Sabbatical or New Direction?

The Pastor of our church just returned from a Sabbatical.  He has now begun to write about the experience and the lessons learned from it.  This made me think about my current period of unemployment (even though it's only been 2 weeks so far!) as potentially a type of sabbatical.  My severance agreement grants me 7 months of salary continuation, one month for each year of service.  I've worked for GuideOne for 7 years, and now have 7 months off.  Seems like a sabbatical to me, except for the part that my job isn't there to come back to.  (a key difference, I'll grant you)

Right now, I am feeling like I need to busy myself with searching for work rather than calming myself, letting the adrenaline high (from the work challenges I faced) slowly dissipate, and search instead for insight and wisdom.

One of the ideas we are discussing is whether or not I could move straight into retirement.  Of course we can, but it may be a strain financially, and wasn't in our plan (which had me working for another 4 1/2 years).  So I don't yet know if this is a sabbatical, a period of rest from which I will come back to the workforce reinvigorated, or if it's a transition into a new career: retirement.  I love the sound of that last phrase.  I have such plans for retirement!

Among those plans is a daily routine that addresses body, soul, mind, and spirit, at least a half-hour of each.  Body: 30 minutes of exercise daily, varying among movement, strength, and endurance; Soul: 30 minutes of creativity daily, whether contemplating beauty, appreciating music, writing or making music; Mind: 30 minutes of reading daily, with a variety of literature: fiction, non-fiction, poetry; Spirit: 30 minutes of devotional reading, bible study and prayer.  More possible in each of these categories, of course, but no less than this in each.

These last two weeks I decided to try the routine as if I were retired and see if it's sustainable.  I've done fairly well with it so far - usually 3 of the four categories handled, with the one missing being different each day.  I've found that the search for work intrudes and disrupts the routine and is mostly what causes me to miss one area.  So, it's a half-hearted effort at best, but it seems that if I didn't have a work search intruding, it would be sustainable.

I've even written another children's book already.  :)  This will be my third, and it's focused on my boyhood experiences making maple syrup with my Dad and brother down in the woods behind my childhood home.  At this point all I need is an illustrator.

And that writing exercise just scratches the surface.  I've laid down 6 song tracks in the last two weeks as well.  There's poetry in my head just waiting to be let out onto paper.  I have a longing to help lead a small group, to do more teaching.  All I need is the time.

Will it be now?  Or in another 5 years?

No way to tell right now, so I'm not quite sure how to treat this 7 months of salary continuation.  Sabbatical?  Or a new direction entirely?

The Other Shoe Dropped

In my previous post I talked about the anticipation of waiting for a new management team to make all their final decisions around organizational structure (watching company officers be let go was rather like seeing tin cans being shot off a split rail fence one by one).

Well, this week it was my turn.  I happened to be working remotely Thursday when I got a call from HR telling me my position was being eliminated in a reorganization.  Friday was to be my last day, so they said to be there at 7AM to turn in my badge and pick up my severance paperwork.

It wasn't a surprise, really, I felt the odds were pretty good that I would get painted with the same brush as many others who went before me, and indeed I was.  The old saying is true: "the new broom sweeps clean".  Very.

Still, in each week that went by that say me still on the payroll, I was grateful to still be employed.  And just about a year ago, I was also nearly on the cutting room floor so to speak, and managed to get a reprieve by taking on a tough new assignment, which was not really given enough time to complete, but it still gave me about another year of employment, so I'm glad of it.

But now, it's time to dust off the old resume', ring up some recruiters, and see what's out there.  Since I turn 62 this fall, I theoretically could retire, but that's not financially prudent, as I need to work about 4 1/2 more years at my current pay scale to be finish off my house mortgage.  THEN I can retire!  And finding something at 62 at my current pay... [gulp] is not going to be easy.

So as they say, "life is what happens while you're making other plans", and "the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray".  And so they have.  The question now is, can we get them back on track, or will we have to make some major adjustments to those plans?

I feel the earth - move - under my feet

For the last 8 months I've been pouring myself into a new role at my company.  Exciting, challenging, demanding, rewarding, and building to a head when I reported out to the Board of Directors in May on my progress.  All went well until...

The CEO retired, a new one got hired, and 7 of the most senior officers of the company got summarily replaced!  Only 5 existing executives (VP & up) are still there and only one of them is reporting to the new CEO.  The six of us AVPs are all still on the payroll (so far).  The CEO is female, and two other females in the AVP/director ranks got immediate promotions to higher officer titles.  None of the males did; plus, all the officers who got replaced were male; one of those men was replaced by a woman as well.  Maybe there's a message there, maybe not, but it does seem like women came out particularly well in this transition.  We went from 2 women in the officer ranks to five (including the top spot) within the space of two weeks!  Remarkable.

