She was the checker at the grocery store and I was her next customer. Glancing at her name tag, I was stunned to see her first name: “America.” I smiled, “You are surely the most popular person in this store. After all, everyone loves America!” (Looking back, I realize she has heard every bad pun regarding her name and I shouldn’t have bored her with another.)

She said, “Unfortunately, not everyone.” I had to agree.

A couple of minutes later, as I was leaving, my arms loaded down with bags, I made eye contact and said, “God bless America.” She smiled, “Thank you.”

I walked out of the store thinking this was surely the first time I’ve ever had someone thank me for saying “God bless America.”

She is America; I have just blessed her.

Two days later — lessons have a hard time penetrating my cranium — it occurred to me that I am America, too. That you are and that guy is and the woman over there, she’s America, too. We’re all America.

And the best way to bless America is by blessing her and him and that one.

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My friends email in this direction asking, “So what are you going to be doing now?”

The retired ones as a rule don’t ask that. They know. If you’re in the ministry, you keep on doing what you’ve been doing—serving the Lord, taking opportunities to preach or teach or lead or counsel or serve. The big change is they take away your office, your mileage allowance, and the regular paycheck. (Sounds like quite an adjustment, doesn’t it.)

I will now give an honest confession, which may or may not be good for my soul. For the most part, all I’ve done for the last 5 years has been: what I’ve wanted to do. And what has that been? Meeting with pastors, speaking whenever the opportunity arose, drawing for the Baptist Press, sketching people at block parties and church functions, and blogging. Once in a while, something of a denominational nature came up where my presence was expected and I attended or led or participated. But mostly, I did exactly what I wanted to do.

Tonight, on my way to the church where I’m preaching a revival, I called my wife back at home in River Ridge. I told her what I’d done today—speaking at the noon luncheon, sketching high school students at a local school, combing a used bookstore and coming away with a couple of gems, and I was then headed for the evening service where I would draw people before and after the worship times. Margaret listened to this and calmly said, “You’re in heaven, aren’t you.”

A wife knows.

Nothing much will change, except for the disappearance of the regular check. But I will look to the Lord and everything will be fine.

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An eight-year-old child once wrote to Dr. Seuss whose real name was Theodore Geiss: “Dear Dr. Seuss, you sure thunk up a lot of funny books. You sure thunk up a million funny animals… who thunk you up, Dr. Seuss?”

Brian Upshaw has just re-directed my message for next Monday’s noon luncheon at the North Greenwood (Mississippi) Baptist Church on the subject of “how to love children”. Brian said, “Pastors who think of children as the church of the future instead of the church of TODAY will find themselves preaching to empty buildings.” When I thanked him for that insight, he admitted he heard those words from Andy Stanley earlier this morning in a conference.

Bob Anderson, longtime pastor in our state, once told a seminary audience, “We know Jesus was a happy person because children loved him. Children do not like to be around unhappy people.”

A little boy was playing in the yard when he saw a large Chow dog loping down the street, its heavy hair hanging out from its head. The boy ran into the house and breathlessly told his father he’d just seen a lion. The dad, well acquainted with his child’s tendency toward exaggeration, said, “Son, you had better be telling the truth.” “I am, Dad, I promise,” the little boy insisted.

Dad got up and walked to the window and came back. “Son, there is no lion outside. That’s just a big dog.” Then he said, “Now, I have warned you about telling things that aren’t true. I want you to go to your room and talk to the Lord about what you told me.”

A few minutes later, the boy was back. Dad said, “Did you talk to God about what you said to me?” The child said, “I did, Dad, and the Lord said the first time He saw that dog, He thought it was a lion, too!”

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I have several favorite shepherds — David Crosby, Mike Miller, Tony Merida, Jay Wolfe, for starters — but Don Davidson of Alexandria, Virginia’s First Baptist Church leads the pack for my money. Don writes a journal once a week or so for their website. I always drop by and read several at one time and without fail find myself thinking, “I wish I were a member of his church!”

His journal for April 21 was so fun and thought-provoking, I thought you’d get a kick out of it. (Remember now, most of what I do here is directed toward pastors and church leaders. So, for the pastors among our readers, let this be your invitation to get to know Don Davidson through his church’s website. You might also imitate a lot of what he does in his journal.)

He wrote:

“Confession is good for the soul, they say, but bad for the reputation. Here are some things you may have already suspected. Don’t hold me to any of this. In fact, delete after reading, please….

–Theologically, I am neither Calvinist nor charismatic, fundamentalist, moderate or liberal. Just a Baptist Christian with a little mix of all the above.

–Pastoring churches is the only job I have ever had (except for appliance salesman at Montgomery Ward my senior year of high school).

–I love Tyler Perry movies that feature Madea!

–No, I don’t actually read all of the books that I mention in my sermons. Who has the time? But I do read book reviews in magazines and online.

–I never learned to type in high school. This explains why my e-mail replies (if you get one at all) are so short and to the point.

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The Heart is a Rebel.

Miss that and nothing else makes sense, either about the human condition or what God did to heal its maladies and re-align its focus.

I’ve driven the interstate across our city for enough years to remember when it felt like a parking lot and required five minutes to go a city block. These days, since the highway has been widened and the lanes increased, we can breeze through what were formerly congested spots at fifty miles per hour. Some motorists, however, choose to go seventy. Where the limit is seventy, they go eighty.

