Homeless Dave

The company that owned the three-story building that became our church forsook it for a mere $25,000.  It snuggles in a rundown section of our city a half-dozen blocks from the local mission to the homeless.  For years, boards covered the windows in its upper stories.  It comes as no surprise then when a homeless man or woman veers into our building as we gather for worship on Sunday mornings or evenings or Wednesday nights.

Dave first walked in during a Wednesday night a year and a half ago.  Appearance and odor announced his position on society's ladder.  Do you indict me for my superficiality?  You would be right to do so.  God indicts me.  "My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory...but if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors"  (James 2:1, 9).

I've learned this lesson before.  One morning eighteen years ago, as I served as an elder in my church in Utah, I noticed out the window a couple walking up the walk to our door.  "Oh, my," though I.  He stood a towering six foot four with hair that would have made Gene Simmons proud and and topped with a Berkley beret.  She perked along beside him on pink stilettos, a Barbie-doll wife coifed with tumbling gold locks and bedecked with size-4 clothes that matched her petite frame.  Immediately God skewered my heart for my godless assessment of exteriors.  I met them at the door and welcomed them to our fellowship.  The giant, Robyn, and his bride, Dena, became some of our closest friends during our time along the Wasatch Front.

Back to Dave.  Arriving after our service had commenced, he took a seat near the back of the room where he fidgeted about and never seemed to focus on the pastor's points.  On Wednesday nights, we have a small break between our formal service and when we reconvene to pray about issues affecting us.  During that break Dave expressed a need for a few dollars to get something to eat and to purchase a bus pass so that he could start looking for work.  The pastor, not wanting to abet a drug or alcohol habit, asked to keep his wallet while Dave went and got his food and his pass and then returned, and our pastor told him he would be happy to take him wherever he needed to go after the service if he would be willing to stay during our time of prayer.  Dave said he needed to be on his way and left.

To this day, the pastor still has his wallet.

Two other times, though, over the past eighteen months, Dave came back to our church.  He reran his story like a Disneyland automaton.  One time I offered to take him to get his pass or some food and he became angry that I wouldn't trust him by just giving him money.  He left.

Two Wednedays ago, Dave returned again.  He walked into Wednesday night's service, sat down for five minutes, restless the entire time, and left.  He didn't even wait for the break or to talk to anyone.

The following Monday I was by myself down at the church sweeping out a room we were renovating.  I had the door open to the street, enjoying the cool breeze of the fall day.  In walked Dave, and out came the same tattered story.  He asked if he could help me for the nine dollars he needed for the bus pass to get to his job at Whataburger.  While the story remained a ruse, his willingness to labor instead of just shilling for a few dollars encouraged my soul.  I enlisted his help.

When it came time to pay him and not wanting him to squander his keep on alcohol or drugs, I offered to take him to get the bus pass.  "I see where this is going," he huffed.  Realizing I would not pay him unless I could take him, he relented and got into my car.  As we drove to where bus passes are sold, he again became frustrated that I wouldn't just give him the money and asked to be dropped off near some apartments.  Dave did not want a bus pass.  Nor did he want food; he told me he had food at home.  Here I wanted to help a man who wanted no help.

What did Dave want, I do not know, but as I got the few dollars out of my wallet that he had earned, he crystalized in my mind a distinction among America's homeless, a distinction our PC culture refuses to address.  Dave, like so many others, seeks to leech off of the productive belly of America.  Dave has no desire to find a real job with 9-to-5 responsibilities.  He feeds at the mission and mooches a few dollars more here and there for -- what?  Porn?  Drugs?  Maddog?  Weed? 

We used to call such folks vagrants and vagabonds, tramps and hobos.  Such a lifestyle was seen as a blight to a town, and such parasites were driven out of town.  News exposes have shown that many of the guys on street corners are running a business, a business taking your money.  Today we embrace these folks as "homeless."  We pretend they have no choice.  We flagellate ourselves and lament, "Our society has done this to these poor souls!"  What a sham.  Let us call bums "bums."

Before you stone me as a granited-hearted Scrooge, I do understand that there are folks who have tragically lost everything they have and that passionately want to work hard to again become part of the commonwealth of man.  I do believe there are folks who long to be part of a family but through mental deficiency or physical malady have been cast off.  We, individually (not through government mandate), have a responsibility to those who have suffered loss or have been ostracized.  They can be productive members of society or vital members of a family. 

But those are not the folks of which I speak.  Dave and his ilk have no desire for either.  Paul commanded the church at Thessalonica, a church dealing with vagrancy, "If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat."   When we give such leeches free bread, we foster their vagabondage, we abet their sloth.

