A Pilgrim’s Odyssey

Wild, For That Which Is Before Our Eyes

Law enforcement across the country is completely demoralized. Officers are leaving in droves and departments can’t replace them fast enough leaving them short-handed and stretched thin. Crime, especially violent crime, is up in the cities where they are leaving the fastest. At this rate, activists who want to see law enforcement neutered and defunded may get their wish sooner than later.

This exodus won’t end soon, and the results will be devastating. As this continues to develop, you might ask yourself, are you ready and able to live a little wild? Since the Civil War, our wars have been fought on foreign shores, our depressions short lived, and our riots relatively tame. But what is coming will be worse than anything we’ve seen on our home shores in sometime, and you might ask yourself, are you prepared?

I thought about this today as I spoke to law enforcement officers about suicide prevention, and after reading a post, accurate let me say, that said my family was a little wild. In a good way! We are wild and we are ready, are you?

A Hidden Life: Part 1

I want to talk about something beautiful today.

Flying to Madison, WI where I’ll be speaking, I watched the Terrence Malick film, A Hidden Life. I will have more to say about this incredible movie in future podcasts, but today I want to focus on one important beautiful thing it exposes.

A Hidden Life depicts the life of Austria’s Franz Jagerstatter, a conscientious objector who was put to death at the age of 36 by the Nazis, and later declared a martyr by the Catholic Church.

This depiction of his life shows that true beauty is found in those moments few people other than ourselves and those close to us see. A dinner table of smiles, hands working together in the dirt, early morning in an empty church, children laughing, a thrilling motorcycle ride, lovers embracing, the smell of spring, and friends and family gathering.

It is real. It is deep. Yet, if you don’t slow down and focus, maybe you miss them. Maybe you even stop having them. A Hidden Life makes you slow down and watch what matters to a man who has lived a good life. As Franz is broken down in prison all he is left with is his faith and his memory of the moments that mattered. They fill his head as he approaches the executioner’s block. When our hour approaches, what will fill our head?

If you haven’t yet, spend an evening with those you love watching A Hidden Life. Nothing I’ve ever seen on film better wakens one to what really matters in life.

Mary And Zosimas Go To The Desert

One of my favorite services of the year is almost 3 hours long and celebrates the life of St. Mary of Egypt. It reminds us of the joy of repentance, the fact that whatever we have done, however full of despair or shame we may be, God is waiting to welcome and comfort us.

There is no greater beauty than this one of an aged, naked women walking in the desert alone for over 40 years filled with the grace of God.

Fermenting The Power Of Faith

Faith born from incarceration is usually a deep one. It is a faith found in despair and down on your knees, right where God wants you.

The late Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship and before that, aide to Richard Nixon, was one such person. He was introduced to Christianity by a friend who gave him a copy of CS Lewis’s "Mere Christianity" as his arrest was imminent. As he did his time for his part in the Watergate scandal, his belief in God grew into an unshakeable faith. Cultivated in his prison cell, he spent the rest of his life spreading the word to others, inside and outside the bars.

A recent article in Salvo magazine, spoke of Colson’s belief that faith needed to be “fermented” and that the best way to spread our faith was to live it and let others see it in our lives.

The article contrasted this with what our current church culture seems to do, a sort of “carbonation” hoping that a quick shot of excitement will boost someone into a deep and lasting faith. It’s what I call the "Six Flags over Jesus" phenomenon.

A better method is perhaps that of William Wilberforce who with his contemporaries worked for decades to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. His work succeeded although he didn't live to see its success.

Live your faith deeply and patiently. Truly believe, we are not of this world when Christ lives in us.

Staying Focused In Life's Fire Storm!

Another Friday on fire – a shooting at an Indianapolis Fed Ex ground facility, a young man killed in a confrontation with Chicago Police, the Derek Chauvin/George Floyd trial winding down, more protests and violence in our cities, a vaccine pulled for potential side effects, pulling our troops out of Afghanistan (no doubt for the Taliban to soon take over).

In the midst of all of this, keeping our cool, thinking straight, making rational decisions can be hard. Staying on the track of following God and treating others as created by God even harder!

A few suggestions:

• Make time during your day to be still and pray.
• Read the Psalms.
• Force yourself to have a face-to-face conversation every day.
• Do not look at the news!
• Get outside daily with no technology and just walk.

A fire will burn until it runs out of heat, oxygen, or fuel. Don’t allow yourself to be the fuel for all the fires of our tragic days. Get out of the way, start a new path, set in motion a holy fire and give it the fuel to burn!

Where Are We Going - Home?

I just finished a Business Insider article on the impact of Covid on working at home. One takeaway, most larger companies, especially big tech companies, benefited greatly from it. Workers are more productive, they take less time off, and it saves the company money.

Before Covid the at-home work force was about 8%. The author predicts it will stabilize now at about triple that, say 22% or so, then continue to rise.

