worked out from all the networking I did with churches who do not have a pastor. My aim is to get some kind of interim position. Of course, God may have other plans! I just cast my bread on the waters that make sense to me, and somehow, as in both last positions, God provides something out of the perifery to employ me in Kindgom work and grow me at the same time.

So today, in an internet discussion group, the above mentioned subject came up. And the discussion prompted a memory for me, and since I’m in the mood to explore my writing, I wrote up a memory I have about an event that happened in church when I was a child, an event which was part of what shaped my views of what should happen in church.

It’s called “Getting wound up about superficial symbolism” If you’d like to read it you can click on the title, or cut and paste the link below into your browser, or find it in the list of pages to the right.

http://pastorpete.wordpress.com/lifelessons/getting-wound-up-about-superficial-symbolism/

Well, I’m going to have some time to put things up here again. The addiction treatment facility I was working at the past 8 months has been affected by the economy and had to lay off a number of employees, myself included.

Interesting article from Time magazine about the resurgence of a new form of Calvinism. The series is about 10 Ideas that are changing the world right now. New Calvinism is #3 on that list.

The New Calvinism

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard “The Old Rugged Cross,” a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are…well, hark the David Crowder Band: “I am full of earth/ You are heaven’s worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity.”

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin’s 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism’s buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism’s latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination’s logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time’s dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation’s other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don’t have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by “glorifying” him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism’s loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.

No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don’t operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, “everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world” — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle’s pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom’s hottest links.

Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the movement’s doctrinal drift, but can’t offer the same blanket assurance. “A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness, divorce, drugs or sexual temptation,” says Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists. “They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God.” Mohler says, “The moment someone begins to define God’s [being or actions] biblically, that person is drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist.” Of course, that presumption of inevitability has drawn accusations of arrogance and divisiveness since Calvin’s time. Indeed, some of today’s enthusiasts imply that non-Calvinists may actually not be Christians. Skirmishes among the Southern Baptists (who have a competing non-Calvinist camp) and online “flame wars” bode badly.

Calvin’s 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to see whether Calvin’s latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting or whether, during these hard times, more Christians searching for security will submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country’s infancy.

clipped from www.time.com

My job, put into simplistic common descriptors, is to be a midhusband to confession.
I had no idea going into this what a privileged role that would be. Beforehand, I worried about what I might hear from gang-member addict dealers, from PTSD suffering military personnel, from spoiled irresponsible cocaine dependent rich kids, from addicted anesthesiologists and from hulking bulking policemen and sports figures, from ordinary seeming mothers of young children and supposedly doting successful husbands. I worried I’d be loaded up with ‘crap’ that they’d offloaded onto me.
It doesn’t work that way at all! With one or two exceptions God lets me ‘forget’ or certainly not carry the burden of someone else’s erroneous behaviour. That does not mean that my naive ears don’t feel they’re losing their virginity though. They do. It is painful. I am repeatedly deeply troubled by the height, the breadth and the depth of self-and-other destroying behaviour the human creature is capable of creating and enduring and persisting in.
My job is to assist patients in writing their 4th step and then to ‘hear’ their 5th.
The process has such wisdom to it. Its wisdom affects me, has me feeling privileged, feeling part of something ageless and not bound to earth. The longer I am in it the stronger is my grief of over how the ‘church’ handles the same issues. There is a better way.
Step 4 consists of taking a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of oneself. Its best chance of working well is if the inventory maker has accepted they — believing they are the makers of their own destiny — are not running their life well at all and had allowed a substance or activity to take over their lives, creating unbelievable chaos and destruction. They then need to turn to some power outside of and greater than themselves for help and turn their destiny and life over into that power’s control.
Then they look at their life, and get a GPS fix on where they are and where they have been and what exactly life has been like. They write it all down: their believing they know best, their not being in touch with their true feelings or corking them and presenting something more pleasant so people will like them more (or so they believe), their unrealistic expectations that cause them to let themselves down and be let down by others, the fears they hold (most often fear of rejection or abandonment), the things they feel guilty for, the grudges they hold and carefully nurse by restating their case to anyone — grudges that bottle up anger inside them. And then the way they always end up feeling sorry for themselves. ALWAYS, no matter what they try differently, they end up hating themselves and those around them and in the despair of misguided understanding of life they turn to a chemical or gambling or sex or work or exercise for relief. It doesn’t come.
So they come to us chaplains when they do their 5th step and share all that. They know they are sharing it with God as they understand God as well. It takes 2 hours on average. And in the process many are completely astonished to find they’ve lost heaviness. They come in hunched, anxious, jittery, eye-averting, burdened, fearful and sometimes still playing sleight of word distraction games. Protecting their disease, not even seeing they are doing it. They leave lighter and enlighted to have found that confession is good, that holding is unhealthy.
And that result is the tremendous privilege of it! It is akin to the being born again that Nicodemous could not understand. The inner child who’s emotional and psychological growth was halted when it learned it’s feelings did not seem to fit being expressed in their world, FINALLY makes contact, and begins to stir the person toward Life abundant, Life as God intended.
The process works for Atheist, Agnostic and Hindu alike. It works for Jehovah’s Witness, Muslim and Buddhist. And it works for both excommunicated and righteous Christians. A salvation process is born in a place we don’t expect it. A spiritual journey is undertaken. God is connected with a sinner, and freedom is found. The sinner is taught to be open to let God be known to them. The barren place becomes fertile again, the place of shame transforms to a place of Glory.
It is truly a wonder to be a midhusband in Confession and ReBirth