The new CEO is a complete whirlwind.  She makes decisions even faster than I do, and I thought I had a tendency to shoot from the hip!  This woman is a gunslinger par excellence.   She initially said she might need 30-45 days to put an org chart together, and she published one in 3 weeks.  It was comforting to see a box on the chart that described my current role, even though my name wasn't on it.  There were lots of those nameless functional boxes, though, and the explanation given was that whoever the person was at the top of any particular column of boxes would have the right to name his/her own team beneath.

Yesterday I found out who the person above me in the food chain will be.  He's not showing up for another 10 days, but when he does, the process of vetting me for continuing employment commences.    Just when I thought that I cleared the biggest hurdle facing me - the Board - it turns out there's one more that still remains.  I'm strangely calm about it; I feel confident that God has all things under control, including my welfare.  So, I can relax and be myself, knowing that whatever comes, God will be in it.  :)

It also helps to be turning 62 this Fall.  Not that I want to take retirement... I prefer to work another 4 years.  But if push came to shove... I think we could make it.

So, it's kind of a week-to-week gig while the ground continues to pitch and yaw under my feet; I just widen my stance, bend my knees a bit, put my hands out for balance, and roll with it!

Relocation or Exile?

Today in church the pastor preached from Jeremiah 29, the passage where God, through the prophet, told the people of Israel that they should embrace their exile to Babylon and not struggle against it, because the generation that went there would die there.  It would be the next generation (or two) who would return to Jerusalem.  But as for those who were still smarting from the humiliation and disruption, God told them to lean into the pain, to build houses, plant gardens, marry off their children, and settle down.  What's more, they should work for the benefit of their new location, because it would be in their best interests in the long run.  It's not unlike when a parent tells a squirming child who is trying to get out of the car seat or the dentist's chair: "Stop struggling, and sit still!  Read, play a game, watch a video.  You're not getting out, so you might as well make the best of it!"

I couldn't help but reflect on the many, many relocations we have been through since we started out.  Of the 17 moves (most of which were prompted by job changes) we've gone through, I count 10 of them as being "involuntary" or at least undesirable - not things I would have chosen had circumstances not pushed us in that direction.  Many of those experiences of career change and lifestyle disruption seemed like exile at the time.  I kicked against them and didn't want to go, but felt I was "forced" to by circumstances.  At the time, I could not hear the kinds of things that God said to the Israelites in exile - I didn't appreciate what God might have been up to, what plans He had in mind for me (to give me a future and a hope).

As I look back on them all now, it's much more clear that every move, every job change had a purpose - whether discipline, or opportunity, or both.  A difficult circumstance, an isolation, a disruption, led to a period of growth, a new set of friends, an opportunity for another family member, an accomplishment, etc.  Much like with the Israelites in captivity, who used that time to write, collate, and codify the canon of the Old Testament scriptures.  There was no exile God's people faced, nor any that I faced, that was without hope and a future, and none that did not eventually produce a benefit.

Going through those troubling circumstances over and over have given me confidence that there will always be hope and a future, and even an accomplishment, in and beyond any experience of disruption and exile.  

Even in Iowa!  ;)

Christianity's Moral Philosophy

In the classes that I teach for UIU on Contemporary Ethics (and to a lesser degree in the classes on World Religions), I explore some of the primary ethical systems in practice in humanity, such as:

• Consequentialism (of which popular Utilitarianism is a special case)
• Virtue Ethics
• Deontological Ethics 
• Natural Law

as well as some others not as widely practiced, like Feminist and Relational Ethics.

Whenever I do this, I inevitably get around to the question of which of these is most like Christianity, or more precisely, which of these is most consistent with historic Christian theology and praxis?

The conclusion I most often come to is that the moral philosophy of Christianity is a special case of Deontology, in which the Moral Imperative of Deontology is informed by God in three ways:  1) the basic moral hard wiring common to humanity, 2) the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and 3) in these latter days, a living and active relationship with God through faith in Jesus as the Son of God.  

Deontology, to those readers who may not have had much opportunity to study ethics, is sometimes called the "ethics of duty".  A prominent proponent of this ethical system was the philosopher Immanuel Kant.  The essence of it is this: there are such things as moral good and moral evil, and they are known by the vast majority of humanity.  As a result of this nearly universal agreement, we must take them as moral imperatives to do the right and avoid the wrong as those concepts are generally known.  We have a duty to obey these moral imperatives, the obedience of which is moral goodness, and the disobedience of which is moral evil.