My heart aches for Dave.  What makes him different from me?  Why do I choose to labor and he to panhandle?  Regardless, he has a choice, and he has chosen his path just as I have a choice each day to trod the path I have chosen.  For me to encourage him in his lifestyle would be as sinful as looking down my nose in prejudice for his filthy clothing or foul smell.  I must deal with my prejudicial sin before a holy God (and it is a stench in His nostrils), but I cannot condone Dave's sin as I repent my own.

As he got out of my car, I asked Dave not to come back to our church unless he wanted our help to become a productive part of our city or unless he wanted to get his life straigtened out before God.  If he wanted to travel a new path, there would be a dozen families willing to come along side and help him to that end.  I would like to hope I would be near the front of the line.

Until then, there would be no more bus passes for Dave.

Global warming: Indicting God

Not a week goes by that I don't see on Drudge some world leader or Al Gore clone suggesting that if we don't do something about global warming by tomorrow lunch, we can expect the earth will look like burnt toast by dinner.

What I find particularly disconcerting is when our own government officials go batty and legislate some ridiculous restrictions upon manufacturing or big screen TVs (yes, in--you guessed it--California). Now more boa constricting daffiness from Sens. Barbie Boxer and John Kerry in the form of greenhouse legislation (read about it here).

Here's something to consider, though, especially among those of us who call ourselves Christian (which, believe it or not, comprises most of the Senate):

“While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Winter and summer,
And day and night
Shall not cease.”

That's God's promise (Genesis 8:22). Did you catch what He said? As long as the earth is, there will be planting and reaping. It's going to be cold and it's going to be hot. We will have winter (snowing lots in October this year...October!) and we will have summer. These will not end. This cycle will not stop. His promise.

So if the emissions of my two suburbans would thwart that, if everyone in California having a wall-sized big screen TV would counter that, or if felling the entirety of the rain forest would terminate winter anywhere on the planet, then God knows not of which He speaks.

So there's the dilemma: Do we put our lives in the hands Al Gore's science and Kerry's and Boxer's legislation, or do take the God, the God we say we believe and trust, at His word?

Yawn

I've said it before. If you're going to sink your money into a news periodical, invest it in WORLD MAGAZINE (on-line here). It's a good source for news both current and investigative. And the best part, they make no excuses for their bias. Their mission statement (in every issue) is:

"To report, interpret, and illustrate the news in a timely, accurate,
enjoyable, and arresting fashion from a perspective committed to the Bible as
the inerrant Word of God." (You can find more detail here.)

That's the problem with Time, Newsweek, and most the major papers. You keep pleading to the people that you are unbiased while sporting your Obama tattoos and NARAL bumper stickers. Unlike the box of chocolates, with WORLD, you can be pretty sure what you're going to get.

Anyway, to plug WORLD today is not why I write. In the current issue, Joel Belz, WORLD's founder and former publisher, writes about one of his semi-annual straw polls. He takes a pen and pad and toddles to the local Wal-Mart to ask the man on the street some current events questions about a particular issue of the day. His question that day asked whether the respondants would be in favor of or opposed to their state giving married status to homosexual partners. The follow-up asked on what they based their position.

While knowing that the answers he got were not scientific in the least, the answer to the third question he posed to those in favor of homosexual marriage, and really the reason for his asking the other two, left him to suggest "we might all prepare for the thunderous collapse of our society." What was the question?

"Why, based on your justification of homosexual marriage, should (your state)
not also endorse polygamy -- or even the marriage of a man and his very lovable
dog?"

Can you guess the responses? They hadn't really thought about it. When pressed a bit further, Belz came to the conclusion, "It's clear that not a single of the (respondants) had ever once pondered such a matter. But much worse, they didn't care, and nothing I could say even fascinated them with the argument."

Ouch. Much of what is on the table today requires not only rigorous thought but rigorous debate. To have the latter, you must have gone through the former. Consider these:

• How is it we consider a judicial nominee for the Supreme Court when she has suggested that empathy for certain people groups is necessary when administering the rule of law?



• George Tiller is murdered. His murder is barbaric. Why is the media silent about the blood on the man's hand? Would the response be the same if Ahmadinejahd were assassinated by radicals?



• North Korea and Iran, nations who loathe the United States, are on the threshold of deliverable nuclear weapons. What do we do?



• Israel and Palestine. Who do we support?



• Bailout, bailout, bailout. Is this right? What are the consequences of what has been enacted.

Belz asked questions about homosexual unions, but the same can be said about any topic. We have failed to think about issues and have not used moral lenses to examine them. We have failed to do this because we do not care. He concludes:

"The direction of our vapid thoughtlessness is clear; only the speed of its
takeover seems now in question."

Looking back over the last dozen years, I don't think there's any question about the speed. Alas.

Earth Day/Hour vs. stewardship

An actual nighttime satellite image of the Korean peninsula...read the fine print.

