Happy Thanksgiving

On this Thanksgiving I thought it would be great to encourage you with a true Thanksgiving story. A little more than a month ago I received an email from a man in our church who I didn't know asking me to pray. That is not uncommon. The prayer request itself though was the first one of its kind for me. The man was asking me to pray for his wife who was anonymously donating a kidney to a man she had read about in our local paper. It was an astounding act of compassion. I immediately started praying. As the story unfolded I realized the connections and the movement of God went deeper and deeper. I received this email earlier today.

Joe,

I wanted to take a minute and let you know how much Lynn and I have appreciated your support throughout the past month. I also wanted to let you know that you have truly made an impact on so many lives in this world and wanted to share with you how you impacted several people by one sermon. The following is an excerpt from a blog that apparently families of patients undergoing surgery can set up to keep others informed (caringbridge.org). The family of the recipient of Lynn's kidney posted this earlier this week.

We have some exciting news, yesterday we received a letter from Roy's donor. I know so many of you have been so curious about this. We both cried as we read her letter. Her name is Lynn and she is a 46 year old married mother of 3 daughters. She worked for ten years at Clev Clinic in heart surgery. It was there that she was exposed to patients undergoing heart, liver and lung transplants. She said it made her aware of how important donors were.

In church one Sunday, our pastor was speaking about how he wanted church members to really look at new ways they could serve each other and the community. She prayed along with the church that day asking God to "use me as You see fit". She said she left the church that day feeling God had big plans for her.

Several months later she returned from a vacation to a stack of mail and newspapers. She put the Hudson Hub Times aside in a pile, and several times thought about tossing them out - that she would never get a chance to read them. A few weeks later she picked up one of the papers and being a dog lover was drawn to a picture of a man, a woman, and a dog. She says as soon as she began reading the letter she knew it was written to her. Knowing she was O positive blood type it was no suprise thats what he needed.

She thought about the article and prayed about it. Then shared the article with her family and asked if they would be okay with her starting the process to see if she was a match. Her family gave their blessings.

Later in the summer, she happened to see a wedding announcment in the Hub. It was our daughter Heather. After she read this she found out that we not only have the gift of beautiful daughters in common, but that we also attend the same church.

She says that without God, she would not be at this point, and since the day she decided to do this had no doubts about her decision. She tells Roy ( I have only felt joy in my decision and look forward to being able to help you enjoy a better quality of life. My prayer for you is that this allows you to be able to enjoy your family more fully, with more energy and joy than ever. I pray that you are able to travel more freely, without being burdened with dialysis. I thank you for the opportunity to give and for changing my life. I look forward to meeting you.

We will never be able to thank our "Angel Lynn" enough, but we do know that it was not a coincidence, that God has brought us together. She has touched our lives and hearts in a way we do not fully understand. There are no words to express our gratitude for what she has given us. We cannot wait to meet her and her family.

Thank you for all you do.

That is the end of the email. The movement of giving and receiving is the movement of grace. This Thanksgiving both Roy and Lynn will experience the afterglow of grace. An amazing gift both given and received. Find a way to participate in the movement and have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

The Smell of God

I just arrived back in the States this morning. I spent the last week in Senegal, Africa. There is no way for me to communicate all that I saw or experienced there but I want to try to get something down for you. I remember walking through a street in Dakar and wishing everyone could see what my eyes were seeing. There are nearly 4 million people in Dakar. The dry season has just begun so the dust is starting to blow but there are still pockets of stagnant water in the slums left over from the flooding. It seems the poor just don't get any breaks and I suppose that is true around the world. Whenever I go overseas I come away loving what Jesus does inside of some people and wanting more of Jesus myself. The movement of the incarnation is to give up, go to, and be with. It is the movement Christians continue to make throughout the world and I saw it up close and personal this past week. As our missionary friends took us into the back streets of Dakar I entered into some of the deepest poverty I have ever seen. I have seen the very poor in villages in the Philippines and in India. But there is something that is stunning about urban poverty. It assaults all your senses. There is a smell so strong you can almost taste it. It lingers. A poverty so deep that when the wind blows the smell sticks to your skin. As I walked the streets the verse came to mind, " And yet for our sakes He became poor." I began to think of Jesus coming to earth. The original movement of giving up, going to, and being with. I wonder how our poverty struck him. All the rebellion and pride, all the hatred and injustice and greed...it must have assaulted his senses. And yet he emptied himself and became poor and lived right down here in our squalor and it was our type of poverty that beat the life out of him and nailed him to a cross. When certain leaves are crushed they give off a sweet fragrance that can fill a house. When Jesus lay dying on the cross a fragrance went out to all the world. And then I thought of my missionary friends who were picking their way through the streets and telling me dreams of ministries where poverty would be touched by the love of this Jesus. I heard of a Muslim teacher who when he heard of how a Christian woman had taken his student to the hospital and cared for him for 9 days said, "These Christians love muslims more than muslims love muslims."It struck me that while deep poverty has a distinct smell there is a fragrance that is even stronger still. It is the smell of God. It is the same scent that people smelled when they walked near the One they called the Christ. It is the smell people smell now when one of us walks so close to the savior that his scent comes off our skin as well. I have sung songs about wanting to see God but on the streets of Dakar I smelled him and it was just as good.