As to how these moral imperatives for Christians become informed by God, there is a presupposition that must first be stated.  Christians hold that God exists (specifically YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), that God is the epitome of moral goodness, and that God was directly involved in creation of the universe in which we find ourselves.  Unlike Deists, Christians see God as interventionist, as immanent, not as disinterested and aloof.  In the process of creation (whether by fiat - ex nihilo, or by active divine guidance of evolutionary processes) God imbued creation with a moral order as a direct result of God's own nature.  The LOGOS of God, the divine creative reason and will, was what guided creation, and still does.  We see this in John 1:1-3a: 

"In the beginning was the [LOGOS], and the [LOGOS] was with God, and the [LOGOS] was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being."

As a result of this moral order permeating creation, humanity also has a moral compass - the conscience.  The Apostle Paul described the effect of that this way in his letter to the Romans (1:19-20 and 2:14-16)

 "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse ..."

"When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all."

So even without the Jewish and Christian scriptures, God still impressed on the hearts of humans what is morally right and wrong.  But God did not stop there.  Being an interventionist God, willing to step into the created order and steer it, God also sent teachers to humanity in the form of Moses who communicated to ancient Israel the Ten Commandments and other teachings of the Law of God, as well as the prophets who told Israel and Judah when they were going morally off course and how to change direction.  Here is a clear example from the prophet Micah (6:8):

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

And this from the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Philippians (4:6-9):

Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

In this way, the scriptures also inform the moral imperatives by which Christians strive to live.  But for those who have put their faith for their moral salvation in the free grace (undeserved favor) of God, through identification with Jesus Christ as Savior, there is an additional way that God informs their moral imperatives: by the indwelling presence of the Spirit of God, as explained by Jesus himself in John 14:15-17, 25-26):

"If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. [...] I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you."

This spiritual connection with God via the Holy Spirit is what informs us moment by moment of what is true and right.  It also assures us of our position as beloved children in the family of God, as the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8:7-17a:

For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.  But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.  

So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ...

So, with their Deontological Moral Imperatives being informed by God in these ways, Christians have both a duty to obey the Moral Imperatives of God, and have a joy in doing so since they know that this pleases God, and aligns with the moral order of the universe.  For Christians, then, Moral Goodness is adherence to, and alignment, affiliation with, God and God's teachings; Moral Evil is departure from or rebellion against the same.

When faced with a moral choice, the Christian attempts to align decisions with God's moral order, and is informed by conscience, the scriptures and by the Holy Spirit's guidance in the moment.  The dilemma faced by moral philosophies like Utilitarianism, with its need to assign cost and benefit to life and death, health and suffering, is not one that should trouble Christians.  When faced with a test like the "lifeboat" scenario, where you must choose who gets thrown overboard to allow an overloaded lifeboat to stay afloat, there is no need to evaluate the value of the elderly passenger versus the child, the woman versus the man, the professor versus the carpenter, etc.  For the Christian, the moral imperative is to do as the Apostle Paul teaches us in his letter to the Philippians (2:3-8): 

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.

As Christians, we align with Jesus in our moral choices.  And so when faced with the lifeboat scenario or other such moral dilemmas, our moral imperative is informed by God through our conscience, the scriptures, and the guidance of God's Spirit.  

Who leaves the lifeboat?  

I do.  I go overboard, so that you all can live.

Fandom and Identification

During the NFL playoffs, Diane and I wear our Packer T-shirts on gameday (like today!  #GoPack).

We identify ourselves as followers of that specific pro football team. I also have Packer gear in my office, stickers on my car, autographed items by Packer players and ... wait for it ... season tickets to all their home games at Lambeau Field.  Not to mention that in my chest freezer I have two boxes of genuine sod from Lambeau - real Frozen Tundra!  Man, I identify with that team.

What it made me wonder about is how do I identify myself as a follower of Jesus? The Scriptures teach that identification with Christ is an essential element of a faith that leads to salvation.  Theologians like N.T. Wright have devoted entire books to the concept of a believer's identity being tied up with Jesus Christ, it is that important that we do so.  

So, what evidence is there that I identify with Jesus and depend on Him for salvation?  I certainly have the gear (Bibles, study materials, t-shirts, and mugs) at home, in my office, in my car... never did get Jesus' autograph (or a piece of the True Cross), but nevertheless, there is evidence.  There's even ... wait for it ... a Masters' Degree in Theology from Bethel Seminary.  I suppose I could go up there and cut some sod from the campus lawn and put it in my freezer as further proof...

Beyond the gear, I do also sprinkle my emails and conversation at work occasionally with tangential references to Scripture and the stories Jesus told.  I've preached sermons, sang inspirational songs in worship, led Bible studies, helped to grow up new believers into a more mature faith, given funds to people and organizations that advance the Kingdom of God, etc.

