God's Perfect Love Drives Away All Fear

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear . . .” (1 John 4:18).

The little fellow standing on the corner of the street, just down at the end of the block from San Jacinto Elementary School and his second grade class, was trying to be “a big boy,” but the tear-trails mapping their way down his crimson-flushed cheeks were proof positive that it wasn’t working very well.

Maybe big boys—you know, those third-, fourth-, or fifth-grade boys, or even those sixth grade pseudo-gods who ruled the elementary school roost, the unchallenged kings of the puerile pecking order—maybe they would have handled the calamity sans tears. He could hardly imagine a sixth-grader in tears.

But he was just a little guy. And he was standing there, waiting on his usual corner for his mom to pick him up, just as usual, but on this particular day he was holding in trembling little hands a damaged paper bag. Several streams of what looked like colored sand were slowly leaking out in hour-glass fashion from several punctures in the paper bag. The smell of perfumed soap crystals bore mute witness that the “sand grains” were in fact bath salts.

Those colored bath salts had been carefully layered into a little jar in rainbow fashion to form a second-grader’s gift to his mother for the upcoming Mother’s Day. But that was before the sack and its love-laced contents had been dropped by clumsy second-grade hands, completely accidentally but with complete devastation, to the ground.

The colors of the rainbow, now indistinct, loosed, and effectively destroyed, mingled with shards of glass in the sack which just a few moments ago had been the humble enclosure for a treasured gift and now was just a sack for trash.

I still remember the tears rolling down my cheeks.

But you know the end of the story, don’t you? You know that my tears soon dried as my mother’s kiss and her warm embrace proved yet again that she loved the giver more than the gift and, even broken, my gift was to her, beautiful.

I wasn’t really afraid that day that I might lose my mother’s love. It just broke my heart to break her gift.

But I know now that even big boys and girls sometimes stand in one of life’s corners with tears streaming down their cheeks. And they—we—are indeed afraid.

We’re afraid because we realize that the gift we so wanted to give our Father is broken, and shattered, and lying in pitiful pieces.

We’re afraid because the gift of pure lives that we so wanted to present as the tribute of love now seems anything but pure. Twisted and marred, it’s no longer beautiful.

We’re afraid.

But we needn’t be.

Our Father, our God of all grace, drives away all fear, kisses away all tears, hugs away all humiliation, and wraps up the tear-streaked beloved in the warm embrace of perfect love.





 





Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Don't Be One of Job's Friends!

The Book of Job is the textbook on suffering.

Open that Bible book and you’ll see an extraordinarily good man undergoing extraordinarily terrible affliction. He loses his family (except his wife, and keeping her might easily be counted among his afflictions), his wealth, and his health. He’s reduced to sitting on a pile of ashes, scraping his many sores, and praying to die. He is a picture of complete misery.

As if he weren’t already miserable enough, Job has a visit from three “friends.” The wretched fellow is in such terrible shape that they don’t even recognize him at first, but when they do, they break into such a frenzy of wailing and grief that one would think Job had already died.

In fact, I’m told that the kind of wailing they undertake is precisely the kind that happened in that culture when the undertaker had already been called!

For seven days, they sit viewing the “not yet dead” body of their friend, acting as if he were already dead, and then they undertake a premature post mortem of his trouble.

They speak. And they shouldn’t have. These “miserable comforters” begin to debate the man they’d come to console. The question is, “Why do the righteous suffer?” Job’s friends have a quick answer: “They don’t! ’Fess up, Job! What have you done to deserve this pain? We know that the righteous always prosper; only the wicked suffer.”

We do? Since when? No, it just doesn’t work that way, does it? One wonders what world Job’s friends had been living in. It certainly wasn’t the world you and I live in.

Unfortunately, Job’s friends are still around. “Turn your life over to the Lord,” they preach, “and all your troubles will be over. Life will be for you beautiful, rosy, and probably prosperous.” And then, if life is not? “What is wrong with your faith? What sin lurks in your life?”

Job’s friends.

Maybe Job’s original friends had some excuse for their folly, but their modern counterparts who can read the New Testament should know better.

They should hear the Apostle Paul telling persecuted believers, “We did not want any of you to lose heart at the troubles you were going through, but to realize that Christians must expect such things.”

They should listen to Jesus’ own words: “In this world, you will have trouble . . .”

Or they can simply look at the cross and see what the world did to the best man who ever lived.

A time of trouble is a good time to pray for stronger faith. And any time is a good time for humble self-examination.

But when trouble comes, don’t pay too much attention to Job’s friends. They were dead wrong then. And they’re almost always dead wrong now.





Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Pride Is the Bait on All Sorts of Hooks

I still remember a letter I received some years ago now. I was being invited to shell out $35 for a volume entitled, The World Book of Shelburnes.

