The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” ~ Matthew 7:1-3

 

If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. ~ Galatians 5:15

 

These words of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul from 2,000 years ago hit so hard right now. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a post-mortem on the fall and destruction of one of the most prolific churches in the 21^st century. This was a tough one to listen to but I’m grateful I finally listened to it. It took me three years to consider listening and I’m glad I waited, because the lessons here sank deep. Chaulk full of 25 episodes with interviews and helpful and prescriptive contemplations, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill explored the death of one of the most influential and successful churches in America. It is also a convicting examination into my own heart and mind: the intentions, compromises, misunderstandings, and impulses. These are lessons for doing better in every space I operate in, with very real and well-intentioned people who operate in ways that are great examples of the very good, very bad, and very ugly. After listening to this helpful investigation, I had to find out who else was talking about it and how others were feeling about it. Carey Nieuwhof had one of the best takeaways I found, writing from a leadership perspective. I value good leaders, and being a good leader, so Niewhof’s lessons are prescriptive to me:

 

Originally published by Carey Nieuwhof

 

“Like so many leaders in the church space, I listened to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast…To say it was hard to listen to is an understatement.

It took me a month or two to even decide whether I would listen to it or not.

For those who may not know, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a podcast produced by Christianity Today that chronicles the humble beginnings, explosive growth, and very public dissolution of Mars Hill, a megachurch that once had multiple campuses in Seattle, Washington (one of the most unchurched cities in the U.S.). 

Filled with interviews with former staff and church members, the focal point of the series is the leadership style of lead pastor Mark Driscoll.

Like many people I know, when I started listening, there were times when I shut an episode off, thinking I couldn’t go any further, only to resume it a day or a week later. The story is so painful for the multiple layers of hurt involved and yet crucial for what we can learn moving forward.

Eventually, I finished the series, but the ambivalence never really disappeared.

So, why this post?

Mainly because this is a leadership blog, and the patterns described around Mars Hill are not unique to Mars Hill. They’re not even unique to churches. 

The patterns can happen—and do happen—in varying degrees in many different churches and businesses.

While The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast isn’t a definitive account of what happened in Seattle (for example, despite attempts, former Mars Hill Lead Pastor Mark Driscoll didn’t agree to be interviewed for the show), it provided enough of a picture of the unhealthy happenings in churches and the dysfunctional happenings within leaders to convict me of my own sin (again).

For me, the most disturbing part of listening to the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is that I saw some of myself in the story.

I recognized some of the same impulses in me.

There’s a shadow side of leadership, pride, and power lurking in most of us. Perhaps in all of us. At least, it definitely lurks in me.

And if you identify the unhealthy patterns in your own life, maybe you can catch it early enough to prevent it from harming others.

So, let me go first to say that everything I’m describing below is things I’ve had to wrestle down in my own heart and my own leadership. I hope and pray for progress and victory for all of us who lead, including the leaders and people who were part of Mars Hill.

Exposing the darkness in ourselves is one of the greatest ways to find more light.

Here are five reflections I’m processing after finishing the podcast.

There's a shadow side of leadership, pride, and power that lurks in most of us. Perhaps in all of us.

1. The Ends Actually Don’t Justify the Means

I’ve worked in a few places over the years: a law firm, at radio and tv stations, at a church, and for the last few years as an author, speaker, and a podcaster myself, running a small communications company.

You’d think it was easier to lead like the ends justified the means in a law firm or private company.

Nope.

It was easiest as a pastor.

For exactly the reasons described in the podcast, you end up saying things like:

• Well, more people are coming to faith than are leaving.
• I can’t be responsible for the consequences…that’s up to God.
• If it means more people come to faith, then let’s do it.

The church I led was not even close to the size of Mars Hill, nor did it have the influence of Mars Hill. But in the first decade of ministry, we became one of the fastest growing and one of the largest congregations in our denomination.

In the midst of all of that, some people got hurt. Often I moved fast and broke things. Sometimes I broke people.

Eventually, I realized that the ends don’t justify the means—that often different means produce much better ends.

I also realized that health and growth don’t have to compete with each other. You can have both. And if you can’t have both, choose health.

Listening to the podcast, I realized that what made those first few years of leadership so confusing was that great things were happening, and we were doing all of this ‘for God.’

In my heart of hearts, I believed that whatever we did that resulted in more people coming to Christ was a good thing.

Over time though, I realized that how you do what you do is just as (if not more) important as what you do.

In the church, more people is a good thing. But more love is even better.

As you have probably figured out, more love often leads to more people. But if it doesn’t, you’re still left with more love.

2. The Body Count Matters

I won’t go into the details outlined in the podcast, but one of the recurring themes was the body count at Mars Hill—the people who ‘fell off the bus’ or got pushed off the bus as it moved to new places and new heights.

For a season in my earlier years of ministry, we were growing quickly. But the underbelly of that season of growth was that we were simply growing faster than we were losing people.

It got so bad in some rapid growth years that I have a distinct memory of telling my team not to use pictures older than six months since there were too many people in the photo who had left.

I wince when I think about that now.

I don’t know why everyone who left ended up leaving (high growth and high churn seasons can be like that), and not everyone who left was mad or hurt—many tried it for a while and realized what we were doing wasn’t for them—but I do know that in all the churn, I started to form callouses around my heart.

When people leave or criticize you, it hurts.

The natural thing to do is to grow cynical, to stop listening to the disappointments and the complaints. And for a season, I did just that.

Had I let that go further, it’s likely I was only a few steps away from allowing the churn to be a badge of honor. Ugh.

Fortunately, I burned out after a few years of very rapid growth. I say ‘fortunately’ because, even though my burnout was the deepest pain I’ve ever gone through personally, I realize now that God was re-forming me in the midst of it.

I now think of my burnout as a divine intervention of sorts.

On the other side of burnout, I became much more sensitive to the pain and hurt I was causing, especially unintentionally. Often as leaders, we don’t mean to hurt people or even realize we’re doing it. Or we harden our hearts because we can’t stand the pain of people rejecting us.

I realized (and am still learning) how much of a mistake it is to close your heart to people or act like their leaving doesn’t matter. It does.

And while caring is hard, the ultimate damage of not caring is far greater.

Caring carries risk. So, leaders, please hear me. Your heart will get mangled, and you’ll be tempted to stop caring and trusting people altogether. Don’t.

So, you might ask, does opening your heart and caring about people stop people from leaving?

Nope. People still leave. Maybe not as many, but still, people leave. And it still hurts. (Toxic people are a different category, but most people aren’t toxic people. They just see things differently than you do).

People who disagree with you should be treated well and loved regardless of whether they are ‘with you’ or not. It’s not about you or me. It’s just not.

After I burned out and started to recover, we launched Connexus Church.

I look back on some of those launch photos a decade and a half later and smile. To my surprise and delight, most of the people who helped us launch are still with us.

And for those who left…well, if people were valuable to you when they came to your church, treat them as though they are just as valuable when they leave.

3. Charisma is a Double-Edged Sword

Culturally, we use the term ‘charismatic’ to describe leaders who have a magnetic pull to their personalities.

Leadership tends to attract and reward charismatic people. In the case of preachers, I imagine the concentration of charismatic leaders is even higher than in the marketplace as a whole.

Why? Many preachers are excellent communicators, and the ability to communicate is a significant factor in charisma.

So, what’s the challenge?

The good thing about being a charismatic leader is that people follow you. The bad side of being a charismatic leader is that people follow you.

As a charismatic leader, you have the potential to lead thousands of people to a much better future and the potential to lead thousands of people right off a cliff.

From the time I was young, people told me I had charisma. Honestly, I didn’t know what that meant at that point, but having led for decades now, I realize charisma is a double-edged sword.

The temptation to use your charisma to consolidate power and use it to your benefit is real. Another temptation is to form an inner circle of fans, sycophants, and enablers who won’t challenge you or pose a threat to your viewpoint.

I got to a point early in my leadership where I was so sensitive to criticism that I felt the impulse to create an inner circle like that.

Fortunately, prayer, counseling, and people who knew me and loved me enough to help me see the truth helped me realize that ultimately that’s a path that leads to death, not life.

This brings us back to the original meaning of ‘charisma’ for all of us who at some point have been called charismatic leaders.

Charisma is a Greek transliteration into English; it means both ‘gift’ or ‘favor’ and carries a sense of having a grace given to you by God.

In other words, to the extent you possess any, your charisma is a gift and a favor from God to be used and stewarded not for your glory but God’s.

Of all the character traits we can cultivate, humility might be the greatest when it comes to stewarding charisma. As I’ve learned, again and again, only humility can get you out of what pride got you into.

If you find yourself surfing off your own giftedness, humble yourself.

This takes quite a bit of intentionality. But I’ve learned you can get to humility through two paths:

1. Voluntarily
2. Involuntary

How does involuntary humility happen? Simple: When you’re humiliated by others or a situation.

Humiliation is simply involuntary humility. When you won’t humble yourself, others are happy to do it for you.

I’m trying to take the voluntary path moving forward. I don’t always get it right, but I’m trying.

4. Your Character Needs to Grow Faster Than Your Platform

As I listened to story after story during the podcast, I realized that the real issue is character. It was at Mars Hill and it is in all of our lives.

The challenge is that in an age of instant celebrity, your platform can grow faster than your character.

I think that’s one of the reasons so many megachurch pastors fail (here’s a post with some thoughts on why it keeps happening).

As we’ve seen too often in the church (so painfully), all the competency in the world can’t compensate for a lack of character.

Character is the great leveler. You may be smart, but if people don’t trust you, they won’t want to work with you. You may be the best preacher in your city, but if you treat others as less than, people will stop listening.

