Just Thinking About "Time in a Bottle"

“What is a grain of wheat?” Paul Tournier asks. “It contains a whole plant you cannot yet see. What is a silkworm? You cannot define it without seeing in advance all its metamorphosis. What is a child? You cannot describe him without thinking of the whole life of the man, with all its unknowns, for which he is preparing.”

As I first read those words years ago, I sat at my desk and examined the little Christmas present I had just received from my mother. It was a simple little thing—a small bottle with a glass stopper. Inside were ten or fifteen marbles. She’d tied a thin baby blue ribbon around the little bottle.

Once it was a vitamin bottle, but now it was becoming a very special paperweight. I remembered the marbles, every one. They were mine, or at least they had been.

The bottle? The bottle once sat on the small table by my aged maternal grandparents’ bed in the old house at Robert Lee, Texas. It had held just enough water to use to take a pill or to wet a dry throat.

Dr. Tournier writes of the metamorphosis, the transformation, we see when caterpillars are changed into butterflies and blonde-headed little boys into graying grandfathers. That little bottle is for me an appropriate symbol of the process. Nestled inside the glass bottle of the aged are the glass trinkets of childhood. Thus encapsulated by a marble-filled bottle is the whole spectrum of life from spring to winter, from youth to old age.

No one is immune to the metamorphosis wrought by time. With each tick of the clock every one of us is being transformed. Tournier is right. We see a small child and wonder what the adult will be like. We wonder about the many unknowns life holds for graduates walking across the stage. We each, no matter what our age, remember what we ourselves have been and ponder what we may yet become. The present flits into the past on the wings of a hyperactive hummingbird, and we are powerless to slow it down or grasp it into stillness. The future races to meet us with blinding speed, oppressed with such a low opinion of itself that it can’t wait to change its name to “The Past.”

But Christians needn’t be frightened of the frenetic future or paralyzed by the echoes of the past. We are all being changed, but God’s children know that the transformation can be filled with joy and hope. Our Creator promises to lovingly fill our lives with His life, continually re-creating us by Resurrection power, changing us “into Christ’s likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18).





Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Freedom Is a Costly and Precious Gift

I am writing this column on a beautiful and calm morning. It’s a holiday, and I’m planning to be seriously involved in doing almost nothing serious today.

I’ve watered the fresh concrete in my driveway, trying to help it cure slowly and hoping to get it to grow. So far, that’s worked.

I’m sitting on the back patio, life-giving coffee and a deadly pellet gun on the table by my side. The coffee? Well, everyone knows it’s foolish to try to write without coffee. And the pellet gun? Well, grackles occasionally show up to try to eat my dog food and chase off civilized birds. I’ve heard some of those nasty grackle-birds are endangered. I doubt it, but with all of my heart, I hope so. They’ll be more endangered if my aim is good today.

Today is Memorial Day. It’s a special day when we especially remember the sacrifice of those who have risked, and many lost, their lives and liberty to keep us free. To remember means to think.

Being still and enjoying time like this is something we should do more of. Thinking tends to happen on the rare occasions when we stop “doing” long enough to think about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

As I was thinking some this morning about those who have given life and liberty to safeguard the life and liberty which are God’s gifts to us, I thought of a short radio speech given almost 90 years ago in England.

Winston Churchill was talking about “The Causes of War.” He said that many people are convinced that the best way to avoid war is to “dwell upon its horrors,” to spend a lot of time talking about and focusing visually and rhetorically on the horrible cost of war in bloodshed and suffering. Yes, he said, such focus may indeed have genuine value in keeping civilized people from invading and subjugating other nations.

But it is very little help at all when rogue nations with power hungry and blood-thirsty leaders attack others. As we now know, to endlessly negotiate with a Hitler is as effective on the world scene as giving moving speeches on the playground to the school bully. Bullies like to talk. It gives them more time to brutalize the weak, and is very encouraging to them as it proves beyond any doubt the weakness of the speaker.

