Archive Page 16

Love and Basketball

Published March 3, 2015 Current events , Love Leave a Comment
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This story has been making the rounds on television – I saw it first on the CBS news, so here’s the link:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-high-school-basketball-team-incredible-sportsmanship/

It tells about how a couple of high school boys in Waco, Texas, thought it was sad that the Gainseville, Texas, juvenile correctional facility’s basketball team never had any fans when they came to play. So this time, when the Gainesville Tornadoes came to play in Waco, these two students made sure that the Tornadoes had fans, posters, and even cheerleaders to make them feel like a real team.

Of course, they were already a real team, but it just took a bit of love to help them to fully realize it. A classic definition of the kind of love God expects from us is this: meeting other people’s needs at the expense of our own. I’m sure it wasn’t necessarily easy for the two Waco kids to put this whole thing together, and I’m sure that they could easily have just brushed the whole thing off. But in the end, because of the love showed by the people in Waco, at least a couple of the Gainesville players said they would never forget that day for the rest of their lives. Who knows, maybe it even turned them around.

I work in criminal justice, and I understand the need for empathy to solve the kinds of criminal issues we see today. What I don’t say enough is that I absolutely think that God is really the only way to solve any criminal justice issue. We can talk about cost-benefit analyses, constitutional mandates, and even social science research, but it’s only love for our fellow human beings that will change our future for the better.

Jesus said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” but this merely reminds us that the word “least” is really a label that we use in the world. God doesn’t love them any less, but they do offer us an opportunity to show love, mercy, and justice in concrete ways.

As Saints, what we do in the world matters, but the two boys in Waco have shown that you don’t have to dump a bunch of money at a problem or come up with some amazing super-solution to make a difference. All it takes is a bit of love and creativity, and God smiles.

God and Music

Published February 15, 2015 Hearing God Leave a Comment
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bach

Wow, when things get busy, they really get busy. Denise is working harder than ever, and I’ve been out of town. Still, I have no excuses for not talking about God. Supernaturally speaking, it’s sort of inevitable. The more you want to talk about God, the more resistance you’re going to get. But that, my friends, is a completely different blog.

So when I’m rushed and don’t know what to say, I talk about something that I really love, which is music. Now, I don’t know about you, but you just can’t explain music without God. There is simply no way to fit music into evolution, or secular humanism, or anything apart from God, who gives some of us the gift of being able to play, and the rest of us the ability to feel the powerful emotional touch that comes from music. That’s why most musicians will never attribute anything they do musically to themselves. They can’t. Even when they don’t necessarily call it “God,” they know that it all seemed to exist outside of them, and that they were merely permitted to grab onto a part of it. If you watch the Oscars, you’ll see a lot of people thanking their producers, their directors, and their fellow actors, but if you watch the Grammys or the County Music Awards, a ton of people thank God or Jesus Christ.

When I play concerts, which is certainly not very often, I try to end by talking about the notion of gifts and infinity. God gives all of us gifts. Some of us are blessed with the gift of being able to make music, but we all have something, and each of you have at least one, and probably several, really wonderful gifts from God. And because we’re also given an ability to understand the concept of infinity, we can immediately take a known concept and imagine what it might be like in its infinite or perfect form. So, for example, if a piece of music seems beautiful, people can think of beauty and imagine it in its perfect form. This perfect form, of course, is the thing that awaits all of us when we enter the Kingdom as followers of Jesus Christ.

Every good thing that we do provides people with a glimpse of God and heaven, because we can reach people through our gifts and then tell them, “now imagine how you might feel if you experienced this thing in its infinite and perfect form.” That’s probably why one of my favorite passages is Matthew 5:14, which says, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before [others], that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

So . . . whatever your gift, find someone and share it with them. Heck, share it with me!

But never forget to give all the glory to the one who gave it to you.

Pope Francis, Freedom of Speech, and Love

Published February 1, 2015 Current events 2 Comments
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I didn’t have time to write about it when it happened, but I was quite impressed by the Pope’s comments concerning freedom of speech in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris. Basically, he said that there must be limits to what we say or depict, and that perhaps deriding someone’s deeply held faith should be one of those limits. No, he didn’t condone the killings in Paris, but he took a decidedly Jesus-like attitude toward the whole thing. Here is the Wall Street Journal’s story on it:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-sees-limits-to-freedom-of-speech-1421325757

Think of it this way, is making fun of anyone really a loving thing to do? What if it hurts people to do it? In the Charlie Hebdo case, the cartoons led not only to killings in Paris, but also to a variety of politicians saying that we should root out radical Islamists and kill them. Everything surrounding the decision to run the cartoons seems to have led only to a focus on killing other people, and that simply cannot be squared with anything taught by Jesus Christ.

Sure, we allow freedom of expression in America, and so we allow people to get away with tons of horrible and hurtful things in the name of the First Amendment because we are “Americans.” But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have some self-restraint.

In another story, the group Reporters Without Borders said that the Pope’s statements were dangerous, and that limits to freedom of expression should never be set by religious leaders. Well, I disagree. By following Jesus, I often have to refrain from things that may be within my rights to do, but that would hurt people, and thus would not reflect God’s love. Everyone has a choice, and I simply choose to follow Jesus. He limits my secular freedoms every day, and I am better for it.