Lack of character kills careers, shatters families, ruins friendships, and destroys influence. And even if you never get fired or divorced over the compromises you make, your lack of character will limit the intimacy, joy, and depth you experience with God and with people.

Competency gets you in the room. Character keeps you in the room. As a result, it’s character—not competency—that determines your capacity.

Although I hear the argument all the time, I personally don’t believe there is anything inherently bad about a large church or organization.

But there is something inherently difficult in it. And to some extent, the larger something is, the harder it is.

Please know, this doesn’t mean leading a small church or venture is easy. I have led small churches. I get it. Few things in leadership are easy.

But I’ve also led some larger ministries and organizations, and the larger it is, the greater the pressure and the more there’s at stake.

I remember when our church grew past 300; my mind was blown. Now, it’s five times the size.

Or look at this blog or my podcast. Honestly, 100,000 readers or listeners was inconceivable a decade ago. Then millions showed up.

Nothing gets you ready for that.

It’s way too easy for your platform to outgrow your character. And that’s where all the danger lies.

Add to it one more fact: You and I are not naturally made to lead thousands or millions.

It doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means you’ll have to grow your character faster. Much faster.

5. Many Leaders Want to Be Celebrities—And The Internet is the Bullet Train

The podcast focused a lot on pride, narcissism, and the desire for celebrity.

It’s super easy to point the finger at a leader like Mark Driscoll, but that still leaves us with four fingers pointing back at ourselves.

And even if you don’t have a platform of your own, it’s easy to get a platform (a big one) by criticizing and destroying other people.

Before you deny that this applies to you, do a little gut check. Ask yourself, How good would you be with complete obscurity, with an irrelevance so deep nobody notices you or cares? 

Yep…very few of us are good with that. After all, God designed us to be social creatures and to live lives of meaning and purpose.

Interaction and making some kind of a difference are core to a meaningful life.

The challenge becomes, of course, that the internet is the bullet train to celebrity. Just ask any 12-year-old YouTuber.

There’s more than a little irony that The Rise and Fall of Mars Hills podcast criticized Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill for using the internet and social media to rapidly grow their ministry, while The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast itself was using exactly the same platforms as it became the most listened-to podcast in the Christian space.

And before you or I claim innocence or protest too loudly, well, you’re reading this blog post and perhaps you listen to my podcast or follow me on social and you’ll leave your comments online and…

You see?

Yeah.

It’s easy to criticize people with bigger platforms than yours, and in doing so let yourself off the hook.

A better approach is to dig deep and probe your own motives.

After listening to the podcast, I found myself asking questions like Why do I like the fact that my podcast gets downloaded so much, or how many people read my blog/buy my book/come to my talks?

There’s something ugly under that.

Alternatively, you can be so allergic (and self-righteous) about remaining obscure that your option becomes what…do nothing? Say nothing? Attempt nothing? That’s not faithfulness either.

Once again, humility and character are the keys here.

So what do you do?

Work twice as hard on your character as you do on your platform.

If we all did that, our posts would be more kind, our comments more grateful, our content more purely motivated.”

Source: https://careynieuwhof.com/some-reflections-on-the-rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/

The Cross and The Machine

             It’s become a new and enlightening practice of mine to hear and read about the lives and faith journey of others. Life is big and profound, especially when the Lord is summoning people into His kingdom through lavish means. Paul Kingsnorth is such a life and I learned about him on Bari Weiss’s podcast, Honestly. The episode is called “The Story of Someone Who Changed His Mind.” To me it’s a modern, refreshing and honest exegesis on Romans 1:23 and its examination of our modern, ultra-industrialized, so-called post-Christian era. Paul's transparency about his experience with the stuffiness and clash of the ancient ways of Christianity and modernity's opportunistic opulence leaves you saying, 'wow, I thought I was the only one struggling...well said.'

But Kingsnorth’s story is also a hopeful and living example of Romans 2:4 which reads, “Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?” Kingsnorth’s testimony, which he mentions in the episode and published below, is a beautiful tapestry of man’s waywardness and God’s patience and kindness. Kingsnorth, a professional writer, meticulously captures the details of his life and faith journey leading him to faith in Christ and community in the church – somewhere he consciously never intended to be. Well, as the saying goes, if you ever want to make God laugh tell Him your plans:

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First published by the Paul Kingsnorth on June 2021 on https://www.firstthings.com

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“Europeans didn’t only disinherit Aztecs and Incas. Continuously, since the sixteenth century, we have been disinheriting ourselves.”
—John Moriarty

 

“There is no bloodless myth will hold.”
—Geoffrey Hill

 

"We must have been fifteen or sixteen when we discovered the church visitor’s book. It was an old church, maybe medieval, and I would pass it with my school friends on our way to the town center. I’m not sure what possessed us to go in; it might have been my idea. I’ve always loved old churches. For a long time, I would tell myself that I liked the sense of history or the architecture, which was true as far as it went. Like the narrator in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” I would venture into any church I found, standing “in awkward reverence . . . wondering what to look for,” drawn by some sense that this was “a serious house on serious earth.” ­Obviously, there was no God, but still: The silence of a small church in England had a quality that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

 

This visit was less serious. A fifteen-year-old boy with his schoolmates can’t be admitting an interest in rood lofts. I’d like to say it was someone else’s idea to write in the visitor’s book, where other people had inscribed things like “what a beautiful building” and “I feel a tremendous sense of peace here,” but a man should never lie about matters of the soul. It was I who took up the biro and scrawled, “I WILL DESTROY YOU AND ALL OF YOUR WORKS! HA HA HA!” then signed it “SATAN.” A few days later, we came back and did it again. “DIE, NAZARENE! VICTORY IS MINE!” I think we’d been watching the Omen films. We kept going for weeks, wondering when we’d be caught. We never were, but one day we came in to find that all of our entries had been tippexed out and the pen removed. The fun was over. We went to the video shop instead.

 

More than thirty years later, in the early spring of 2020, I was reading the autobiography of the Irish philosopher John Moriarty and following the news about some new virus that was apparently spreading in China. Moriarty’s book is called Nostos—homecoming—and like all his work, it is impossible to summarize because it is less a narrative than a myth. One of its threads, though, is how ­Moriarty gave up on the simple, unconvincing Christianity of his Irish rural youth and left for Canada to become an academic, only to become equally disillusioned with the empty-can rationalism that characterizes postmodern intellectual culture. Something was missing. Was it Ireland? Moriarty threw in his academic career and moved back to the mountains of Connacht. He had lost faith in science, in the mind alone of itself, in an age that had disinherited its people. But even at home, some part of the jigsaw was missing.

Seeking it, whatever it was, Moriarty crashed into a devastating personal crisis. One day, walking in the mountains, he suddenly had a mystical vision that broke his world apart. “In an instant,” he wrote, “I was ruined.” He seemed to see into a great abyss in which all of his stories were dust: “I had been let through not to a heaven but to a void that was starless and fatherless.” For years, he wrote, he had been engaged in “a genuine search for the truth, not merely a speakable truth, but a truth I would surrender to.” Now he realized, with a terrible inevitability, that there was only one story that could hold what he had seen, only “one prayer that was big enough.” He had, he wrote, been “shattered into seeing.” Whether he liked it or not, he had become a Christian.

A truth I would surrender to. I put the book down. I didn’t know quite why, but Moriarty’s story had shaken me. I realized that I had been searching for years for a truth like that. “How strange!” he had written. “Christianity making sense to me!” Somehow, the way he was telling the story—interweaving the Gospels with the Book of Job, the ­Mahabharata, the Pali Canon of the Buddha, the folk tales of ­Ireland, the poems of Wallace Stevens—was making sense to me too. What was going on?

“The story of Christianity,” wrote Moriarty, “is the story of humanity’s rebellion against God.” I had never thought of that ancient, tired religion in this way before, never had reason to, but as I did now I could feel something happening—some inner shift, some coming together of previously scattered parts designed to fit, though I had never known it, into a quiet, unbreakable whole.

A truth I would surrender to. What was this abyss inside me, this space that had been empty for years, that I had tried to fill with everything from sex to fame to politics to kenshō, and why was something chiming in it now like a distant Angelus across the western sea?

For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me,
And that which I was afraid of is come unto me.

Something was happening to me, and I didn’t like it at all.

Urban England in the eighties was not, shall we say, a spiritually rich environment. My family never set foot in a church when I was growing up, which suited me fine. The nearest I came to serious religion was probably through my best friend, who was from a Pakistani family. He’d been on the hajj to Mecca and fasted for Ramadan and did all the other things that Muslims did, which I knew very little about. This was before Islam became a political lightning rod and everyone felt they had to develop strong opinions about it. All I knew was that my friend thought religion was real, which seemed quaint and very un-English. We in the modern world had long grown out of superstition.

Still, at least my friend’s religion seemed to pulse with some sort of living energy. The same could not be said of the Christianity which, when I was a child, was still at least nominally the national faith. I grew up singing hymns, listening to parables recited by teachers at morning assembly, and performing in Christmas nativity plays with a tea towel tied around my head. I knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart. Whether I liked it or not, I was taught as a child the outline of the Christian story—the story that had shaped my nation for more than a thousand years. I didn’t realize that my nation was surviving on spiritual credit, and that it was coming close to running out.

