What I Learned on My Summer Vacation 2010 Part 1
Tom Shrader reflects on lessons learned during summer vacation, using Titus 3:3-4 to contrast humanity's natural sinful state with God's merciful salvation through Christ. He emphasizes that our value comes not from what others might pay for us, but from the fact that Jesus gave His life for us while we were still sinners.
“There's nothing you can do to make God love you more, nothing you can do to make God love you less.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: What I Learned on My Summer Vacation
Recorded: September 01, 2010
Duration: 43 min
Themes: salvation, mercy, grace, sin, redemption, value, identity, love, feeling worthless, struggling with identity, new believer, questioning self worth, dealing with guilt, experiencing shame, young adult, seeking purpose
Scripture: Titus 3:3-4, 1 John 4:9, 2 Corinthians 4:14, Philippians 2:12-13
Theological Themes: soteriology, salvation by grace, total depravity, human sinfulness, justification, sanctification, divine mercy, christology
Full Transcript
First day back. We're going to do something that I do about every other year when I come back from vacation. I'll do a little "what I learned on my summer vacation." So I want to do that this weekend.
We'll go down to the U and see what happens down there. I don't know where you're going to be at 12:15 on Saturday, but I want to be with the Iowa football team doing Chapel. So I'll have such a downer message. I guarantee you they'll be so screwed up by 7:30.
When I looked at the schedule at the beginning of the year, there's two games: Ohio State, which obviously you hate them, and that'll be hard. And then I think this is the scariest game of the year for us. I think that's a problem. Not that it matters what I think, but I don't like this at all. So we'll be doing that. I'm going down boldly. I'll stand down. Finally, I'll be one of the sharpest people in the crowd.
How I Prepare These Messages
Let me take you through what I learned on my summer vacation. Here's how this shakes out, because it's always iffy. I think I'm going to do this week and next week, and then we'll start something.
Here's how I do the process. I know this is coming, so I start making notes. Sometimes I'll start really early when my brain's engaged. I might not quite be on vacation yet, but I'll start making notes. Then toward the end of the time, I'll just take them and put them in order. What'll happen is I'll see an ad, or read an article, or see a clip on TV, or watch an event, and it makes me think of something to come back and relate to you.
The iPad Adventure
About two months ago, longer than that now, maybe three months ago, I got an iPad. Now, I am personally not a tech guy, but you don't have to be. Apple's tech for you. And so I really am into this thing.
One of the great things about the iPad for me are the note-taking sections. When you turn the iPad horizontally, the keyboard is so big it's just easy to take notes. So I just took notes all through it. Once it's there, I don't have to save anything. Once it's written, I forget it.
So it was a week ago today, we were coming home, and I left my iPad in the restroom at the Portland airport. Yeah, that's not good. And I'm absolutely distraught.
This is more information than you want, but a year ago, I have a favorite pair of sunglasses. I'm not going to buy expensive sunglasses because I don't have the money. So I'll buy like $12 sunglasses. Well, I somehow found this pair of sunglasses. They're the greatest pair of sunglasses I've ever had.
A year ago, I left them at Flagstaff Ranch playing golf. When I was up there this year, I only got to play one round of golf in the six weeks, but that doesn't matter. I went to Flagstaff Ranch and said, "I played golf here last year, I left my sunglasses here. It was a year ago. Any chance they're here?" The guy goes, "I doubt it, man, but go look." Well, I found my pair of sunglasses.
But then Thursday, I was so distraught about losing my iPad that I left my sunglasses on Alaska Airlines. So they're gone.
The Mysterious Phone Call
So I'm home. I got home. I'm literally sick to my stomach, just distraught. The phone rings and this guy says, "I got what you want." I said, "Really? What is it?" And he said, "I got what you need, man."
Well, now I'm having flashbacks. I'm thinking, what is it you have? Who are you? Are you recording this? So he said, "Tell me what you really want, man." And I said, "I don't know, world peace. I don't know." And he said, "What do you want? What do you need, man?" And I said, "My iPad." He said, "I got it."
I said, "Really?" He said, "I'm in Casa Grande." I said, "Okay." And I said, "I'll come right down. I can come down first thing tomorrow morning and get it." And he said, "You know, I'm coming up to Phoenix. I got to go to Gilbert." I said, "Really?" He said, "Can you meet me there?" I said, "It's out of the way, but I can get it."