I’m not from a tradition that puts much stock in direct or indirect personal revelation from God. The Bible itself, approached rationally, will tell you what God wants you to know. That’s what we were taught. But I’ve had several experiences that had me open to other options. So, when a person came to me with a “word” they said God gave them to give me, I was respectful and open.

This link takes you to the pages where I’ll tell that story:

http://pastorpete.wordpress.com/lifelessons/personalized-prophecy/

I was involved with a discussion about what sin is. Someone spoke of a “list” form of identifying sin and a “relational” understanding. This was my input into the dialogue:

I want to know the list of things that are sin, for my own sake and for the sake of helping others keep out of it. I want to know actions to avoid. It comes naturally for me. Because of that, I’m drawn to people who can definitively give me the list, saying God helped them figure it out.

I want to know the list of good things to do as well.
That’s why my heart beats faster and my mind pays attention when someone asks: “What do I have to do to obtain eternal life?” When I hear that, I expect to be able to add to my do and don’t lists.

But the way my Saviour handled this very question is giving me reason to re-evaluate the approach that comes naturally. When Jesus was asked the question, he painted a word picture in response in which the list-oriented people used the rule book to avoid showing compassion, and the list-less person ended up being the good example. Hmmmm. What might he be showing me, a list-wanting person?
I’m still working it out.
But the more I struggle and reflect, the more a relational approach to sin makes sense. It humbles me in its grace and it’s simplicity. Something in me wants it to be harder than it appears.
It looks more and more like evandadam* broke relationship by trying to be equal to God, then hiding.
I can relate. I want to be God in my life and in the lives of others. I don’t want to submit or take responsibility for what I have done that broke relationship.

Sin is now less about violating a list item and more about internal attitude for me.
So, profoundly, the message God left is more a message of how hard God has worked to relate to me and to others and the price God has paid to make relationship possible again. God has made a way for list item violations that I do so readily to be dismissed, to no longer be a barrier between God and me, if I just accept that God loves me that much, stop being God myself, and admit them. I come out of hiding, accept God’s outstretched mighty hand, and walk the Way.

A story I’ve been told from my toddlerhood came back to me recently. I came in from playing outside, and my mother figured it was time to try teach me to wash my own face. So she held me up in front of the bathroom mirror and pointed out the boy in the mirror, and after some coaching got me to see that he had dirt on his face. She asked me what we could do to fix it, handing me a warm wet “Doekie” while she asked.
What did I do?
I started washing the face of the boy in the mirror of course!

The story is such a wonderful illustration of what I still tend to do naturally. I try to clean the logs out of other people’s eyes and am in danger of obsessing about them and their logs and dirt, all the while avoiding cleaning my own eyes and heart, or having them cleaned. People are drawn to me as a good leader and teacher and one who “tells it like it is” if I do that, but meanwhile crud builds in me. It’s frightening.

Pete, searching out the godly way.

* just a creative way of saying Eve and Adam, partly because it can be turned into E. Vandadam which sounds like a Dutch origin name

It was back in 1994/5. It was an interesting life-lesson.

Here’s part one of the story: http://pastorpete.wordpress.com/lifelessons/prayer-story-for-alah-abda/

I got a call this morning that one of my male friends – the rare kind that you can call anytime about anything – died suddenly of heart failure. I am writing him a farewell letter that I will share with the family, since I won’t be able to make it to the funeral.

Here is an early draft:

Well Henry, what you used to say turned out to be true. I’m hurting. You’re the one who told me you wanted people to hurt, in words something like this: “if it doesn’t hurt to say goodbye, you haven’t connected, so I want it to hurt to say goodbye.” Knowing you are physically gone hurts. So you did it! As I think this, I can hear you, your softly rumbling voice in the memory of my head saying a resolute but unsmug “Well. Good!”