Back then, there were two distinct flavors of Christianity, both of which I tried to avoid. One was the fusty old Church of England variety. You would see this if you had to go to a wedding or a funeral, or when a vicar was invited to give a sermon at school. The vicar would be a slightly Victorian figure, an older man almost dainty in his manners, trying his best to speak in a dying tongue to a generation of kids more interested in their ZX Spectrums. The Victorian vicar would hand out morality lessons from a man who had lived two thousand years ago and whose core imagery might as well have been from Mars: wine presses, fishing boats, vineyards, masters and servants, virgins. The basic pitch seemed best summed up by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I’d rather have been reading than listening to a vicar: “One man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.”

The second flavor was the trendy vicar. Unlike his predecessor, the trendy vicar was plugged into the spirit of the age. He knew that instead of bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist, we were watching The Young Ones and playing Manic Miner, and he was on our side. The trendy vicar had a clipped beard and wore jeans and sang folk songs about how Jesus was our friend, and gave awkward, vernacular sermons in which biblical stories were interspersed with references to EastEnders or Dallas or Michael Jackson songs. Despite his good intentions, the trendy vicar was much worse than the stuffy vicar. At least the Victorian sermons were in some way otherworldly, as religion should be. If it was pop culture we wanted, and we did, we were better off sticking with the real thing, which was to say the thing without any Jesus in it.

So, I had no reason to take any notice of religion in general or Christianity in particular. My Muslim friend had a faith that was passed to him by his family and was clearly a central part of their worldview. Nothing similar was offered to me, and even if it were, it would have been undercut by the wider cultural narrative. The school may have had mandatory religious education classes, but the age taught another faith: Religion was irrelevant. It was authoritarian, it was superstitious, it was feeble proto-science. It was the theft of our precious free will by authorities who wanted to control us by telling us fairy tales. It repressed women, gay people, atheists, anyone who disobeyed its irrational edicts. It hated science, denied reason, burned witches and heretics by the million. Post-Enlightenment liberal societies had thrown off its shackles, and however hard both species of vicar tried to prevent it, religion was dying a much-needed death at the hands of progress and reason.

Et cetera.

Still, there was enough truth in this story to fuel the intellectual anger of the Dawkins-esque teenage atheist that I later became. People had walked away from the church by choice, after all, and not just because they all wanted to have premarital sex. The message seemed irrelevant. Across Europe, the exodus was happening. Corrupted, tired, suddenly powerless, Christianity was dying in the West. And why not? I hadn’t seen anything relevant in it. Where was the mystery? Where was the promised connection with God? Who was this God anyway? A man in the sky with a book of rules? It was long past time to move on.

I didn’t know back then that the Christian story is the story of our rebellion against God. I didn’t know that by taking part in that rebellion I had become part of the story, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t know, either, why Christians see pride as the greatest sin. I only knew that I could argue a good case for the injustice of the world made by this “God,” and the silliness of miracles, resurrections, and virgin births. I knew I was cleverer than all the people who believed this sort of rubbish, and I was happy to tell them so.

I kept visiting empty churches. I just didn’t tell anyone.

Up on the mountains of England and Wales, I had my own visions. Walking and camping on the hills for weeks with my dad, I felt something settle within me that was more real than any theology. I might have been a teenage atheist, but my ­atheism amounted mainly to arguing with Christians. The religions of the book were obviously nonsense, but I knew there was something going on that humans couldn’t grasp. Trudging across moors, camping by mountain lakes as the June sun set, I could feel some deep, old power rolling through it all, welding it together, flowing from the land into me and back again. With Wordsworth, I was dragged under by “A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought / And rolls through all things.” Nothing humans could build could come close to the intense wonder and mystery of the natural world; I still believe that to be self-evidently true. This was my religion. Animism, pantheism, call it what you will: This was my pagan grace.

 

Years of environmental activism followed. Working for NGOs, writing for magazines, chaining myself to things, marching, occupying: Whatever you did, you had to do something, for the state of the Earth was dire. Nobody with eyes to see can deny what humanity has done to the living tissue of the planet, though plenty still try. There were big, systemic reasons for it, I discovered: capitalism, ­industrialism, maybe civilization itself. Whatever had got us here, it was clear where we were going: into a world in which industrial humanity has ravaged much of the wild earth, tamed the rest, and shaped all nature to its ends. The rebellion against God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature, human and wild. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called “needs.” Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God.

Activism is a staging post on the road to realization. Dig in for long enough and you see that something like climate change or mass extinction is not a “problem” to be “solved” through politics or technology or science, but the manifestation of a deep spiritual malaise. Even an atheist could see that our attempts to play God would end in disaster. Wasn’t that a warning that echoed through the myths and stories of every culture on Earth?

Early Green thinkers, people like Leopold Kohr or E. F. Schumacher, who were themselves inspired by the likes of Gandhi and Tolstoy, had taught us that the ecological crisis was above all a crisis of limits, or lack of them. Modern economies thrive by encouraging ever-increasing consumption of harmful junk, and our hyper-liberal culture encourages us to satiate any and all of our appetites in our pursuit of happiness. If that pursuit turns out to make us unhappy instead—well, that’s probably just because some limits remain un-busted.

Following the rabbit hole down, I realized that a crisis of limits is a crisis of culture, and a crisis of culture is a crisis of spirit. Every living culture in history, from the smallest tribe to the largest civilization, has been built around a spiritual core: a central claim about the relationship between human culture, nonhuman nature, and divinity. Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one we’re living in.

Now I started to dimly see something I ought to have seen years before: that the great spiritual pathways, the teachings of the saints and gurus and mystics, and the vessels built to hold them—vessels we call “religions”—might have been there for a reason. They might even have been telling us something urgent about human nature, and what happens when our reach exceeds our grasp. G. K. Chesterton once declared, contra Marx, that it was irreligion that was the opium of the people. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world,” he explained, “they will worship the world. But above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.” Here we were.

I went searching, then, for the truth. But where to find it? Elders, saints, and mystics are notable these days for their absence. In their place we are offered a pick’n’mix spirituality, on sale in every market stall and pastel-shaded hippy web portal. A dreamcatcher, a Celtic cross, a book about tantra, a weekend drum workshop, and a pack of tarot cards with cats on them, and hey, presto: You’re ready for your personalized “spiritual” journey. On the other side, you will find no exhortation to sacrifice or denial of self, and certainly no battered and bleeding god-man calling you to pick up your cross and follow him. No, you will find instead the perfect manifestation of everything you wanted in the first place: the magnification of your will, not its dissolution. Expressive individualism disguised as epiphany, the reaching prayer of a culture that doesn’t know how lost it is.

I wanted something more serious, something with structure, rules, a tradition. It didn’t even occur to me to go and ask the vicars. I knew that Christianity, with its instructions to man to “dominate and subdue” the Earth, was part of the problem. And so, I looked east. On my fortieth birthday I treated myself to a weeklong Zen retreat in the Welsh mountains. The effect of seven days of disciplined meditation in a farmhouse with no electricity was astonishing. Something in me flipped open. For the next five or six years, I practiced Zazen and studied the teachings of the Buddha. It is clear enough why Buddhism is taking off in the West as Christianity declines: Its metaphysical claims seem convincing, its practices, when taught properly, yield results, and as a tradition it is even older than Christianity. It is, in short, a serious spiritual path, but with none of the cultural baggage of the church.

And yet. As the years went on, Zen was not enough. It was full of compassion, but it lacked love. It lacked something else too, and it took me a long time to admit to myself what it was: I wanted to worship. My teenage atheist self would have been horrified. Something was happening to me, slowly, steadily, that I didn’t understand but could clearly sense. I felt like I was being filed gently into a new shape.

Something was calling me. But what?

Obviously, it wasn’t Christ. I had read the New Testament a few times, and I mostly liked what I saw. Who couldn’t admire this man or see that, at root, he was teaching the truth? Still, he obviously didn’t die and return to life, this being impossible, and without that, the faith built around him was nonsense. I was a pagan, anyway. I found God in nature, so I needed a nature religion.

This was how I ended up a priest of the witch gods.

The short version of the story is that I joined my local Wiccan coven. Wicca is a relatively new occult tradition, founded in the 1950s by the eccentric Englishman Gerald Gardner, who claimed he had discovered the ancient remnant of a pre-Christian goddess cult. He was fibbing, but the practice he sewed together out of older, disparate parts is strangely ­cohesive, complete with secret initiatory rituals, a law book that can be copied only by hand by initiates, magical teachings, spell work, protective circles, and, at the heart of it all, the worship of two deities: the great goddess and the horned god. All initiated Wiccans are priests or priestesses of these gods; there are no laity. My coven used to do its rituals in the woods under the full moon. It was fun, and it made things happen. I discovered that magic is real. It works. Who it works for is another question.

At last I was home, where I belonged: in the woods, worshipping a nature goddess under the stars. I even got to wear a cloak. Everything seemed to have fallen into place. Until I started having dreams.

I had known, I suppose, that the abyss was still there inside me—that what I was doing in the woods, though affecting, was at some level still play-acting. Then, one night, I dreamed of ­Jesus. The dream was vivid, and when I woke up I wrote down what I had heard him say, and I drew what he had looked like. The crux of the matter was that he was to be the next step on my spiritual path. I didn’t believe that or want it to be true. But the image and the message reminded me of something strange that had happened a few months before. My wife and I were out to dinner, celebrating our wedding anniversary, when suddenly she said to me, “You’re going to become a Christian.” When I asked her what on earth she was talking about, she said she didn’t know; she had just had a feeling and needed to tell me. My wife has a preternatural sensitivity that she always denies, and it wasn’t the first time she had done something like this. It shook me. A Christian? Me? What could be weirder?