Long story short, I got my iPad back. There's probably a story there. But I got it back too late for Sunday. But you all were fortunate enough to still be able to get what I learned on my summer vacation.
The Most Influential People in History
I'm going to give you a couple points, like three points. The second is the big one. But the first one, this is just an observation. I was going through some stuff, and I saw there's a guy named Michael Hart who wrote a book in 1978 called "The 100 Most Influential People in History." I love lists like that because I don't know why I just do.
Let me give you the top six. I'm going to try to make one point out of this. It's nothing noteworthy. You don't need to write this down. Number one is Muhammad. Number two is Isaac Newton. Number three is Jesus. Number four is Buddha. Number five is Confucius. Number six is Paul.
Now, the guy commenting on this said the first person on Hart's list is Muhammad. Hart asserts that Muhammad was supremely successful in both the religious and secular realms. He also believed that Muhammad's role in developing Islam was far more influential than Jesus' collaboration in the development of Christianity.
Well, it can't be more influential because Christianity is Jesus. He's essential to it. That still isn't my point. My point is: even when a secular historian writing with no spiritual angle, just looking at facts, granted it's totally subjective, when he looks at it, five of the six most influential people in all of history deal in the spiritual realm. I thought that was really interesting. You got Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Paul. It's interesting to have an influence over a period of time.
Time. It's like an acknowledgment. We got all this world around us and all the things that are in it. And we'll talk about some of those in a minute. But at our core, we understand that there's a spiritual component here that's undeniable. That even if you get your ducks in a row, even if you line things up, at the end of the day, you look at your ducks and go something's wrong.
Isn't that the parable about the man who was wealthy, then had a bumper crop. Then he said, what am I going to do? I'll build bigger barns. And then God says, well, you fool this very night, your soul will be demanded of you. And then Jesus asked a profound question. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world? He wins the game on Saturday. He gets everything. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?
If I were to flip it around, I could phrase it this way, kind of negatively. If I gain my soul, does it matter how much of the world I have? Now, I understand the battle in that. Trust me, because I live in this really real world.
Seeing Pain Around Us
One of the things that happened on summer vacation is I just was exposed to all this pain around me. Not just in my family, I take my family out of it. How many people are hurting? The unemployment rate in the United States is twice the unemployment rate in Mexico. The economic pain of those who are underemployed. You guys read the paper. It's like 17, 18% of underemployed, unemployed, those who have quit working. That's a lot of people. With huge ramifications.
So point one, even secular people understand that the soul, the spirit, something inside of us bigger than us is all around us.
Antique Roadshow Meets Fox News
Here's the big point for the day. I want to take two shows, bring them together. This will be masterful if it works. I'm going to give you three shows that I watch periodically. So you got Antique Roadshow, American Pickers (those guys are out of LeClaire, Iowa, right outside of Davenport), and Pawn Stars. So if you take those three shows, we'll use Antique Roadshow because that's the one most people are most familiar with. So group A is Antique Roadshow.
Group B is Fox News. Whenever I talk about this, because politics is so polemic, there's a whole bunch of people on Fox News I don't like, I'm neutral on some, but there's a whole bunch of them I just don't like. Not profitable to list them. There's one I love. I like Megyn Kelly too. And I really like Martha McCallum, but they're morning, they don't count. And I'm starting to like Greta more. She just kind of asks questions. She just grinds like a little lawyer, and she's just like a little gnat, she never goes away.
Here's who I like the most, and the good thing is you can get them for two hours, because you get them on Fox and you get them on Fox Business. I love Cavuto. I love Neil Cavuto. So I'll watch Cavuto, I try to catch Cavuto every day, at least an hour. When he was on vacation this August, it was very difficult for me, I missed Him a lot. So I'm going to take these two things and blend them together.
The Value Question
If you have Bibles, open them to the book of Titus. So we're going way to the end, and we'll go to the book of Titus, and we're going to go to chapter three. Here's what I want you to see. Here's why I'm taking Antique Roadshow. Every experience on Antique Roadshow goes like this. Somebody comes in with something, and they'll give it to them. But Pawn Stars does the same thing. If you bring an item in on Pawn Stars, the first thing they say is, where did you get it? Because we've got to establish it's not stolen. If you don't have a story, you're out.