Mysterious Ways

I preached a series not too long ago called, Defeaters-Why People Don't Believe. There seem to be some common objections to the Christian faith that stand as roadblocks that can be difficult to climb over. My intent was to give some help in getting over those roadblocks. One of the sermons was on the problem of science. Science really has no beef with Christianity and Christianity has no beef with science. The conflict is really between two philosophies. The philosophy of theism (the belief in a personal God) and the philosophy of naturalism (the measurable world is all there is). Anyway, I found out that someone in our church sent that sermon to a family member who administrates a blog that is pretty much a forum for elevating naturalism at the expense of all religion but Christianity in particular. This administrator took offense to my message and sent it to everyone on his blog asking them to watch it and then send their critique so they could lampoon me. So they did. Many found it appalling, some called me a liar, others couldn't even stomach more than 10 minutes. It was fascinating to read their responses and their critique. But, here is the thing. They watched it. These are people who would never darken the doors of our church. They are a fairly hostile bunch and each one of them sat down and had to watch a sermon because the administrator asked them to because he was so incensed by the whole thing. I ended up registering on the blog and jumping into the conversation. I started by saying, "Hi, I'm Joe Coffey. I feel like I am walking up and sticking my head in a huddle of guys who want to beat me up." They have welcomed me into the conversation. So far, some of them have softened enough to be cordial and even friendly. Others are still calling me names. One of the challenges of being a minister is being able to develop relationships with people who don't believe the way I do. Almost all of my relationships are with people like you who are reading this. Now I have a whole new group of friends. Well, kind of friends. They are friends to me. I am talking to the God they don't believe exists every day about them. One of them told me his wife was pregnant and home sick. I immediately told him that I would be praying for her and for him. The next email I received from him told me not to worry about the caustic comment one of the bloggers had just written about me. I am on a cyber adventure with God. Very cool. The whole internet is a mystery to me but a greater mystery still is the way God works to bring himself front and center to those who believe he is a figment of my imagination. God has given them a cyber pastor and they never saw it coming.

Liam, Heaven, and Joy Without End

I just spent the last 5 days with my grandson. Sure, my daughter and son-in-law were up visiting too, I think, but my attention was on Liam. Will and Rach live in Virginia so it was a treat for them to be here for 5 whole days. Liam will be 2 years old this month. He is a ball of energy. The thing I noticed is his capacity to enjoy doing the same thing is enormous. He and I got into a game of running from my bedroom where I would pick him up and launch him onto the bed and then dive on him, to his bedroom where there was a bed made up on the floor for him, where he would throw himself down and I would dive on him and we would wrestle until he escaped to run to my room and repeat. Now, when I say repeat I mean repeat...as in do it again...and again...over and over...and repeat. Again, over and over. Now, I am in pretty good shape for an old guy. I think I was even wearing my official Ironman paraphernalia. Liam wore me out. We happened to be doing something that made him laugh and that was enough to keep him doing it for what seemed to be forever. It made me wonder what has happened to my ability to drain an experience of every ounce of joy. Liam was wringing the little game we created of the last drop. Something has become jaded inside of me. I looked in his eyes when I picked him up to tell him that he had had enough and it made me envy him. His eyes were as fresh as the moment we started the game. That got me thinking about heaven. I don't know about you but I have always wondered about what we will do in heaven. I seem to get bored so fast here on earth. What will eternity feel like? And then I remember Liam's eyes and I remember the line from Amazing Grace, "When we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing his praise then when we first begun." Liam will have no problem with eternity. Such is the state of innocence. Give him a grandpa who loves him and will launch him onto a queen size bed and he is good for hours. Give him a heavenly Father whose love for him fires the sun, who will launch him into a God-sized universe, and he will be good for an eternity...and so will I.