Powerful Words (Friday Devotional)

 

Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.

- Ephesians 4:29

One of my prized possessions is a wooden baseball bat I’ve had since high school. When I hold that bat, memories come flooding back of taking batting practice with my brother and hitting tennis balls over the neighbor’s yard. It makes me think about hours spent outside playing my favorite game—and it makes me look forward to the hours yet to come, because that bat is already something Andrew and Katherine try to lift, something that could bring us together for many years.

Of course, the bat has another use too. When Lindsey and I awoke one night to a sound outside and feared that there might be an intruder, the bat was what I grabbed for protection. As I inched along the perimeter of our house, the bat was transformed from a nostalgic toy to a blunt instrument, from a tool to a weapon. The same bat that I associated with so much joy could also be used to inflict pain.

Words are the same way—they can build up or tear down. They can be constructive or destructive. They can bring people together or pull them apart. It all depends on how they are used.

The Bible encourages us to put our words to good use, building up others and giving grace with our speech. When employed as encouragement, wise counsel, prayer, and affirmation, well-chosen words can be an expression of love, something that brings people closer to one another and to the Lord.

So may your words be wielded as tools rather than weapons, as something to build people up instead of tear them down. Words are powerful—so what effect are yours producing?

Thank You for the Sting (Friday Devotional)

My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.

- James 1:2-3

The other night when I was putting Katherine to bed, I suddenly heard loud, shrill cries ring out from Andrew’s room. Curious and concerned, I went to see what was going on. When I walked into the room, Lindsey explained to me that she was getting ready to put hydrogen peroxide on a nasty scrape on Andrew’s knee and that he had screamed because he knew it was going to hurt. With equal kindness and firmness, she assured him of two things: 1) he was right, it was going to sting for a moment, but 2) after the initial pain, the medicine would help his knee start to heal.

I went back to Katherine, and a few minutes later we all regrouped for books and bedtime prayers.  When it came time for Andrew to say a prayer, he offered up his typical thanksgiving for his grandparents and for trains. But at the tail end of his prayer came something I wasn’t expecting: “And God, thank you for the sting that’s making me better.

That’s not a prayer we say often, if ever. Nobody likes pain. Nobody likes struggle. Nobody likes difficulty. Even if we can acknowledge that there are things to be learned from life’s rougher patches, we’re never eager to learn those lessons firsthand. We’d much rather be comfortable.

But one of the most difficult lessons that the cross of Jesus Christ has to teach us is that in order to redeem the brokenness of this world, a price must be paid. Not every victory is won without pain. Sometimes we must experience not only life’s joys, but also its travails, to mature in faith. 

But the hope of Christ is that life’s stings are momentary, that the cross is a prelude to the empty tomb, that on the other side of earthly struggle is eternal life. The Bible goes so far as to say that when we face trials, we can consider them to be “nothing but joy,” knowing that God is capable of turning darkness into light, that from the testing of faith comes endurance and maturity.

It’s a difficult teaching to accept, far easier in the abstract than in lived reality. But if you keep your eyes fixed on the crucified Savior whose death gave you life, you can say the powerful prayer of a child: God, thank you for the sting that’s making me better.

Off to the Races (Friday Devotional)

 

“But flee from these things, you man of God, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness.”

- 1 Timothy 6:11

You can tell something’s special when you’re willing to run for it. Nobody goes darting down the grocery store aisles at top speed, no matter how much of a rush they’re in. People don’t sprint from their car to the front door of their house unless something’s on fire. But when you hear that your favorite store is giving away $1,000 gift cards to the next 5 customers to walk through the door—suddenly you’re off to the races, whether you’re wearing Nikes or high heels.

You can also see how threatening something is by whether you’re run compelled to run from it. When a yippy Chihuahua comes racing toward you at top speed, you probably just bend down to check its tags, but when an angry Rottweiler does the same thing, you take off in the opposite direction. Some threats we choose to confront, but the most terrifying we flee from.

In one of Paul’s letters to his disciple, Timothy, he offers wisdom about what spiritual things we ought to run from. He points to false teachers who are “trapped by many senseless and harmful desires,” specifically the love of money and possessions. This is an issue we still struggle with today. So often our contentment, security, and happiness come from accumulating material things and stockpiling wealth, rather than remembering Jesus’ words about storing up treasures in heaven. Paul not only cautions us to avoid the love of money, he says to flee from it—to run the other direction, because of all the things that can distract us from God, it is one of the most threatening.