But Antique Roadshow is a little more sophisticated. So how did you come about this item? My grandmother's grandmother's grandmother used to clean house for George Washington, or whatever it is. And then they'll take it, and they'll take the piece, and they'll always ask, what do you think it's worth? And that's where the person always goes, oh, I don't think it's worth anything. Well, if you didn't think it was worth anything, you wouldn't have brought it in. So we've established that you're a liar, is what we've established at this point.
The Whole Point
The whole point you're trying to get, when you peel away Antique Roadshow, is what's the value of this thing? And even then, they'll take, well, a value at an auction is. So basically, what he's saying is, the value at an auction is between 10 grand and 20 grand, depending on what somebody values it, what they're willing to pay.
So I was watching Fox News, and on vacation, I did a lot of nothing, but four days in a row, either Shepard Smith or Megyn Kelly had a break where they led into the next segment with the phrase, we have a story you won't believe. And they were all stories. One of them was, we've got a potential credit crisis coming, so everything's a crisis. I'm almost crisis-proof now. I mean, there could be a comet ready to hit this building, and I go, yeah, whatever, that's not happening.
But they said, we have a potential credit crisis coming based on this huge amount of social security numbers that have been stolen that are kids' social security numbers that you don't realize that they're stolen until this massive debt is rolled up. Now I don't know how you and I can't get any credit, but somebody who's got a social security number of a four-month-old gets credit, I don't get that.
There was a gal by the name of Sharon Orange, she's FBI's Section Chief of Financial Crimes. Here's what she said: "Even though we have certain compliance measures in place, people will adopt whatever the scheme. It doesn't matter if the market's up or down." Here's what she's saying: whatever system we put in place, there's always somebody that figures it out. Whatever the scheme is, they'll come up with a new scheme.
Cavuto had a line the other day: we just keep making the same mistake over and over again. We learn that spending more doesn't work, so we spend more. We learn that one party's arrogant, so we throw them out to get in another arrogant party. We make mousetraps to catch the corporate rats, and bigger and better corporate rats come along. That's the human condition. That's where we are.
The Story That Changes Everything
I read this book in a couple of days. Really a good book, just an awful title. The guy's name is Mike Erre. The title of the book is "Why the Bible Matters." The subtitle is "Rediscovering its Significance in an Age of Suspicion," meaning the Bible. There's a whole bunch of stuff in here, but I want to take you through this, because this is really important.
Let's start by looking at Titus chapter 3, verse 3, and Paul writes this: "For we also once were foolish ourselves." Now He's writing to those of us who know Christ, and He's saying, here's what you were, so here's the before picture. We were once foolish ourselves, and we lived it out. We were disobedient, we deceived, we were enslaved to various lusts and pleasure. I don't think sex there, that's part of it, but we were enslaved to this, we couldn't do anything but bad.
Lust there is just a desire, even a good desire run amok. So we didn't just desire food, we desired abundance of food, comfort food, whatever it is. We were enslaved to these lusts and pleasures. We spend our life, how about this, here's where we invest our life, in malice and envy and hateful, and we hate one another.
The Human Condition on Full Display
We hate one another in terms of families can't get along, we hate one another in terms of husbands, wives. I mean these are two people, think about it, and we can debate whether the divorce rate is 50% or whatever. Let's say it's 50%, it doesn't matter if it's 40 or 60. These are one out of every two marriages where two people voluntarily get into it. I mean when's the last time you went to a shotgun wedding? They don't have those anymore, it's more fashionable not to get married.
So two people voluntarily say "I pick you, I'll be with you forever," and half the time it doesn't work. That's people who can't get along. He said that's what we were, that's the human condition.
Learning Through the Greatest Narrative
Erre writes this in his book: "I'm convinced that most of us live according to a narrative." His point here is that we learn best by stories, and that history is His story. I'm convinced we learn by a narrative. He said these narratives answer the basic question: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? What's right? What's wrong? And then this is a great question: Can we even know these things?
Now the world comes along and tries to answer those in a variety of ways, so we're all material, so just produce and pursue the material. Even early on the Gnostics and the early accusers of the church, or people in the church would say listen, we're spirit and body, and what happens in the body doesn't really matter, it's the spiritual that matters. So there's always that kind of battle in the midst of this.
