In great frustration I found myself standing in line at the Department of Revenue yesterday, because they can’t assign me an employer tax number electronically like the IRS does…..no! I have to come down to the office and fill out paperwork. This is an example of government abusing people rather than serving them, but I digress.

While standing in line, quite perturbed, and not enjoying the emotion welling up inside of me, I decided there was a better use of my time, so I looked around the room and began to pray for people. There was the 40-something black man; I prayed that he’d be well-loved by a woman who would encourage him and care for him. In front of him was the woman with the hunch back–obviously something wrong; I prayed for her health and healing. And then there was the little girl, between two and three years old; I prayed the parents who were with her would love each other much, take care of each other, come to know Jesus and raise the little girl in an atmosphere where she’d know Him, too.

I noticed as I prayed there was an abrupt shift in my emotions. OH, I was still waiting in line, but my wait had been put to better use and I was able to endure it. And, who knows what happened at a supernatural level because of what I asked God to do in the lives of those oblivious people?

Life is full of lines and frustrations. It’s gonna happen. In the midst of it the scripture speaks of “redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:16). One way to make good use of time that feels frustratingly stolen, is to invest it in blessing the people around us. It’ll help them, and it’ll help you to!

It occurs to me that if you don’t have any regret, you aren’t trying very hard.

Regret is inevitable, because mistakes and missteps are inevitable. If you don’t have any, you probably haven’t been in forward motion trying to achieve, accomplish, or make a difference.

Fortunately, regret isn’t fatal. It’s just a way of saying “In hindsight……,” Since none of us have 20/20 foresight, hindsight is likely to produce occasional regret.

Do you have regrets? I do. But they are irrelevant, because I’m living toward the future with the benefit of the wisdom and experience in my past.

Hey Christian leaders, what do you think about starting a church and naming it “Leadership Church?”

In general, I’m kinda tired of hearing about leadership. I think it became way too trendy and Maxwellian. That has resulted in many unqualified people speaking to the topic, weakly.  However, it doesn’t diminish our need or its importance.

Families need leadership in the worst way. Men need to step up badly.

The country has lost its direction and needs leadership willing to speak truth to power and call people to righteous behavior ultimately born only of Christ-in-you. Our collective course ultimately leads only to cultural disintegration.

The church has lost its passion, its purpose and its power. We’re floundering badly; as reflected in family and country. That’s partly because we are mostly leaderless; amoeba-like, lacking in clarity of our purpose and in organizational direction. We neither think rightly, nor speak rightly to the culture.

So…….if you were going to start a church (For the record, I have no plans to) why not call it Leadership Church and let your teaching be LEADing men and women to Godly righteousness through Jesus. Let your worship LEAD people in how to worship God for all He’s worth. Let your men’s ministry raise up Godly men who LEAD their families. Let your student ministry raise up LEADers for campus. How about raising up business LEADers who deploy Godly principles in the marketplace?

People often ask what a church is like—it’s flavor, essentially—and I think it would be cool to answer that question overtly in the name of the church. Imagine a church focused on:

1. LEADing people to Jesus.
2. LEADing them to maturity in their faith.
3. Enabling them to LEAD their families, their neighborhoods, their workplace, and the country itself in a Godly way.

Leadership Church. I like it!

I’ve been particularly reflective for the past few days; not sure why. We’ve had another great Christmas. The family has gathered, and scattered, and will gather again. The party train keeps rolling on this time of year.

The girls had a big Christmas morning; too big, some would say. But that’s what Christmases are for. I even got in on the action—both sides—as the recipient of 5 bottles of the nearest thing I have to a favorite wine along with a new tennis racket that’s sure to make me a U.S. Open contender in 2013.

I was also a big giver this year. The operative term being “big.”  Among other things in Kelly’s stash this Christmas morn was a $3.50 gallon jar of whole dill pickles. (That’s big! You ever try to eat a gallon of dill pickles?) They are sort of a hillbilly version of mistletoe, only they make her pucker up even quicker! Tractor Supply is a great place for last minute stocking stuffers and goofy do-dads you can’t find anywhere else.

In the midst of all that we have and do, more and more I’m becoming aware of the temporal nature of things. As I trod through the cold this morning feeding the animals, Christmas music was playing in the barn….I’ll be home for Christmas…… and for some reason I began to think about a young mother I know who lost her husband tragically a couple of years ago just as the holidays were beginning. I wondered what Christmas mornings were like in her household.

I’m so blessed. I’ve got so much. I enjoy it all so richly. And yet, this isn’t it. There’s more and better to come that will someday make all this seem comparatively worthless. That’ll be it!  Someday, I really will be home for Christmas. Oh, that will be glory!

