by Steve | Sep 15, 2017 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, September/October 2017
By B.J. Funk-
My daddy never liked that my friends minimized my double name into initials. Until he went to heaven at the age of 87, he called me Betty Jo unless, since I was the baby, he affectionately called me Baby Jo. He often put me on his knee and told me the story of the Betty Jo Princess. That’s me. I was his princess. His story of me was filled with sweet thoughts, beautiful pictures, and happy endings and was formed by how my daddy viewed me. I wanted to stay in that story forever.
But, then life happened. Young adulthood brought disappointments and difficulties, and the Betty Jo Princess felt the need to hide from life. Climbing back up and shaking myself off, I was ready for the next story. God’s story. That’s where my heart is now, and that’s the story I want to stay in forever. He, too, sees me as His princess. The real story of me is formed by the way my Father views me.
Like me, your story has not turned out exactly as you had planned either. During your up days and down days, every question and every answer did not feel good. Perhaps you felt the need to hide. After some time, you climbed back up, shook yourself off and began the real story of your life. God’s story. That’s the story that balances highs with lows, smiles with tears, and brokenness with strength. No glossing over. No kisses making it all well. No rainbow hunting or sugary hugs. Just a reality that is hard and yet secure, because we all know by now that it’s much better to let life shape you than to hide behind everything we presume is real, only to find out it never was.
In practically every story you read in the Bible, you can find yourself. Let’s take, for instance, the book of Genesis. Walk into the Garden of Eden as God comes down to visit with his children. Are you hiding beside Adam and Eve, hoping God won’t find you because you have disobeyed? Move with Moses as he begins the long desert journey with the Hebrews. When all of the weary travelers begin to grumble because they have not found water, is that you standing close to Moses and grumbling the loudest because things aren’t going your way? When Moses came down with the Ten Commandments, had you given all of your gold jewelry to help make the golden calf you could worship with the others? When did you decide your God is not enough? Seriously?
Watch Joseph’s brothers throw their little brother into a cistern, leave him for dead and then lie to Jacob, deceiving their aging father for years. How long have you held on to a lie in your family? Have you deceived someone who trusted you?
The remarkable and unbelievable part of your walk through Genesis and all of the Bible is that God walks it with you, making a weaving out of the ups and downs of your life, placing love right beside every wrong choice you make. The amazing truth that stands out in your story is that God watched you hide, grumble, deceive, lie, and worship an idol, and he didn’t throw you off the planet because of it. Instead, he tenderly embraced you, loving you through slip-up after slip-up, never condemning you and always reminding you that you are precious in His sight.
You might not always hear His love sounds. He places them inside of us, near our hearts, where they vibrate healing life. You might not always feel his love touches, but they are there. Silently, sweetly, and carefully, he stamps your hand with “Approved” and then waits for you to find out that you really are.
As the story of your life takes the heavy waves that crash against your soul, you will be reminded quite often that you are loved with an unfailing love by an unfailing God. On the days when the tears flow and you don’t understand, God watches closely as you give your tears to him. He doesn’t plan on ever leaving you. If there’s any leaving to do, you’ll have to be the one to do it.
But, why would you? What’s safer on the greener grass of the other side? Only God. Realize today that whatever is happening in your life is the continuation of God’s story for your life. Your story is still unfolding. Seeing your life this way puts a stamp of “Whatever – and Hallelujah” all over your heart.
I choose the story of my life to be God’s story. What about you?
by Steve | Sep 12, 2017 | In the News
By Steve Beard
“We’ve seen the secret things revealed by God/ And we heard what the angels had to say/ Should you go first, or if you follow me/ Will you meet me in Heaven someday?”
Johnny Cash wrote those lyrics many years ago for his wife, June Carter. The song is entitled “Meet Me In Heaven” and it testifies to the irreplaceable bond of love, trust, and devotion that was shared by the couple throughout their 35-year marriage.
On Friday, September 12, 2003, Johnny Cash died at age 71 of complications from his longstanding bout with diabetes. Nearly four months after the passing of his beloved wife June Carter, the legendary Man In Black discovered the answer to his lyrical question.
It is strangely fitting that his last album, “The Man Comes Around,” will epitomize his legacy. It deftly embodied the gritty and brooding sound that marked his remarkable career.
Although Cash justifiably received numerous accolades for his rendition of Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt” and its accompanying video, the title track of the album has been widely heralded as one of Cash’s greatest songs.
“The Man Comes Around” is about the Day of Reckoning and the notion that there will be an accounting for the way in which we live on earth. It is described by Cash collaborator Marty Stuart as “the most strangely marvelous, wonderful, gothic, mysterious, Christian thing that only God and Johnny Cash could create together” – perhaps the finest tribute that can be paid to a songwriter.