Oh, yes, Churchill allowed, it’s a fine thing to remind ourselves never to attack and pillage other peace-loving nations and to negotiate solutions to reasonable differences with other civilized nations.

But how do you effectively deal with nations who laugh at the idea of freedom and whose brutal and truly evil leaders gobble up and enslave nation after nation? Very differently.

Freedom is God’s gift to us, and it is precious. Thank God for all those, and their families, who have paid a very real price so that we can live in a land with mornings like this one.







Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

It's No Secret: I Love the Church!

I love the church! Not just (just?) the church universal, that marvelous and miraculous Body of Christ composed of all God’s children, everyone who ever has or ever will wear Christ’s name, all the sons and daughters of God . . . Oh, I love “that” church, too.

But I also love the local expressions of that Body, the little bands of disciples—all of them small indeed compared to the grand Body from which they spring—working in a million places to glorify God and share Christ’s love. I love the church.

Oh, I know, loving the church is not always in style. Lots of “Baby Boomers” like me, sentenced to too much time in the 60s and 70s, find it hard to trust any institution. (And it IS unwise to completely trust the human side of even a divine institution.) Some folks, also like me, grew up in “separatist” traditions or groups who tended to talk more about “the church” than they did about the Lord of the church.

For lots of reasons, it’s easy to lose respect for the church as seen in her all-too-human local expressions. Some lose respect for the church in general because many churches are small, and our culture only respects “large.” Some folks point to little churches that seem short-sighted and poorly “run.” And some are. Some lose respect because some large churches seem so plastic and choreographed that they feel fake. Yes, and some are, and could put on a fine show without God at all.

And we all know that when bad things happen in the church, the spectacle is particularly unseemly. When a church gets caught up in power struggles all dressed up as pious piffle, or divides and walls itself off from the rest of the Body over molehills of supposed “doctrine” masquerading as mountains . . . When “issues” prance around like the old naked emperor with no clothes, most sensible folks (in the church or outside it) see how bad that looks. It’s like a hairy wart on Miss America’s nose or, sadder still, a cow patty dropped on top of a luscious cheesecake. It’s all the more ugly because we know how beautiful it can and should be.

But I still love the church. I’ve seen her beauty. I’ve felt the warmth of her embrace and seen the depth of her love, and the very best blessings of my life have been gifts from the Lord given through her hands.

I love the church, and I love the little church I’m a part of, and I hope you love yours. Through our doors and into our “family” have come F-16 pilots and janitors, 4-pound newborns and 103-year-old little ladies, teachers and farmers and brand new parents and brand new great-grandparents and . . . Well, an amazingly diverse group of folks!

Each Sunday young families do the hard work of rounding up and dressing up the precious little rug-rats and heading through these doors. Much older folks navigate via walker and wheelchair to these pews. Folks in every stage of life between infancy and antiquity come in to honor their Lord, to be a blessing and to receive a blessing.

And yet again I am amazed at what the Lord of the church does in the lives of his people.

I love the church!





Copyright 2012 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 People Are "More Than Conquerors"

When St. Paul stakes with words God’s claim of sovereignty over the circumstances of our lives and proclaims the Almighty’s promise of ever-present and never-failing love, the great apostle does so with his eyes wide open.

“What can separate us from the love of Christ?” he asks, and when he lists among the weapons of the enemy, “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword,” his list is much more than hypothetical. These are the words of a man who has opened his eyes on many mornings and seen these very darts of Satan aimed ominously in his direction.

Long before Peter Jackson’s breathtaking motion picture trilogy captivated the hearts of theatre audiences, The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien was my all-time favorite book. (Tolkien thought of it as one but the publisher thought one massive volume would be massively daunting to readers, and it became three books). I’d far rather spend one day in a hobbit hole with Frodo Baggins than a week in a mansion with any king or president or head of state I can think of.

Some of my favorite lines in the first of the trilogy’s books, The Fellowship of the Ring, are these as the faithful dwarf Gimli comments to the king of the elves: “Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” And Elrond the king answers, “Maybe, but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.”

