“For the Altitude We Have Received, We Thank Thee”

I am writing this column a bit early this week—mostly as a defensive measure. As long as I’m writing, I’m under air conditioning. And I’m not mowing the second half of my yard.

I mowed the first 5000 square yards of my yard this morning, but then I had a noon meeting. Since it’s 103 degrees now, I’m willing to wait until later to finish.

The legendary David “Davy” Crockett had already served in the U.S. Congress (from Tennessee), but he lost the 1835 election and famously fired a verbal volley toward the fools who failed to again elect him: “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.” This summer, my own feeling is that no choice is required. We can easily do both at the same time. Sometimes things just work out.

That said, I am willing to wait to mow the little chunk of Texas in my vicinity until the hellish temperatures abate just a bit later this evening. One of the nicest features of this region of Texas is that “high plains” are, well, high. Altitude, I’ve decided, is a gift from God. I think also, as I cast my eyes over toward my friends and faithful readers in New Mexico, that mountains and snow are among God’s best gifts, and the real deals require what? Say it together in an attitude of praise to the Almighty, truly the “Most High”: ALTITUDE! (Okay, for purists, I just mention that in this column, I’m using “altitude” and “elevation” pretty much interchangeably, and I’m not distinguishing between “true” altitude, “absolute” altitude, etc. It matters not much here. But it matters a lot if you’re flying a plane.)

In Muleshoe, Texas, where I live, affectionately known as the Greater Muleplex, our altitude is 3800 feet. It’s roughly 70 miles down to Lubbock. I still consider that a (truly boring) trip, though most of our citizens make the trek more often than they change their minds. Make that trip, and you’ll descend to 3200 feet. Keep on heading down—say, on down U.S. Hwy 84 to Post, Texas—and you will have dropped off the Caprock Escarpment (the “Cap”) and managed to lose 600 more feet (down to 2600).

People have gone farther down and survived. Right after our son Jeff went to play college football in Abilene, we called to ask how it was. He said that the level of intensity was definitely high, but, physically, anyone who could survive a Coach David Wood (Muleshoe) workout could survive any workout. But, he said, “the humidity is killing me.” He was still in Texas, but he’d descended much closer to the other option Davy Crockett had mentioned.

Altitude.

You may have noticed that Texas towns/cities list their populations—not their elevations—on their signs. I’ve thought about this. I could be wrong, but I think it’s because most below-the-Cap Texas towns feel some inherent shame in being low-lyers. It’s bad theology—yea, verily, mistaken theology—and it makes no sense at all, really, but I think that deep down they just feel that they must have done something morally wrong to be consigned to the desperately altitudinally challenged nether regions of the state.

It’s like the guy who slips on the ice (oh, heavenly thought, ice!) and straightway opines through his moans, as a bone sticks out through his shin, “Aw, *!@*d^, I wonder what I did to deserve that!?” The rational answer is almost always, nothing really. Ah, but, unbidden, we say it, thereby saying more than we mean to say.

So, conversely, be assured, dear friends who may be consigned to the nether regions in the present heat wave, that I’m aware it’s no moral superiority that allows my neighbors and me to at least experience, even though it is presently 103, some significant cooling down after sundown. We’ll drop into the low 70s sometime after midnight and, for a few hours at least, it will make a little less sense to rush into going berserk because of the heat.

I know. We’re short of scenery here. We’re mostly dry, often-airborne dirt with some scorched and drought-stricken crops scattered around. But at least up here we get a wee bit of daily relief in the evenings.

I’ve managed now to put off lawn-mowing long enough to catch maybe a 10-degree break before I fire up the mowing machine.

Yes, friends, that’s the blessing of altitude. Doubt I can pull it off, but I sure would like to import some more of it. Bring in a mountain or two. And way more snow. If I can figure that out, I intend to propose listing the newly-inflated elevation prominently on our town’s sign. Along with a big thermometer so we can watch the evening temps drop even more quickly.

If that happens, I’ll probably need the Lord’s help to watch my attitude—about my altitude.

You’re invited to visit my website, and I hope you’ll take a look there at my new “Focus on Faith” Podcast. At the website, just click on “Podcast.” Blessings!

Copyright 2023 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Good Words Can Point to Nuggets of Truth

I enjoy reading, and I particularly enjoy reading good columnists. “Good” may mean that I agree with them. I can be narrow that way. But “good” also means that they make me think. I do that rarely enough that I appreciate the help.