After the dream, it began to make sense. Suddenly, I started meeting Christians everywhere. They were coming out of the woodwork: strangers emailing me out of the blue, priests coming to me for help with their writing. I found myself having conversations with friends I’d never known were Christian, who suddenly seemed to want to talk about it. An African man contacted me on Facebook to tell me he had had a dream in which God had told him to convert me. “If you want to know God,” he told me, “you need to read the book He wrote. You know it already: It’s called nature.”

It kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being . . . hunted? I wanted it to stop; at least, I thought I did. I had no interest in Christianity. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sounded pretty damned edgy. But I knew who was after me, and I knew it wasn’t over.

One evening, I was sitting in the kitchen of the house in which our coven had its temple. We were about to go in and conduct an important ritual. As we got up to leave, I felt violently ill. I was dizzy, I was sick, I was lightheaded. Everyone noticed and fussed over me as I sat down, my face pale. I had an overpowering feeling that I should not go into the temple. I felt I was being physically prevented from doing it. Someone had staged an intervention.

After that, there was no escape. Like C. S. Lewis, I could not ignore “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.” How much later was it that I was finally pinned down? I don’t remember. I was at a concert at my son’s music school. We were in a hotel function room, full of children ready to play their instruments and proud parents ready to film them doing it. I was just walking to my chair when I was overcome entirely. Suddenly, I could see how everyone in the room was connected to everyone else, and I could see what was going on inside them and inside myself. I was overcome with a huge and inexplicable love, a great wave of empathy, for everyone and everything. It kept coming and coming until I had to stagger out of the room and sit down in the corridor outside. Everything was ­unchanged, and everything was new, and I knew what had happened and who had done it, and I knew that it was too late. I had just become a Christian.

 

None of this is rationally explicable, and there is no point in arguing with me about it. There is no point in my arguing with myself about it: I gave up after a while. This is not to say that my faith is irrational. In fact, the more I learned, the more Christianity’s story about the world and human nature chimed better with my experience than did the increasingly shaky claims of secular materialism. In the end, though, I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true. The Angelus that was chiming in the abyss is silent now, for the abyss is gone. Someone else inhabits me.

I am not a joiner, but I accepted, eventually, that I would need a church. I went looking, and I found one, as usual, in the last place I expected. This ­January, on the feast of Theophany, I was baptized in the freezing waters of the River Shannon, on a day of frost and sun, into the Romanian Orthodox Church. In Orthodoxy I had found the answers I had sought, in the one place I never thought to look. I found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart—a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters. The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had never heard at all.

Out in the world, the rebellion against God has become a rebellion against everything: roots, culture, community, families, biology itself. Machine progress—the triumph of the Nietzschean will—­dissolves the glue that once held us. Fires are set around the supporting pillars of the culture by those charged with guarding it, urged on by an ascendant faction determined to erase the past, abuse their ancestors, and dynamite their cultural ­inheritance, the better to build their earthly paradise on terra ­nullius. Massing against them are the new ­Defenders of the West, some calling for a return to the atomized liberalism that got us here in the first place, others defending a remnant Christendom that seems to have precious little to do with Christ and forgets Christopher Lasch’s warning that “God, not culture, is the only appropriate object of unconditional reverence and wonder.” Two profane visions going head-to-head, when what we are surely crying out for is the only thing that can heal us: a return to the sacred center around which any real culture is built.

Up on the mountain like Moriarty, in the ­Maumturk ranges in the autumn rain, I had my own vision, terrible and joyful and impossible. I saw that if we were to follow the teachings we were given at such great cost—the radical humility, the blessings upon the meek, the love of neighbor and enemy, the woe unto those who are rich, the last who will be first—above all, if we were to stumble toward the Creator with love and awe, then creation itself would not now be groaning under our weight. I saw that the teachings of Christ were the most radical in history, and that no empire could be built by those who truly lived them. I saw that we had arrived here because we do not live them; because, as Auden had it:

We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

It turns out that both the stuffy vicars and the trendy vicars were onto something: The Cross holds the key to everything. The sacrifice is all the teaching. I am a new and green pupil. I can talk for hours, but ideas will become idols in the blink of an eye. I have to pick up my cross and start walking.

How can I feel I have arrived home in something that is in many ways so ­foreign to me? And yet beneath the surface it is not foreign at all, but a reversion to the sacred order of things. I sit in a monastery chapel before dawn. There is snow on the ground outside. The priest murmurs the liturgy by the light of the lampadas, the dark silhouettes of two nuns chant the antiphon. There is incense in the air. The icons glow in the half light. This could be a thousand years in the past or the future, for in here, there is no time. Home is beyond time, I think now. I can’t explain any of it, and it is best that I do not try.

I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I am terrible at this, but at least now I understand the path.

In the Kingdom of Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell. And what if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through? As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over ­humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. We have always been ­offered the same choice. The gate is strait and the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is there any other road that leads home? 

Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist, essayist, and poet living in Ireland.

Source: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/the-cross-and-the-machine

Simulation of Triumph

Preserve me, O God, for I take refuge in You.

I said to the LORD, "You are my Lord; I have no good besides You."

As for the saints who are in the earth, 

They are the majestic ones in whom is all my delight."

(Psalm 16:1-3)

Therefore strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear

 you. (Isaiah 25:3)

The Christian Bucket List: 50 Things to Do before Heaven

 June 2, 2010

By Joe McKeever

This has become a popular parlor game and a best-selling theme for all kinds of books -- places to go, things to do, foods to eat, scenes to see, before you leave this world, or "kick the bucket." That's what gave it the name "bucket list." Hollywood made a movie about this a few years ago.

Today was evidently a morning of slow news because one of the television shows ran a feature on beer, "50 brews on our bucket list." "Oh great," I thought. "Just what some beer-guzzling couch-potato needs, an excuse to indulge himself even more."

So, let's try to do the right thing here and come up with some positive, non-alcoholic deeds which every disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ should do before departing this earthly sod.

Everyone will have his/her own list. This is mine, with a little help from some Facebook friends whom I've asked for contributions. Since we're going for 50 things to do, we'll break this article down into several manageable segments.

Putting them in any kind of order would be impossible since I don't know what we'll end up with. So, just because one item is low on the list and another is high says nothing about their relative importance.

50. Visit the Holy Land.

Margaret and I went to Israel once, over 20 years ago, and found it life-changing as well as ministry-altering. Honestly, I probably would not have gone then had it not been a 10th anniversary gift from the First Baptist Church of Columbus, Mississippi. For months after returning, I ran a low-grade fever just thinking of where we had been and the sights we had seen. I'd turn a page and there would be a photo of Jerusalem or the Sea of Galilee and my eyes would tear up. It had that kind of effect on me.

So, go. Traveling to the Middle East is as safe right now as it has ever been, and you're not getting any younger. I'm thrilled to see the occasional seminary program that allows young preachers and missionaries to visit Israel as a part of their education. Wish I'd gone when I was 25. But on the other hand, I got far more out of it by going when I was 44. Best solution: go twice.

Oh, and send your preacher. Even if he's reluctant to go.

49. Win someone to Jesus.

To do this, I suggest three steps: pray, asking the Holy Spirit to lead you in this. Second, find a plan. If someone walks up and says, "Tell me how to be saved," you need to have an answer. Remember, no sermons. And no fuzziness. Get it straight and keep it simple. (Go to my blog, www.joemckeever.com, and click on "How to Know Jesus Christ and Live Forever" for a simple approach. Or ask your pastor.) And three, start asking people.

I'm serious; ask people if they would like to know Jesus as Savior. The next time you attend your family reunion, I double-dog dare you to stand up and announce, "Hey, everybody! I'm trying to learn how to lead people to know Jesus Christ as Savior. If anyone wants to know how or if you have a question about this, I'll be over here under this tree. Come over and let's talk."

See what happens.

48. Stand up to a church bully.

You remember how you have sat in church and recoiled at the antics of some brute who was smarter than God, holier than Jesus, and delighted in spewing venom in the direction of the pastor? He is so used to throwing his weight around and having timid Christians cower in his presence that he's forgotten what it's like for someone to challenge him. The pastor, bless his soul, has grown weary of standing up to him alone.

In confronting him, you're not going to do it his way. You're not going to be brutish or mean-spirited; otherwise he wins, since he holds a black belt in that art. You're going to out-sweet him. So, the next time your church has a business meeting in which this guy (or in rare cases, this woman) sets in to undermining the pastor, you raise your hand and ask to say a word.

The pastor will call on you. Believe me, he will. He lives in hopes that someone, anyone, will stand up and do the courageous thing.

You stand to your feet and say so graciously, "Pastor, I'd like to read a verse of Scripture to Mr. Bully (insert his name here)." And you read Hebrews 13:17. (If you find something else better for this purpose, fine. Otherwise, this says it as strongly as any place in the Bible.)

Then you say one more thing. "Mr. Bully, I know you will stand before the Lord and give account of what you do at the judgment. But, my friend, I can't wait that long. I just want you to know that I for one have had a belly full of your ravings. Please sit down and shut up."

Then sit down.

Regardless of what happens, you have done what no one else in the church had the courage to do: confront the bully. Good for you.

The rule of thumb here is that the meaner Mr. Bully is, the sweeter your spirit must be in standing up to him. If the bully is just your average guy, don't go for overkill in responding to him.

47. Memorize an entire chapter of the Bible.

Which one? The one that delights your soul and ministers best to your life. Some I've memorized and preached series of sermons from include Psalms 1, 23, 103, and 139. Also, Isaiah 40 and Philippians 4.

How to memorize? The easiest way is not to try at first. Just read that chapter again and again, thinking about it, learning it, enjoying it, savoring its insights. After becoming familiar with it, visit your church library and pull out a commentary on that chapter and read what others have written about it. As you dwell on the riches of this motherlode, you will end up memorizing it without trying.

