My route to work for several years took me down the same road at about the same time every morning. And, more often than not, I would see the same woman, power walking down the sidewalk in my direction.

I knew she was out there to exercise, so I didn’t offer her a ride.

When Blake Pollock of Rochester, MI kept seeing the same man walking along the road on which Pollack was commuting to his bank job – no matter the weather – he eventually offered him a ride. He learned that James Robertson was walking to work – a commute of 21 miles each way. Daily.

Pollack took Robertson’s story to the Detroit Free Press, which published it front page. Here’s a man working for just over $10 an hour, who hasn’t missed a day of work in years, even after his car gasped its last years ago. He could not afford to replace it so he walks, catches a bus, and walks to work 21 miles each way, five days a week from areas that no metro Detroit bus serves.

When his 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift is over, he hikes seven miles to catch the last bus for a ways, then walks the last five miles home in the dark.

After the story of Robertson’s grueling commute appeared in the newspaper, a 19-year-old Wayne State University student started a crowd-funding site to raise $5,000 to get Robertson a car. Within three days donors inspired by Robertson’s dedication contributed more than $210,000. Plus two dealers each offered a new car.

Now, instead of saving money for a new pair of work boots, Robertson is weighing car options, and he has money for maintenance and insurance as long as he’ll need it.

This is a rich story on many levels.

First, it demonstrates the power of a story. We may think people are getting harder and more isolated and tribal. And we are. But a powerful story still moves us.

Use stories to communicate. Whether you’re preaching, disciplining a child, giving a speech, training an employee, extract a story from your experience or reading, or listening, to demonstrate your point.

If you are leading an annual giving campaign, put a person up front to tell her story of sacrificial giving and the blessings that follow. I still remember a couple at my church who told of selling their dream house so they could lower their cost of living and be more generous. Our annual giving reached an all time high after that.

Second, this story illustrates that money follows the information flow. Robertson’s could still be walking for the next ten years if no one knew his situation. What are you doing to tell your story? It doesn’t just happen.

Third, the story of James Robertson illustrates the importance of having and supporting the mediums through which we receive our stories; be they the newspaper, NPR, publications of your favorite organizations or reader supported web sites like my favorite baptistnews.com.

Fourth, Robertson’s story is a heart-warming reminder that our self absorbed, insular, tribal society can still respond with a generous heart.

If you have a project to get done, money to raise, people to help – tell their story.

‘It was different because it was better’

It takes more than a tithing sermon from Malachi 3:10 to create an effective annual stewardship campaign in your church.

An effective effort requires a major time commitment to plan, enlist volunteers, establish committees, design materials, conduct meetings and prepare sermons. Ministers serious about issues larger than raising a budget – such as teaching stewardship and leading a congregation to grow in generosity – must do all of this while keeping all their other ministry plates spinning.

This is where I can help you.

Two pastors of churches that recently conducted highly successful annual stewardship campaigns utilizing the expertise of a development consultant confessed that they could not do it all.

Davis Chappell, pastor of the 8,000-member Brentwood United Methodist Church, realized he had “so many wheels turning” in his second year at the megachurch that “I really needed someone I could count on who could help us.”

“As a pastor, you say you can do that in addition to your other duties, but you cut corners,” Chappell said. “The more you have someone who can take some of that off you the more successful you’re going to be.”

Chappell led the church’s annual giving campaign the previous year himself and saw growth. “We could do it ourselves,” he said. “But we’re stronger when we have a consultant who comes in to help.”

Bruce Cochran, pastor of 250-member First Baptist Church of Seymour, IN agrees with Chappell that the professional help they received increased their effectiveness, developed leaders, freed them for regular pastoral duties and resulted in significant financial gains to support church ministries.

Cochran said the difference in conducting their campaign internally as they have done, or in using a consultant “was polish, professionalism, efficiency and comprehensiveness.”

“It was different because it was better,” Cochran said. “It was communicated better, participation was better, and it was not just the pastor standing up and saying we should do this.”

First Baptist’s priority was to return to the place where it could again devote 20 percent of its income to missions – an historical standard the church had to back away from during the recession. Results were so positive the church is again giving to missions at that generous level.

The Brentwood church also gives missions high priority and dovetailed one of its satellite churches into its annual campaign effort. The benefit of using a consultant, especially one who has been a minister, is “pastoral experience,” Chappell said. “He’s not going to do anything to embarrass us. He brought us a pattern and a stick-to-it-iveness.”