And as I hear that the hurting turns mysteriously comfortable. Oh pain is still there, but the warmth of that flagrantly open and honest admission I know you would make spills down my face and I feel lighter… yet more grounded, and I find myself celebrating the connection we had, and it becomes hard to tell what kind of tears these actually are. They are glad-sad tears, and then they are sad-glad. There is joy in them, gladness about the connection that can’t be erased by your death, value in the experiences we shared, appreciation of the enduring wisdom of the insights we were led to together in our many seemingly rambling yet Life-finding conversations.

Our first meeting comes to mind. My second sermon as a student pastor. After, you came barreling up to me at some point and said words like “I’ll bet your professors love that sermon, but it didn’t do Dick-all for me!” Just what a rookie preacher LOVES to hear. But I needed to hear it. Truly. For I was in danger of heading off into preaching a heady gospel I was learning about at Seminary.

We became friends out of that somehow, and you introduced me to the gospel of the Sow-minary. A Gospel that fits the pig-pen of life. Today, partly due to how God used you to direct the shaping of me, I am no longer a pastor, but am working in the pig-pen of Addiction treatment, because church work was in part too neat, too tidy, too boxed in, and the whitewash baked on too well, the manure pit too unreachable to be able to raise a healthy stink that meant the land was being made fertile again.

So now I’m helping wean addicts off the swill they’ve been using and become addicted to because they believed that they should NOT feel, so they did not learn to acknowledge they have a soul, a spirit, and did not learn to nurture it, and came to find themselves in a hell where nothing would numb the inevitable inner pain that results. And they appreciate learning, slowly, how to feel and acknowledge and express pain and other feelings. They come to Life as they learn to get rid of their manure. So thanks for that Henry.

There is much more. I’m sure over the days more will come to mind. You and your outlook not only resonated with me, but they are woven into the fabric of who I am now, and the threads you put in are hard to identify.

Some memories that are flooding back can’t be shared in such a public way, such as some of the experiences we had making Elder visits. For a couple of these I still haven’t figured out what exactly happened, they are not explained in any expert’s book (you’re the one who gave me a new understanding of Expert: “Ex” means before, or used to, and “pert” standing for pertinent, so an expert is someone who used to be pertinent. The real pro’s are the ones who are still doing it). But the book I find the most similar stories in is the Bible. And the moving force in those events was definitely Spiritual and beyond or above what you and I were capable of. You encouraged me to explore these things. Yet I don’t think you ever did that intentionally. You went with whatever came, and I tagged along. Hmmm. Sounds like discipleship to me…

I still use some of the Semordnilapses and other word games you introduced me to now and then. Yeah, you didn’t know that’s what they were, but I just looked it up, and its the word palindromes read backwards. like LIVE and EVIL, and especially LIVED and DEVIL as an illustration that if we live in the past looking only backwards then the devil is likely having a heyday.

By now, you might be getting a big swell headed, so I need to remind you that you could be pig-headed too, and get so locked into something that the world outside of you would disappear. I remember the time you called me and begged me to come home with you because you knew you had really blown it with Jean out in the offsite barn preparing pigs for shipping, and you had been so trapped in your own stinking thinking that you totally trampled on normal conversation and created a chaos that met Jean’s inner wounds with salt… and well, you and Jean know the rest of the story, it’s not mine to tell. But boy did I learn about me trying to help you!

Around you is where I learned to make use of an ability to see patterns, to see when there is likely something behind what appears to be going on, like the Wizard behind the curtain. I just used that ability effectively just yesterday, where a group was amazed when all I did was show clear patterns in someone’s story.

A woman was talking about sneaking cookies before going to sleep at night and how that was wreaking havock with her Diabetes. She had already talked about other things she did to numb pain, and how she doesn’t remember having feelings since being 5 years old. She talked about how she has nerve damage in her feet from her diabetes and how that damage is traveling up her legs. Then she talked about how she has lived most of her life feeling as if she was only “living only in the top half” of existence. So I named the patterns I heard her speak of: I hear you say your life is about numbing your pain, and you are eating extra cookies at night to do that, just like you used alcohol at night before, and you feel like you are missing half of life and your abusive sugar intake is causing you to go numb from your feet upward. That alarms me!” The stunned reaction of all present when I said that surprised me. I keep forgetting that not everyone listens and looks for patterns and what might be said via them.

I remember exploring with you if there might be another way to avoid overeating other than willpower, because we both saw that deciding NOT to eat the cookie made us WANT the cookie more. And I began to learn to look at the cookie and not even want or need it, and it would stop “calling me.”

From that my mind wanders over to another shared learning, namely that “Humility pursued is already lost” or any virtue pursued can’t be gained by reaching for it. If you decide to be humble today, you are not likely to succeed, because you will be measuring all you do on a humility scale, and the moment you think you are doing well, any humility you had is gone. It’s so simple. Yet it’s profound.

What’s even more bizarre is that once you see that and let go of any need to be humble, people start calling you humble.

Henry, you were a humble, wise man. It hurts to know you’re gone. And that is good.