Work, Faith, and Watermelons

Every Wednesday, every summer, I would help my dad sell watermelons at a local market in the early morning sun. We’d sling the big green fruit until the sun reached its apex and then head into the café for a burger and a Dr. Pepper. Each afternoon we’d park on an old bleacher at a cattle auction behind the café and watch dozens and dozens of livestock being sold.

The auctioneer would rattle off numbers in a kind of turbo-speak auctioneer lingo. It sounds like absolute gibberish to anyone uninformed but is more like music to those who get it. I learned to love it. One afternoon I learned to love it even more.

In walked this pitiful looking skinny little black and white calf. He was clearly incredibly sick. His hind quarters looked like they were covered in his own poop. This little guy was knocking on death’s door.

The auctioneer looked down at the calf, tilted his wore-out old cowboy hat back on his head, and leaned over to the guy next to him to whisper behind his hand. When he sat back up and spoke into the microphone the speakers kind of squawked as he told the two hundred people gathered, “Startin’ the bidding at fifteen dollars.”

We all just kind of sat there for a second. Even in my eleven-year-old mind I could remember thinking, “Who would want a sick almost-dead calf? Even for $15.” Just as I thought they were going to send the sick little calf back to his pen (and an almost certain death) my dad did something I had never seen him do before at the auction. He raised his hand.

The auctioneer looked around. He looked some more. He did some more of the secret auctioneer jabbering and finished with five words which changed our lives, “Sold to the Watermelon King.” My dad had just bought our first cow.

Over the years we would buy a lot more cows. Hundreds of cows. Thousands of cows. We would sell some. We would eat some. We would lose some to death, disease, and predators; but not that first little black and white calf.

My dad loaded him up in the back of his tiny little pickup everyone called “Jimmy.” That morning the truck had been filled with vibrant green watermelons. That afternoon it carried a calf on death’s door. Both cargoes had a lot to teach me about living a life of love. We drove the little cow home, named him Oreo, and nursed him back to health.

Oreo started a chain reaction. We would sell our watermelons, go to the auction, and dad would buy a calf. They were almost always sickly and small. Without fail every one of them needed to be fed by a bottle. In a single summer our farm became a nursery for the downtrodden bovine masses. We were like a safehouse for diseased little orphan cows.

I didn’t know enough back then to realize what was happening. Today it makes perfect sense. My dad, The Watermelon King, as I heard the auctioneer say so many times, didn’t believe in hopeless cows or hopeless anything. Dad has always believed when you mix hard work with big faith you can land right in the middle of great hope. When hope seemed like a longshot to so many my dad saw the opportunity.

I guess I must have picked it up along the way. It’s hard for me to see a hopeless situation. I embrace the challenge. I find it almost impossible to shy away from the opportunity.

I love that about my dad. Just like I love it about Jesus. In heaven’s roll book there are no hopeless cases. There are simply empty lines waiting to have your name written in them. Everyone has a spot. Everyone has an invitation. Regardless of history or hang-up.

I cannot remember a childhood summer not completely occupied by watermelons. Some kids remember band camp. Some can fondly recall team camps and travel baseball. For the occupants of the King Farm it was all about those watermelons.

There have been many summers when the conditions for growing watermelons were extremely difficult. Even in the best of conditions the work can still be brutally hard. None of those factors have ever deterred the Watermelon King. During the extra hot or the extra dry years, he pumps water to his plants from nearby ponds. If there is an abundance of pests taking the crop he sorts out countermeasures. Over the decades he’s come up against plenty of hard times. Still the watermelons come off the vine by the thousands. This year will be no different.

I don’t really know how I could even begin to quantify the amount of time I spent working those fields before life sent me elsewhere. My dad has done it his entire life.

It was sometimes backbreaking work. There was the planting season when we’d crawl on our hands and knees transplanting tiny plants. Later we would walk the same long rows of young plants again with a garden hoe in hand as we went around killing weeds. We would plow, and fertilize, and irrigate, and protect. All the things you do to protect such an undertaking.

Inevitably right around Independence Day each year dad would begin to pick some to check them. Once they were ripe the next few weeks would be a blur of picking, stacking, carrying, sweating, and selling. It was enough to make a young man start wishing for school to start.

Dad knew what his dad knew before. The Watermelon King learned it from Preacher King. Work makes winners. There is progress in the process. A watermelon doesn’t spring up overnight. A man doesn’t either.

It can be a hard way to live. It can also be a holy way to live. There is a simple joy found in it. A unique perspective. Years of toting all the ripe green fruit shaped me in so many ways. It strengthened my arms as well as my heart. It set the stage for what God has been teaching me now for more than twenty-five years—living things grow. There is beauty in the progress. Jesus knows no hopeless cases or empty fields. No conditions are too hard or intimidating. He works in us and on us and calls it good.

