Kevin J. Bowman - a pilgrim trying to be the hands and feet of Jesus

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lntensional Intentional Attention

Wednesday, April 02, 2008 12:28 PM

It's not the divinity of Christ that I struggle with. It is his humanity. We teach that Christ was both fully God and fully human. Perhaps my problem is that I have never met anyone who was fully human.

The NIV translates John 10:10 to have life "to it's fullest." It's the experience of being fully human that I both desire and doubt. Since we have little record of Adam before the fall the lifestyle of Jesus left to us by the Gospel writers is the only play book for the fully human experience.

So approaching the Gospels with a new set of questions I will seek to learn:

What things did Jesus do?
What things did Jesus desire?

Doing and Desiring these two actions sum up the whole quantity of our time. Even the little decisions of life fall into these categories. What we desire is the philosophical backdrop for what we do. By this I mean what things I DO reveal what things I desire.

Two easy to explore examples of this from my own life are comfort and television:

I desire to be self sacrificial, yet I DO things that expose my greater desire for personal comfort. I desire to find more time for relationship both with people and with God, yet I waste time by watching television, so I expose my greater desire for amusement than for relationship.

Fully Human living requires intensional intentional attention. By this I mean our life must be intensely directed external thinking. Look at the examples of Jesus that demonstrate this. Comments by gospel writers like, "as was his custom" talking about times of prayer; actions like noticing the woman who touched his garment to receive healing; encouragements to Martha to just sit and be with him; decisions like encouraging the sinless to be the adulterous woman's judge. His attentions were CONSTANTLY turned toward intentional interactions.

I think the contrast to this is inattentiveness. Most of my day is spent on matters and issues that appeal to and consume me. This is not because of obession, but more because of laziness. I focus internally and therefore I lack the intentional effort to pay attention to the poverty around me. Jesus was zealous in his effort to constantly keep the poverty of his surroundings at immediate access. Among the poor he saw the poverty of their situation. Among the lepers he saw the poverty of their bodies. Among the tax collectors he saw the poverty of the minds. Among the pharisees he saw the poverty of the spirit. His eyes were always attentive to whatever poverty was present in the people he encountered.

I am not struggling with this as a theorem that must be solved to solidify my faith. Instead I want to look like Jesus! I want my time, and my day to be spent like his time and his day. I want to breathe out life, peace, and community like he did. I want to be healing in people's situations. Poverty is everywhere around me. I can see the starving orphan, the lonely coworker, the fearful student, the broken marriage, the ignored child, the forgotten widow, the addicted acquaintance, the suicidal teen, the ... on and on the list the list can go, right here, right around me, but I must be external.

It's not the divinity of Christ that I struggle with. It is his humanity. Then I guess, it's not so much his humanity, as much as my own humanity. I struggle if I can live out Intensional Intentional Attention. I struggle if I am willing to be Fully Human like Him.

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Homecomings, Treasures, and Community

Saturday, March 29, 2008 3:53 PM

In about 2 hours from now I will leave my house to travel over to Midway to pick up my family as they return from the Spring Break travels. I can not wait for their return. I miss them terribly when they are gone. My wife, is my best friend in the world, and I feel very disconnected as she is several states aways. My oldest daughter constantly challenges my creativity. My middle daughter is my Rock - Paper - Scissors opponent and I have felt quite a hole in my life missing out on a week of competition. The Boy is an adventure as he is discovering his individuality. So although in the midst of the absence of my family my friends have fed me supper and kept me company till the late hours of the evening, I feel like I am wandering aimlessly when they are not around.

So today is our homecoming! As they were gone, I have spent time deciding about what things we will NEED in Africa. My wonderful All Clad pan set, and Le Cruset Stoneware will have to come with us. Our Furniture, Televisions, and Tivos will probably stay behind. Some of the kids toys will make the trek, while others, will be left behind. After a short time the process certainly gets you thinking about treasures.

When we were on our vision trip in Swaziland with Hopechest the team was distributing NEW SHOES that a church back in the states had collected. Although, I was not at all involved with the people handing out the shoes I was present, and made an interesting observation. The children would BAG their old shoes as they came out of the little stick built hut where members of our team were handing out the shoes. These old shoes were worn out, and is desperate need of replacement, yet to the Swazi orphans, they were a treasure that needed to be protected and returned home.

All of this kind of meshed together in my brain this morning, as I was cleaning and preparing for the family to come home. In Revelation 21:4 Jesus promises all things are being made new. HE at the center of EVERYTHING become renewal. In the New Heavens and Earth, our final homecoming where all the community of God's People will be at rest all these treasures whether a stainless steal pan, or a worn out shoe will appear just a futile. In light of the true homecoming of being restored to the greatest treasure of all our aimless meandering, and useless hoarding will melt into the eternal community of life.