Then, when you're ready, write out the chapter or type it on a large sheet of paper. Go for large, bold print. Arrange it into paragraphs. And work on learning it one paragraph at a time.

Everyone will have his own techniques for memorization. Frank Pollard, longtime pastor of Jackson, Mississippi's First Baptist Church, once showed me his exercycle and said, "That's where I do my memorization."

I find I memorize better when my hands are busy--maybe driving or mowing the grass or washing dishes.

Once you've got the chapter memorized, don't lose it. Say it to yourself frequently. Think about it. When you lie awake in the middle of the night, go over it. David said, "Thy word have I hid in my heart." That's the idea.

46. Visit a mission field and do something there for Jesus.

When I was a young preacher, this was practically unheard of. No one but career missionaries went to the trouble of traveling to a foreign country to work for Jesus. But in the last generation, that has changed. The tiniest church in the remotest part of Mississippi or Alabama will often have members who do regular mission work in countries like Nigeria or Belize or Mexico.

You're too old? You're not even close. I've seen them go in wheel chairs, some in their 80s. If the pastor or mission team leader approves you, go for it.

I promise you one thing: after visiting with believers in Haiti or working alongside a mission team in Recife or seeing the conditions in Guatemala City, you will never be the same.

45. Join a choir.

Your church doesn't have a choir? Even better. Get out of the four walls of the church building and go join one (or start one) in your community. You can't sing? No excuse. You're too old? Start a senior adult choir.

There's something magical about working with a group of your peers to learn a new song, forcing yourself to master that part and to blend in with the other voices, and then performing it at the local nursing home or in your church. You will have fun, laugh a lot, develop friendships, and be serving God.

Hey, you and I are going to be singing in Heaven. Might as well get in a little practice here.

44. Learn to pray better.

One of the finest things that could happen to many of us would be to develop a divine dissatisfaction with our prayer life. Just make up our mind that there's more to this prayer business than I've found out, and set ourselves to learning how to pray better and more effectively.

How to do that? The church library is a good place to start. (Or a local Christian bookstore.) Pull out a dozen books on prayer and read the first chapter of each one. You'll find one that hits you between the eyes. That's the one. Read it. And remember: if you find one great idea that makes your praying better, it was worth the money or time and trouble.

Ask people whose prayer lives you respect to pray with you and to teach you how to pray. And if you are the preacher and can't see yourself asking a church member for this kind of help, do it anyway. The humbling will be good for you.

I'm not saying you'll ever reach the place where you'll feel you've arrived in your prayer life. You'll know you've progressed when you love the Lord more and can't wait to speak with Him about this person or that need.

43. Become a person of good humor and frequent laughter.

Even though I'm personally gifted in the art of silliness, I don't recommend you go that far. But there are too many dead-serious Christians in the pews today, too little laughter, too few spontaneous smiles.

I've not heard this in years, but people used to chide one another with, "If you're happy, tell your face about it!"

This is about two things: the sounds of joy coming from your mouth--words, laughter, positive words--and the appearance of your countenance, your facial expressions.

Get a concordance down and look up "countenance." Some of us will be surprised to know what a premium the Lord puts on sunshiney countenances. None of us like to be around droopy faces and it turns out the Lord doesn't either!

In drawing people, when I find someone who doesn't want to smile--I'm amazed how many people fall into this sad category--I tell them: "Look at my face. Notice how it sags when I look normal. And now watch when I smile." The face lifts and the entire shape of my facial outline changes.

Next Sunday, as you get out of your car, make a conscious effort to force a smile onto your face and greet everyone warmly. Some will be so shocked they'll want to know what happened. Just tell them it's on your bucket list.

42. Volunteer in your community.

The Meals-on-Wheels people need drivers. Big Brother/Big Sister needs sponsors. Tutorial programs need volunteers to work with children. Your homeless shelter needs helpers. The elementary school could use volunteers.

A group of seniors in Mississippi started the Macedonian Call Foundation a few years back to provide automobiles for furloughing missionaries. People donate their used vehicles, they get them in good running shape, and then hand them off to missionaries who plan to be in the States for a few months before returning to the field. My wife and I donated a car last year. The state director drove down to McComb, Mississippi, about half way from Jackson, with a friend who drove the donated car back. It's a wonderful ministry and has given these beloved senior Christians a vital way to make a lasting difference for Christ.

If your community has nothing important for which you could volunteer, then assume there are needs going unmet and look around for them.

41. Find someone from your past and apologize.

If you're like the rest of us, you can recall people from your school days or later whom you were rude to, offended, or hurt with some careless act or word. You've not seen them in years, and yet you think of them with regret from time to time. The thought keeps recurring, "I sure wish I could go back and undo that." You can't, but you can do the next best thing.

Find them. Ask the Lord to bring you together. Contact the alumni office of your school or a church in that town or some old friend who might know their whereabouts. Type their name into Facebook. The internet has whitepages.com. No one can hide for long these days!

Then, write them a letter or make a phone call. Plan how to say what you want to say so you will not make matters worse. Tell what you did and how sorry you are. Tell them you have often wished you could go back and undo that, and that you want to ask them to forgive you. Then wish them well.

Don't be surprised if they don't remember it. That's all right, even good. But you remember because you did wrong, and now you are trying to make it right.

I've told on these pages of how when I was in the 7th grade, a classmate and I stole Dixie's billfold at school. My friend, a candidate for the reformed school if one ever existed, suggested that I move her billfold to an empty desk nearby. When the bell rang, she would leave without noticing it was gone. He would get the wallet and later divide the money with me. I did and he did.

Our class was having its 40th reunion when I saw Dixie. I called her off to the side and said, "I need to confess something to you. When we were in the 7th grade, I stole your billfold." She refused to believe it. "Anyone but you," she said. That made it even worse.

I told her what happened. She tried to refuse to accept the $20 I handed her, but I insisted it was for me. I was purchasing peace. She wrote me a couple of weeks later to say she and her husband had bought Bibles for a mission organization with that money.

And I have wonderful peace in place of an old self-inflicted wound.

40. Pay off everything and get out of debt.

Is this a "Christian" goal? Or just something that would be good for everyone to do? In Scripture, one reason for believers having money in the first place is so that we may be generous. One of the great hindrances to our generosity is the heavy debt load we stagger under. We'd like to give to help those poor people or to support the missionary, but we don't have it to give.

If we paid off our debts and did not incur additional financial burdens, think how liberating that would be.

The question is how.

Answer: live simply, get everyone in the household behind this goal, say no to expensive choices such as eating out or purchasing entertainment centers or new cars, and double up on the existing payments. If you have too many credit cards, cut all but one or two up and close the accounts. The way I understand Galatians 5:22-23, discipline or self-control is a part of the fruit of the Spirit. You'll be needing it to get control of your finances, so it's good to know the Lord wants to produce it in us.

39. Find your spiritual gift and put it to use.

According to the Bible (Romans 12 and I Corinthians 12), every believer is gifted by the Holy Spirit with a spiritual capability. We can only dream of how effective the Christian community would be if we all claimed our gift and put it to use for the Lord. My hunch is less than one-third of the members of a typical church even make an effort toward this.

Rather than take some kind of printed inventory that purports to tell you what your spiritual gift is, my suggestion is rather that you try a lot of things. To find out if your spiritual gift is teaching, sit in on Bible study classes, then volunteer either to substitute for the teacher or to assist him/her. To find out if your gift is in "helps," volunteer to assist in some kind of project--a church banquet, a Vacation Bible school, a youth camp--and try your hand at it.

The best way to recruit people to the place where the Lord has prepared them is simply to expose them to various kinds of ministries. Their spirit will respond to the right one.

38. Develop some latent talent such as for music or art.

Often when I'm sketching people, someone will say, "I used to enjoy art. I just got away from it." I suggest that they get back to it.

When churches began having orchestras in worship services, members remembered their old high school saxophones or clarinets gathering dust in closets. They cleaned them up, began practicing, and now they play in church every Sunday. For some, this has opened up a new world.

I've known retirees who began taking piano lessons for the first time. "I've always wanted to play," they would say. They'll not turn into concert pianists, and that's not their goal. It's something for their own growth and fulfillment.

Take a cooking class. Find out when your local plant nursery is having classes on growing roses and sign up. The local art store has postings for new classes all over town, from beginners to intermediate to accomplished. Ask the Red Cross about classes for CPR and lifesaving training.

37. One time in your life, contribute twice as much to the work of the Lord than you did the previous year.

If you are a tither--and my personal conviction is that this is God's plan for every believer--that would mean giving one-fifth of your income to the Lord the following year. And that would require sacrifices, or at least life-style changes.

36. Tell everyone you love that you love them.

Emmalou Holland was lying in the hospital and growing weaker daily. She said to me, "Pastor, I must be worse off than I thought I was. Everyone who comes in here tells me they love me."

What a pity that we wait until someone is dying to tell them how much they mean to us.

What if you and I made a list of those we love most--family, friends, co-workers, brothers and sisters in the faith, pastors, teachers--and made it a point to tell them that we love them and are grateful to the Lord for bringing them into our lives. Don't qualify it, don't complicate it, just tell them.

35. Drop by the Intensive Care Unit at your local hospital and see if there are family members of critically ill patients who need you.

A family from Tennessee spent several weeks basically living in the ICU waiting room at one of our hospitals while their son lingered between life and death. After he died, the father said to me, "I never knew there was so much suffering in these places. When I get back to Chattanooga, I'm going to become a visitor to our hospital's waiting rooms. The Lord has opened my eyes to this need."