It starts with a seed in the soil. It sprouts, blossoms, and yields life. You can’t have a field without the work, and the field is fruitless without the process.

The faith life for those following Jesus is not so different. It starts with a small seed in good soil. Your soul sprouts, blossoms, and gives fruit. It gives life. You can’t have the faith without the work, and the faith is fruitless without the process.

Clouds and Cages

Photo by Venezuelan Tourism.

After college I had the incredible opportunity to serve a parachurch organization called Chi Alpha for a little over a decade. That time was foundational and monumental for me. It is permanently fixed in my soul as a vital season I will always treasure for the special memories made, the friendships developed, and the growing taking place within my own heart and mind.

One of my fondest memories came at the very end of my time with the organization. For months we had planned a trip to Venezuela to work at an orphanage in the remote countryside. It was an exhilarating adventure full of many special moments with dear friends.

On the last day of our adventure we took a gondola up into the mountains near Caracas. A gondola is basically a small cage for people suspended on a cable that is then carried slowly up the side of a mountain. Just think of a big aquarium dangling from a wire going up the side of a mountain and you have the right idea.

We waited at least an hour for our turn to step into a cage. As we waited I listened to a group of local girls argue about whether my friend Rob was Justin Bieber. I don’t think Rob knew he was the topic of conversation at all, but it didn’t stop the boys accompanying the young ladies from shooting him ugly looks.

I had ridden a ski lift many times, dozens of times, but I wasn’t altogether prepared for the adventure about to ensue as my friends Jake, Ellen, and Rashad stepped into the gondola ahead of me. We all settled in for what was supposed to be an almost twenty-minute ride to the top of the mountain. Rashad was clearly very nervous about the experience while the rest of us were good to go.

As our tiny cage crept up the side of the hill some things began to change. Visibility plummeted even as our altitude rose. The temperature within the small suspended glass box decreased as well. And then, as a white wall loomed ahead of us, my friend’s nervousness escalated into full-blown panic.

We passed out of visibility and into an alien world of white fog, the gondola ascending into the clouds themselves on the side of a remote Venezuelan mountain. It was eerie to be sure. Rashad was scared, but what happened next was both beautiful and hilarious. At the top of his lungs my large friend began to not just sing, but bellow in a deep baritone, the lyrics to the timeless hymnal Amazing Grace.

Remember that picture of an aquarium from earlier? Yeah. Bring that back and add a large man singing boisterously enough for cages on either side to hear. It was awesome! It didn’t take long for him to calm down after that. Which I think all of us in the car appreciated since we were maybe halfway up the mountain.

I don’t think the beauty of the moment was lost on any of us that afternoon. We had spent a week working with kids in an impoverished place. We had helped clean up a school and made playgrounds playable again. The evenings were spent serving a faraway church that shared a common faith. So, Rashad’s instincts weren’t to allow his panic and anxiety to carry him into a dangerous reaction suspended high above the mountain valley. His reaction was to lean into grace, and his demonstration was to literally voice his feelings in song.

 There have been many times when my life has found me suspended above the valleys of failure and dangling within the fog of uncertainty. Sometimes nerves get the best of me. It’s not a thing I think anyone has perfected. I am continuing to learn just how little I should fear what lies within the fog, because I have great faith in the one who makes the fog.

I’ve known about Jesus all my life. I am after all a church kid. But I started living my faith on my own—as real as I knew how, in my teenage years. I’ve lived a life wrapped in stories of my forefathers and grandparents, my uncles, and friends—many of them also followers of faith in Jesus.

Perhaps what I see the most about those who follow authentic faith is their lives are not free of hard things. They don’t get out unscarred or without having to face down fear. They don’t make it out at all. None of us really do. I know, that doesn’t sound like the most encouraging thing a guy could say when he is trying to make a point about faith. But here’s the bottom line: those of us who don’t just dabble in faith, but go all in, will consistently find ourselves in places and situations that feel like a group of friends dangling on the side of a mountain.

The thing about this life is no one gets out alive. We all have choices to make. We can fear the fog. We can let doubt keep us from stepping into the gondola when it’s our turn and forever miss the journey ahead. We can wait at the bottom and never see the beauty waiting just above. Or we can step into a journey of mystery and uncertainty.

I want to keep stepping on the gondola. I want to keep letting life carry me up and into the fog. I might not know exactly where I’m going, but I do know exactly where I’m heading.

 After several more minutes of a grinding pace that s-l-o-w-l-y carried us up the precipice we broke through the clouds. There, on the other side we were met with a festival you could not have seen or even imagined from the ground below. We stepped out of our cage into a party.