But in commanding us to flee, Paul does not leave us without direction, aimlessly running one way with no destination in mind. Instead, he tells us what to run toward—righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness. Not only are these things we ought to consider or learn about, they are virtues we are told to pursue, to run after. For while finding your contentment and your fulfillment in earthly things is something threatening enough to run from, finding contentment in the things of God is special enough to run for.

Think about what captivates you enough to run. What are you pursuing and what are you fleeing? Examine your heart and ask yourself whether you are driven more by the things of God or the things of this world. Scripture compares faith to “running the race”—so are you running toward God, or toward something else?

Sticky Fingers (Friday Devotional)

 

When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

- Mark 2:16-17

The most disciplined member of my family right now when it comes to prayer, ironically enough, is the one who’s still learning to talk. Every time we sit down at the kitchen table to eat, Katherine will insistently reach for my hand and for Lindsey’s. One of us will say grace and, if for some reason the prayer doesn’t meet Katherine’s standards, she’ll look to the other parent expectantly, refusing to let go of our hands until somebody gets the prayer right. Not until she smiles and shouts “Nennen! Nennen!” (that’s “amen,” for those of you who don’t speak toddler) can we follow Andrew’s subsequent command and “Dig in, everybody!”

But the other morning at breakfast, things went a little out of order. A hungry Katherine had already been given a head start by the time I sat down to join her—the strawberries on her tray were half-eaten, and the jelly that had been spread on her toast had relocated to her face and fingers. So when I sat down next to her and she extended her little hand to me so I’d say grace, what was being offered to me were the world’s stickiest fingers. There was no way to keep my hands clean and love her well in that moment. So without hesitation, I took her sticky fingers in my own and we prayed.

Christlike love is like that sometimes—it’s not always neat and tidy. In fact, it’s inherently risky; Jesus’s ministry cost him his reputation and ultimately his life. In reaching out to lepers, dining with sinners, and ministering to the dispossessed, Jesus had a lot of interactions that made his life harder, not easier.

But love compelled him to see past the potential objections. When we follow his example, we care less about our own reputations than others’ souls, less about security than grace. The love of Christ commands you and empowers you to love even and especially when it’s inconvenient, even and especially when doing so means taking a chance. So reach out today to someone who needs a touch of grace—because if you’ll look past the sticky fingers, you’ll find a smiling face.

April Reading Log

      

Reading is about quality, not quantity...but this month I managed to pull off both! This is a long one, folks...buckle up and take a look!

2 Articles I Like This Month

"Baseball's Mental Health Reckoning" by Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated. 15 minutes.

Playing professional baseball is inherently stressful, given the public pressure, travel schedule, and high stakes. Add COVID-19 and a national racial reckoning on top of that, and an alarming number of players have already decided this year that enough's enough and have walked away from the game.

"Who's Responsible for the Texas Blackouts?" by Christopher Hooks, Texas Monthly. 12 minutes.

In the wake of February's power outages, Texans were hopping mad and looking to learn who was responsible. Was it ERCOT? The PUC? Ted "Cancun" Cruz? Ultimately, according to Christopher Hooks, the buck stops with the state's most powerful politicians, the men and women who appoint the overseers of our electricity grid. And if history is any judge, they will continue to take credit for the grid's successes and pass the buck when it fails.

Reading Through the Fantastic Four- #46-74, Annuals 4 and 5

Too much to adequately cover here, but suffice it to say that the issues I read this month are among the best and most consequential in the 60-year history of the FF. It began with a bang: the introduction of the Inhumans, a family of mysterious, superpowered beings living in a Great Refuge in the Himalayas. Immediately after that, the FF met the mighty Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, and his herald, the Silver Surfer (these three issues are often considered the high point of Marvel's Silver Age). While Galactus was defeated, the Surfer was bound to Earth after betraying his master to save humanity—an exile which allowed the villainous Doctor Doom to steal his powers and embark upon a reign of terror that only his own ego could bring to an end. And lest you think the cosmic goodness ends there, Stan and Jack follow those adventures with the introductions of both the Kree (including Ronan the Accuser) and the enigmatic Him (later to be known as Adam Warlock).

That's not all, of course. There's the introduction of the Negative Zone, a dimension made up of anti-matter, and one of its most dangerous residents, Blastaar the Living Bomb-Burst. There's the romance of the Human Torch and Crystal, an Inhuman who was separated from him for weeks when Maximus the Mad established a seemingly unbreakable barrier around the Great Refuge. And there's the announcement that Reed and Sue are going to have a baby, bringing a new dynamic to Marvel's First Family.

