Trade Up

Last Friday I go where few grown-ups have gone before: I attended our church youth group's small group.

Well, now I've made it sound like it was intimidating! I have a son who just turned 13, and he's involved, so it was totally legit for me to come (in fact, he asked me if I would). However, I do think that we adults can have a tendency to shy away from groups containing more than one or two teenagers at a time. Maybe we think that, I don't know, acne is contagious, or that they will call us "old bald person" or something (although the Bible tells us that if they do, God will avenge us... just kidding!) Anyway, the kids in the youth group at our church are the greatest kids ever; I actually enjoyed the evening quite a bit!

One of the things we did was a game where each team (we had three) was given a plain old can of soup, and we took it around the neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking to trade it for something. We could trade it for anything we were offered (well, anything except for a human or animal!) but the idea was to try to "trade up" - get something more valuable than what we were offering. The story is that in the past, teams who have played this game have traded up to quite valuable things, like cars. We didn't expect to get a car, but we did our best to get something cool!

My team actually had the most interesting story to tell when we got back. We traded our soup can for a real, whole pineapple. Then we traded the pineapple for a pretty cool CD carrying case; it was made of red plastic, and it could open on both ends and folded out like an accordion. We traded that for a ceramic statue of three ducks with an umbrella; the umbrella actually had a solar cell on top, and under the umbrella it was supposed to power a little light; we couldn't get the light to work. In our last trade, we got a racketball racket with good strings but a kind of sticky handgrip for the ducks. When we got back, the response from the other teams was, You had CERAMIC DUCKS, and you traded them for THAT??? Apparently, the other teams thought we had traded down on our last trade. The ducks were cool, and they might have won the game if another team hadn't traded up for a working Keurig coffee machine (!), but in my opinion, a racketball racket is actually useful. A broken duck lamp is not.

My wife likes to go to the grocery store on the weekends. I still don't really understand why she wants to do that and take up time we could be doing something as a family (or resting!) when she could go during the week while the kids are in school and I'm at work, but that's how she likes it so that's what we do. Usually she goes by herself, but sometimes for various reasons she asks me to go along. Now, I'm not going to lie to you and say that I'm happy to go or that I don't put up a fuss to get to stay home, but if she really wants me there, I go with her. I push the buggy sometimes, I load the stuff into the car, I take it up when I go home. She's my wife, and she needs me. I can afford an hour or two for that.

We have a friend named Danny Cahill. Now Danny is quite famous, but we did know him before he was in the public eye. In the autobiography he and his wife co-authored (it came out a few months ago), Danny talks about how as a young man he dreamed of being a professional musician, but because of some errant ideas he was taught growing up, he believed that when he got married and wanted to start a family, he needed to give up those dreams and (basically) "get a real job." When he gave up his dreams, he gave up on himself, and wound up weighing 460 pounds with a crushing gambling habit. (After years of struggling with his weight, he scored a spot on season eight of "The Biggest Loser", a "reality" game show in which very overweight people compete to lose the most weight in a certain number of weeks. Danny lost 239 pounds and won the show!)

The point of the game we played in the youth meeting was to think about making trades. The team who wound up with the coffee maker obviously traded up from a can of soup. We and the other team (who ended up with a case of bottled water) traded up too, but most of the teens thought we had gone backwards with the racketball racket. After everyone told the group about their adventures, we discussed the story about Esau trading his birthright (the right to become the head of his clan after the death of his father) to his younger father for nothing more valuable than a single meal at the end of a long day. It's pretty clear that Esau did NOT "trade up." We talked about making choices that we later discovered (or knew all along) amounted to trading something valuable for something less valuable - choosing to hang out with friends at the expense of studying for an important test in school, choosing an exciting-but-no-good boyfriend/girlfriend over a better-but-less-flashy one, and so on. Teenager-level stuff.