There were jugglers and vendors, markets and handmade things. There were singers, dancers, performers, and artisans. Delectable treats and sweet things hung from stalls lining the cobblestone paved walkways. Happy people walked shoulder-to-shoulder stranger with stranger and no one stopped to argue about politics, sports, or other trite things.

The sights of people in celebration were spectacular, but when you looked past the wondrous scene of joy unbridled there was something even more spectacular to behold—the view.

Stunning vistas the like of which I had never witnessed met my gaze. No small feat for nature to throw the way of a kid raised in mountains who spent most of his free time around mountains and on mountains doing mountain things. I watched what must have been kids playing on a nearby range. I saw an airplane fly by—below us. I saw miles of mountains, farms, roads, and villages. It was spectacular.

It was, to say the least, monumental in scale and beauty. I could see for miles. The horizon seems further away so far up. As if ascending to such a majestic place somehow offered a perspective not to be found elsewhere.

And really that’s the way of it. Faith does lend perspective. Before and behind. Below and beside. Faith gives you a glimpse into what you can’t see. Faith doesn’t even help you see it all the time either. It just helps you come to terms with what can’t be seen.

The trouble is we sometimes forget our own faith. We forget what happened yesterday that gave us the boldness to believe in the first place. We forget the wins we’ve seen and the losses we’ve been carried through.

Forgetfulness can do a real number on faith. It can make the fog seem thicker and the cage seem smaller. No one forgets on purpose. We just displace the memories of all the spectacular things we’ve seen with new stuff. Often boring stuff. We fill our minds with spreadsheets and P&L statements, with PTO meetings, soccer practices, and deadlines. We jam it full of Facebook, Snapchat, and cable news. We keep on cramming until we don’t even remember we have forgotten something sacred to us. In our scramble to fill our lives with meaning we move some of our most meaningful moments toward the fringe—losing them to the fog of forgetfulness in the process.

All of this leaves us with the appearance of meaning, and belonging, and purpose—but at the cost of our souls. We raise up a wondrous facade. Like a shrine built to our own importance and interests. But that can never last.

When the fog looms and the cage squeezes I am the last guy I can depend on. I’m probably too busy freaking out. Especially if I am too busy being important to remember what’s important. The cure or fix or just plain better way of doing life is to remember. Remember what amazing thing God has done in your life and remember how it changed you forever.

You Stink At Multitasking: Try This Instead

I am crazy. I work two rewarding but difficult jobs. I have four kids, an amazing wife, and a lot of people who are constantly needing my attention. I love this life of mine. But I often felt like the old variety show act where the guy or gal is constantly spinning a bunch of plates on top of sticks. You can only keep that going for so long before they crash. So I decided to stop spinning the plates. Nothing about the level of my responsibility or the amount of work I have to accomplish changed. If anything I do more work now. Here’s how I get more done without crashing. I stopped multitasking, because I’m not good at it.

You are not good at multitasking. You might think you are. I know some of you think are. But research has actually demonstrated that the better you think are at it—the worse you really are. Let’s do a simple exercise to demonstrate this. 

Exercise One: write three columns similar to the ones below using Arabic and Roman numerals and the first ten letters of the alphabet. For this first step write them in rows going across from left to right alternating the categories as you see in the example. So you’ll write 1, I, A, 2, II, B, and so forth until you finish with 10, X, J in the final row at the bottom. Time the process with the stopwatch on your phone and write down the results at the top of your grid.

1      I     A

2     II     B

3     III    C

4     IV   D

Exercise Two: write the three columns again. This time do it from top to bottom. In other words, don’t switch to the Roman numerals until you’ve finished the first column of 1-10 and don’t switch to the alphabet until you’ve completed column two. Time yourself again. Write the results at the top of the second grid of characters.

Your second number was faster. Probably by quite a bit, and it always will be. No matter how many times you repeat this exercise the second number will always be faster. Sure, you can rig the results and your first number will definitely improve the more you do it, but getting better isn’t the point.

The point is that this is an exercise in what is called context switching. Context switching is what you are doing every time you shift gears to think about something different. So when you’re on the couch folding laundry, watching Stranger Things, answering texts, and checking in on your work email amidst the cries of needy kids—you feel REALLY busy—and you are, but it’s literally taking two, three, or even four times longer to get it all done.

There is a cost to context switching. A real measurable mental cost. You just proved it to yourself with the above exercise. First of all it costs you time. It not only costs you time, but it also costs you energy. It takes mental energy to suddenly shift gears. So when you live in the above chaos I described, juggling seventeen things at once, you feel exhausted at the end of the day for a reason. Mentally, you’re spent. And then it costs you even more time because of the mistakes you have to correct along the way.

Some of you do this so habitually that your own brain has tricked you into thinking that you are both great at multitasking, and that you are accomplishing more by doing it. Not true. What’s happened is that you’re mind has actually rewired your neural pathways—the structure your brain uses to send and receive information. 