Leave your lights on, and give the glory to God.

Green

The color of the Grinch.

The color of envy.

In traffic, 'tis the color that makes my heart sing. I'd rather not see red.

The color of money.

The color of the grass and the trees.

Ah, 'tis the color of my bride's mesmerizing eyes.

The Packer's jerseys.

The uniforms of the team formerly known as the North Stars.

Mmmm, cilantro, that wonderful herb found in TexMex cooking.

Green. All green.

Really, I've had no beef with green. The co-opting of a rather fine color by the likes of Greenpeace caused my no lost sleep. The fact that it's the color of Islam never bothered me too awful much, either.

Green now sends chills down my spine like some surreal and demonic nightmare. The enviro-apocalyptics have demanded that the planet's population bow to their "sky-is-falling" scree and the color to trumpet their caustic cause -- green.

I tolerated "The Day After Tomorrow." Enjoyable escapism if you ignore the propaganda. Now every movie where the earth future is at stake, dollars to donuts you can rest the blame squarely on the shoulders on the industrial world (read: America). Note Shyamalan's bomb "The Happening" and the current remake of the cult-classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

I've simply ignored Oregon and Vermont and pretty much anyone wearing Birkenstocks. But when Anderson Cooper pronounces "The Planet in Peril" and that I MUST alter my lifestyle to prevent California from sliding into the Pacific, I draw the line. CNN called attention to its conviction that man has the power to adjust the earth's thermostat by transforming their red logo enviro-friendly green. "We care!" they declare.

When that happened, I wasn't surprised. I would change the channel but that would presume I watched CNN (okay, sometimes a perverse, rubber-necking curiousity gets the better of me and I'll tune in...but I quickly repent). I just about spewed my spleen when I saw that Fox News had buckled to the enviro-pressure.

God called us to steward and manage HIS creation. That's plain. It's interesting to see how God created within the planet a "healing" mechanism similar to man's immune system. A volcano belches and cloud, wind, and rain sweep the pollutants away. Like the area around Mount St. Helen's, flora and fauna teem like nothing happened. How arrogant to think that we can break God's earth.

It tickled my ribs when recently a chief meteorologist at the Weather Channel declared man-made global warming and enviro-insanity to be an utter fabrication. The earth is merely working through a temperature swing the likes of which it has swung through for millenia.

Green logos will continue to get my goat. I have little green remaining in my IRAs to bring me pleasure. Guess I'll turn to the green of the Grinch and of our Christmas tree. 'Tis the season, afterall.

Braking the global warming bandwagon

You cannot obtain objective clarity about the outside world staring through a snow-frosted windshield. As much as the passenger next to you might think he can explain what's going on outside your Neon, he sees only as well as you do. Guessing helps not at all.

Two things might assist. You could get a call from someone outside who has a clear view of what's going on. Or you could turn on the defrost and melt the frost (I guess you could get out and scrape the windshield, too, but that would ruin my analogy).

With regard to global warming, the only one external to this big blue marble upon which we're riding is God Almighty. He has told us plainly to steward the earth. He destroyed it once before by flood but promised never to do that again (by flood, anyway). Nothing within prophecy seems to indicate the demise of the earth either by man's hand or God's. From my chair, it seems man's stewardship of the earth, for the most part, is pretty good.

For those of us within the car (living within the car), it's tough to say. Ice cores from the poles have so many presuppositions that if any one of them is not right, the resulting conclusions could be 180-out. What was the temperature in Minsk like from 2000 BC to 1500 BC? Ummm...

The consensus regarding global warming is that there is no consensus. Many would have us believe that no educated person could possibly deny that we are destroying the planet, but that is simply not the case. So what's a sane person to do? Turn on the defrost.

The best that we can do, since we're not likely to determine whether global warming or global cooling is in our future, is to ask smart questions about the premises, presuppositions and conclusions about those who are certain about what's happening outside the car.

Regis Nicoll analyzed the PP&C of those pushing us to adopt the Kyoto Accords, extreme environmental government impositions to somehow reduce the heating affect upon the planet. In his article (linked here), he asked six great questions that stewards like you and me can ask about the soothsayers who see environmental catastrophe over our horizon. Here they are:

1. Is the earth warming?
2. Is warming an overall bad thing?
3. Is human activity the primary cause?
4. Would forced standards sufficiently reduce global temperatures?
5. Would they be cost-effective?
6. Would forced standards not create more—or more severe—problems than they solve?

He handles his questions in greater depth in the article. What such questions expose is that the fellow sitting next to you can't see out the window any better than you can. Perhaps the questions might defrost the issue a bit and help us all see things a bit more clearly.

Photos:
Frost from www.wunderground.com
Sun from NASA.gov