But later I got to thinking about things that happen to adults. Danny had traded the most valuable thing a person can have, a dream that gives them a reason to get out of bed in the morning, for a lie. Later, he traded that lie, which had brought him to a point where he was so unhealthy that he was very likely to die young, for the truth that hard work can lead to extreme results; in the process he got his health back, and he even got to play a song he had written on national television. Now Danny is a recording artist and a motivational speaker; look him up on Facebook sometime!

I haven't done anything that extreme, but I have given up little things for what seems at first like a lesser reward. Giving up my Friday night, for example, for the opportunity to go tromping around a neighborhood trading soup cans for ducks. Trading part of my weekend afternoon to push a shopping cart around for my wife. Even giving up my chance to watch a TV show I like so my kids can play a video game, or not buying some electronic gadget I've got my eye on to pay for dance lessons for my daughter or a band trip for my son. As a married person and as a parent, there are so many things that you sacrifice, knowingly and without hesitation, and it doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all; it's just what a parent does. Danny does that too; I know his wife and his children, and he would do anything for those guys. But Danny went one step too far: he sacrificed a destiny God had given him for the sake of a picture of a family man that was not what God intended for him. If he were standing here right now, I know he would tell you that was the wrong choice. Some things, things from God, should not be sacrificed.

Don't get the wrong idea: I do not think that an adult should sacrifice his family on the altar of his career either. After your personal relationship with God, your career should take distant fourth place to your spouse and to your kids. But if God has put something in your heart, God knows how to make it happen without causing suffering for your family. In fact, if you are honestly chasing God's plan for you and for your family, they will flourish because of it.

Don't trade something precious for something hollow. Plan your course, but let the Lord order your steps. When you do, every trade will turn out in the end to have been a trade up!

Hope

Last night in church my pastor taught on Colossians chapter 1, verses 1-6. As he was reading the passage, one thing in particular stood out to me. I guess I sometimes tend to try to figure out cause and effect when I'm reading the Bible, and in that few sentences I see the following causes and effects: first, the Gospel was bearing fruit and growing across the world. The people of Colossae heard the message, and they understood it, and it began to grow and bear fruit in them as well. One of the first fruits of this was the "hope of Heaven" in their hearts; once the hope of Heaven had taken hold inside of them, they began to have faith (confidence) in Christ Jesus, and also love for each other. Faith, hope, and love... just like in 1 Corinthians 13:13! It reminds me of the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:2-9, Luke 8:5-8) where Jesus compared the Word of God to a seed which could grow and produce fruit under the right conditions. Obviously those conditions existed in Colossae, because the fruit was certainly happening!

Easter is almost here again; last Easter I posted a video from a VeggieTales Easter video

VeggieTales: An Easter Carol DVD

in which an angel character explains that "the hope of Easter" is something the world cannot do without. When hope is absent, the world becomes a nasty place. When I first saw that VeggieTales, I thought it was odd to emphasize "hope" as being what the story of Jesus' death and resurrection are all about, but tonight as I thought about those first six verses in Colossians, I realized that the talking vegetables were right... hope is central to the story of Christ! (We're not talking about "hope" in the sense that you "hope" something will happen but it may not; we're talking about "hope" in the sense that you are in a ship at midnight on the ocean in a raging storm, and you are about to drown and die, and you see the lights of a rescue ship, and suddenly you have hope.)

After church I was talking to a friend who is in the middle of a very rough time in his life. He has been having painful health problems, and he is having a difficult time financially as well. He sounded like he was having a hard time seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I reminded him of a story in 2 Kings 6:24-7:20 in which the salvation of God comes suddenly and unexpectedly. The capitol city of Israel, Samaria, was under siege, and food was running so low that people were resorting to incredibly desperate measures just to stay alive. Some men with a deadly, contagious skin disease who were just outside the city had an idea. They knew their options were to starve where they were, to go into the city and probably starve there, or to go into the enemy camp and see if the enemy would give them some food, so they decided to go to the enemy camp and take their chances. But God had miraculously scared the entire enemy army away, and the diseased men had everything they wanted! When they went back to the city and told the people, suddenly the entire situation went from famine to feasting as they plundered the camp of their enemy. God had turned things around in less than a day, with no effort at all on the part of the Israelites. That's the kind of God that we serve!