My favorite columnists are my favorite columnists in large part because they’re good at wielding words to cut through fog and haze and mental mushiness. At least, they help me see what’s going on around us all through the eyes of someone I’ve learned to trust as a no-nonsense observer. At best, I get to glide along for a while on words given wings by a writer who is a master at launching them.

Just FYI, the late Charles Krauthammer was one of my favorites. His books, especially the compilations of his columns, are incredibly good. I’ve always enjoyed George Will, a man guaranteed to expand your vocabulary and slow to put up with nonsense. A lover of baseball (and a baseball scholar!), he’s good at calling balls and strikes. His writing pointed me toward the late William Zinsser who literally wrote the book On Writing Well—and wrote brilliantly. I love reading Lance Morrow. “Brilliant” is not over-much praise for him as well.

My favorite columnist for a good while now has been Peggy Noonan. Some of the best money I spend is for (this sounds like a contradiction in terms) the online version of the Wall Street Journal print edition. Their regular columnists are very good—and they have Peggy Noonan, the best of all, I think. Her weekly columns are more than worth the price of the subscription.

I hear many people boiling over these days about media bias. I don’t blame them; the slants are obvious. All I have to do is mention “far to mostly right” or “far to mostly left,” and you can immediately name news organizations occupying those slots.

I was once standing at a border crossing between Uganda and Kenya when a Greyhound-type bus rolled past. It was rolling under its own power, but it had obviously “rolled” before. Over and over. It looked like a barely mobile parallelogram, a four-sided object, kind of like a matchbox squashed out of square with wheels attached. It was so whomper-jawed that the windows were broken out and the outside corners of the tall seats jutted out through the geometric plane on one side.

Our national news is often like that. With editorials and commentaries, you expect opinion. But my opinion is that with far too much of the national news, we get slant. Like that bus, it rolls down the highway, listing or almost tumbling off left or right. That is wrong, unethical, and unprofessional, but it’s been a long time since it surprised us much. The various news organizations have long ago pasted their ads on their chosen sides of the slanting bus.

I like it when I have the feeling that I’m reading—traveling on a bus—that at least makes an attempt not to roll down the road sideways. The news is reported “straight” and the commentary is labeled as such. Hearing or reading such, I feel that maybe I’m heading down the road toward at least something that squares a bit with reality, that I’ve learned something. Maybe even some truth.

One of the things I enjoy about a good column is that, even as the issues and news items of the day change, some of the nuggets of truth the columnists dig out in their particular mining still glitter days and months and even decades later.

How’s this for prediction? In one of his columns, G. K. Chesterton (no one ever road words like Chesterton) wrote, “We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four” (Aug. 18, 1926; thanks to Brad Shorr for his compilation of Chesterton quotes from The Illustrated London News).

And, regarding political parties, “I do not particularly object to the pot calling the kettle black. The Party System is made like that. But I do strongly object to the pot calling the kettle white” (Chesterton, Feb. 21, 1914).

But the real reason I suppose that good columnists write, and that I enjoy reading their work, is again put into words by Chesterton: “I have gone through most of my life looking for an uninteresting subject—or even an uninteresting person. It is the romance of my life that I have failed to find either of them” (Jan. 11, 1913).

And there’s a deep truth. Our Creator made a world full of marvels, and most marvelous of all are our fellow beings.

You’re invited to visit my website, and I hope you’ll take a look there at my new “Focus on Faith” Podcast. At the website, just click on “Podcast.” Blessings!

Copyright 2023 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

“I’m Okay. I’m Just Tired.”

“I’m okay. I’m just tired.”

I don’t know what you usually say if you’re ever a bit tired and down and, truth be told, as you look around at our world and society, deeply disappointed.

But that’s what I say. To others and to myself at those times. I hope most folks don’t think of me as being depressive and depressing. I hope my tombstone has something engraved on it pointing to the real hope I absolutely believe is ours in Christ. But, yes, on some days, I figure that stone will say: “I’m okay. I’m just tired.”

Living in this world has always been tiring. And lots of people have had, and do have, things a lot harder than we do. I’m a wimp, and I know it. I should be far more grateful, and I know it. Which disappoints me in me a great deal.