“Everybody won’t be treated the same,” Cash wrote, “There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down when the Man comes around.” The swinging ladder from above never was an unfamiliar sight to Cash — dodging death numerous times from drug-related addictions earlier in his career to health-related maladies in his later years.
If American music had a Mount Rushmore, Cash’s distinctive profile would be prominently chiseled into the rock. He is most widely known for hits such as “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ring of Fire,” and “I Walk the Line,” selling more than 50 million records throughout his career. He is the only person to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. His audiences have included presidents, prisoners, and everyone in between.
Throughout his illustrative life, Cash wrote books, hosted a popular television show, starred in and produced movies, and recorded 1,500 songs that can be found on 500 albums. His appeal is recognized by everyone from gangsta rappers to roughneck steel workers because of his charismatic magnetism that has spanned five decades of popular culture.
“Locust and honey…not since John the Baptist has there been a voice like that crying in the wilderness,” is how U2′s Bono described him. “The most male voice in Christendom. Every man knows he is a sissy compared to Johnny Cash.”
His songwriting orbited around the universal human condition of sin and redemption, murder and grace, darkness and light. His recent three-album collection is titled “Love God Murder.” What you see is what you get with Cash. There was never a manufactured feeling to his art. When he sang, you could almost taste the hillbilly moonshine, smell the gunpowder of a smoking revolver, and feel the drops of blood off the thorny crown of a crucified Christ.
In 1968, he recorded his now famous album “Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison” and produced “Live At San Quentin” the following year. The prison albums were some of his most expressive and impressive work. “I was in the prison band in San Quentin when I first saw Johnny Cash,” remembered country singer Merle Haggard. “I was impressed with his ability to take five thousand convicts and steal the show away from a bunch of strippers. That’s pretty hard to do.”
“My biggest selling albums have always been the prison albums,” Cash once told Rolling Stone. “I think there’s a little bit of criminal in all of us. Everybody’s done something they don’t want anybody to know about. Maybe that’s where it comes from.” Cash had a special affinity for the outlaws and down-and-outers. He recalled the inspiring moment when an inmate at the Tennessee State Prison told him, “I believe I can make it another five years. I know somebody out there cares, cares enough to come in here and sing for us.”
Of course, Cash spent his fair share of time behind bars for incidents surrounding his alcohol and drug use — mostly overnights in holding cells. He turned to drugs as his career began to take off in 1958. At first, he looked upon them as a divine favor from above. He once told Larry King, “I honestly thought it was a blessing — a gift from God.” But it did not take him long to realize that he was deceiving himself and that the drugs were trinkets of the Devil, luring him deeper into retreat mode from unresolved issues in his life.
“Drugs were an escape for me, a crutch — a substitute for what I now feel. I was looking for a spiritual high to put myself above my problems,” he recalled, “and I guess I was running from a lot of things. I was running from family, I was running from God, and from everything I knew I should be doing but wasn’t.”
Throughout this entire time, he never stopped singing gospel songs. He was stoned on amphetamines while he sang “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord,” one of his most beloved songs. “I used to sing all those gospel songs, but I really never felt them,” he recalls. “And maybe I was a little bit ashamed of myself at the time because of the hypocrisy of it all: there I was, singing the praises of the Lord and singing about the beauty and the peace you can find in Him — and I was stoned.” He was in a drug-addled hell but these old gospel songs were etched deeply in his DNA. “They were the first songs I ever heard — and I know this sounds corny, but they’re the songs my mother sang to me.”
Cash’s freedom from long-term drug addiction came through of the power of prayer and the stern hand of his wife who walked by his side through the dark night of the soul. Looking back on the difficult years, Cash says that the drugs “devastated me physically and emotionally — and spiritually. That last one hurt so much: to put myself in such a low state that I couldn’t communicate with God. There’s no lonelier place to be. I was separated from God, and I wasn’t even trying to call on Him. I knew that there was no line of communication. But He came back. And I came back.”
Back in the 1970s when he became more serious about his faith, Cash says it was Billy Graham who advised him to “keep singing ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘A Boy Named Sue,’ and all those other outlaw songs if that’s what people wanted to hear – and then, when it came time to do a gospel song, give it everything I had. Put my heart and soul into all my music, in fact; never compromise; take no prisoners.” Cash subsequently sang in the sold-out honky-tonks of the world and the jam-packed arenas of the Billy Graham crusades — never allowing himself to be too easily pigeonholed by the holy or the heathens.
