Jon C. Swanson's Blog, page 34

walking.

The other day, I walked out of the hospital as an ambulance, horn blaring, headed toward the Emergency Department entrance.

I kept walking. 

The page came as I was packing up, thirty-minutes later than planned. My pager was already cleared, and cleaned, and ready for the next user. But my coworker told me what was coming. “Cardiac arrest.” We fistbumped and I put my pack over my shoulder. I clocked out. I said goodbye to a nurse, and the public safety guys. 

Even knowing that there w...

Not for what they do for us.

When we read the words of James, talking about his older half-brother Jesus, he’s inviting us to consider that we aren’t the best neighbors.

We like some people better than others.

And, James suggests, we do that because we think of what they can do for us. We use people. We gain status from people.

James wants us to imagine a gathering.

Twenty or thirty people are showing up at a large house for a Bible study. The owner of the house is working on the refreshments and asks a frie...

A prayer for the twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

God.

We come to you and ask that your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

It sounds noble.

Then we read words from James that “the royal law found in scripture” is to “love our neighbor as ourselves.”

That sounds okay for those of us who have carefully chosen our neighborhoods, who have strategically chosen our schools, who have found a church that is comfortable to our way of thinking and living, who have selected teams and clubs and groups appropriate to our tastes and asp...

On imperfection

I have a really old pair of shoes. I keep them by our front door and only wear them to take the trash out.

The stitching has worn out in several places. The soles are maybe the third set I had put on. I eventually decided to stop repairing them, since they still work perfectly to go back and forth to the trashcan.

We are not perfect. Only God can claim that attribute (Matthew 5:48).

But God can still use us.

I often beat myself up for how I fail. I could go on much longer abo...

The Christian way.

I’ve been asked in situations recently to talk about the Christian way to do something.

I don’t know how to answer that question.

Because I know too many people who identify themselves as Christians who do things in very different ways. I know of people in different countries, on different continents, speaking different languages. And there may be a significant difference between the way Christians do things and the Christian way to do things.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, many of those...

Send me?

Rich Dixon is asking questions again.

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One evening during the second FREEDOM TOUR, we talked about the notion of “being sent.”

We began with this prompt:

Then I heard the voice   of the Lord saying,
“Whom shall I send?   And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I.   Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8)

A while back I spoke at a men’s retreat. One guy answered a question about fear in a brutally honest manner. “I’m afraid if I really listen to God, He might tell me to do something I don’t wan...

Washing hands.

In Mark 7, Jesus is responding to religious leaders who are criticizing his disciples for not living up to the teachings of the elders.  In this case, the disciples weren’t following a religious custom of washing their hands.

At one point, he seems to say,

You don’t care about what God says about how to live. You care about what people have said that God must have meant about how to live. You care about establishing rules about how to live.

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Our attention and our time are eat...

A day

In the U.S., it’s Labor Day, one of our Federal holidays. In my world, it’s Monday. So I’m working. I decided that I’d give you and me a day off.

A prayer for the twenty-second Sunday in ordinary time

God.

If I understand correctly,

You care both about what I say and how I say it.
You care both about what I do and what reasons I have for doing it.
You care about widows and orphans and invite me to do the same.
You care about the damage to others I can do with the anger in my heart.
You care about the stories I tell of you or the lack of those stories.
You care that the word you have put in us changes what we build our lives around, what we use to make our decisions.

We know that you ca...

Ben TV

I’m watching Ben TV.

He’s napping upstairs, under a quilt made by a woman who was kicked of her bedroom seventy years ago by my mother.

More accurately, my mother moved from Wisconsin to Minneapolis to finish her teaching degree. She didn’t have a job. She didn’t have a place to live. And her first day in town, she ended up with a job at the drugstore and a room at the Hellicksons. The room had been Joyce’s.

She forgave my mother.

Joyce and Walt reconnected with my parents and th...