The Apostle Paul had seen the nightfall. He’d seen trouble, hardship, persecution, and all the rest. He’d been on the receiving end of the very worst of Satan’s weapons. And that makes his resounding affirmation of faith all the more impressive and trustworthy. No empty words, his.

Paul had indeed seen the nightfall, but still he writes with utter confidence, not in his own strength but in the strength of his King: “No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God!

God’s people are more than conquerors even in the midst of tragedy when tears seem to be more constant than any other companion. God wraps us up in a Father’s embrace in the midst of our tears, and the Almighty cries with us. Remember Jesus’ tears before the tomb of Lazarus?

God’s people are more than conquerors even as they are lying flat on their backs wracked with the pain of physical disease because they know that through Christ all pain and suffering will one day be forever banished and, even now, the disease that can kill our bodies can never kill souls filled with God’s genuine life, and one day death itself will forever die.

God’s people are more than conquerors, and nothing in all of creation or beyond can take away the victory that is ours in Christ Jesus.







Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

This Fallen World Is Out of Kilter, But One Day . . .

“The Online Etymology Dictionary.”

That’s the name of a website I discovered recently. No, it’s not a site devoted to knowledge about bugs. That’s “entomology.” Etymology is indeed a “-logy” so it’s “the science of” something. But not creepy-crawlies. Etymology is the science of word derivations. The site’s owners describe it as “a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English.” Nicely put.

I’m glad somebody created such a site. I’m imagining them as a group of under-appreciated, underpaid, societally under-valued, mildly depressive but devoted English majors who are also afflicted with the kind of itch history helps scratch.

Even for a society on technological steroids, it’s probably good to keep around a few of the old fossils just described. Math and science folks help us know how to go really fast and do cool stuff. Humanities folks help answer pesky questions about which direction we’re going and what cool stuff is worth doing (and where there’ve been wrecks we maybe should avoid).

I feel better just knowing that the Online Etymology Dictionary is available and doing good work for humanity. It’d be a shame for some fine old English words and phrases to be lost or orphaned and nobody know from whence they came. Sometimes a phrase comes along and just begs you to try to meet its parents by following the wheel ruts back up the road a bit. I was grabbed by just such a phrase recently, and that’s when I discovered this site.

If something is “out of working order or alignment,” “out of order,” “not in good condition,” we might say, “It’s out of whack.” But we’re just as likely to say, “It’s out of kilter.” We know what that means. But why does it mean what it means? What, pray tell, is the “kilter” something might be “out of”?

My money was on “kilter” being an old nautical term. I like old nautical terms. But no. Or maybe a surveyor’s or navigator’s term. Nope.

I learned that the phrase first shows up in the 1620’s. “Kilter” is a variant of the English “kelter” which pops up around 1600 and means “good condition, order.”

 But why does it mean that? The word was sired somewhere! You never met a word without some verbal ancestors. Alas, this one is short on birth records. That’s too bad, because it’s a cool word and part of a great phrase. It’s a shame Al Gore wasn’t around to invent the Internet a few hundred years earlier. Maybe if the Online Etymology Dictionary had been around a good bit longer, a good phrase wouldn’t be so sadly orphaned and, just maybe, the world would be a little less “out of kilter.”

 I hope you’re not feeling “out of kilter.” Yes, we live in an “out of kilter” world. But we can thank our Father for the gift he gave to be sure that one day, pure joy and complete goodness and order will reign, and nothing and nobody will ever again be out of . . .

Well, you know.

Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

No One Erects Statues to Honor Critics

In an old issue of Leadership Journal, Haddon Robinson retells the story of a very talented young musician who was crestfallen as he sat reading the critics’ reviews of his recent concert. The negative words stung his soul like fire. It was an older and more accomplished musician, the famous Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, who comforted the young man by patting him on the back and remarking, “Remember, son, there is no city in the world where they have erected a statue to a critic.”

Maybe that’s at least partly what Jesus was saying with his well-known words from what we know as the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:1-3).