According to the letter, “extensive work has been done throughout the world on a project relating to the distinguished Shelburne name.” This work will focus on Shelburnes “who immigrated to the New World between the 16th and early 20th centuries.”

Wow! That made me feel privileged. Absolutely unique. One of a kind. Wonder why they sent the letter bulk rate?

I read on.

“The first Shelburne we found came to Charles Town, South Carolina, in 1767. Her name was Margaret.” Hmm.

“Shelburne” is plastered all over the letter. Twenty times in one page. Coupled more than once with the adjective “distinguished.”

Makes me wonder why they wrote in bold print on the order form: No direct genealogical connection to your family or to your ancestry is implied or intended. So they could just as easily have peddled The World Book of Shelburnes to Joneses, Smiths, or McGrady’s?

I hadn’t read a full paragraph into the letter before I recognized that old “The circus is in town! Hang on to your wallet!” feeling.

Pardon me, but I’m pretty sure peddlers who pitch to our pride speak with forked tongues.

It happened in Eden, remember? The combination of a smooth-talking serpent, Adam & Eve’s abysmal lack of sales resistance, and an unvarnished appeal to sinful pride (“Eat this, and you’ll be like God!”) brought cockleburs to Paradise.

I’m happy to wear the Shelburne name. And I think I could point you to a few other wearers of the monicker who’ve done it some honor.

But I’m also quite sure a little real research would turn up a horse thief or two. And I suspect the primary finding of such research would be that Shelburnes are people just like everybody else.

You can extend that truth, if you wish. I’m very proud to be an American, a Texan, a citizen of Muleshoe, but I’m not such a mule that I’m blind to weaknesses or unaware that some other fine nations, states, and cities exist.

And, if I read my Bible correctly, there is, for those who wear the name of Christ, a great deal of room for confidence in Christ and his cross, but no room at all for arrogance regarding MY group, MY sect, MY tradition, or MY righteousness. When Christ died for us all, even the most unworthy, the Father plugged forever the last rat-hole open to human pride.

Whenever you suspect a peddler on your porch, at a political rally, in a pulpit, or using a bulk mail permit is baiting you with pride, watch out! Some unscrupulous angler is getting ready to set the hook and reel you in.







Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Mister Frisbie and the Music of God's Joy

I’m pretty sure I just participated in “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”

Several hundred of Mr. Frank Frisbie’s former students—“his kids,” as he has always called us—and many friends gathered at Amarillo’s Tascosa High School to surprise our former choir director on his 75th birthday and to say “thank you” to this dear man. We arrived early, rehearsed, ate lunch, and then once Mr. Frisbie was ushered in and got his breath back after the surprise, honored him with a concert.

Billy Talley directed us. He’s a good friend, cut from the same fine cloth as Mr. Frisbie, and has been Tascosa’s choir director now for almost three decades. The first quartet song I ever attempted to sing in public I sang with Billy Talley. Practice went fine. But at the real deal we each somehow started in a different key. Crashed and burned. The song? “No Tears in Heaven.”

Billy led us as we sang in Mr. Frisbie’s honor. Then our teacher himself directed us. I stood singing on the risers beside my brother (also one of Mr. Frisbie’s kids and now his pastor), and the years fell away. (Nothing else fell. By now Mr. Frisbie’s “kids” are mostly at the age where horseplay on the risers and a fall might not mean a trip to a nursing home but . . .). Amazing! To be standing back where I’d stood so many times so many years before, being directed again by such an influential person in my life.

In 1974-75, I was the choir president at Tascosa and spent a good bit of every day with Mr. Frisbie. As I actually had about three periods of choir each day during my senior year, most of my days were spent singing or getting ready to sing. During special times, we Freedom Singers spent more time away from school singing all around Amarillo than we did in class. It didn’t hurt us. It blessed us. And one of the best blessings was learning about life from this good man of deep faith.

On a One to Ten scale of tender hearts, Mr. Frisbie was always an Eleven. Beauty. Pain. Laughter. Love. All of the above and so much more would move this good man to tears. Maybe one of the reasons his heart has always been so good is that it has always been washed so often.

As he directed us again and we sang, “The Lord Bless You and Keep You,” I was half an inch away from washing the back row of basses off the risers with tears of my own. I would have done so unashamedly had I not so wanted to keep honoring him in song.

Mr. Frisbie has never stopped teaching. His life teaches me that life can be breathtakingly beautiful and filled with joy. His life also teaches me that sometimes life is difficult and poignantly painful. But Mr. Frisbie’s best lesson is that life is not God. Only God is God, and the God who is the Source of all goodness and love, all beauty and joy, loves “His kids” completely. He will walk with us through it all. One day we’ll lift hearts and voices together in a concert that will never end.

No tears in heaven? Well, none of the pain-filled kind. But I’m betting tears of deepest and purest joy will flow wonderfully. Mr. Frisbie has taught me that.





Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.