Chappell said stewardship is about trust, first an expression of trust in God and then of trust by the donor in their leadership.

“That’s a blessed burden,” he said. “We’ve got to live up to that.”

During their annual campaign the church did not emphasize a financial goal or the need to fund a budget. “We pointed out that the stronger our generosity the deeper our outreach,” Chappell said.

The result was a growth in commitments of “roughly 340” new giving units and an $800,000 increase in committed gifts. “That is “really significant” for us, he said.

The satellite church, which was conducting its campaign at the same time, saw an increase of 65 percent – or $100,000 – which was “enormous.”

“They had never done an operating campaign,” Chappell said. “We are very, very excited that our daughter outpaced us.”

Chappell encourages pastors to address stewardship as a spiritual discipline. Besides, he said, “everybody’s talking about money” and the conversation is better directed from the pulpit than in the parking lot.

“The only thing worse than a church that always talks about money is one that never talks about money,” he said. “I’ve never known a person who accidently tithed. Discipleship is not an accident, it’s an intention.”

In Seymour, Cochran originally was planning a capital campaign but he liked the idea of “getting a head start” by doing an annual giving emphasis first. TCP consultants are finding many churches electing to teach generosity through annual stewardship before beginning a capital campaign.

After an outstanding success in their annual giving effort, First Baptist held a Legacy Campaign and secured $600,000 in planned gifts through which they will fund long-term physical plant and mission needs.

 

For a no-obligation conversation, call me at (919) 607-4991 and we’ll discuss the possible.

 

As a cyclist, I’m always aware of the wind. Thinking of the wind today reminded me of living in Oklahoma where a constant, ceaseless wind never leaves you alone.

Like a pushy neighbor, wind squeezes uninhibited and uninvited through the slightest crease in your front door, obtrusive, obnoxious, constant, leaving behind a layer of dust, like empty bottles and potato chips after a loud party.

Leaning against wind on the soccer field, it snaps and flaps my pants legs like an old mother beating her rugs.

Short, stubby trees lean chronically north, backs to the strong south wind like bent old men looking for a seat. Trees don’t develop long torsos, don’t’ extend long arms into the sky. Trees keep their arms down and hands close to their breasts.

I know it’s windy in Oklahoma because one day it stopped blowing and I fell down.

I was told that in the Dust Bowl days people hung wet sheets over closed windows. Yet they still found dust – in their refrigerators! Today Oklahomans just run a dust rag over the counter and tell the kids to button up.

Face the wind and its roar against your ears and blocks other sounds. Like a hot, dry towel it wraps itself around your head and draws until our face feels like the peeling separated from yesterday’s orange.

Your face shrinks into a permanent scowl. Your lips curl inside protectively, and squint against the onslaught of dust.

Through downtown buildings devil wind lurks against the wall and jumps onto the sidewalk to flip up a frilly dress, then roars down the street, scattering papers and blowing off hats.

Firemen say the wind evaporates moisture so fast that prairie grass can be tinder dry an hour after a soaking rain.

Cyclists get so excited by a tail wind they must take care not to ride it so far in an hour they cannot return in a day, struggling against their benefactor gone bad.

Oklahoma’s wind is bare knuckled and hairy chested, unencumbered by any subtlety. It clings to you like a too friendly dog or an ugly date. It grinds off tooth enamel and makes contact lenses torture.

Big trucks blasting through the wind are a blessing to other drivers. Although empty semi trailers have been capsized by wind on the Arizona desert, you don’t think about that when you struggle up behind a moving air dam like a big truck.

Wind is buffeting you, drowning out the radio, and you’re pulling against it like a swimmer against the tide. Suddenly the truck’s vacuum pulls you into its protective pouch and your world grows silent, smooth and easy.

Oklahoma wind gets to newcomers. They’re not used to wind flipping their car hood against their windshield when they check the oil, or chasing their wigs across the yard, or searching the neighborhood for their trash cans and small dogs.

We may not be Oklahoma wind rookies, but winds still catch most of us, sometime. A death, unwanted transfer, church conflict, downsizing, child’s problem or spouse’s health are all winds that can sweep us like tumbleweeds over barren plains.

You can roar in frustration and anger, throw up your hands, pull your hair and give up the ghost.

Me? I’m going to slide in behind a big truck.

All signs pointed to rain.

With work on a four-day summer schedule I was looking forward to a good long bike ride on Friday. But the newspaper said rain. The weather channel said rain. The computer said rain. My bunions said rain.