And it's all presented with Stan Lee's customary mix of bombast and humor and with Jack Kirby providing what is, in my opinion, the best art of his career, aided by the stellar inker Joe Sinnott. Every issue this month was an absolute delight. Excelsior!

BREAKOUT CHURCHES: DISCOVER HOW TO MAKE THE LEAP by Thom S. Rainer

What does it take for a good church to become great, for stability to give way to excitement and steady erosion to become a tidal wave of success? Breakout Churches seeks to answer that question through a study of thirteen churches, all of whom saw their attendance, conversions, and attitude explode after a long period of plateau. None of these churches did so by changing pastors, nor by turning everything upside down and starting from scratch. Rather, these transformations were the result of Christlike, intentional, bold leadership.

The genesis of Thom Rainer's study was a popular business book, Good to Great by Jim Collins, which explained what it took for mediocre businesses to reach the next level. Recognizing that the church could apply some of Collins' lessons but not all of them, Rainer sought to determine what ingredients "breakout churches" had. After surveying thousands of churches, thirteen fit the criteria Rainer and his team were looking for (a testament to both the specificity of their task and the declining state of the church in America.)

For those who have read other Rainer books, his findings will sound familiar. Churches needed humble leaders who were willing to set a vision and stick to it, but not so stubborn that they drove their churches places they weren't ready to go. Churches needed to be outwardly focused instead of inwardly focused, thinking about the community more than their own needs and preferences. And churches needed to be on the same page, able to articulate their vision and commit to it.

While the overall points aren't anything new to this Rainer reader, this is probably my favorite of his books that I've read so far, both because he is able to point to case studies instead of speaking in generalities and because the book's longer length allows more room for detail. His shorter books, while breezier reads, can feel like expanded pamphlets—this one demands to be taken more seriously. For pastors who share my general skepticism about church growth books, this one is worth checking out—it has the data, the theology, and the common sense you're looking for without the off-putting salesmanship.

THIS OLD MAN: ALL IN PIECES by Roger Angell

Roger Angell is the dean of baseball writers, considered almost universally to be the greatest living chronicler of the sport. How remarkable then that Angell, 99 years old at the time of this writing, has never been a full-time baseball writer, serving rather as the fiction editor for the New Yorker for decades and contributing a variety of pieces (including and especially his baseball essays) regularly to the magazine. This Old Man is a collection, likely the final one in his lifetime, of pieces from the late 2000s.

Not surprisingly, the baseball writings are the best, glittering with Angell's intelligent but still down-to-earth prose. Whether he is memorializing departed legends (something he has to do a lot given his own age) or wittily summarizing the latest World Series, these brief essays show that the master's still got it, that even in twilight he has retained his love for the game and his capacity to convey that love in language.

Other essays deal primarily with two things: his life an upper West Side New York intellectual and his career and famous friends at the New Yorker. While not unenjoyable, these pieces are pretty provincial, the kind of stuff I almost always skip when I'm reading my weekly issue of the magazine. Nevertheless, when he talks about some of his contemporaries, from John Updike to his stepfather E.B. White, there is a certain fun in getting a look behind the curtain.

This Old Man is a collection primarily for Angell completists and New Yorker fans; it's not something I'd loan to just anybody. But I had enough connection to the author that I enjoyed it. Nevertheless, my next Angell collection will be strictly about baseball.

MY LOSING SEASON by Pat Conroy

You can learn more from losing than from winning. That's the premise at the heart of Pat Conroy's memoir, My Losing Season, which tells the story of his high school and college basketball career, specifically his senior season at the Citadel, a military university in South Carolina. While most sports memoirs take you on a journey to the championship game, My Losing Season is a voyage of mediocrity, of Conroy's attempts to endure the harsh environment of his school and the disappointments of a failing coach and an underachieving team.

The star of the book, as so often seems to be the case in Conroy's stories, is the Citadel itself, a merciless system which seeks to instill discipline and conformity into its cadets at all costs. In numerous books, Conroy exposed the school's flaws even while declaring his love for it, and this book is no exception to that pattern. Set side by side with the Citadel in that regard is Conroy's father, an abusive tyrant of a man who the author made infamous in his thinly veiled fictional memoir, The Great Santini. Though the elder Conroy was not living with Pat during the year this book chronicles, his presence is deeply felt, and no chapter goes by without him playing a role.