Repentance, I don't mean the silly telling God I want to behave better than I have in the past. True Repentance, the kind that is traitorous to our previous allegiances, treasures, and communities; calls us out celebrate that homecoming now. I am PRESENT in the NEW HEAVENS and EARTH with Christ when I am GATHERED in HIS COMMUNITY to RESTORE HIS TREASURES to the broken places of this old earth. I celebrate the peace of homecoming when I am working in community to break bondages, and proclaim life!

This is a resolution! I resolve to live in the REAL PRESENCE of the NEW KINGDOM, NOW by treasuring the broken, by restoring the lonely to community, and by working alongside Christ to bring to reality when all things are made new.

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Tom Davis' New Book

Tuesday, August 28, 2007 9:13 PM

Tom Davis, whose first book "Fields of the Fatherless" changed my life, has released a new book which is available from Amazon today. It's title is Red Letters: Living a Faith That Bleeds and I am so very excited for my copy to arrive. Please, if you have not read, Fields of the Fatherless, buy it and read it. If you can not afford it, contact me and I will buy it for you. I am sure that this book will be equally as exciting.

In light of the email from CHC announcing Tom's new book, I visited Tom's blog and from there add him as a friend on Facebook. After adding him as a friend I saw he had received a comment from Mike Todd of Waving or Drowning which I am an occasional reader of already. Once one Mike's site I saw a reference to Pernell Goodyear, who spoke at Up/Rooted a few months back. So I surfed over and read down his blog. On his blog he had a reference to some research on community conducted by M. Scott Peck that I found very relevant to the issues of apathy and disengagement that I think plagues the church I attend.

First, read the 4 stages of community:
  1. Pseudo-community - An initial state of "being nice". Pseudo-community is characterized by politeness, conflict avoidance, and denial of individual differences. Let's be honest - most of us can't keep this up for long. Eventually someone is going to speak up, speak out, and the dam breaks.
  2. Chaos - In the stage of chaos, individual differences are aired, and the group tries to overcome them through misguided attempts to heal or to convert. Listening suffers, and emotions and frustration tend to run high. There are only two ways out of chaos: retreat into pseudo-community [often through organization], or forward, through emptiness.
  3. Emptiness - Emptiness refers to the process of recognizing and releasing the barriers [expectations, prejudices, the need to control] that hold us back from authentic communication with others, from being emotionally available to hear the voices of those around us. This is a period of going within, of searching ourselves and sharing our truths with the group. This process of "dying to the self" can make way for something remarkable to emerge.
  4. Community - "In my defenselessness, my safety lies." In this stage, individuals accept others as they are, and are themselves accepted. Differences are no longer feared or ignored, but rather are celebrated. A deep sense of peace and joy characterizes the group.
Based on the communities I have been a part of in my life, these stages are perfectly categorized. A lot of communities, never move past a see-saw of Pseudo-community and Chaos. When the pain from emptiness begins to ware into the group the choice is to retreat back to the appearance of pseudo-community.

Since this stalemate between pseudo-community and emptiness settles in a longterm lodging within chaos a new category emerges that sits outside, yet alongside the progress which is the disengagement. The members divorce themselves from any sort of dependence on the community, and instead of being forced to fledge for the growth of the community, their belonging a apparition, since they are present only in body.

This ties into our lack of focus on the authentic mission of the Kingdom of God, since one can not be deeply involved in the sacrifice it takes to follows Jesus' lifestyle as an island. The dependence that is necessary to force forward the nurture of the community is the weakness one realizes when they have over expended their personal physical, emotional, and spiritual resources in serving the least of these.

The challenge to leadership is to find ways to compel membership to "fish or cut bait" by enlightening them to the destitution their independence has led them to.

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Gospel According To Starbucks - A Review

Thursday, February 15, 2007 12:11 PM


Lenoard Sweet in his newest offering "The Gospel Accoring to Starbucks" challenges the church to rethink it's "brand image" in light of a post modern culture. His book indicts not nly the IC bust also the Emergents for their failure to practice what he calls the EPIC life.

E - Experiential
P- Participatory
I- Image Rich
C- Connective

I found his work to be brilliant. The work came off as a heart felt conversation with a pastor rather than a preachy dissertation by a scholar. Though he showed no embarrassment to flex his scholarly credentials this was always done in such a way to accent his shepherding nudge. I was blessed by the ideas he presented and the medium he chose to communicate the ideas through.

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