The biggest consequence of this according to the article, and not surprising given the wokeness of the Stanford based article, was that working moms would be more likely to want to work at home than men, but we couldn’t let this happen less disparities arise from the men who are more likely to go to the office and network. Their solution, we mandate equality and the amount of time worked from home. More and more control over people’s lives.

What the article didn’t address, and what is more interesting to me, is how this foreshadows where we are going as a society. Are we really going home? Or are we becoming more isolated and easier to control? Slowly, we are being turned into fuel for the Matrix, in our case, the Matrix of politicians and big business. We are their fuel, and their control over our lives is the matrix. Isolation makes us much easier to divide, conquer, and feed off of.

Overcoming The Wide Veneer Of Ignorance

We think we know a lot.  But in reality, more and more of us know a little bit about many things that usually amounts to a lot of nothing.

We are fooled into thinking massive amounts of information means massive amounts of knowledge. It seems to me, it just increases the opportunities for people with real knowledge to fool those who think they are smart.

It is better to dig deep, and know the things well that lead to a better life.

I had a conversation recently and many assumptions had been made about the person in question we were discussing, and yet, no one making those assumptions had spoken with the individual to confirm what we were talking about. It was a bunch of gibberish.

This past weekend, I spent time with my mom and we talked about her childhood where most, if not all, of their food came from the homestead. And that was normal. Gardens, canning, chickens, cattle, smoke houses, etc., imagine the amount of practical knowledge to live like that!

In the spirit of digging deeper, there might not be better advice on communicating that James 1:9: "Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger;"

Or in our data age – quick to research, slow to form an opinion, slow to judge others opinions. And don't be afraid to dig and live deeply.

Living The Beatitudes

Years ago I had the joy to stand where the Beatitudes were delivered. It was a hillside with amazing acoustics. How amazing to imagine being one of those listening to Christ that day. Then I had a jarring thought, "what if I actually followed them? Do I really try to live this way, or do I do my best to avoid living this way?"

Being Watched, Into The Divide

Traveling the last couple weeks to Nevada and Texas, the reaction of people wearing masks and not-wearing masks seemed to shadow a dystopia. Nowhere more so than in airports.

During the summer, if you’d walk around an airport without a mask you'd get looks like, “Do you want to kill someone? How rude and insincere can you be?”

Now, whether in Texas where the mask mandate was dropped, or in Nevada or North Carolina where it still exists, there is basically no reaction. You could walk by someone wearing 3 masks and they’d look at an uncovered face with no concern.

Currently, it seems, for most people who regularly wear masks, it’s done, because well, that is what you do. Not out of fear or any real concern that not doing so is going to get people killed.

Which leads to the question, what else can we be talked into? And forced to obey? This might sound alarmist until you look at things like the growth of the surveillance state.

Which leads to a Wired article I just read about our surveillance society. An unparalleled ability to monitor people and make sure they are doing what they are supposed to. Security cameras, license plate readers, smartphone trackers, drones, not to mention every move on the internet and our computers, and soon they will be coordinated into one super system of surveillance.

As we’ve been talking about the last few podcasts, this is the opposite of being a little wild as were created. This is being tended into an electronic life-stock fence. It will continue to influence our lives and behavior, and will continue to divide.

The Revenant & The Wild Inside Us

Traveling this past week was I able to watch the Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Revenant for the first time. The story of frontiersman surviving a bear attack to exact revenge on the man who murders his son, it is truly epic. It is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. While obviously Hollywoodized, it is based on the true story of Hugh Glass.

I couldn’t help but think about a podcast I did a few weeks ago on Henry David Thoreau’s essay “The Wild”. At the core of our nature, we are wild.

As Glass struggles to heal and survive abandoned in the wilderness after the bear attack, the screen jumps with life. Crawling through the dirt, escaping to snow caves, eating raw meat, fighting the French, the English, and Indians, he body surfs rapids and ultimately triumphs in a fierce and brutal showdown with his enemy. The entire time, life bursts from the action. Life, in its rawest sense.

Then I left that world of brutal truth as we arrived at the airport, and I was bombarded with the sniveling gossip and woke news of modern media and TV. If we ever descend into the wilderness for even a short term, watching the fragile egos of modern society will be quite a sight. And no doubt, savage, as the selfish consumers of matrix technology turn on themselves and others.

This past weekend, after the crew who filmed my wife and I’s interview on our love story were finished, they commented, "All your kids seem so happy. We’ve never seen that before." I credit wildness! As hard as it may be, and as much as it seems like wrestling against forces of nature at times, we’ve allowed them to explore, to wander, to dream, to learn from falls and scrapes, to see the truth in trees, and streams, and creation.

Don’t be afraid to be a little dangerous, maybe a bit reckless. Definitely get dirty. Enter the forest with nothing and feel what it is like to survive. You may never feel more alive.