If you decide this is a special concern of yours, I would suggest you work through the volunteer office of the hospital and get their endorsement for what you have in mind.

34. Visit a nursing home and minister to patients who rarely have visitors.

Again, you will want to work through the administration for this. Most would be thrilled to have you come by and read to people, chat with them, or even sing to them.

If you have not visited a nursing home (retirement home, senior living center, they go by various names), you would be surprised how few people have family members come by on a regular basis. For the most part, these are not especially pleasant environments. Many elderly patients hardly know they're in the world, the odor of ammonia is often the dominant fragrance, and the staff is usually overworked.

If this is something you've never tried, get with whoever on your church staff visits nursing homes and ask to accompany them a few times. Expose yourself to this ministry and pick the brain of the one leading it.

Charlotte Arthur of Charlotte, NC, is a champion of nursing home ministry. Once when she and I were making the rounds, she said, "My mother loved this kind of work and began taking me with her when I was six years old. That's how I learned to enjoy it."

33. If your city has a children's hospital, become a volunteer.

These days I'm not actively a volunteer for the children's hospital of New Orleans, but I once was. Every Friday, my off day from the church, I would check in at the volunteer office, pick up my badge, and then roam the halls looking for children to draw and entertain and minister to. Nurses would give suggestions and direction. In the cafeteria and waiting rooms, siblings of patients sat with their parents. and most were delighted at this little ministry.

My wife used to be a volunteer in the neo-natal ICU at Tulane Hospital in New Orleans. So many of the newborn babies were born to drug-addicted mothers, meaning that the babies arrived that way also. Margaret's only role when she walked in as a volunteer, was to sit in a rocking chair and rock these tiny babies.

32. Plant some flowers or even a tree.

This one doesn't sound as spiritual or as life-changing as the others, does it? But aren't we grateful for those who beautify our world by such labors of love.

I recall being surprised one day when I was about 8 years old. We were living in a mining camp on a West Virginia mountaintop. Everything about that place was dreary, mainly due to the smoke from fires, cinders from steam locomotives in the valleys, and the produce from the mines itself. One day I noticed my parents had planted some seeds along the walk in front of our house. Thereafter we had marigolds and petunias, bright colors to contrast with the ugliness around us. In time, they set out roses and let the runners expand as they wished. Years later, long after we had moved away and the camp had been disbanded, we visited that site again and walked the hillside. Here and there, the only evidence that humans had ever lived here was the flowers.

Someone approached Francis of Assisi as he worked in his garden. "What would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?" they asked. He answered, "Go right on working in my flower garden."

31. Read A. W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God.

A Facebook friend suggested this for our bucket list. I recall reading it more than half a lifetime ago, so I'll put it on my own personal list to do.

Tozer was a Godly leader in the Christian-Missionary Alliance denomination. His columns for their monthly magazine were widely read. Long in heaven, his writings continue to bless and challenge, to convict and to inspire God's people.

Tozer's writings are dense. That means you'll not read the book at one sitting or even in one afternoon. It's not that kind of reading material. The book is small but the reading is heavy. You will read a page and lay the book down and repent. That may be all you get to today, but tomorrow you will review what you read today and take in a few more pages.

My guess is you'll want to read more of his books after this one.

30. Make up your own bucket list.

These fifty are only suggestions, some of them mine and some from Facebook friends. Not everything will suit you; find those that do.

A friend who works with the Baptist churches across Montana suggested no one should go to Heaven without first visiting the Big Sky state. I'm not sure everyone will want that on their list, but there it is.

Someone else suggested sky diving and bungee jumping. Not for me, thanks. But you will have your own list.

29. Make a will.

You'd be surprised how few Christians have wills stating what is to be done with all they leave behind after their death. I suspect it's because we don't want to think about dying, don't want to have to arrange to see a lawyer, or think we're far too young for this sort of thing.

Read the ages in the people across your newspaper's obituary page today and decide for yourself. I just turned 70 and fully half the people making today's obits are younger than I am.

In most cases, you simply leave everything to your children to be divided equally. But if they're small, you'll still want to name their guardians in case you and your spouse depart simultaneously. And then, the lawyer will think of questions to ask that never occurred to you.

The Baptist Foundation in whatever state convention your church is part of will have a type of kit to assist you in thinking this through. After filling out the information it asks for, you could take that to your lawyer and simplify the process.

28. Wash someone's feet.

I would not have thought of this as a Bucket List thing to do before I die. But a Facebook friend suggested it.

You'll recognize foot-washing as what our Lord did with the disciples the night before He went to the cross. It's in John 13. God's people rightfully see it as the ultimate act of humility and servitude.

The leader of St. Bernard Parish, just downriver from New Orleans, recently made the news when he went around to various offices in parish government and washed the feet of his employees. He emphasized that he did not tell them he was coming and did not alert the media. "I don't want people thinking I did this for the publicity," he said.

So why did he do it? To make an unforgettable statement to his people that he was there to serve them.

In my last pastorate, I brought up a number of deacons and washed their feet in an evening worship service. Later, a man who had been visiting with his family came by to grill me about that. He had heard that some bizarre sects do this and so was afraid we were morphing into weirdom.

Just because we washed one another's feet. Go figure. (The man and his family joined the church and are still here, some 15 years later.)

27. Buy a pastor a suit of clothes.

Now, not every pastor needs a new suit and these days, with the changing standards of worship attire, not every pastor may even want a suit.

Here's my thinking on the subject.

As a beginning pastor, my two or three suits and one sport coat were in a constant rotation. They were embarrassingly cheap. One day, Pastor James Richardson, my mentor and dearest friend in the ministry, told me he had bought several new suits for himself and wondered if I would mind receiving seven of his older suits. Mind? I was ecstatic. The fact that this gift came just as I was transitioning from the pastorate to the staff of the largest church in the state--where James had recommended me--was clearly more than coincidental.

Some years later, when I was pastoring again and making a livable income, I would notice a neighboring pastor who would benefit from a new suit. I placed a phone call to the friend who sold me my clothing and ask him to call that brother, saying someone is paying for him to come in and choose a new suit. We kept it anonymous.

What's even more special about this is from time to time, someone would do the same thing for me.

One thing we learned early on that the salesman should tell the pastor who is getting the new suit: Don't choose the cheapest thing on the rack. We're trying to upgrade your wardrobe, so pick out anything in the store you want.

A good suit--such as a Hart Shaffner Marx--will last for generations. I know because the two or three I purchased will outlive me.

26. Chaperone a youth mission trip.

I can hear someone laugh, "Yes. Once in a lifetime is enough."

For some, it will be. And for those who have never done it, it should go on their Bucket List.

In doing this, you will make a lasting investment in the lives of a few youngsters. And you might discover those youth have opened up a part of your own life you didn't know existed.

Last night, as I write, a friend in Jackson, Mississippi, e-mailed to say that her church is sending their youth choir to New Orleans the last week of May. Her church is large, so the group is 250 strong. That must be about as large as any youth choir I've ever heard of. The adult counselors will have a mammoth challenge, one that demands excellent organization, infinite patience, and divine wisdom.

She said their itinerary in our city calls for them to do a program at the parish prison. That will be an unforgettable experience, one I've never had and I suspect none of the adults along on the trip have had either.

The kids will be ministering to their audience. The adult chaperones/sponsors will be ministering to the youngsters in the choir. Everyone benefits.

25. Give a needy child the Christmas of his life.

A Facebook friend suggested this and gave no other information. I suppose it stands as it is.

A hundred questions flood my mind: what if the child has siblings? would you omit them? can you do this once, then abandon the kid because "I checked it off my Bucket List"? what else will you do for him/her? what would be the most beneficial type of Christmas to give a child? And how would one go about this?

We'll leave the questions there. It's an idea.

24. Become something of an expert on one book of the Bible.

A generation ago a friend suggested it would transform the life of the typical Christian to focus on one book of the Bible and really master it, to make it his. I decided to do that with I Peter.

Why I Peter? It's short--just 5 chapters, so it's manageable. It has great treasures in it, unlike some of similar length which I will not name (because they are all treasures in themselves).

Thereafter, I read and re-read I Peter. I memorized a good bit of it and recited it often in the car or while walking. As a pastor, I preached through the book on several occasions. I read numerous commentaries on this little epistle.

If you choose the right book--the Gospel of Mark would probably be an even better choice for most people--mastering it will provide a guidestone for understanding the rest of the Bible. The thing about Mark's Gospel is that it's shorter than the other three, is primarily devoted to what Jesus did and not to lengthy teaching passages, and is a great entry level study book.

In the middle years of my ministry, I did this with the New Testament book of Hebrews. That one had always lurked in the back of my mind as a mysterious book, one I was not sure I should tackle. But studying it, learning it, and teaching it turned out to be one of the greatest joys in over 40 years of pastoring.

In the last decade of my pastoring, I chose Romans and "went to seed" on it. Later I wondered why I had waited so late in life when learning it early on would have made a great difference. Clearly it's because the book is so deep, with chapters 9-11 in particular scaring off the typical Bible student. But it wasn't that bad at all, and the Holy Spirit showed me such wonderful delights in studying Romans.

On my blog, www.joemckeever.com, on the right side of the page, scroll down to the section on Romans and you'll see some of the choice insights which made studying this "gospel according to Paul" such a blessing.

23. Make sure all within your sneeze halo are saved.

I'm indebted to Harry Lucenay, longtime friend, neighboring pastor, and now pastor of an international Baptist Church in Hong Kong, for the "sneeze halo" concept.