No tribal warlord is hauling off my grandchildren. No “dear leader” is starving me so he can play with nuclear warheads. No sawed-off dictator is dropping bombs on my head and on daycare centers and hospitals while moaning to anyone who will listen (shame on us if we do) that he’s been seriously provoked and can’t be blamed.

“In times like these, it helps to remember that there have always been times like these,” a wise person once said. True, I think. But a lot of us do seem a bit more than usually tired. Stuff adds up. I hesitate to start listing much.

But, wow, when you think about it, in just the last few years… I’m talking about all of us here. Not even counting the individual challenges that come to each of us personally. Just a taste here. Serious racial strains and then riots, looting, and arson in summer 2020 in Oregon.  Such behavior is never defensible. Then the mess at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. No way that was defensible; it was shameful and pathetic. Oh, and the 2020-21 ham-handed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Disgusting.

And the politics connected? Pathetic. People, including chief executives, trying to defend the indefensible are always pathetic. In the military, generals presiding over serious wrecks on their watch are almost always held accountable by some combination of reduction in rank and pay, forced retirement, etc. I wonder why at the voting booth we don’t seem to hold Commanders-in-Chief just as accountable. I love the cartoon where one of our recent presidents (I’d make it two, and provide two horses) is handed the reigns of a horse: “Here’s a horse, pard, and there’s the sunset. You know what to do.” If only. How lobotomized and spineless do our political parties have to be to rush us, one more time, toward a choice in 2024 that the majority of Americans greet with as much enthusiasm as the choice between a near-fatal bout of hemorrhoids or half a dozen root canals?

Oh, and I almost forgot (not really, but I’d like to) about a little pandemic. Brutal and 10 out of 10 on the stress-scale, even before it was politicized.

So, are we all tired and a little depressed? And maybe a lot disappointed because, for some reason, we expected better? Yes.

I need to listen to the late Dallas Willard, one of the wisest spiritual mentors I can imagine. He warned, “You have only to ‘stay tuned,’ and you can arrive at a perpetual state of confusion and, ultimately, despair with no effort at all.” Ouch.

So, what to do?

Tune in much more and much more often to God’s wisdom in his word than to society’s idiocy always in our faces. Focus on what is good and permanent, not what is maddening and fleeting.

It wouldn’t hurt to demand with our votes some combination of wisdom, character, and integrity from politicians, even as we often remind ourselves to “trust not in powerful princes, mortals who cannot save” (Psalm 146:3). The psalmist goes on to say, basically, that they die quickly and decay into dust. I admit to indulging in a grim smile when one commentator recently used the term “actuarial arbitrage,” making the not very nice claim that leaders of both parties wouldn’t be all that cut up if a blood clot or myocardial infarction solved their 2024 candidate problem in a way that required no courage at all on their part. Nope, not nice, but true, I bet.

Remember my Dallas Willard quote? Jesus himself told his disciples long ago, as he was introducing a great parable in Luke 18, that “they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” So, how not to become cynical and deeply disappointed? Jesus tells us where to “tune in.” Keep praying, he says. And on a much lower level, I might suggest that, once you’ve done the above, it might be good to call a friend who could use some encouragement. Or go dig in the garden or mow the yard. Positive change. Small, but real.

And, of course, we do very well to remember our true King and the kingdom that can never be shaken. His really is “the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.”

Oh, I so badly need to focus on that truth—if I want to have a healthy soul, the real and life-giving confidence of a child of God, and a much better epitaph than “I’m just tired.” 

You’re invited to visit my website, and I hope you’ll take a look there at my new “Focus on Faith” Podcast. At the website, just click on “Podcast.” Blessings!

Copyright 2023 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Praying at a Condemnation Hearing

When I was a much younger preacher, I was occasionally asked to offer an invocation, a prayer, at the opening of my hometown’s City Commission meetings. Once my part was done, I often stayed around for a while just as an interested citizen to see what was going on that might be interesting.

On a few rare occasions, I found myself at a meeting where “condemnation hearings” were on the agenda, and they were indeed interesting. The city couldn’t condemn (and order torn down) somebody’s dilapidated building without going through due process, which is certainly as it should be.

But the time had to come when the owner, some of them as dilapidated as their decaying buildings, either cleaned up the mess or ran out of time and excuses (though the excuses could be entertaining). Eventually, for the good of the city and all of us who preferred not to live in a slum, the order was pronounced: Condemned! None too soon for most of them.