Guess what? It’s pretty hard to reroute those things. Your brain doesn’t like that. It also likes the path of least resistance. That’s why you can’t just watch a show with your significant other anymore without checking your phone every 90 seconds. It’s why you can’t walk from from your car to your office without headphones in or checking your phone again, or both. You have wired your brain to attempt to do many things at once and you’re not doing any of them as well as you could if you chose only one of them to do.

Maybe you think you don’t have a choice. And some of it could be outside of your immediate control. I get that. But try this. It’s a technique sometimes called batching or blocking. I’ll explain it to you using how I handle email.

I’m a pastor and an adjunct professor so email is an ever present reality. But I don’t like it. I think it’s second rate communication at best, but it’s what we have so we roll with it. Dozens and dozens of emails pour in every day. So a long time ago I gave myself permission to stink at email—and somehow I got a lot better at it. This is what I do. I spend about five minutes at a time roughly three times during my work day looking at email. That’s it. I block off a chunk of time and I only do email then. I don’t even open the app on my phone unless I’m traveling or think of an immediate reason to send a message that can’t wait. I also never open an email I don’t intend to respond to immediately. Because then I have to tackle the same email twice. More wasted time.

Email is only one thing. There are many things that can be done in blocks or batches. Probably almost anything repetitive and systematic about your life or work can be done this way. 

How can you get creative about eliminating context switching in your daily routines? How can you eliminate the feeling of busyness and replace it with actual worthwhile accomplishment? One of the ways you can do that is by seeing multitasking for what it is—the place productivity goes to die.

Try it. I promise it will not be easy. But I also promise that as you figure it out and things change for you, it will definitely be worth it.

Find Your Fit

Have you ever reached for your screwdriver only to discover you’d attached the wrong bit? The right bit matters. The right bit fits. It gets the job done. Big job, small job, it doesn’t matter. If the tool isn’t the right tool the job isn’t getting done.

You matter too. And you fit. You fit somewhere. You were made with something in mind for you. You fit. And if it sounds like I’m calling you a tool—well I guess I am. I’m sorry about that.

You fit. Get to your place. Find your fit. Go where it works for you and where you work. Get to the place where the good stuff God put inside you can be unleashed in order to make everyone around you better. Do it.

If you haven’t found that place yet, that’s ok. Keep looking. Keep working. You will. It’s out there.

You might find that it doesn’t look like you thought it would. But it’s there. And when you discover your fit it’s amazing. Go for it.

July 17 - What She Could

Mark 14:3-9 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. (Mark 14:8 ESV)

As Mary anointed Jesus with the costly perfume people grumbled at the apparent waste of such an action. Jesus chastised them, declaring her sacrifice to be a beautiful and selfless act of worship. She had done what she could with what she had. It was her way of offering all that she had to God.

What does God ask from us? Better yet, what has God already done for you, or given to you, that He might be asking for you to use for His Kingdom? Mary did what she could, whatever she was able to do she did for Jesus. Furthermore, her faithful act of worship had a part to play in God's work of salvation.

What can you do? I think it's high time that we in the American Church stop showing up to sponge off of the insight and experiences of the few. God still speaks to us, He still reveals Himself to our hearts, He still challenges us to take up His cause. What are we going to do about it? When will we cross the line and stop merely being consumers?

Mary did what she could. I don't know what we can do, but I think it's time we found out.

March 6 - Casting Nets

Read: Luke 5:1-11

And Simon answered, "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets." (Luke 5:5 ESV)

Everything we know about Simon Peter suggests that he was a successful fisherman. He made a career out of it. He had multiple boats and even several partners. When Jesus climbed into his boat one day he had already fished unsuccessfully for the entire night. So, why then did he obey the advice of a carpenter and cast his nets?

Sometimes the person with the most talent, best intentions, or superior intellect can miss the mark. There is always grace in those situations. There is always opportunity for improvement. There is always a chance to let Jesus show you how that you might do it better.

Peter had already seen Jesus at work. He was no stranger to Capernaum. He had even healed Peter's mother-in-law at an earlier date. No, Simon Peter knew who Jesus was, and what he was about. He didn't completely grasp the full implications of it all, but he believed. He believed in Jesus. So when Jesus, a trained carpenter and traveling preacher, asked him to cast his nets at the end of a long and fruitless night, it wasn't a man Peter was listening to. It was faith.

Unfortunately, we often wait until we have weathered a fruitless night before casting our net with Jesus. When all along we could have started with him. All along we could have followed him into a life of fruitfulness. Casting nets is work; and pulling in full nets is even harder work. Still Jesus compels us to come and throw out our nets. I for one am anxious to see the catch.