Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.  For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”.

• Mark 10:42-45

Boilerplate

I was born into a Presbyterian Church.  For all my life up until now, I have been a member of one Presbyterian Church or another.  It is told that the founding fathers were wondering how the organizational structure of the US Constitution should be set up and a founding father who was Presbyterian showed how it worked in his church.

So, if anyone has had enough time to screw up bureaucracy and the church as a whole, the Presbyterians are great at it.

I had someone tell me that I do not sound like a member of the Presbyterian church, and I replied that I might just be a Reformed School Dropout.  This is a play on words.  Reform school is what they used to call a special school for juvenile delinquents so that they could be incarcerated and given an education at the same time.  They do not have these schools anymore or they call them something different.  Presbyterians and a few other denominations are considered Reformed Theology instead of protestant, but the military could not understand the distinction, so my dog tags read PROTESTANT, meaning Christian and not Catholic.  And of course a school dropout is someone who quit before finishing.  Thus, I think I really dropped out of the reformed way of thinking and the bureaucracy of the denomination when I accepted Jesus into my heart.

When my heart is moved to do something, I feel that it is the work of the Holy Spirit.  Once I suggested that I was going to buy a banner to show where people were being persecuted for their faith and I simply wanted a prayer made on a specific day, the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted.  The pastor said he would send that to the worship and discipleship teams for approval.  As usual, it was buried in committee until after the specific day.  Bureaucracy had triumphed and the Holy Spirit was grieved.  The next year, I bought the banner.  I handed out prayer cards to my Sunday school class.  I displayed the banner each Sunday for a month before the day of prayer, and I took the banner down before a bureaucrat caught me.

Yes, I am a Reformed School Dropout.

Discussion

I have written about this before, but I only heard about the relationship thing with Jesus for the past twenty years.  I accepted Jesus as my Savior over fifty years ago.

What was I doing for those first thirty years as a Christian?

I guess I was trying to reconcile God in my heart with the legalistic world I grew up in, honoring my parents even though one of them despised me, and bouncing from one job to another trying to do the right thing and keep food on the table for the family.

And I was empty inside.

Yes, I had Jesus in my heart, but at times we had wrestling matches as to who I listened to, Jesus or myself.  Why listen to me?  I knew nothing of the world.  I had been force-fed a world that “ought-to-be” by my mother.  My mother lived no more than two or three hours from where she was born, except for the years my Dad was called onto active duty during the Korean conflict.  My Dad taught artillery school at Fort Jackson, SC.  I guess it is no longer known by that name.  But that was before I was born.  Conceived?  That might be a different matter.

When you are taught the formative things by someone that saw that the world was different and then rejected it, you either learn a new way to live, or you get a lot of bumps and bruises, and I was constantly banged up.

And Jesus was there to sooth the aching joints and ice down the swollen parts.  I was learning that relationship thing from a totally different perspective.

And to be honest, many churches today still have trouble preaching about us having a relationship with Jesus.

Why?  It is all throughout the Bible.  God is there for us when we stick to His plan and trust Him.

I would love to have a counselor to help me with my retirement, but God meets my needs, and those counselors will not touch your situation unless you have about $50 for every one dollar that I have.  And they really are scraping the bottom of the barrel in taking those people.  They would tell me that I cannot afford to retire and I should go back to work.  I was 62 when I was laid off.  It was illegal to tell me I was too old, but they said I was over-qualified, and they hired someone fresh out of college that could not do the job, but they thought he was cheaper.  I was used to being underpaid.  Now I am over 10 years older.  Would they even look at my resume?

So, with eviction looming in a year and a half, I am trusting in Jesus even more than I ever did before.  I am not worried.  Something will come up.  I trust my best friend, the loyal one, the faithful one.  Jesus will see me through yet another setback because our friendship and relationship has grown.

Yes, I still do irresponsible things.  I might go out and buy a new pair of pants for the first time in about ten years.  Yep, living on the edge.

And maybe God has a totally new adventure for me to take.  It is not really up to me, and if I had learned that a lot sooner, I would have been a lot happier.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.