My primary weather monitor is the modern miracle of glass. I looked out the window and saw no rain. I saw squirrels falling all over themselves scrambling for access to the bird feeder; and I saw rabbits nibbling at the herb garden, but I saw no rain.

I waited and debated. I pondered and wondered. Should I ride and risk a soaking, or stay home and kill two hours wishing I’d gone?

Then I remembered: hey, rain only affects a bike’s handling, braking, traction and visibility, so I thought even if it rains, what could be the harm? I’m not going to melt. So off I went.

I enjoyed a great ride and stayed mostly dry. By the time it rained a little on me, I was close to home and the rain felt refreshing.

Of course, I was glad I took the chance. I stayed within a radius fairly close to home and had my phone with me in a plastic bag in case of a hard storm. So rain posed little risk, actually.

Do you live under threat of rain? Are you waiting for the next step, wondering if you should go back to school, change jobs, ask that girl out, try something new? You’d like to and if you were honest, you’d realize you’re killing a lot of time waiting for the answer to fall from the sky like summer hail.

People around you are the weather report, warning you, urging you to buy bread and milk and be on the road only if absolutely necessary.

You’re afraid failure might soak you so instead of anticipating success or even working as hard as you should at whatever you’re doing now, you fall into weather report mode; listening to everyone else; paralyzed by opinion; rotting by option.

You can lose a lot of sunny summer days that way.

What’s the worst that could happen? Do you risk failure? Yes. But failure is just your first step to your next starting point. Don’t let the threat of rain keep you from trying.

I attended a statewide meeting of Baptists several years ago felt like I needed to be watching ceiling tiles and checking out cracks in the floor. Speakers spouted lots of catastrophic imagery.

As the seasonal Christmas tune says, “The weather outside was frightful.” It was constant rain one day and blow-me-down wind the next. But those natural conditions were nothing compared to the forecast from inside the building.

A seminary president said an earthquake had occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention and a tsunami is on the way. A pastor said, “When God wants to do an impossible task, He takes an impossible man and crushes him.”

Then he said God wants us to be “broken before the Lord.”

Other speakers implied that unless we are crushed, broken, humbled, living in dangerous places, bruised and trampled we will not be in condition for God to use.

Yikes.

I got the sense that I need to be like Private Beetle Bailey after Sarge has beaten him into an unrecognizable pulp.

But I knew what everyone was talking about. Until we are willing to deconstruct the “self” we’ve so arduously built, we’re not very usable to God. We’ll get in the way because we have our own agendas and are subject to our own self-constructed limitations.

God does not want to break us for no good reason. He just wants to crack the shell to get to the nut. Or for you northerners, he wants to crack the ice to get to the fish.

We spend a lot of time painting, patching and primping the veneer to make ourselves presentable to God. But He’s most interested in what’s hiding beneath. If He needs to take a whack at that shell, He will.

It might be better for you to start the deconstruction ahead of time.

Here is a Christmas quiz, with questions gathered from several sources. You can use it any way you wish but it makes a great Sunday School class or other party function. Make 2-3 teams and have a competition, with the winners earning the last of the egg nog!

As you can see, these are only the questions. I DO have an answer sheet!

Christmas Quiz

From Matthew 2 (mostly 🙂 )

1. How long had good King Wenceslaus been king of Judea at the time of Jesus’ birth?
2. Who was king in Judea at the time of Jesus’ birth?
3. How many Magi came to worship Baby Jesus?
4. Which is the only book of the New Testament that mentions the Three Kings?
5. What did Herod ask of the Magi?
6. What country were the Magi from?
7. What gifts did they bring to Jesus?
8. What dream did Joseph have after the Magi left?
9. What signaled Joseph that it was safe to return to Judea?
10. When Herod realized he had been outwitted by the Magi, what was his reaction?
11. When Mary, Joseph and Jesus returned from Egypt, they intended to come to Judea, but they learned one of Herod’s sons was ruling there. What was the son’s name?
12. Why were Mary and Joseph afraid of him?

From Luke

13. Who told Mary she was to bear a child?
14. Who was Mary’s cousin who was also pregnant in her old age?
15. What was the name of the son this cousin eventually bore?
16. Who issued the decree that prompted Mary and Joseph to go to register?
17. To what town did they travel?
18. Why did Joseph and Mary travel to Bethlehem?
19. In what kind of building was Jesus born?
20. Where was Jesus laid?
21. What animals surrounded the manger?
22. How many angels spoke to the shepherds to tell them the “good news of great joy?”
23. What did the angel of the Lord say to the shepherds that he also said to Mary?
24. What did the little drummer boy ask of Mary?
25. How old was Jesus when he received his name?
26. Who was the righteous man in the temple who the Holy Spirit had revealed that he would live until he saw “the consolation of Israel”
27. What name is given to the four-week period leading up to Christmas?