J. B. Phillips, in his paraphrase, just puts it this way: “Don’t criticize people, and you will not be criticized.”

That’s hard, isn’t it? But it says something we need to hear.

We’re all familiar with Jesus’ words, but we easily push them to the backs of our minds when we take up the role of critic. We allow ourselves to become the self-appointed judges of our neighbor next door or our co-worker on the job or the lady sitting on the other side of the pew. Criticism, you see, is the most common form of judging.

But Jesus makes fun of judges like us: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and fail to notice the 2 X 4 plank in your own?”

It’s one thing to offer kindly advice to someone we’re charged to teach or train (and someone who has also regularly received our genuine encouragement and affirmation): “I really appreciate the work that you do. Have you ever thought about how this particular part of your work could be more effective?”

It’s another to spend all of our time looking down our noses at others and appraising them with jaundiced eyes, quick to offer criticism, spoken aloud or not, but “donating” encouragement about as often as we donate kidneys.

The eye, Jesus says, is “the window of the body.” If I’m looking at the world through dark glasses, I shouldn’t be surprised if the whole world takes on a dark hue. It’s altogether too easy for me to become the self-appointed judge of everyone and everything around me. I sit up in the reviewing stand watching the world go by and writing down the marks I award to each person who parades by for my inspection. Without the benefit of a court or Presidential appointment, and certainly no divine mandate, I ascend to the cardboard bench of my own making and judge while the world goes by.

For most of us, judging ourselves should be task enough.



Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Real Joy Is Found in the Presence of Heaven's Prince

I guess I need to see an Eye, Ears, Nose & Throat specialist. Or maybe a neurologist. I keep getting things stuck in my head.

I got a frog stuck in my throat at the end of a recent sermon. (Better for it to hop in at the end than the beginning.) Allergies, I think. Exacerbated by the fact that it never rains here anymore.

I often get songs stuck up there. Sometimes they’re really good ones. But the more pernicious the song, the longer it seems to stay stuck in my cranium. Stuff like “Achy Breaky Heart” pops in unbidden. Or the theme song of hell: “I Did It My Way.” (Great. Now it’s back.)

Sometimes literary quotations get stuck up there, too. Maybe I read the book this week. Or maybe three decades ago. But a quotation jumps into my brain and starts bumping around.

The way to replace songs lodged in my head is to listen to some music I love and replace the stuck stuff. And the way to get the quotation dislodged is to write about it and/or get busy reading something else.

This morning the dismal words of poet Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) in his “Hymn to Proserpine” began replaying in my head, and I will now proceed to remove them.

In the poem Swinburne ruminates on what a “philosophic” pagan might have felt as Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire (declared so by the Emperor Constantine in 313). Constantine’s nephew, Emperor Julian the Apostate, died in 363, the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire. Julian had wanted to take the Empire back to the “good ol’ days” when paganism ruled unbridled and being a Roman was fun (my phrasing). The death-bed “last words” attributed to Julian (probably falsely) were, “You have conquered, Galilean.”

Thus Swinburne writes, “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.”

That view could hardly be more mistaken, but I think I understand why some adopt it. Real “holiness” is never loud. Real piety has no need to be pretentious or “self-conscious” at all. Spend much time with folks more sanctimonious than sanctified, whose “holiness” could well be described as condescending, tiresome, persnickety, frenetic, manipulative, boring, burdensome, unsmiling, self-righteous . . . and you can count on your world quickly going grey as all the life is chased away. (God help us not to be those folks!)

But spend time getting to really know the Galilean, and you’ll find eye-popping color, the richest laughter, the deepest joy even in the midst of sorrow, and a genuine breadth and quality of wide-awake life that will dwarf your best dreams of what real life could ever be.

Maybe Emperor Julian longed for the good ol’ days when Bacchus, the god of revelry, and his ilk held sway. But the real joy found in the presence of Heaven’s true Prince is enough to make Bacchus blush and go pale forever.








Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.