When we stop and we say those are those big questions, here's what we find: yes, we can know those answers. That's why this book is really important, and to really be seen not just as a book. Here's my fear: this has become more of a textbook than a real live book. So we fill in blanks and we memorize verses and we color things up and we move them around, that's perfect, that's great, but you can do all that and miss the story, and miss the fact that God creates in chapter 1 and 2, we screw it up in chapter 3, and the rest of the book is about Him putting it back together again.
The Story We Won't Believe
That's what Paul is saying to these people. So let's tie it all in: what's your value? What do you go for at auction? And how are we in this world where you won't believe the story we have? Well here's how you get what you won't believe, it's Titus 3:3. Here are all these things, this is what we're doing. If you have somebody that's living like that and you give them technology, they're going to find amazingly creative ways to exhibit their sin.
Verse 4: "But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ."
John writes this in 1 John chapter 4 verse 9: "By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten into the world so that we might live through Him. And this is love. Not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sin."
The Great Exchange
So that, here's the story: when Adam sinned, He plunged us into ruin. All of us. So we all come into the world sinners. And then we manifest that sinful heart, we manifest it as we go through life.
One sense in which we look at a Hitler and go, "How does that happen?" Well, the real question for us is, "How come we don't see that more?" And the reality is we do. It's just that we may not have somebody with the drive or the capacity to galvanize a nation like that.
I use this illustration all along. We look at a Bernie Madoff. He's a terrible guy. He's a rotten guy. He absolutely is. I'm for putting together a category of corporate terrorists, of guys who do that, and you treat them as a terrorist. I'd be really serious about that. But I'll hear people just put down Bernie Madoff, and then when you go in their briefcase, you'll find paperclips and pins and stuff that they've taken from work. So they're Bernie Madoff without any ambition. A paperclip's easier to steal than to screw you out of a couple of million dollars. So that's just who we are. That's our heart.
God's Love For Us
The value you have is this, and this is huge: while we were yet sinners, love is this, not that we love God—that's good—but the reason we love God is because He first loved us.
One of the guys on Fox starts his program every day by saying, "You're about to enter the no spin zone." Well, let me just tell you, here's my knockoff of that. I think that we're about to enter the way too familiar to us zone. But most of you, when you look around, you've got Bibles. Most of you in this group are in church somewhere. Most of you probably Christians, biblical Christians, followers of Christ. We should be in awe of the fact that while we were yet sinners, the guy that's a sinner doesn't get it. The person that's lost doesn't get it because they're in their sin and they love it.
You've been redeemed, removed from it. And as that happens, you begin to see your sin more. And that should make God and the reality of His redemption for us an awesome experience.
The Danger of Familiarity
I had a friend from Iowa down and we were meeting early for breakfast. It was one of those mornings where there were some clouds, but they were like see-through clouds. So as the sun was coming up, it didn't block out the sun. It just manifested the beauty of the sun. It's kind of to me like the sunsets. So we're having a sunrise that's comparable to our sunset on this day. It's just a beautiful sunrise. Coming up, we're out in the East Valley and you can see the mountains from Fort Peaks and the sun's coming up and all this.
My friend said to me, "That is magnificent." And I'll put it in real time. So we're getting out of the car, he said, "That's magnificent." I said, "Yeah, it's like that every day." See what's going on there? All of a sudden, something becomes so familiar to you that you lose the reality of it. You lose the impact of it. My fear is the only way to deepen that and rejuvenate that is to somehow have it in jeopardy. Now you can't lose that salvation, so maybe it's my own sin.
Your Value to God
It's this amazing love that I understand. What's the value? What's your value at auction? God sent His Son Jesus who died so that you would have eternal life. That's your value to the one who created you. And He loves you. He keeps coming back to this idea of love. It's His love for us, not our love for Him.
Paul says it this way in 2 Corinthians 4, verse 14. He's talking about this new creature and we're ambassadors for Christ. And His prelude to that is the love of Christ compels us. So what's my motivation? Is it just discipline? Is it just get it done?