So, surprise! Condemnation is not without its positive aspect. But I’m thinking right now about a type of condemnation that is not positive at all, a feeling that I’m afraid oppresses us all from time to time and, some folks, almost continually. It’s the nagging suspicion that we simply don’t measure up. As individuals, as family members, as students, as employees, as… you name it.

I hope you had parents whose love was unconditional, who wanted the best for you but whose love you knew was there always, through successes and failures. Priceless! But too many folks have had parents whose love was, or at least, felt, “transactional” or conditional.

Maybe you have a great boss whose support you can count on. But too many people work for bosses whose management style is more bull whip than affirmation and haven’t given a real compliment to anyone since the Carter administration.

So, it’s rather ironic—stay with me here—that before we can hear the truly good news of Christ, we need to hear this news: no one measures up. Not by themselves. No one.

“Ah, but I’m so religious, I measure up.” That’s a lie.

“I keep all the rules, so I measure up.” Another lie.

“Well, at least I’m closer to the mark than you are.” Lie. The best person you’ve ever known or heard of is in the same leaky boat we’re all in. Mother Theresa. The Apostle Paul. No one measures up completely. (Read Romans 7 to hear St. Paul’s take on this. In fact, I dare anyone to seriously read Romans, grapple with its truth, and not find it life-changing.)

Oh, we can try to lower God’s standards. Folks of the toxically religious sort (not all is toxic) pick a few pet rules they can keep and ignore the really hard ones, the ones that are hard to measure but truly affect souls. Pharisees in all ages pick their favorite rules and look down on others. It’s a game. A lie. A delusion.

So, the Apostle Paul calls us all out. In Romans 3, he says, no less than three times, as if— exactly as if—he’s trying to call us out, trash all of our excuses. “No one is righteous; no, not one.”

If we don’t, if we can’t, measure up on our own even to our standards, much less God’s, where does that leave us?

In a bad spot. In deep need. So, the apostle himself cries out, “What a wretched human I am! Who will set me free?” (Romans 7).

Then he rings out the answer that takes the focus completely off of us—off of our bad-ness and off of our supposed goodness: “Thanks be to God! God did [what no law code and what no human effort can do] by sending his own Son.”

The perfect sacrifice, the Son “measured up” completely, and those who trust in him partake fully in the pardon and the power only he brings.

“A continuous, low-lying black cloud” hung over us (Romans 8:1, The Message). Guilt and fear and, yes, condemnation. And if being right with God was something we scraped and struggled to attain by our own effort, it would make a sad sort of sense to live in fear, always feeling condemned—or working very hard to ignore that nagging uncertainty.

But if he has done the work, always, fully, and forever, then our task is not to earn something that can only be received as a gift. Our job, and a full time job it is, is to trust him. A life lived to honor and thank him is the only proper response. No more fear. Joy, security, peace, deep hope, freedom.

And the focus? It’s never on us. When we do poorly, we know we are forgiven, and he lifts us up to move on. When we do well, we know who empowers that, and we thank him. We’ll find we won’t have a self-righteous leg to stand on. No, but we’ll have two good legs to dance on.

The focus is where it should be. The worship is where it should be. No more games. And now? No condemnation.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).

If you want a condemnation hearing, you won’t find it regarding anything God builds. I’d suggest a good worship service instead. A song or a few there. And a song in your heart.

You’re invited to visit my website, and I hope you’ll take a look there at my new “Focus on Faith” Podcast. At the website, just click on “Podcast.” Blessings!

Copyright 2023 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

The Apostle Paul Had Seen “the Nightfall”

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 pictures captured the hearts of theater audiences, The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien was my all-time favorite literary work. (Tolkien thought of it as one but the publisher thought one massive volume would be massively daunting to readers, and it became three books; and The Hobbit is really the prequel to all.). I’d far rather spend one day in a hobbit hole with Bilbo or Frodo Baggins than a week in a mansion with any king or president or head of state I can think of (even the ones I’d be willing to invite into my home).

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 answers wisely, “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 the 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. And, yes, since Christ baptized even suffering with his own blood, no suffering, for those who trust him and live in him, need be meaningless. It may be horrible. It may be almost unendurable. But it is not meaningless.

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.

You’re invited to visit my website, and I hope you’ll take a look there at my new “Focus on Faith” Podcast. At the website, just click on “Podcast.” Blessings!

Copyright 2023 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.