My friend knew that story already, but as I reminded him of it, I could see that hope was beginning to dawn in him. There are no health problems or financial problems in Heaven, and he is a citizen of Heaven! The Gospel message that gives us hope is that even when it seems like the sun is going down on your situation and things are getting bleak, God will send the salvation you need. Ultimately, the hope of Heaven means that we will spend eternity in the presence of God, but in the shorter term, in this present life, no matter how bad things may look to you, God is very able to make the situation turn out in your favor!

Cover Versions

In 1983, I sat in a movie theater and wondered something. I looked at the space station on the screen and wondered why the Empire would think that their design was so great that, even though the Rebellion had destroyed the first version, they should try to build another one. Didn't they have any other ideas? Didn't the guy who wrote the story have any other ideas?

I wonder how many times "Big Yellow Taxi" has been recorded. Never mind, Google, don't tell me... I don't want to know. I'm afraid I can't count that high! I personally can think of at least three or four versions off the top of my head, and I know there have got to be dozens more. What about "Heard It Through The Grapevine"? Of course, everybody knows the old Gladys Knight version and the CCR version, but what about the California Raisins' version? What about that one, huh? Hey, what about "Knockin' On Heavens Door?" Bob Dylan, Guns 'N' Roses, and tons more. A few months ago I learned to my surprise that Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" was a rework of an older song by Big Mama Thornton. When someone else records an already-recorded song, the new recording is called a "cover" of the original. Often, these are not very different from the original versions. But sometimes they become more well-known than the originals (like "Hound Dog"), and sometimes both the original and the cover become ridiculously well-known (like "With A Little Help From My Friends", which was originally recorded by The Beatles and then covered with a completely different arrangement at Woodstock by Joe Cocker). Sometimes an artist even reworks his own song (Eric Clapton's two radically different takes on "Layla"). We just finished watching a movie whose soundtrack, for no apparent reason, consisted largely of cover versions of Beatles songs. Too strange.

I never realized how many cover songs there are in the Bible until I got into my "read the Bible in a year" project this year. Psalm 53, for example, is a revision of Psalm 14. The Psalm that David sang in 2 Samuel 22 is presented in a slightly modified form in Psalm 18. The song in 1 Chronicles 16:8–36 is reworked from pieces of Psalm 105, Psalm 96, and Psalm 106. And Psalm 136 has the earmarks of being a heavily reworked version of Psalm 135. There are many other examples of repetition of individual verses or verse clusters in the Psalms.

There are lots of Death Star-style examples of narrative being repeated, too. Take The Ten Commandments, for example: they appear in Exodus 20, and they appear again in Deuteronomy 5. Of course, a lot of the book of Deuteronomy is a repetition of material from Leviticus. Most of 1 and 2 Chronicles is derived from 1 and 2 Kings, and anyone who has spent any amount of time in the Gospels knows that some of the stories about Jesus appear as many as four times, once in each Gospel account. In a few spots in the Bible, whole passages are repeated: take, for example, 2 Kings 18-20 and Isaiah 36-38.

Why all the repetition? There's no one answer for all of the examples. I've been learning some of the reasons, though; Deuteronomy repeats Leviticus to teach a new generation of Israelites about God's law. The Chronicles are a retelling of the Kings for a different audience: the books of Kings were written before Israel had been taken into captivity in Babylon, and the Chronicles were written after they had returned. Some of the Psalms seem to have been repeated because different versions were intended for different uses. But it's fun to think that maybe years after Psalm 14 was written, some guy picked up his psaltery and recorded his cover version, which hit the charts as Psalm 53. Hey, why not? And if the writer of 1 Chronicles can piece together several existing Psalms to create a new one, then it's OK for me to use Bible language and thoughts in my own songs.