Faith as a To-Do List
We ended vacation at Cannon Beach, so I had a couple of days with nothing to do, but taught for four or five days. I can't remember. And I was talking about a variety of things. One guy was just laughing. He was saying he is so obsessed with reading his devotional in the morning and doing his Bible study that he would acknowledge most days all he gets is through it. He doesn't get hardly anything out of it. This is a day to read four chapters in Numbers and two chapters in the Gospel of John and read from His devotional. I have a lot of time. And he said, "I just am driven by getting through it."
Now there's nothing wrong with getting through it. But what's the point? I would contend you're better off reading one chapter and getting something out of it than six chapters and checking a box. But I can't throw many darts at this guy because he's thinking like most of us including me think. I got to get it done. Got it done. Got it done. Got it done. So all of a sudden Jesus becomes a to-do list. Faith becomes a to-do list for me. And then I have to even rank those. In the old days they used to do it this way: A things and B things and C things.
The Bible Study Controversy
We had something really interesting this year in our women's ministry at church. We had a short period of time. It's funky. We made a couple of schedule changes and so it shortened the time frame we have in the fall. So normally there would be like, I don't know, 10 or 12 weeks and now there's seven or eight because of some things they're doing. So now we have to come up with classes. And it's really interesting the classes and they're really creative.
Well when the list came out we have always done a Precept study. You know what Precepts is? It's kind of chapter by chapter, verse by verse. You study this thing and get all this stuff. Mark up your Bibles, draw your lines. We didn't have any Precepts. These gals in Precepts went nuts. "You don't have any Precepts." Well the more entrenched they got in how outraged they were, the more angry I was, to be determined we wouldn't do a Precepts class if we had 50 weeks to do it.
Now I want you to get the tension there because we'll do a Precept study in the fall or in the spring. That was always the plan. Here are these gals. Most of them whose Bibles are all marked up. They're tagged, they're colored, they're moved. They know Greek and Hebrew and all that stuff that goes with it. And they want another Bible study. At the same time I got a whole group of younger girls saying we need the older...
The Danger of Learning Without Living
Women need to mentor us. But I often hear, "Oh, they can't do that. They're in a Bible study." It's like walking by the guy who's bleeding and dying and his guts are falling out. He may be hurting physically or emotionally and he's saying, "Can you help me?" And you respond, "No, no, no, I can't. I'm going to Bible study. We're doing a Bible study on the Good Samaritan. I don't have time for you."
You ought to know me by now after 25 years of this. I'm not against Bible study. But the end means of Bible study is not the study itself. Here are the phrases I've used over the years: it's to transform my heart, to inform my mind so that I live a radical life. If that's too hard to remember, just go heart, head, hands.
You all make a lot of notes. I don't know what you do with them, but you might write this one down because this one's worth it: Learning doesn't equal obedience.
The Better Church Problem
Here's the real issue: The better your church is—by that I tend to mean more conservative, Bible-oriented (I'm fine with SBC or East Valley Bible Church as examples)—the more likely that learning will suddenly become the mission rather than life change and obedience. You get a really good Bible teacher who's taking the Greek and parsing it, moving it out, and giving you history. It comes alive, and you can become addicted—strong word—to the study but never the action.
The whole point we get in Scripture is we want to see our heart transformed and our mind informed so that our life is lived in some sort of radical way.
Working Out Your Salvation
Paul is writing to the church at Philippi and he writes these words: "So then beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more in my absence"—in other words, you've followed me and done what I've said when I'm there and when I'm not there (that's a compliment, by the way)—"Work out your salvation with fear and trembling."
Here's what he's not saying: He's not saying earn your salvation. He's saying let your salvation be manifest. Live the transformed life. "For it's God who is at work within you both to will and to work for His good pleasure." It's God who's doing this thing.
Restful Activity
The phrase we've been using lately is "restful activity." I'm not about trying to please God, make Him happy, or make Him love me more by what I do or don't do. We'll stay on this love of God idea because I say this all the time and I don't get near the awe that it feels like I should get for this thought.
There's nothing you can do to make God love you more. As a Christian now, there's nothing you can do to make God love you more, nothing you can do to make God love you less. That ought to just blow your socks off. That should not be something you write down and make into a bumper sticker or a wristband. That ought to rock your whole world.
Freedom from Probation
Even as followers of Christ, we tend to feel like we're still on probation. "I know You've forgiven me, I know You love me, but I've got to do these things and these things. Because if I don't, I'm going right back into this slavery." That's not true.