A couple of weeks ago, Face the Nation host Bob Shieffer said that he likes Pope Francis because he often reminds us that religion is about kindness. And so Shieffer, a self-described “strong” defender of the First Amendment, nonetheless ended his show by saying that the Pope’s comments about freedom of expression remind us that “there is a difference in having the right to do something and doing the right thing.” I think Jesus would agree.

Let’s Try This Again . . .

Published January 21, 2015 World Leave a Comment

When we first formed the “Arming the Saints Ministries,” Denise and I were figuring that we’d actually be ministering. And, in fact, we have been. It just hasn’t appeared that way, though, and so I thought I’d at least explain why.

Those of you who know us know that we try to follow God wherever He takes us, and we try to do whatever He tells us to do without question. But that doesn’t always lead to the kinds of lives that we would have predicted for ourselves. For example, until God wanted me to go back to live with my dad when he was so sick, I never would have predicted that I would become a 24-hour-a-day home health care worker. But that’s what I became, and I soon realized that my ministry was right there, taking care of my dad. So until all of that happened, and until Denise got a new job not too long ago, I think we both just figured that we’d gradually work on our ATS ministry until that was what we would be doing full time. We predicted a certain life together, but it turns out that God had other plans.

In fact, what God wanted me to do after taking care of my dad was to help re-design our country’s system of criminal justice to be more fair and more loving (if you can call a thing like a criminal justice system “loving”) for all people. For the last two years, that’s all I’ve done, but I could never have done it without God also guiding Denise into a job that would pay for all of my free work. If you’ve read her book, you know that Denise and I don’t believe in coincidences, and so we believe that everything has worked out exactly the way God planned it. We still consider ourselves blessed; we’ve never really wanted or needed much, and God has allowed us to continue a ministry through our work.

Still, there’s so much going on with us and our walk that it would be a shame not to at least write about it here. Unfortunately, Denise simply doesn’t have the time; she’s doing what she probably does best – spending her entire day (and well into the night) helping people through their world problems with a supernatural perspective. A lot of folks call it a “workplace ministry,” and that’s exactly what it is. There’s no pulpit and no pews, but she demonstrates God’s love by showing how that love can play out in the world each day. But that’s no excuse for me. I have time. In fact, I’m going to start making time because I honestly just feel a lot better if I spend a portion of every day talking about God.

So, anyway, I’ll be the one writing this blog for a while, but Denise will always be right here with me. We pretty much think exactly the same way on just about everything, anyway, and so you might not even notice too much of a difference.

And since I was talking about trying to predict our lives, let’s start with something about prediction that I saw the other day in a magazine. The editors of the magazine asked a variety of historians, legal scholars, and authors, “What is the greatest upset in history?” The answers were all over the map, and included sporting events, battles, and other historical happenings. But the one that got my attention was from a legal type (like me), who said that Christianity was the biggest upset because nobody “would have predicted that today the faith of billions would bear [Jesus’s] name.” Of course, we know that’s wrong. God knew it, and in fact Jesus even told his disciples, just as the scriptures foretold, that the story of Christ, and repentance, and forgiveness of sins would be preached to all nations. When Jesus told them this, the Bible says that he “opened their minds” so that they could understand the scriptures. The phrase “opened their minds,” according to John MacArthur in his Bible commentary, “seems to convey a supernatural opening of their minds to receive the truths He unfolded.” But really, these truths were foretold as prophesy in the OT, and so pretty much everyone back then had some ability to predict that when the Messiah came, his following would ultimately span the earth.

So even when things seem like they don’t go as predicted, when you follow God you should take solace in the fact that they are likely going exactly as predicted by Him. God has us all in His hands, there’s nothing to fear, and if you decide to follow Him, you’ll end up doing a ministry somewhere, somehow. He has it all figured out, and it’s all part of that amazing plan that He has for your life. There are no coincidences, and there really aren’t any upsets. There’s only the truth as unfolded by Jesus.

I’m Denise’s husband, Timothy Crane, and I’m going to do my best to talk about our walk with God more often because I think that’s what God wants me to do. I hope you will, too.

We are Back and Blessed

Published January 5, 2014 Gratitude 1 Comment
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Blessings on a New Year!  I apologize once again for my absence the latter part of this past year.  Once again the natural world provided us with ample opportunity to hold fast to our supernatural Lord to keep us blessed, safe and above water.

We had an amazing year, beginning with recovering from double hip surgery.  Praise the Lord that he gave me the surgeon that the world advised against because he was young, newly certified and had little experience.   But it was my blessing to have the latest technology and procedures because we stepped out in faith and listened to the Lord and not to the world.

The year continued with Tim starting a new business to help people who were wrongly held in jail to get out.  His job went away while he was out of town taking care of his ailing father who went on to be with the Lord.  As always, the Lord provided for our every need and even in abundance to allow us to help out a few others.  The training that Tim performs takes him all over the nation teaching people in the legal system how  to reduce jail populations and how to better determine who should stay in jail.  He received a blessed email thanking him for his work that allowed many people to spend time with their families at Christmas rather than in jail.  Tim named this project, “Gods’ Project” and he stopped tracking the supernatural alignments after he had documented over 100.

Finally, the Lord moved me to a new job with a huge measure of favor.  Learning my new job is taking a lot of time, but I am so grateful to see the blessings of the work of my group and the blessing of peace in the office.

I hope that you are able to reflect on 2013 with many measures of gratefulness and insight into how much our Lord has blessed you (even in difficulty) and how much He loves you.

Prepare for a fabulous 2014!  I know it will be amazing.

Blessings, Peace and Abundance!!

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