Christmas traditions questions

28. What date is St Stephen’s Day?
29. In Charles Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol, who was Scrooge’s dead business partner?
30. The song White Christmas was first performed in which 1942 film?
31. London’s Trafalgar Square Christmas tree is traditionally given by which country?
32. In the song The Twelve Days of Christmas, ‘…my true love brought to me nine…’ what?
33. Name the original eight reindeer from the ‘Twas the night Before Christmas’ poem?
34. Which Christmas carol includes the lyrics ‘…To save us all from Satan’s power, when we were gone astray?
35. What color are the berries of the mistletoe plant?
36. In the inspirational 1946 film, It’s a Wonderful Life, what’s the name of George Bailey’s guardian angel?
37. In which modern country is St Nicholas’s birthplace and hometown?
38. Who wrote How the Grinch Stole Christmas?
39. From which country does the poinsettia plant originate?
40. Who is officially credited as the author of Auld Lang Syne?
41. How many points does a snowflake have?
42. The carol “Silent Night” was written in which country?
43. Where did “Good King Wenceslas” rule?
44. Which Christmas plant has the Latin name “Hedera”?
45. To which city does New York cop John McClane travel to on Christmas Eve in “Die Hard”?
46. What fruit is used to make a Christingle?
47. What Christmas food staple was first brought to Great Britain by William Strickland in 1526?
48. Which European country was the first to issue a Christmas stamp?
49. In which German city would you find the shrine of the Magi, said to house the bones of the Three Kings?
50. Which Pope in AD 320 declared December 25th to be Christmas Day?
51. Which Saint first performed a nativity play?
52. What present did Harry Potter receive for his first Christmas at Hogwarts?
53. On what date does Twelfth night occur?
54. Who wrote the song “White Christmas?”
55. Which US state was the last to declare Christmas a holiday?
56. In Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” what is Scrooge’s first name?
57. Name the three reindeer whose name begins with the letter ‘D’.
58. With which seasonal product did J C Hall make his millions?
59. Who composed “The Christmas Oratorio?”
60. In which film did Judy Garland sing, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”?
61. In which fictional land is it always winter but never Christmas? –
62. In “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” why was The Grinch so mean?

I had a birthday this week. Like comedian George Lopez would say, I was thrilled to have it because it means I’m not dead.

Friends and family called to indicate their memory is still sharp enough to have remembered my birthday. Some sang, some were brief, others wanted to catch up. Most of them asked if I felt another year older.

Truth is, I don’t feel another year older. I feel about like I did five or 10 years ago. In fact, because of diet, exercise and a good wife, I feel just like I thought five years ago that I’d feel at this point. And I may be naive, but I expect to feel the same 10 years from now. After that I may give the whole diet and exercise thing a rest.

But it strikes me that I’m actually doing and feeling much better than I would have guessed, were I to ask myself 25 years ago what I thought I’d feel like at this point in my life. Strange? Not really.

At age 62 I’m not playing pickup basketball like I once did. My football playing consists of throwing passes to grandsons, who do all the running. But I can still hum it in a nice spiral.

I’ve traded running, which I never liked, for bike riding, which I love. I’m riding 64 miles tomorrow to commemorate my birthday — one mile per year with a couple extra thrown because the route is 64 miles and I don’t want to stop two miles from home.

I eat basically a paleo diet, with some allowances for chocolate covered raisins and more fruit than it likes because, hey, it’s fruit and has to be good for you. Paleo is ultra low carb, basically meat, veggies, fruit. I haven’t done soft drinks for years; don’t eat stuff like rice, bread and potatoes that turn to sugar in your body. I’m not on any medicine of any kind. Thank you mom and dad for good genetics.

Some 100 Facebook friends took the time to say “Happy Birthday” and that was nice. I got a new computer monitor to fight “text neck” from being hunched over trying to read my tiny laptop screen.

But the birthday, the demarcation of another year gone by, was really, just another day. I’m going to a birthday party Sunday for a grandson who has been excited about it for a month. My daughter blocks off her “birth month” for daily celebration.

“Just another day” can be a good thing when your days are good. And thanks be to God, my days are good.

I wish the same for you.