You're a child of the King and He'll never abandon you, He'll never desert you. He disciplines sin in a variety of ways, but you can't make Him love you more. So don't try. You can't make Him love you less. It's not a license to sin. It's a reality that as I sin and as I live my life, the love of Christ manifested on the cross is now compelling to me.
I'm not driven by the idea that there's this cosmic killjoy God who's out to destroy me if I screw up. I'm driven by the fact that here's this God who loved me so much that while I was still a sinner, He sent His Son to die for me, and I don't know how to respond to that other than to say thank you and to praise Him and to let that be the motivation that begins to transform my life. So I'm not conformed to this world, but I'm transformed by the renewing of my mind, and then my life changes.
Your True Value
I was in a church service the other day and the guy had a great phrase: "Let us be who we want to be and let us be who we really are." So the big gigantic point for today is this: What's your value? What do you go for at auction? Well, I don't know what somebody else would pay for you—a buck 99—but Jesus gave His life for you.
The DirecTV Revelation
Here's the third point, and next week I want to talk a little bit about work and vocation. If you're sitting there thinking, "Well, I'm retired," by vocation I just mean what you do with your life. How is that invested?
When I was on vacation, I saw an ad, but I was in a mindset to see it. I saw a DirecTV ad that I'd seen before but had missed this point. If you're a DirecTV customer and you get a friend to sign up, you get $100—I'm assuming $100 credit on your DirecTV bill. In the ad, if Tom gets his friends to sign up, he gets $100. Then suddenly all the friends are there, but every head turns into Benjamin Franklin. You've seen that ad? Every person becomes $100.
I'm thinking, how would it affect the way I treat people if I saw everybody as a $100 bill? If I saw everybody as what they can do for me? I want to take these two ideas next week—I want to expand that one and expand this whole idea of vocation.
Up all the time. But it was a week ago today that we came back to reality. So we're driving back from Cannon Beach, and we don't rent a car anymore. They'll come and pick us up, which is nice. So we fly into Portland.
If you've never been to Cannon Beach, Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce owes me, it feels like. If you've never been to Cannon Beach, I'm telling you, it's a great place. You can catch a two o'clock flight out of here on Thursday. You can be in Portland by five. You can be at Cannon Beach by eight. There's only one place open. It's called the Driftwood. You can go there and get a really good burger. There'll be a game or something on. You can spend Friday, Saturday, most of Sunday morning, maybe all the way in, get a late flight back. And when you come back Sunday, you'll feel like you've been away a long time. It's a great place.
The Canyon Revelation
So it's about an 80 mile drive. We're driving back into Portland last Thursday. We're in the van, Susan's friend's driving. She's in the front, Susan's in the front, and I'm sitting in the back. We're down to two lanes, and we're behind a logging truck. We're coming up on this big hill. So we're just putzing along.
I'm in the back going out of my mind. You gotta put it in context. I got nowhere to go. All I'm gonna do is go to Portland and leave my iPad in the toilet. I got nothing to do. I'm not driving. I have no responsibility. All we're gonna do is get to the Portland airport. You get through security at the Portland airport. Depends on the time of day. We got through, I would say, because they really were intense, in 90 seconds. So we got through. There's just no way. There's nowhere to go. There's nothing to do.
We're putzing along. We're going about 10 or 15 miles an hour. I look out to my right, and there's this beautiful canyon. Now, I break down, because I'm not much for natural beauty. The Grand Canyon, I've been there once. We got there. I said, "My golly, what a gully." I'm gonna give you a spin on the Grand Canyon. And this will sound really stupid, but it's true. And it'll save you a lot of aggravation. It looks just like the pictures. It just does. You get there, that's the first thing I thought. I thought, "This is just like the pictures." Well, if it looks just like the pictures, you don't need to go there. It's just not profitable time, unless you want to meet Germans. There's a lot of Germans there.
I look to my right, and I'm in this van, 10 or 15 miles an hour. Here's this amazing canyon, this river, and I'm just struck by the beauty of it. Now, my mind is fully engaged, and I'm thinking, "I've driven by that canyon 30 times anyway. 15 times in, 15 times out. And the only time I saw the beauty of it is when the semi was there to stop me and force me to look out." So it becomes this metaphor for life.