Secondary to the abuses of the school and the father are Conroy's relationships with his teammates and his enigmatic, hard-to-please coach. Conroy does a good job of spelling out their motivations and idiosyncrasies, and by the end of the year you have a good feel for what the team's makeup was like, both on the court and in the locker room. As for the action on the court, there is probably too much for those who don't care about basketball and too little for those who picked this book up thinking it was about sports—a good sign, in my opinion, that Conroy struck a good balance.

Ultimately, the book isn't really about sports (the best sports books rarely are), nor about victory (since the team rarely won.) Rather, it's about how Conroy grew into a man at the Citadel—and not the kind of man the Citadel wanted him to become—and how his experiences with his team shaped him. Told in Conroy's familiar lyrical style, it's a delightful read, worth picking up for any of the writer's fans.

THE CONQUERING SWORD OF CONAN by Robert E. Howard

If you've read my previous two entries, you know what to expect from this third and final collection of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. In tale after tale, Conan is thrust into trouble, usually thanks to the machination of an evil sorcerer. Conan befriends an attractive woman and gets deeper into trouble. Ultimately he rescues the damsel and slays the monster by the strength of his arm and the slash of his sword. Some of these stories are more beloved than others, most notably the final story, "Red Nails," which feels like a primer for all sword-and-sorcery books, featuring all the sorcery, sex, and monsters the genre promises. But truthfully they're all pretty similar, something Howard himself was conscious of by the time of his self-inflicted death in 1936.

One thing that left a bad taste in my mouth while reading this book was the racism which gets pointed at both African-Americans and Native Americans. In "The Man-Eaters of Zamboula" he depicts a tribe of black men as savage cannibals; in multiple stories the fictional Picts are thinly disguised Native Americans and portrayed similarly as savage, unthinking brutes. Howard was a white man from Mission, Texas writing in the early 1920s, so I don't expect him to have 21st century values. Nevertheless, his presentation of Conan as the "great white hope taming the savages" was a tough pill to swallow in several stories and distracted me from the otherwise fantastical tales.

To be honest, after three months I'm kind of glad to be done with these stories. While crucial in the development of the sword-and-sorcery genre (indeed, arguably the forerunner of that genre), Howard's Conan tales had started feeling pretty laborious and redundant by the time I finished this third and final collection of his stories. My next encounter with the character will be in comics (there's an Essential Conan the Barbarian that I eventually need to get around to), and I'll be curious to see whether or not I prefer him in that medium rather than in Howard's prose.

CHARLOTTE'S WEB by E.B. White

Andrew and I read this one together, one chapter per night, in the month of April. I wanted his first chapter book to be a special one, and Charlotte's Web certainly qualifies as special. It's a classic for a reason, folks.

If you need a refresher, Charlotte's Web tells the story of Wilbur, a meek little barnyard pig, and his friendship with Charlotte, a spider who lives in the barn's doorway. Fearing that Wilbur will be slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte sets about weaving messages in her web, labeling Wilbur "SOME PIG," "TERRIFIC," "RADIANT," and "HUMBLE." Her plan works, as Wilbur becomes famous around the region and beloved by his owners. But as the story draws to its conclusion, Charlotte's life comes to an end, leaving Wilbur with her newly hatched children to carry on her legacy and be his friend.

E.B. White (who, incidentally, was the aforementioned Roger Angell's stepfather) is a master children's storyteller, writing in a simple but elegant style that is understandable for children but never dumbs things down for them. I was particularly impressed by his willingness to "go there" when it came to the facts of life around the farm: when we meet Charlotte, she explains to us how she traps bugs and sucks their blood for food; Wilbur's number one fear is being killed by the farmer. White doesn't hide the truth from the kids reading Charlotte's Web, he trusts them with it.

It's that commitment to the truth, to both the good and the bad of friendship, maturity, and love, that have made Charlotte's Web so beloved since its publication in 1952. I'll leave you with this gorgeous paragraph from the penultimate chapter:

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Yes, I cried when I read it aloud to Andrew. How could I not?

ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS VOL. 7 by J.M. DeMatteis, Peter Gillis, Don Perlin, Alan Kupperberg, et al.

Sometimes series end with a whimper instead of a bang. For The Defenders (rechristened The New Defenders at the end of vol. 6), that was certainly the case. In a book that felt more like an X-Men spinoff than anything (owing to the presence of Beast, Iceman, and Angel, all original members of the merry mutant team), the identity that had been carved out over 100+ issues was cast aside in favor of more conventional stories. As a result, the book faded into the background of the Marvel Universe and was cancelled after its 152nd issue. This volume doesn't make it that far, ending after #139, but I'm confident I didn't miss much.