Still, I hear in the back of my mind the Apostle Paul saying to the Corinthian church:

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing."

This reminds me that the gear means nothing, the acts of devotion mean nothing.  What is telling is my heart attitude, which no one really sees.  The outward appearance of fandom can easily mislead others; we can even deceive ourselves into thinking we identify with the object of our devotion because of all the things we do.  As God said to Samuel when he was looking for a replacement for King Saul, "the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”  May my heart be true, though all else be outward show.

Genetics and the Doctrine of Original Sin

With the proliferation of DNA testing into criminal justice, paternity and prenatal testing, and ancestry research, it was only a matter of time before knowing what's in your genome became affordable and within the reach of "regular people" (like me).

About a year ago, I sent in my saliva sample and $99 and got back a .csv file full of crazy stuff, like this:

#Genetic data is provided below as five TAB delimited columns.  Each line 

#corresponds to a SNP.  Column one provides the SNP identifier (rsID where 

#possible).  Columns two and three contain the chromosome and basepair position 

#of the SNP using human reference build 37.1 coordinates.  Columns four and five 

#contain the two alleles observed at this SNP (genotype).  The genotype is reported 

#on the forward (+) strand with respect to the human reference.

rsid chromosome position allele1 allele2

rs4477212 1 82154 T T

rs3131972 1 752721 G G

rs12562034 1 768448 G G

rs11240777 1 798959 G G

rs6681049 1 800007 C C 

Page after page of this stuff is what was used to determine that I am less Western European (particularly Saxon and Bavarian) in ancestry than I had thought.  Instead I have more of an Eastern European ancestry (think Prussian and Austro-Hungarian empires), with a chunk of British and Scandinavian heritage mixed in.  Okay, then.  So much for my parents' and grandparents' stories..

That process was pretty interesting.  But even moreso was what happened when I joined Livewello.com and sent my genomic record in to look for mutations (favorable and unfavorable) that might be useful to know about, like for instance knowing that I have a genetic predisposition to reject the effects of Metformin (a common pre-diabetic medicine) because I have a gene mutation that blocks its absorption into the bloodstream.  But on the other hand, I have genetics that help me to resist substance addictions, and lack mutations which would tend toward Alzheimer's and Dementia.  Woo!  I'll be the life of the party in the nursing home!

I told my local endocrine specialist about the anti-metformin gene and she just shrugged and said "nothing I know anything about", and went right on with her normal treatments.  But then, why should she be expected to know about this emerging field, when it's not what she was trained in?

So, over Christmas, Diane and I drove to Austin, TX to see our daughter.  While there, I visited a clinic which specializes in genetic disorders (especially of metabolism) to see what they could tell me.  Yikes!  I feel like the Apostle Paul when he said "Oh wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Page after page of bad news.

Well, not THAT bad.  It's just that in dealing with inflammation of all sorts, processing key nutrients, weight management, and production of energy, I have genetic deficiencies that spell an uphill battle to ever be "normal" in those areas.  I've known for years that I have tendencies toward certain health problems, like my parents and siblings did, but never anything that conclusively points to why.  Now I know - a lot of it is genetics.

And yet, even though genetics determine your strengths and weaknesses, they don't doom you to a particular lifestyle.  There are things you can do to delay onset of conditions, to supplement chemically what your body doesn't do well, etc.  You still have control over how you deal with genetic predispositions, even though they make make it hard to be in perfect health.

Here is an excerpt from the geneticist's report explaining a little of the interpretation of gene mutations:

So, today I got to thinking about the doctrine of Original Sin in light of all this recent discovery of inherited gene mutations, and I came to the conclusion that Original Sin is like having a metaphysical genetic mutation (as opposed to a physical one) which gives a you genetic predisposition toward estrangement toward (or rebellion against) God.  All of humanity is at least heterozygous (+/-) for this Sin gene; we all have a difficult time being obedient to God, or even just to our own conscience (a proxy for God in those who don't know God).  Some of humanity, I think, are homozygous (+/+) for the Sin gene and by nature have a much more difficult time refraining from doing what is morally wrong.

But, having the genetic predisposition doesn't mean we are helpless and doomed to an immoral life estranged from God.  There are things we can do to ward off temptation, to supplement with prayer and reading in the areas where we don't handle things well, to reach out to God for help fighting against this genetic defect passed down from Eve to us (like mitochondrial DNA).

Fortunately, there was One who was born without that Sin mutation (-/-) and who stands in our place today, offering to us a metaphysical version of "gene splicing" to remove our unfavorable mutation.  His operating room is in the Hereafter, but eventually we who believe will be cured and live a life in Eternity free of the struggle against Sin.  Thanks be to God!