The Battle for Time and Attention
It's everybody's battle. I think the younger you are, the deeper the battle, but the battle's there for everyone. Because I have all these things that I know are really important, and they really are. I have these things that I also know are important, but less significant, and the war rages for your time.
So we were the other day, last Saturday, my son-in-law Tyler, about two months ago, said, "The boys are gonna play t-ball in the fall." I said, "Really?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "When are the games?" He said, "Well, Saturdays." Now, my first thought was, "Really? Because college football tends to land on Saturday. Their t-ball is screwing up my college football." And it didn't take me long to process and say, "Well, I can t-ball it, it's not the same, but I can t-ball it."
T-ball Revelations
So we went to the game, and Brayden was playing. Brayden's four. He'll be five in November. But Yale is about as high as these tables. And Yale just turned three. Yale's been practicing with them, because that's just how he's gonna be, but he was really prepared. "This is a game, buddy. You don't play in the games." But they didn't have enough kids, so Yale got to play.
There's a couple of pictures that Sarah got. One is Brayden's first at bat. He ended up at first base. It's a picture of him turning around and yelling at Susan, "Hey, Nana, did you see that?" But there's a picture of Yale. The bat is about his size, but weighs more. It's Yale's first at bat, and he hits right-handed. So he's like this. He hits right-handed, and he gets it out here, and he can't hold it anymore. The picture is here, and it's out. What happens after that is the momentum of this spins him into the ground. I don't think he ever got to first base. I guess they let him at first base a time or two. But he had no chance of getting to first base. He could not hit the ball and run. If he was gonna hit the ball, he'd have to recoup, regather himself, and then get to first base.
I mean, watching Yale. He's playing, about the second inning he got bored in the outfield, so whenever they'd hit the ball, he'd run in a circle and slide. He comes running over and he said, "Mom, I need water and grapes. I need some water and some grapes." I said, "Buddy, you need to be out there." He said, "I'm really thirsty."
Now all that to say, I'm driving home and I'm saying, "There's not an Iowa game I've ever seen that, other than maybe this weekend, that I would trade for that moment." They play tonight at 5:30 and I can't wait. I'd rather watch that than whoever's in the World Series.
Seeing Reality Clearly
What happened to us this time, and it's been about a year now, but it happened to me last year on vacation is spending essentially 24-7 with Susan is I saw how sick she really is. And I saw it again this time. So I've had a bunch of you say, "How's Susan?" The answer is it's really fluctuating. I just looked down and my phone went off and it said "feeling better today." It's just day by day. She's...
She's really weak physically. I mean yesterday I taught and then I spent a couple hours at church, I picked her up, we went to the hospital to get some stuff, we went to the drugstore to fill it, and then we went and got lunch and she was history after that. So for me, it's not going to impact you all, I don't think, but I've just recalibrated all my time. So I've told them at church, I'll be here to teach and maybe a thing or two, but just don't count on me for doing anything.
And there's nothing, by the way, there's nothing noble about this. I've had a bunch of people say, oh, that's so, no, it really isn't. I just happen to be in a spot where I can begin to do those things. And I'm fortunate to be there because a lot of people might have the same sentiment I have but life has not put them in a place where they can just disengage.
First of all, I have the capacity to disengage. I care about almost nothing. And I have the flexibility to disengage because God's just put a bunch of people in there who frankly can do whatever it is I'm supposed to do better than me. I'm not advocating disengagement. I'm saying, think about that semi-truck in your life as a blessing, not as a curse. Though I'm still cursing the semi-truck because I still wanted to get there faster.
Looking Ahead
Here's what I want to do next week. What happens if you see people as Benjamins, it's money, and at the same time, what happens in this process and what does God have to say to you about your vocation, about work? And again, I want you to get this. If you're retired or unemployed, it's not that you don't have a vocation. We're just going to put it in some context. So we'll look at those two big points next week.
Remind you there's tapes there if you want them and you grab them on the way out. Let's pray. Father, thanks for today. Thank you for what you've given us, what you've done in our life, the way you use us and work in our life. God, we pray that your love for us would be so fresh every day and it would be the thing that motivates us and drives us and compels us. Father, we pray that to you in Christ's name, amen.