The primary running plot in these issues is distrust among the team's members, which makes sense—half of the members are leftovers from the previous Defenders roster, while the other half are buddies from the X-Men. However, rather than setting up a Civil War-style split, the mistrust is primarily directed at one member of the team, Moondragon, a telepath whose incredible power and prickly personality have always made her a difficult teammate to tolerate. This is complicated by the attraction felt by both Angel and Iceman for her.

Sounds interesting, right? Yeah, you'd think so. But the love triangle angle is dropped without explanation, and Moondragon is never made sympathetic enough to make the reader care about her teammates' suspicion—instead of wanting to see her redeemed in their eyes, you kind of wish they'd just kick her off the team and be done with it.

Beyond that, it's pretty standard superhero fare, heroes vs. villains with the occasional guest star. A fine way to kill 15 minutes, but nothing worth remembering.

Also included in this volume are two miniseries, The Beauty and the Beast and Iceman. The former sees Beast team up with Dazzler for a four-issue story in which they fall in love and fight off a gladiatorial villain. The latter, which I preferred, has Iceman proving himself as a hero to his hometown, including his parents. Both miniseries are fine, and in some ways actually superior to the Defenders comics found in the rest of the volume, but they're far from essential, and I'd rather they have been excluded so that the book could have made it all the way to the final issue #152.

With that, my journey with America's favorite non-team comes to its conclusion. The Defenders was never Marvel's best product, but in its prime it was the kind of kooky fun that epitomized Bronze Age Marvel. Never a threat to win any critics' awards, it was nevertheless good for a smile.

SUPERMAN: KRYPTONITE by Darwyn Cooke and Tim Sale

Kryptonite is sometimes treated as a punchline by both casual fans and detractors of Superman, who say it's a convenient plot device designed to make an invulnerable hero more relatable and less impenetrable. And to be honest, that's exactly why it was initially created, not in the comics but on the 1943 Superman radio series. But in Superman: Kryptonite, a miniseries which adapts and modernizes the original comics introduction of the mysterious mineral, writer Darwyn Cooke and artist Tim Sale make clear that kryptonite is a crucial element (pun not intended) of the Superman mythos.

The miniseries tells the story of a young Superman who is still learning the full extent of his powers, unsure whether or not he is as invulnerable as he seems and afraid to find out what could truly hurt him. Enter Tony Gallo, a rich crook who discovered a fallen kryponite asteroid years earlier and now learns its power and employs it against Superman. In the end, there is more to Gallo (and Kryptonite) than meets the eye, and Superman defeats his foe while also entering into a new world where there is something out there able to stop him.

The story, honestly, is so-so. But the art and the characterization are excellent, with Tim Sale providing his trademark cartoony style and Cooke leaning into the idea of a Superman with godlike powers but a humble upbringing. The conclusion the story draws about kryptonite is one I appreciate: Superman may have the power of a god, but thanks to kryptonite he shares that one thing that makes all of us human: weakness.

GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT by Brian Augustyn, Mike Mignola, and Eduardo Barreto

Some of the best superhero stories are those that chuck continuity out the window and ask, "what if?" The two tales in this slim volume do just that: what if Batman existed in Victorian England?

The first tale, "Gotham by Gaslight," has Batman tracking down Jack the Ripper, who in this alternate reality is responsible not only for a series of infamous murders of female prostitutes, but also the slaying of Bruce Wayne's parents (because apparently, no matter the timeline, Batman's parents always have to die.) The real star of this show though is not the story, but the artwork of Mike Mignola, best known as the creator of Hellboy. Mignola masterfully establishes the steampunk vibe and manages to make Batman's costume fit the time well.

The sequel, "Master of the Future" has Batman coming out of retirement to take on a madman who is trying to keep Gotham in the 19th century by ruining its World's Fair-style exposition. Ending with a climactic battle aboard a robot-piloted zeppelin, this story leans even harder into the steampunk genre than its predecessor, and while not as technically impressive as "Gotham by Gaslight" (no Mignola this time), it's a perfectly fun story.

With no continuity to drag things down, both of these stories are self-contained, imaginative, and just plain fun.   I mean, come on, who doesn't want to see Batman solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper??? I'd love to see DC and/or Marvel tell more stories like these, recognizing that comics should never take themselves so seriously that they forget to be interesting.