Johnny Cash was an irreplaceable American original who will be remembered as a cross between Jesse James and Moses – an enigmatic man in black, with a heart of gold, and a voice that could raise the dead. Now that the Man has come around for him, one imagines he’s met his June in Heaven.
by Steve | Sep 11, 2017 | In the News, Perspective E-Newsletter
The Woodlands United Methodist Church is one of the official distribution centers for the relief efforts for victims of Hurricane Harvey. Photo by Steve Beard.
By Walter B. Fenton
Local United Methodist churches across the country have rushed to support people trying to get back on their feet after the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. And they are already preparing to assist those in the path of Hurricane Irma.
Along the western coast of the Gulf of Mexico, teams of United Methodists have assisted thousands of people in the depressing, but necessary task of quickly removing drywall, carpeting, furniture, and appliances from homes flooded by Harvey’s torrential rainfall. Across the region 40 inches of rain fell in just three to four days, and in some areas total rainfall topped 50 inches. Communities that never expected to flood found themselves surrounded by a foot or more of water.
“Our church and community wanted do whatever we could to support people impacted by the flooding,” said the Rev. Jeff Harper, lead pastor at Evangelical UM Church in Greenville, Ohio. “One of our church members owns an 18-wheeler truck and he volunteered to drive it to Texas if we would fill it with supplies. We’re in the process of filling it right now.”
Harper explained they did not know exactly where to send the truck, but his team eventually got in touch with the Rev. Dr. John Hull, pastor of missions at The Woodlands UM Church, just north of Houston. Hull is playing a leading role in coordinating local and national efforts to assist flood victims.
“We don’t always understand exactly why tragedies like this strike people,” Hull said, “but we want people to know God will walk with them as they go through these experiences. As a church we’re in this for the long haul, and it is always moving to see the gifts God has given us rise to the surface as we seek ways to help others.”
Local government officials asked The Woodlands congregation to serve as a major distribution center for relief supplies
Marshall Perry, facilities engineer at The Woodlands United Methodist Church, unloads diapers and water to be distributed in the greater Houston area. Photo by Steve Beard.
in the area. During the storm, and in the days immediately following, the church’s gymnasium filled with cases of bottled water, food, cleaning supplies, diapers, clothes, and other items.
The Rev. Dr. Edmund Robb III, senior pastor of The Woodlands UM Church, reported that church members stocked its large gymnasium with relief supplies four times only to see it emptied it out four times in a matter of days. Church members have worked almost around the clock to assist people forced from their homes by the flood waters.
“Fortunately,” Robb said, “people continued to restock the gymnasium as quickly as it was emptied. The church will continue to serve as a distribution center for as long as local government officials ask us to do so. The response of the congregation has been tremendous.”
The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) has organized an effective cleaning bucket campaign to channel local congregational involvement. (It has also been sending financial relief to respond to the severe flooding and mudslides in Sierra Leone – Advance #982450.)
The United Methodist News Service has published several articles in the past week detailing various ways United Methodists and their local congregations have responded to the storm that hit Texas and Louisiana.
When two members at Chapelwood UM Church in Houston realized the city’s 911 service was overwhelmed with calls, they created an app that helped police, fire departments, and volunteers quickly locate people who needed to be rescued.
Local churches quickly turned into shelters to house people driven from their homes.
And pastors prepared sermons to comfort people who face a long journey to recovery and to challenge others to help wherever they can.
United Methodists are now preparing to assist people in Florida as it braces for Hurricane Irma, one of the strongest storms on record to develop in the Atlantic.
Walter Fenton is a United Methodist clergyperson and an analyst at Good News.
by Steve | Sep 1, 2017 | In the News, Perspective E-Newsletter
By Walter B. Fenton
Surely the psalmist was using flood in a metaphorical sense when he cried out,
“Save me, O God,
for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire,
where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters,
and the flood sweeps over me” (69:1-2).
But for people from Corpus Christi to Houston and on over to Louisiana, the psalmist’s plea has seemed all too real these past several days.
Boy Scouts and veterans join members of The Woodlands United Methodist Church in packing supplies for evacuees of Hurricane Harvey. Photo by Steve Beard.
Our hearts break for families who have lost loved ones to the ravages of Hurricane Harvey’s strong winds and rain inducing floods. From the woman killed by a tree that crashed through her house to the valiant police officer who died trying to report for duty and to the family of six who perished in flood waters as they attempted to flee the disaster, we are left to ponder how fleeting and perilous our lives are amidst the powerful forces of nature. We feel small and helpless. We prepare as best we can, but know our best can easily be overwhelmed.