I have not the slightest doubt that if the speed limit were increased to 90, some drivers would exceed it.

The heart is a rebel. It does not like to obey a law or keep a promise or restrain itself.

The tabloid staring at you from the supermarket checkout line names a husband of some Hollywood star known for her beauty. The headline announces that she has caught him in adultery and is suing for divorce.

What, you wonder, is that man doing committing adultery when he is already married to the most luscious dish on the planet? Answer: the heart wants what it wants and does not like to take

“So when did you announce your retirement?” I keep getting asked. The answer is: “The day I took this job five years ago.”

Once we determined that this was of the Lord, I said to the search committee chairman, Dr. Gail DeBord, “I’ll give you three years.” He said, “Make it five.” And that became the plan.

So, I resigned the day I moved into this office. Gave a five-year notice, you might say. It was most definitely of the Lord. Had I left after three years, we were still in crisis mode here, recovering from the effects of Hurricane Katrina, and the timing would have been terrible.

Now, we’re ready. We’ve done a 12-month re-organizational study of the association under the leadership of seminary Professor Reggie Ogea, and are putting into place an entirely different plan of operation for the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans.

Ten years ago, Freddie Arnold left the Kingsville Baptist Church of Pineville, LA, where he had been minister of education for 17 years, to become Church Planting Strategist for the Baptist churches of metro New Orleans. That was another God-thing, if there has ever been one.

Monday night, at the Spring meeting of this association and the official retirement send-offs for both Freddie and me, I told the representatives of our churches, “No one could ever have had a finer colleague than Freddie. He has been everything we have needed for this critical time in the life of our churches.”

Freddie is multi-talented. I told them, “If you need a sermon, he can preach it. If you need a hymn, he can lead it. If you need a house, he can build it. If your car is in need of repair, he can fix it. And this morning, we found another of his skills. In his early morning walks alongside Lake Pontchartrain, he had picked dewberries, and today, he brought in a cobbler he made with the berries he had picked. Apparently, there is nothing this man cannot do.”

Unless it’s draw cartoons. (But there’s not a lot of call for that!)

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On a state or secular college campus, the atheistic professor has complete freedom to spout his religious views without protest from the students or interference from the dean. Let a Christian instructor relate his personal story to inform the students of his worldview so they can better understand where he’s coming from, and he’s harassed and soon out of a job.

At a convocation of students on the average secular campus, freedom of speech and the First Amendment are championed. Let a student stand and own up to being a follower of Jesus Christ who attempts to live by the Bible, and he/she is hooted down.

Ironic, isn’t it, the hostility that those of a secular bent have toward belief in Jesus Christ.

It’s more than just a prejudice, however. It’s a full-blown hatred.

That hatred is born of a fear of Jesus.

If you have ever read the gospels and wondered how in the world things in that remote day came to the point where reasonably-minded people moved to arrest and crucify the Lord Jesus Christ, He who never lifted a finger against a human on the planet, the Prince of Peace, then take a look around you.

Human nature has not changed in the last 2,000 years.

Look at the way militant gays feel threatened by a Baptist church where the people inside are seeking to live as Jesus did and by His teachings. The believers inside that congregation would never hurt a fly, yet they are vilified as the enemy by the protestors outside who hurl profanity and insults in their direction.

They hate the church for the same reason the religious leaders of the first century opposed Jesus: they fear righteousness.

That surprises a lot of Christians.

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I’ll write an article for the website on preachers who get hurt by thoughtless church leaders or are themselves the perpetrators of wrong against church members, and the comments arrive in droves. Everyone has a story. There is so much pain in the church today.

No one can hurt us like a family member can. Since a church is a family of believers, we become vulnerable to injury as a result of our close dealings with each other.

A friend wrote, “I just read (in your blog) about mistakes preachers make. May I share a story with you?”

She and her husband were members of a church in another state. A casual, impromptu conversation with the leader of the church’s Bible-drillers was misunderstood, then blown all out of proportion and may have resulted in a death. Here is her story, which I have edited for clarity and to cushion her from identification.

“We were chatting in the bathroom at church. I thanked the woman for her work in teaching the children the way to use their Bibles. She commented that she had only one child in her program at that moment. She had sent letters home with the Sunday School children encouraging the parents to get their kids in the program, but with pitiful results.

“The pastor’s wife happened to be in another part of the ladies’ room and overheard the conversation. Apparently, she read more into it than was intended. Later that week, my husband received a nasty letter from the preacher.

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An article in Saturday’s religion page of the Chattanooga Free Press–I read it over lunch driving home from a conference in Ridgecrest North Carolina–spoke of the decline in numbers our (Southern Baptist) denomination is experiencing. The statistics indicate we are baptizing fewer than last year, which continues a downward trend of the last decade or so. We count fewer members of our churches, although, again, the negative numbers are not drastic.

Not yet anyway.

Now is the time to act, our leaders are saying. Every elected and appointed executive of our denomination pulls his teams together and sends them searching for programs and methods to spur a new round of ministry and growth in our churches.

I have two thoughts on that subject. These are not the final answer on anything, I regret to say, but surely these two points must provide part of the answer.

One: times of decline in a church are periods when most churches do precisely the opposite of what they should be doing. They begin looking for ways to cut back on staff and lop off expenses. Training programs for staff are among the first to go and advertising in the community is quickly seen as unneeded.

Counterproductive. Most destructive.

The very opposite of what a church should do.

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