Until then, I’ll keep sucking the marrow out of this wonderful experience and these beautiful people I been graced to share it with. I’ll keep seasoning trips to the ladies specialty shops with stops at Tractor Supply because it just wouldn’t be Christmas without something goofy under the tree. Someday, when I am gone, I’m betting they won’t remember new iPhones or tennis rackets or jewelry. But maybe the gallon jar of dill pickles will become a family legend. That’s kinda what Christmas gifts are all about.

Have you noticed how nearly every time there is a mass murder like the Connecticut school shootings it seems the shooter is described as a “loner” or “dressed in goth” or in some other way that indicates they were perhaps on the fringe, or marginalized? I have a suggestion that I think will reduce these kinds of incidents. I hope my own daughters will pay attention to what I’ve written, and if you like it, that you’ll share it with your kids, too.

How might it be different if we took note of the “odd” kid who is at the fringe of the group, and invited them to its center? Oh, I understand that the guy with pimples and hair hanging down in his eyes isn’t “cool” enough to be in your group. But what if you invited him to sit at your table for lunch anyway? What if you asked about his family? His dog? What he was interested in? Do you think there’s any chance you might be throwing him a lifeline that would save him and others?

Maybe!

When I was young I wanted to be cool as badly as anyone else. I still do, but I didn’t ever quite arrive at “cool” when I was young and my teenaged daughters are quick to remind me that I’m not cool today. However, in college, I was more in the “in” crowd than not, and I’m grateful that I was able to get over myself just enough to be at least welcoming and inclusive to people who definitely weren’t cool.

I remember Bill. What I  remember about him is that Bill was an engineering student. He was dorky tall and skinny, talked like an alien with a nasal blockage, wore black horn-rimmed glasses and had bad acne. Bill was the kind of guy who came in the room and stood on the wall away from the crowd. I remember reaching out to Bill and talking to him. He never made it to the center of the “in” group, but at least he wasn’t ignored and anonymous.

I remember Amy. Same story as Bill. She may have even been his sister, I can’t recall.

Then there was Jeff. He had long greasy hair under a dirty John Deere cap. He wore thick glasses, had bad pimples, never looked anyone in the eye, and mumbled when he talked. Jeff wasn’t cool. I didn’t really want to be his friend. But Jeff and I did have one thing in common: we were both seniors in college flunking freshman algebra. So there we sat together on the back row listening to a Teaching Assistant from Godknowswhere jabbering in an unintelligible tongue while writing undecipherable algebraic equations on the board.

I befriended Jeff. Nothing big. He never came over the my apartment. He probably never met any of my friends. I just talked to him; I treated him as human. I tried to be a bridge across which Jesus could walk and reach out to a guy who I was pretty sure was being ignored by everybody else.

Fast forward three or four years and my phone rang, it was Jeff from Algebra. He said “Do you remember me?” Yes, I did. He was wondering if he could have a meeting with me. Oh great! I thought. Now he’s God’s gift to multilevel marketing and I’m the only guy whose ever talked to him and I’m going to have to set through his presentation. Cautiously I asked what we’d be meeting about and he blurted out “I was wondering whether you could tell me how to be saved?”

YES! Yes, I could. In fact, I was available for a meeting that very morning.

A few hours later I met Jeff in a local restaurant. I didn’t get to lead him to Jesus, he’d gone and bought Billy Graham’s book “How to be Born Again” and had already asked Christ into his life. But I did get to talk with him about what had already transpired, help him understand what it meant, and got to send him into the rest of his life with some basics about how to begin growing in his faith. I never saw him again. But some 30 years later my heart is warmed that apparently I’d acted like a Jesus follower just enough that when Jeff wanted to talk about Jesus, he knew to call me.

I don’t know what ever became of Jeff.

I don’t know what happened to Bill.

I don’t know what became of Amy.

But I do know that for a time in their life I was a friend, they got to sit at my table, and while it wasn’t the coolest table, at least they were no longer socially ostracized. They were welcome.

You want to do something to reduce violence and the risk of a shooting at your school? Make an extra place at the table for the kid who is a loner, then invite them to sit with you.

My daughters, and other young folks, I understand that you are cool, and that you want to be with cool people like you. I know that “they” are weird and creepy, and that you don’t necessarily want to hang with them. But I also know that they’d be welcome a Jesus’ table, and they ought to be at yours. I’m not asking you to make them BFFs. I’m just asking you to be decent and treat them as human. Get over yourself just briefly enough to ask this simply question “How would I want to be treated if I were them?” or even better “How would Jesus treat them?” and then do accordingly.

A little kindness goes along way. It might open the door for you to lead them to Jesus. At the very least it might release the pressure of isolation and shine enough light into their life that it prevents an enraged school shooting.

When we call ourselves Christians we take on responsibilities. One of those is to include people like Jeff, Bill, Amy, and Adam Lanza. If they aren’t welcomed at your table, it probably means you aren’t sitting at His.