A few years ago when a flu epidemic broke out in his part of the world, members came to church wearing masks. Health experts cautioned people about the distance germs travel from a sneeze, some 15 or 20 feet. They called it the "sneeze halo."

The people inside your sneeze halo would be your immediate family members, co-workers, and next door neighbors.

Best way to find out if they're saved? Ask them. Start with yourself: "Look, I know you say you believe in Jesus Christ and in His Word and His Church. But have you genuinely repented of your sin and put faith and trust in Him for eternal salvation? Are you trusting in what He did on Calvary as payment for your sins? And are you abiding in Him and living your life for Him?"

Then, it gets a little harder. In asking those nearest you this question, you might want to preface it with an explanation that this is a Bucket List item dear to your heart.

When baseball pitcher Al Worthington came to know the Lord in a Billy Graham Crusade, he went to a phone and started calling his large family to tell them about the new Master of his life. When an older brother said, "Why, Al, I've been a Christian for 8 years," the Minnesota Twin hurler answered, "Brother, I don't believe it. If you had, you would have told me about it before now."

Have you told those nearest you?

22. Read through the Bible.

Recently while preaching in an Alabama church, I brought a weekday noontime brief message about the Scripture. I urged people to read the Bible through at least once in their lives and more if possible. Hearing someone murmur that he was doing that, I stopped. "How many of you are reading through the Bible at this very time?" Over half the hands in the room went up.

What that church was doing is something I recommend heartily: the pastor is leading them and they're reading it at the same time.

My son tells me he's reading the Bible through these days with a group from our church.

I have no idea when I read the Bible through for the first time, but it was only five years ago I decided to start on January 1 and to finish that year.

One other thought on this subject. Mark up your Bible. Underline or highlight the verses that bless you most. Use one of the white pages in front or back and write your testimony of when you came to the Lord and what he means to you. In most cases, that Bible will outlive you and will minister to the next person who owns it.

I've read the Bible through several times, marking it up, and then have given to some of my grandchildren.

21. Do a random act of kindness.

This too was a suggestion from a Facebook friend. I'm not sure it belongs on a Bucket List for the simple reason that it's not large enough.

A "random act of kindness" is a good deed done anonymously. You're in the drive-through lane at a fast food place and you pay for the order of the car behind you. You're in a poor neighborhood and you drop a $5 bill on the sidewalk for someone to find. You're at the toll plaza on the highway and you pay the toll for the car behind.

In counseling with Al and Alison about their marriage, I learned that his greed and materialism were destroying their relationship. One day when he was in my office without his wife, I said, "Al, I have a suggestion. Give away your money."

He almost had a stroke on the spot. "Are you serious?"

"I'm serious about giving a lot of it away. It's killing your soul, friend. Unless you master your love for money, it's going to destroy you."

The next week he walked in beaming. "I did it," he smiled. What he had done was to give his step-daughter a $100 bill. That's all he did, just gave that to her. It was not anonymous and probably was never repeated. You would have thought he had set up a million dollar foundation though, the way he was so satisfied with himself.

The bad news is Al never broke the bondage to the dollar. His marriage self-destructed.

Acts of kindness are good any time and any way, but anonymously is great. And they should be a regular pattern, not a one-time thing.

20. Cater lunch for the entire church.

Now, if your name is Clyde Etheridge (a deacon in my church), then you'll not need to cater it; you can feed everyone yourself. I was in the church office this week when Clyde walked in and asked Julie, my daughter-in-law and the pastor's administrative assistant, if the bulletin had been done for Sunday. He inserted a note that next Wednesday night's meal would be a Mexican feast in honor of Cinco de Mayo. He said, "I've never done this before, but it might be fun."

I admire people who can do this. I'm not one of them.

A few weeks ago, as we were completing a five-day meeting at Salem Baptist Church in lovely Brundidge, Alabama, Pastor Bobby Hood informed the congregation that they were all to stay for lunch on Sunday. "Sue and I are providing it for you." They paid to have it catered for the entire church.

I said, "Bobby, how do you do that?" He smiled, "With a check."

Smart aleck.

My siblings and I once did it for the entire church back at Nauvoo, Alabama, on the Sunday following our reunion, but I've never tried it by myself. An interesting idea.

19. Write down the story of your life.

Now, unless you are a gifted writer, the story of your life would not be for publication. You would write it for your grandchildren and their offspring.

"Oh, my life is not that interesting," you protest. Whether it is or isn't is not the issue. The fact is that you are fascinating to your future descendants. They will want to know all about you, where you came from, who your folks were, what they did for a living, what interesting family tales you have to relate.

Be sure to put down dates and locations. And remember one more aspect of a good story: conflict is great.

If there were wars in the family or strife over some issue, disagreements over politics, a schism over religion, a divorce over scandal--well, okay, you might want to gloss this over--or a feud over old grievances, tell it. If the scandal is 50 years or older, then write down every juicy detail you recall.

18. Keep a journal for a year of your life.

The best way to keep a journal is by purchasing hard-bound wordless books at the local bookstore or stationery dealer. It is not essential to wait for January 1 to begin. Just buy a book, letter it "No. 1," jot the date at the top of the page, and start writing.

I kept one for an entire decade. It filled 46 books which now occupy a bottom shelf in my home study. It chronicles every sermon I preached, every grandchild's birth, every event in our church and family for the decade of the 1990s.

I recommend hand-writing the journal.

What will you write? Tell about what you did today, whatever news everyone is talking about, important things that occurred, what you ate (sometimes; don't do that every day), what movies you saw, what television you watched, what books you are reading, what magazines, what the preacher preached last Sunday (as well as who he is, where you go to church), what you feel strongly about, what the doctor said about your condition, and remember to include the conflict.

If your neighbor stood in the yard and cursed you out over something, write it down, leaving out the actual words. If your boss accused you unfairly at the office, write it down. Defend yourself. Hey, it's your book--you can write anything you want. Do so. Have fun. You heard a good joke; write it down.

17. Do a blog.

These days, it's possible to have your own blog without it costing you a cent. Don't ask me how, but plenty of people around you have one and can tell you.

My son Marty set this one up nearly 10 years ago. He reserved "joemckeever.com" and said, "One of these days you'll be needing it." Little did we know. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for several weeks this blog was our contact with the rest of the world.

Our website, this "blog" (which is a contraction of "web log"), is provided by an outfit called Hosting Matters and costs me something over $100 per year. A bargain if there has ever been one.

16. Master one of the new techni-gadgets.

The cell phones, Blackberries, iPods, iPhones, and such seem to be endless. Do not ask me the difference. My cell phone is standard issue and no doubt has capabilities that I'm not aware of. All I want is a phone, not a computer in my hand. But that's what I have. It's a still camera and a motion picture camera and a hundred other things.

I suspect that many of my generation (I finished high school in 1958) would not fear the modern techno-craze so much if they were skilled in the use of some of the gadgets.

How to learn: ask a grandchild. (Works for me.)

15. Plant a flower garden.

My family will laugh at my listing this. Three or four years ago, with the help of son Neil, I set out roses in the back yard and one cutting in the front. They are still bearing roses to some degree without a lot of encouragement from me. That's good, because while I do appreciate beautiful flowers, I don't seem to have the patience to do what it takes to produce them.

Nevertheless, for those who have never tried to grow flowers and who now have a little time on their hands, this would be a wonderful thing to do. Visit your local plant nursery and read up on the subject. Or help a friend with his garden and learn by the old-fashioned hands-on method.

14. Read a book of Christian theology.

Too many laypeople leave the theology to the pastor. Not a smart thing to do. Not every pastor is trustworthy or, even if he is, not every pastor is diligent in working out finer points of Scripture's teachings.

Start with your church library. Browse. And don't worry about the posted hours for the library to open. Call the church office. Unless you are unknown to them, the secretary will unlock the door and turn on the lights and you can pull up a chair and enjoy yourself.

Find a good book on what Christian's believe. That's theology. If you are fairly well versed in the Bible, get the kind of book that a seminary would use for a text. Ask your pastor to recommend a good one.

13. Develop a 15 minute comedy routine--and present it in public.

There are two main approaches to this: compile all your family stories into one routine, or flesh the program out with your favorite jokes and funny stories.

I do a half-dozen banquets a year. For the first part of the program, I'll get people from the audience and caricature them on posters. The second part is made up of stories from churches I've pastored, church people I have know, lessons learned in nearly 50 years of ministry. For the last part, I gently segue into a devotional, inspirational conclusion. And even in this last segment, I'm telling stories.

Anyone can do that. If you need help telling the stories, enlist help. Get friends or family members to listen and critique and make suggestions.

12. Throw a street party for your neighborhood.

Get the permission of neighbors (and the police if necessary) to block off the street for a couple of hours, print up flyers and invite everyone, talk some friends into helping you prepare food and lead games, hire the space walks and clowns, and if you're in the New Orleans area, call me to come over and sketch people. If I can, I'll do it.

Why in the world would anyone want to do this?

To get to know the neighbors. To add some fun into the humdrum lives of everyone. Or best of all, because you are a fun person.

11. If you live in the area where you went to school, buy season tickets to the ball games. Attend and cheer, learn the names of players, and act like a kid again.

There is too much seriousness in this world. Sometimes we just need to relax. Few things are as recreational as attending a high school or college ball game.

I dare you.

10. Make your own bucket list.

What would you like to have done before departing this earthly scene for heavenly realms? Build a plane? Jump out of a plane? Fly a plane as the pilot? Or just take a ride on a plane? Put it on your list.

