Oaks Manor Retreat Center Event

If you’ve read A Friend of the King, you’ll remember that I made a big point of starting some new habits or disciplines to become a better friend of the King, and to improve your spiritual sensitivity and hearing ability. Dallas Willard in his book The Spirit of the Disciplines made the statement that “solitude is the most important spiritual discipline and the the hinge of all the others.”

I believe that’s true and never more so than in our rushed, crowded times. That’s why I love, support, and look for places like Oaks Manor Retreat Center near Fort Smith. It’s a short drive to the north, and although it’s close you will feel like you’re in a remote setting. It’s designed and provided for people like you to “come aside, and rest for awhile.” To seek the Lord in a quiet and undistracted setting.

On Sunday, June 30th at 6:00 p.m., there’s an excellent opportunity for you to get better acquainted. Please take advantage of this event to look Oaks Manor over, mingle with some like-minded people, and plan on coming back by yourself or with a few friends. For event details, click here: Oaks-Manor.pdf

“He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of theLord is the key to this treasure.” Isaiah 33:6 NIV

Unfinished Story

Matt Mooney is a great young man! He’s one of my son’s best friends, and I’ve known and loved his parents since the 80’s. He’s recently written a book, A Story Unfinished, about their first son Eliot who was born with Edward’s Syndrome and lived a miraculous 99 days. But the real miracle is what Eliot’s experience has brought about in the lives of his parents, and in the earth.

As the young parents walked through this devastating experience, they did so openly and honestly with their friends and their faith community. Matt, a very gifted communicator, is very honest and real. Not foreseeing anything that has since happened, he blogged about the whole experience while they were going through it, a blog that received about one million hits and resulted in this video.

Since then he’s been on national TV a few times and received a “Father of the Year” award from Tony Dungy’s ministry organization.

His life exhibits courage, sacrifice, honesty, and many other manly qualities that we so need today. It also speaks to the preciousness of life, and opportunities for ministry to those in need. It most clearly speaks about faith in God, and God’s faithfulness in pain.

Enough of all that, Matt would have said several sentences ago. I just want to encourage you to get his book and read it. I plan to review it on the blog when I can pry it out of my wife’s hands.

What I’d like to say now is this: [1] He’s a native Fort Smith lad, let’s support him! [2] There is a book launch party for him on June 27th at the Pavilion. [3] Be there to hear and support him if you can. [4] But the organizers need a RSVP! So go to this link and do so if you plan to come. Thank you for your time.

God Bless Matt & Ginny, and God bless “99 Balloons!”

More from Moore

The Missing Auto Repair Shop

Continuing our Moore OK story… We found no one at home when we arrived at our assigned location. Just a recently placed travel trailer in front of a home that was totaled; split down the middle and missing it’s front porch, much of it’s roof, and all the trees in it’s yard. There was also the foundation of a metal workshop where the owner previously repaired automobiles.

As I walked with Lance who lived there with his wife and four children, ages four to thirteen, he related that they had purchased the property to build their dream home, a small farm in the edge of the country, one year ago. I told him I had moved our small children and family out to a farm years ago and knew the sweat equity and work the first year involved. He turned, looking deeply into my eyes, then slowly shook his head up and down. I told him, “I’m sorry.” There followed several seconds of silence and walking, then I said, “You’re here, uninjured, and your family is OK; that’s what’s important.” It’s a truth that is never clearer than when you’re standing in the middle of rubble. It doesn’t take away the pain or awareness of the loss; but it provides a time to reflect on the true value of such things in comparison to people’s lives and relationships. We too seldom take time to meaningfully calculate the difference between the temporal and eternal? And the worth of each?

My mind flashes to the book I just finished writing, and the discussion of simplicity v.s. materialism; also simplicity as a spiritual discipline or spiritual habit practiced by followers of Jesus over the centuries. I also think of Dr. Richard Swinson’s three rules for establishing priorities: [1] People are more important than things. [2] People are more important than things. [3] People are more important than things.

Lance tells me he turned thirty-four the day of the tornado. Curious huh? He thought so, and he was in deep reflection about his life–something the pace of our times seldom affords. I become deeply aware of the value of such mediation in this moment, watching and listening to Lance.

He tells me his wife called shortly after the storm but it took her five hours to get through the debris before reaching their home. His children were positioned on the north and south sides of the tornado, and he didn’t know about their welfare until two or three tense hours after the storm. All had been spared.

Lance had been home alone that day, and as the monster storm approached he jumped into his nearby storm cellar, joining four neighbor kids and a seventy year old neighbor man who were already huddled inside. The storm passed over with it’s incredible winds, roar, and pressure drop. One thing Lance recounted was that the older gentlemen prayed aloud as the tornado roared over their heads, “God please spare my home.” They emerged to the utter devastation of missing and torn homes, twisted trees like fly-paper, holding belongings from who-knows-where; but with thankful, awed hearts that none of them, nor anyone they knew had been hurt or killed.

And yes, the old man’s house was the only one standing as far as the eye could see; relatively unhurt by the killing, crushing, destroying tornado.

Shelter from the Storm

Moore is Less

A good friend called two days ago with the opportunity to go help the tornado victims in Moore OK, something I had been interested in doing, but has become harder and more complicated since lawyers and bureaucrats have been active in Katrina and Joplin. Alerted at 8:00 p.m. the night before, I showed up in a local church parking lot at 5:30 a.m. yesterday to drive three hours to OKC to help. The destruction and devastation is widespread and in some places complete, as images from television have depicted. It was surreal driving through some of it on I-35. The traffic and people going about their daily business seemed normal; while homes and lives all around were devastated.

Interestingly, this seems to me a small picture of our culture and Christian landscape in America these days… people going about their daily business while lives all around are devastated. This would be confirmed to me by days end.

Our Methodist team from Van Buren & Fort Smith joined with five Baptist men from Ada OK and were put under the supervision of an Israeli team mobilized to help in such disasters, who themselves were working under a disaster response team from Joyce Meyer Ministries, a team now operating out of Church of the Harvest, south campus, near Moore. Interesting huh? The community of God is very far reaching, large, and functions like nothing we really comprehend or can imagine. There are valid reasons for our local church boundaries; and there are at least two valid reasons to get outside of them.

I was just there to help any way I could, to observe, and hopefully get some meaningful contact with people who were directly affected. But I was really there to spend a day with some old and new friends, help some people in real need, and to serve the King doing both. Whatever our hands found to do would be fine with me.

Then it happened. About 3:00 p.m., we broke for lunch at an American Indian tribal donation center about forty-five minutes east of Moore in an area that had also been hit hard. We had earlier in the day helped move a mountain of trash and debris into dumpsters while they were repeatedly emptied by a big trash truck. We then made three logistics runs, I call them, moving supplies from distribution centers at churches (who had made themselves into warehouses), to similar churches where the supplies were needed for families. It looked as if that’s the way our day would end when two pickup trucks with large trailers from a Baptist Church near Atlanta GA pulled up and took our last big load back to Destiny Church OKC in our place, freeing us to call for an assignment to help families in need.

I’ll describe what happened next in another blog post. This one has gotten too long. I’ll summarize like this: Walking along side Lance, who turned thirty-four the day of the tornado, looking at his destroyed home and property ten yards from the storm cellar where he and some neighbors rode out the storm, surviving with no one hurt or lost…

It seemed to me, and to all our team, that Less is Moore.