Returning a Gift, Part 1

Spirituality Column #55
November 27, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Returning a Gift, Part 1
By Bob Walters

This Christmas season I’m going to talk about the best gift I ever got, and about how desperately I want to return it.

My dear friend Russ Blowers died a couple weeks ago. He was a prominent Christian preacher in Indianapolis known throughout the nation and, because of his influence on countless global missionaries, throughout the world.

Over the years Russ
- built a local congregation of 4,000 or so at East 91st Street Christian Church,
- was a good friend of Billy Graham’s,
- chaired or otherwise facilitated the Graham Crusades here in Indy,
- had a vision for both global missions and North American church planting,
- raised two exceptional sons Phil and Paul,
- cared for and stood by his wife Marian (they were married in 1946) through a decade of Alzheimer’s until her death in 2004,
- was a World War II Army Air Corps veteran,
- and, among a zillion other things, was that preacher on Indianapolis Channel 8’s daily “Chapel Door” featurette (oh, yeah … ) from 1954 through 1968.

I had never heard of Russ Blowers (rhymes with “flowers”) until I wandered into “E 91” Labor Day weekend of 2001. Russ had been senior pastor at East 49th Street Christian Church beginning Sunday, Sept. 2, 1951, moved the congregation up to Castleton and East 91st St. in 1977, and retired in 1996.

That Sunday, Sept. 2, 2001, happened to be the exact 50-year anniversary of his ministry with that Congregation.

I was sitting in the back row.

Understand I hadn’t been to church on any Sunday, including Easter, more than a half dozen times since I was a teenager in the early 1970s. I’d go to funerals and weddings, but the God thing wasn’t for me. Christ seemed like a good idea but made no sense. The Holy Spirit was just another ghost floating in the ether, and the Bible was just another old book of decent advice that was hard to read.

It was sitting in the back row that Sunday as Russ, retired but invited back to the pulpit, spoke of Faith, Hope and Love – “The Abiding Values of East 91st” was his sermon title – when “something like scales fell from my eyes” (see Acts 9:18 … maybe read the whole chapter?), and a very surprising tear trickled down my face.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will unwind this story over the coming weeks. He was in church that day because his 13-year-old son Eric suggested it.

Thanksgiving and Forgiving

Spirituality column #54
November 20, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Thanksgiving and Forgiving
By Bob Walters

Thanksgiving, the holiday thing, got me to thinking about thanksgiving, the God thing. That led me to think that the most powerful thing we can do …

for God is to give thanks,
for Christ is to love our enemies,
for the Holy Spirit is to pray,
for human beings is to forgive each other.

Give thanks
It’s easy to thank God for the good stuff – “good” here meaning “comfortable.” At Thanksgiving dinner this prayer is: “Dear God thank You for this abundant meal before us, these loved ones present, and the warmth of this home.”

A great prayer, for sure, but in hard times we must be able to pray earnestly, “Father God, I give thanks for this opportunity to grow closer to You, and to seek Your glory amid this difficulty.”

Love enemies
Loving our enemies is tough, but less so if we recalibrate who we consider to be “our enemies.” Only Satan, the ultimate enemy, is the exception to this rule. Jesus wants to work with the good in each of us despite our sin. Can we work with the good in others despite their sin, and our sin?

Prayer
The Holy Spirit is in us to activate the whole of God’s presence: faith, hope, love, understanding, trust … and prayer. I really do believe the Spirit is in everyone, even though it is plain not everyone taps into It. The way to true prayer is to ask the Holy Spirit to help us pray, and the Holy Spirit knows when we really want the help.

Forgiveness
Forgiveness, when you think about it, is the opposite of pride. And pride – “me before God” – is the No. 1, most common, most debilitating, withdraw-myself-from-God sin in humanity. Pick a sin, and pride’s probably the root of it. A truly forgiving heart is a free heart. Freedom is the key to God’s love … and God’s love is the only completely eternal thing we can know in both this life and the next.

Funny, the deepest earthly victories we can win are things we have to give away freely – love and forgiveness. Wasn’t that Christ’s message on the Cross?

I’m thankful for that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thinks the most enabling, powerful things we can do for Satan are to doubt God’s existence, deny Christ’s power, reject the presence of the Holy Spirit, and hold grudges.