We're all so different, no two people's bucket list will be alike. Some years back, I would have put toward the top of my list to attend the annual meeting of the National Cartoonists Society. These men and women are the heroes, so to speak, of this cartooning business, the best there are, and some are household names in America. I own original cartoons from many of them, drawings they did for their newspaper strips which are now signed, framed, and (mostly) displayed on the walls of my home. In the study where I'm working at this moment, 13 original cartoons are staring down upon me.

I'm past the groupie stage of cartooning, for the most part, so that would no longer be on my list. So, lists vary and they have a way of changing.

Make your own list.

9. Postpone your bucket-kicking event.

I'm not one who believes a day was calendared for your death the moment you arrived on the planet. There seems to be a lot of it's-your-call involved in how long we live and when we die, based on how we take care of ourselves and the risks we take.

To postpone the time of our departure simply means to do a few basic things that should increase the length of our lives:

--eat better. More fresh fruits and veggies, and fewer fries and chips and empty calory-type foods such as cola drinks.

--exercise more. Take walks, do stretching routines, buy some small weights from Wal-Mart or an athletic store and tone up your flesh.

--have a full checkup with your doctor. You'll have to take the initiative with this. If you call your doctor's office and say, "I want a checkup," unless he/she knows you, what you'll get will be fairly worthless. Tell the doctor's nurse you want a) a complete head-to-toe examination, b) blood work, and c) a colonoscopy (if you are 50 or older). If you are female and have not had mammograms as recommended, schedule one of those too.

--ask your doctor or a nutritionist to tell you what vitamins to take each day. In the 1990s, my primary care physician at Ochsner's Foundation Hospital in New Orleans put me on a regimen of vitamins and a baby aspirin each day. She said, "Mr. McKeever, I think we have just prevented a heart attack in you."

--lose some weight. Quit smoking. Laugh more. Get up off the couch, turn off the television (or computer!), and get outside. Go to the park with your children or grandchildren. Toss a frisbee or football. Laugh some more. Enjoy a snow-cone in some weird flavor (they're called snowballs around here).

8. Widen yourself.

For one year, try this: each week visit your local library and spend a minimum of one hour in the periodicals section. This is the sitting area with tables and chairs and with magazines on display. Take down several magazines you have never heard of and flip through them. Read anything that attracts your attention.

If you are a preacher or teacher, always have a notepad handy. I guarantee you are going to run into fascinating articles with information you'll want to remember. And think what fun it will be when you stand before your group and say, "The other day, I was reading an article in Rolling Stone magazine...." Or, Electronics Monthly. Or, Archaeology in Zimbabwe.

You may discover a new career this way. (It's been done, believe me.) And if nothing else, you'll broaden your scope.

7. Deepen Yourself

The 8th item was to widen yourself by reading widely. This one is the opposite. Pick a field you find fascinating and delve into it.

Years ago, we might have said, "Take a course in that subject at your local community college." That still might be the thing to do, but you can almost do as well with your computer. This is somewhat of an overstatement, but...

...the world's knowledge is as close as your fingertips.

Go online. It's all there. You might have to dig a little, and you will definitely have to wade through a lot of irrelevant stuff (I started to call it junk!). And you may end up needing to ask someone more knowledgeable about cyberspace how to find what you're looking for. But it's there, I promise you.

6. Find someone who changed your life and do something special for him/her.

I was reminded of this two days ago by someone who did it for me.

Mike McCain was around 14 years old when his family began attending the church I was pastoring. I was barely a decade older than him and a student in our seminary in New Orleans. A little Baptist church on Alligator Bayou some 25 miles west of the city had invited me to become their pastor. When Mike's father retired from the Navy and took a job with the shipyards in New Orleans, the family moved to the area and started attending my church.

In time, the Lord used me to lead Mike and his father to the Lord. The entire family joined the church and for another year or so I was their pastor, before moving to my next assignment in Mississippi.

That was in 1967 and this is 43 years later.

Mike McCain pastors a Covenant Church in Pennock, Minnesota. He and his wife Connie were visiting his widowed (and now remarried) mother in Baton Rouge, and we agreed to meet at Shoney's in LaPlace. I told him when they walked into the restaurant I could have picked him out of a crowd, he still looks so much like the young Mike.

What a blessing just to sit across the table and see the fruits of a small amount of labor so many years ago. To be sure, the Lord used many teachers and preachers and friends--and his wonderful wife, to be sure--to bring Mike to where he is today. We all are the workmanship of so many people.

What if today you thought of a person who has made a lasting difference in your life and sought them out to thank them.

5. Forgive someone.

This pertains to those who have someone in our past who has hurt us deeply and left scars on our soul.

Do yourself a great favor: forgive them. Get rid of the anger, turn loose of the ill will, and even erase those ugly memories.

It's possible. Not necessarily easy, but it can be done. The Lord is a great healer of the soul. His restoration work will require us to obey Him, however.

This involves bringing ourselves under His lordship in every area. It means humbling ourselves to the Holy Spirit and obeying Him.

If you know where the individual is--and if you are confident he/she knows of the strife between you--then a phone call or letter will do the trick. If you have no idea where they are, ask the Lord to bring your paths together.

In the call or the letter, it's not necessary to rehash old stories. Just say, "I want you to know I have forgiven you. I hope you are doing well. I've prayed for you today."

My guess is you'll want to rehearse that several times to get it right. Don't overtalk, however, and do not stir up more strife by blaming. Just say it simply and close your mouth.

Depending on the circumstances, you may or may not want to renew the friendship. You may or may not want to contact them and tell them of your forgiveness. Ask the Lord to guide you in these matters, or talk to your pastor or another trusted counselor.

On this subject...

It could be you are the one who needs forgiveness. So, you will be the one who calls or writes the individual you have wounded and ask them to please forgive you.

Once again, keep it simple: "I'm so sorry for the pain I caused you back when (and finish the sentence). I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me."

Don't overtalk, don't excuse yourself, and do not make matters worse. Say it, mean it, and shut up.

4. Take your entire family on a Caribbean cruise.

I have just the way for you to do this. I live in New Orleans where cruise ships arrive and depart all the time. This November 20-27, the most wonderful ministry in town--Global Maritime Ministry, which reaches out to the crews of ships using our port as well as to the local port workers--has reserved several hundred rooms on a cruise ship that will go to Belize and Cozumel.

A solid week of fellowship with hundreds of the Lord's choice people in some of the most beautiful parts of His creation! Rest and entertainment, great food and scenery, good fellowship and times of worship--what could be better?

The website is http://www.portministry.com/index.html. (I have a flyer with details and will be adding them to this page.)

If the idea sounds staggering to you, then consider taking this particular trip with just you and your spouse. Then, after gettting that under your belt, you can plan a subsequent cruise with the entire family.

3. Pack some things, lock your house up, arrange to have a friend look after your house, ask the post office to forward your mail, and move to the city where your grandchildren live.

Rent an apartment there for a few months. Become a citizen of that town. Subscribe to their newspaper, explore all the great places to go and things to do with your grandchildren.

Oh, and you might want to make sure your son/daughter and their spouses are okay on this before doing it.

I have grandchildren in North Carolina and New Hampshire who wish grandpa and grandma would quit talking about this and do it!

2. Do the same thing--locking the house up and moving to a community in another state--where you don't know a soul.

You have read everything you could find on that area and you think it would be fascinating to live in that sweet little village. So, why not?

How would you go about finding such a community to "try out" for a while? Go online, for starters. Your library has a variety of travel magazines. But if you're like the rest of us, over the years as you have traveled you have encountered fascinating little towns (or huge cities) and thought you would love to live there for a while. So, check it out and do it.

Thirty years ago when the Cincinnati Reds baseball team was all the rage, I attended two games there and loved every moment of that weekend. Thereafter, I used to say to Margaret, "When we retire, I want to move to Cincinnati. Every afternoon, between 1 and 4, you can find me at Riverfront Stadium watching the Big Red Machine." She learned to ignore that, knowing how changeable her husband is. And she was right in doing so. Cincy is no longer on my bucket list. Although New Hampshire is.

Where would you like to live? Why don't you move there?

1. Get saved.

We've built this list backwards, beginning with #50 and working downward. But the first priority in all of life, no matter our age or circumstances, should be this: get to know the Lord Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and start living faithfully for Him.

How to do that? It's the simplest thing ever: repent of your sins and invite Christ to come in and take over. Yield yourself to Him. Start reading your Bible every day, praying throughout the day during which you worship Him and tell Him what's going on, and find yourself a great church family to join. (Ask Him to lead you in this. Don't try it on your own.)

I said it was simple; I did not say it was easy.

To turn to Christ in repentance and faith involves humbling yourself before God. That's harder for some than others. It might require going against everything you have believed (or not believed) and been taught (and mistaught) for a lifetime.

Why would you want to do this? The reasons number in the hundreds, but here are three--

--The God who created you knows you better than anyone and has plans for you beyond anything you ever dreamed of. Get your life back to the Master Designer and ask Him to proceed with His will for you.

--You and I were not given an infinite number of days for this earthly life. Just as there was a beginning point, there will be an end to it. Thereafter, our eternal destiny will depend on one major thing: your relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ. Matthew 25 describes the eternal abode of the faithful as "a place prepared for you from the foundation of the world" and the wicked as "a place prepared for the devil and his angels." We each get to choose. We have to choose.

--This life can be so much more with Jesus Christ reigning as our Lord and Guide than otherwise. Jesus put it this way: "I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; for apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5).

That's it. Fifty items on a Christian bucket list. Now, using this as a prompter, make your own list.

 

Dr. Joe McKeever is a Preacher, Cartoonist, and the Director of Missions for the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans. Visit him at joemckeever.com/mt. Used with permission.