God Uses Both Mars and Venus To Make Earth Work

If I ever actually had any doubt (and I didn’t) that, to borrow from the wise guy’s book title, men really are from Mars and women are from Venus, one evening’s dinner drama would have put that doubt to rest yet again.

There was no fuss. My wife and I really don’t fuss much. Well, to be completely accurate, we don’t fuss much REALLY. We fuss all the time good-naturedly, but that’s fun.

Anyway, we’d wasted an hour or so trying to decide what we wanted for dinner. Neither of us was too excited about what was available in the house. We finally decided on the American Heart Association’s old standby, cheese nachos. (Oh, yes, nachos are a heart-healthy food, you see, because of the jalapeños.) By that time, I was really getting hungry and was having visions of nachos resting under the oven broiler, cheese bubbling, jalapeños nicely wrinkling, and tostados sizzling to a dark brown just around the edges. Slap on a little sour cream, if you wish, and . . .

Rats! No jalapeños. How did we run out of that staple item? None in the house.

Back to Square One.

That’s when we decided on pizza. We whipped out the pizza coupons. We ordered. We wrote the check. I was halfway out the door . . .

That’s when my dear wife called out sweetly, “Do you want me to go with you?”

I know now how, Martian that I am, I should have answered this dear Venusian immigrant.

“Why, yes, O love of my life and exalted mother of my children! Yes! Come with me to the Palace of Pizza Delight, O dearest one.”

What I really said, in a hurried tone of surprise and bewilderment, was, “Huh? Well, yeah, okay, if ya want to, but hurry up! I’m starvin’!”

Gentlemen, fellow Martians, if you notice your wife’s lower lip stuck out just a tad after hearing such a reply, you should realize that people of the female persuasion, people from Venus, use this as a non-verbal expression of hurt and displeasure.

Well, she did go with me, and we even had a little time to talk about life and our feelings on the way to and fro. But what this illustrates, yet again, is a fundamental difference between the sexes.

For men, fulfillment comes in reaching a goal. Want pizza? I’ll get it! My plan is to do whatever it takes to focus only on that moment when I’m wrapping my gums around the object of my hunt and greasing my capillaries with juice from Italian sausage!

For women, fulfillment comes through the journey. Want pizza? Well, yes, we’ll enjoy eating it, but just as important as the acquisition is how we get it. “Hey, honey, let’s go together!”

Mark it down, Martians. These principles apply to EVERY area of your marriage. God made us this way, and, thank the Lord, it takes the combined perspective of both Martians and Venusians to make things on Earth work well.






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.

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.

Bigger Is Most Certainly NOT Always Better

Of the multitude of really foolish ideas our society naively buys as unquestionably true, one of its most foolish, fiercely held, and utterly false beliefs is this: bigger is always better.

In 1927 British essayist and author G. K. Chesterton, in a book entitled The Outline of Sanity, wrote about what he called “The Bluff of the Big Shops.”

Chesterton wrote more than 35 years before Walmarts and such would begin metastasizing all over America and beyond, but already in England he was seeing little shops being gobbled up by big, and thus supposedly better, shops. He wrote an essay basically asserting that big stores are rarely ever better than small stores and that a society that allows its little shops to be gobbled up by big ones ends up far poorer for its folly. An honest (big) newspaper editor told him they couldn’t print it without alienating big advertisers (“big shops”). So Chesterton simply included his thoughts in a book instead of a newspaper.

He wrote that “a big shop is a bad shop” and “not only vulgar and insolent, but incompetent and uncomfortable.” He opined that “shopping there is not only a bad action but a bad bargain.” If you care about the quality of the product and the quality of the service, bigger is almost never better.

To use Chesterton’s illustration, it’s not true that having a hundred people trimming hats or tying bouquets means that you’ll end up with many more quality products and many more happy customers. The best work will always be done by “a particular craftsman for a particular customer with particular ribbons and flowers.” (Imagine that!)

If you have a blunder in a small shop the “individual customer can curse the individual shopkeeper.” Or, if he’s a nicer sort—forget the cursing—he has an opportunity to talk to a shopkeeper he knows and who cares about his business, rather than a person who is a cog in an impersonal machine.

Oh, but it’s so convenient that all those products are there in the same place. Really? In Chesterton’s England shopping in big shops simply meant that you walked indoors a long way in one shop rather than outdoors the same distance to smaller ones.

The largeness of the big shops is mainly convenient to big shop owners who are able to gobble up “better businesses and advertise worse goods.” Chesterton was quite aware that in this world big fish eat little fish, but he doubted that little fish have to “swim up to big fish and ask to be eaten.” Surely people who recognize the importance and value of little stores would do well to “vote” with their feet and their pocketbooks while some small stores with large quality (and owners and customers with real relationships) were still un-gobbled and available. Little did he know how few “little fish” would remain undigested.

Well, I’m out of space. So we’ll just let this week’s “Focus on Faith” focus instead on modern marketing. Don’t be blaming me for any comparisons or contrasts you might be tempted to draw between mega-marts and, say, some mega-churches.






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.

Genuine Holiness Is God's Light, Not Mankind's

A “rustler’s moon.” That’s what cowboys used to call a quarter moon. It was bright enough that a rustler could see to carry out his cattle filching, but it was not so bright as to spotlight his thievery.

But here’s a fact likely lost on all but your most astronomically-gifted cattle rustlers: be it quarter moon, half moon, 13/16 moon, or blue moon, not a single photon of the “light of the silvery moon” is its own; every ray is actually the light of the blazing sun.

I think a valuable lesson lurks in the moonlight. Christ has called his disciples to be light in a dark world, but not a spark of it is ours; it is all reflected from the Son. If it is his, what business do we have being haughty about shining?

Some of the prevalent ideas about holiness are not all that shiny. The biggest mistake is humanity’s favorite folly: we focus on us and not on God. We like to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps,” light our own sparklers. We stand before his much-more-than-nuclear “consuming fire” proud as Punch of the firefly “holiness” we’ve caught in our own little paper bag.

Focusing on ourselves, we tend to be more sanctimonious than sanctified, sewing scarlet letters on sinners while harboring far worse sins in our own souls.

Focusing on ourselves, we focus on externals. Remember Jesus making fun of scrupulous Pharisees washing the outside of their dishes but leaving last week’s dinner to mold inside?

Real holiness is not focused on self at all. It is not sterile, not colorless, not short on blood and long on hypocrisy. It is most certainly not joyless. It overflows with the very life and joy of God.

Genuine holiness is not all about being knotted up by the “nots”: “touch not, taste not, handle not” (Colossians 2). When I make holiness something about my light rather than God’s, one more tribute to my hard work, willpower, and fine character, just one more sticky note stuck on the mirror—“Be holy” right alongside “Don’t forget to floss”—I create a sad caricature of the real thing.

Instead of becoming more like God, I become a pretentiously pious, persnickety, pain in the tail section, “evaluating” everyone else’s holiness by the twisted knots in my own self-focused tale rather than living joyfully into the wonderful story of the God whose light I was created to reflect.

I’ve long quoted the Apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 2, reminding us that salvation is the gift of God, by grace through faith, “so that no one can boast.” I’m to live as a person who is both saved and being saved. Why? Because I’m God’s, and God is at work in me.

What I’d not so much noticed were the same apostle’s words at the end of First Corinthians 1, reminding us that God’s gifts to us through Christ are righteousness, redemption, and . . . holiness. And then he admonishes, “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.” I’m to live as a person who is both holy and being made holy. Why? Because I’m God’s, and God is at work in me.

Real holiness is not centered on me; it is centered on Whose I am. Any light in my life is God’s, not mine.







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.