God Be With You

Spirituality Column #53
November 13, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) Newspaper

God Be With You
By Bob Walters

How close are you to God?

Pretty close? Not so close? Don’t believe?

Truth is, we all have a different answer to that question. Just like each of us has our own picture of heaven, hell, or the nature of God’s existence, so too we each have in our own hearts a unique sense of our closeness to and relationship with God. There’s not really a “right” answer, and it usually changes over time anyway, but I pose it as one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves.

How close am I to God?

My reality in God, Christ and the Holy Spirit is something that I can talk about, and it might even make sense to others of similar religious orientation, but it’s not something I can share completely with anyone except God. The only real way to share our closeness to and love of God with others, after all, is to love others.

Your reality with God, your closeness to God, is your own business. Not worse or better than mine … just, your own. It’s unique, special and important.

Oh so important.

When we question each other’s closeness to God it hits at the core, I think, of what annoys non-believers and edge-believers about deep believers. If I claim a firm reality in Christ, oddly enough, people who don’t actually believe in Christ will perceive it as a smack down; a claim of superiority, even though it is actually, biblically, a claim of humility.

Now turn that question around and ask “How close is God to you?” and the Christian answer is unswerving and the same for every living soul: God is not only with you and close to you, He is in you.

Christ is in you because the fully-God Christ became fully human to create communion between God and Man, and put the Holy Spirit of God in each of us. That’s sort of the Bible, especially the New Testament, in a nutshell.

My point is that I can’t tell or compel anyone to be closer to God, but I can absolutely with all confidence tell anyone that God is this close to them.

He is with us, and in us. That includes you, and that’s a fact.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) begins his second year writing this column and both congratulates the editors of Current in Carmel for their success and thanks them for this column space.

Discovering a Gem

Spirituality Column #52
November 6, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Discovering a Gem
By Bob Walters

“As a nation we have to understand that it is OK to have Godly values. If the idea of God is in our country’s founding documents (… endowed by our Creator …), in our pledge of allegiance (… under God …), in our courts (… so help me God …) and in our wallets (currency “In God We Trust”), and our country is trying to tell us not to talk about God, well, there is a medical term for that … schizophrenia.” – Dr. Ben Carson

If you haven’t yet heard of Dr. Ben Carson, I’m praying that we will be hearing more from him soon.

Carson is head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore. He became famous in 1987 for separating cranially conjoined Siamese twins at JHMI, and repeated the procedure 10 years later in Zambia. He is the author of three books with a fourth on the way, and he grew up dirt poor in the hard inner city of Detroit.

And he’s black.

And he’s a Yale graduate.

And he’s energetically Christian.

And he’s a prostate cancer survivor.

And he has a sharp eye for irony and truth.

And he’s terrific to listen to about his faith, our country, black culture, medical ethics, the American medical system, and I’m sure other subjects. No room for the long list of profound observations and wry one-liners here, but Google Dr. Ben Carson.

Carson, 56, showed up recently on C-Span which aired his Oct. 23 presentation at the Baltimore Speakers Series, a “cultural entertainment series of diverse opinions.”

Carson on America: “There is something special about us. If we work together, we can do anything.”

On overly expensive U.S. health care: “We are oriented toward sickness. When we are oriented toward wellness, we will save a lot of money.”

Does he favor universal healthcare? “No, but I favor good health for everyone.”

On stem cells: “It is very promising, but research hasn’t moved as fast as it could in America because it has become a political football. When we learn to do stem cells, there will be advancement in the treatment of neurological trauma.”

On growing up: “We spend the first 20 to 25 years preparing or not preparing for life, and then spend the next 60 years either reaping the benefits, or paying the consequences.”

He drew a standing ovation … a first for the two-year-old series, the moderator said.

Carson has been brilliant for years (he’s had the JHMI directorship since he was 32), but a televised, uber-intelligent, relevant, makes-a-ton-of-sense TV appearance can launch a lifetime of achievement into looking like an overnight success.

I’d love to see Carson in the mainstream of American commentary. It would be a great spot for a brilliant physician and a true Christian believer.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that Carson is a Seventh Day Adventist, a denomination with a solid confession of the Triune God.  To see his much discussed 2013 National Prayer Breakfast Speech, Click here: Dr Ben Carson - C-SPAN Video Library