Thousands of people along the Gulf coast have had to abandon their homes with little more than a duffle bag and the clothes on their backs. They have taken shelter elsewhere, with family and friends, or among strangers in a church or a school gymnasium. They are left wondering when they can return home to assess the damage to their property and all their belongings. They need our thought and prayers, and our resources.
In the midst of the storm we turn to the comfort and reassurance of loved ones and even strangers who are going through the crisis with us. And of course, we rely on our faith that God will be with us even if the flood should overwhelm us.
Hurricane Harvey and its flooding rains struck close to home for the Good News staff. Some of us were able to ride out the storm in our homes, but others were forced to evacuate because of flooding. Some of us have sustained damage to our homes, but so far it is relatively minor compared to the grave challenges others are facing.
The entire Good News staff thanks all of you who sent emails, posted your thoughts and prayers on social media, or called us to note your concern and offer your help. Your words of support were a great encouragement. Thank you very much for your continued thoughts and prayers.
Veterans and Boy Scouts join members of The Woodlands United Methodist Church loading supplies for evacuees. Photo by Steve Beard.
Our attention now turns to assessing the damage, and to helping neighbors and strangers recover from the storm’s devastation. We have been reminded once again of the Apostle Paul’s great words: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” Paul was no peddler of a glib theology. He understood that suffering, no matter its source (a vicious crowd or a terrible storm at sea), is a part of this life. But tenaciously, we cling to our rock and redeemer even when the flood threatens to overwhelm us.
Walter Fenton is a United Methodist clergyperson and an analyst at Good News.
by Steve | Aug 29, 2017 | In the News
According to the Texas Annual Conference Disaster Response team, the best way to help victims of Hurricane Harvey are as follows.
Monetary donations:
These can be made directly to UMCOR Domestic Disaster Response, Advance #901670, at www.umcor.org
If churches receive monetary donations for disaster relief, please send these to the conference treasurer’s office marked “Disaster Relief.” We will utilize the contributions accordingly.
Assembling Cleaning Kits:
Also known as Flood Buckets, these can be delivered to the Mission Center in Conroe beginning Monday. A list of kit supplies can be found at http://www.umcor.org/…/Relief-S…/Relief-Supply-Kits/Cleaning
Assembly & Shipping Instructions
Cleaning Kit Materials
- 5-gallon bucket with resealable lid
- Buckets from fast-food restaurants or bakeries can be used if washed and cleaned
- Do not use buckets that have stored chemicals such as paint or pool cleaner
- Advertisements on the outside are acceptable
- Liquid laundry detergent
- One 50-oz. or two 25-oz. bottle(s) only
- Liquid household cleaner
- 12‐16 oz. liquid cleaner that can be mixed with water
- No spray cleaners
- Dish soap
- 16‐28 oz. bottle any brand
- 1 insect repellant spray
- 6‐14 oz. aerosol or spray pump with protective cover
- 18 cleaning wipes
- Handi Wipes or reusable wipes
- No terry cleaning towels
- Remove from packaging
- 7 sponges
- No cellulose sponges due to mold issues
- Remove from wrapper
- 5 scouring pads
- Remove from wrapper
- No stainless steel, Brillo pads, or SOS pads (nothing with soap built in)
- Clothesline
- One 100-ft. or two 50-ft. lines
- Cotton or plastic
- 24-roll heavy-duty trash bags
- 33‐ to 45-gallon sizes
- Remove from the box
- 2 pairs kitchen dishwashing gloves
- Should be durable enough for multiple uses
- Remove from packaging
- 1 pair work gloves
- Cotton with leather palm or all leather
Assembly Directions
Place all liquid items in the bucket first. Place remaining items in the bucket, fitting them around and between the liquid items. Sponges, scouring pads, clothespins, and trash bags can be separated in order to fit all of the items in the bucket. Ensure the lid is closed securely.
Important Notes
- All items must be new except for the actual bucket and lid.
- All cleaning agents must be liquid and in plastic containers. No powders, please.
- If you cannot find the requested size of a liquid item, use a smaller size. Including larger sizes of any item will prevent the lid from sealing.
- If all of the items on the list are not included, please put a label on the bucket indicating what has been omitted.
Packing & Shipping Instructions
- Box Weight: Each packed box cannot exceed 66 pounds.
- Complete 2 packing lists: one for your records and one to put on the shipping box.
- Paste the shipping label / packing list on the outside of each box you send. The shipping list helps the depot to quickly process kits.
- Processing & Shipping Costs: Please enclose an envelope containing at least $1.50 for each kit you send. This donation enables kits to be sent to areas in need.
