Story of Service

MLK, Jr. once said, "Anyone can be great because anyone can serve." If a life of service is a guage for greatness, then my dad was a truly great man. I cannot remember a time when my dad was not in service to his community in some way. He was always volunteering for a community project, a committee for community enrichment, and involved in organizations that focus on community enrichment. Many of my childhood memories of my dad are related to going with him on one of these volunteer efforts.

I don't think I ever questioned the benefits of volunteering or serving selflessly. Being in service is my Dad's legacy. All 4 of us, his children, have a heart for volunteering and building into our community. In whatever way we can, using whatever talents we have. And serving others regardless of our personal circumstances.

I was just thinking of my Dad's legacy of service today. He passed away 2 years ago, October 19, 2007. I am always noticing little ways I'm like my Dad, like my natural ability and desire to find the least traveled route to work. And my passion for volunteering- serving my community and people.

I thought about my dad's legacy of service when my brother called tonight to report his latest fund raising success. Tonight's fund raising report was regarding a woman who just lost her 18 month old child due to the physical abuse from her boyfriend. My brother has lived a troubled somewhat self destructive life. And yet when he hears of a tragedy in his community he jumps in to help however he can. He offers his ideas, enthusiasm, and his talents without hesitation. Tonight he shared how he and his friends raised enough money to pay for the funeral and a nice headstone for this 18 month old. And the one thousand plus dollars left after that are being donated to a fund for other abused children. If you just knew my brothers personal experiences you might be impressed. But if you knew our dad, it's no surprise.

My sister's do the same. They are both teachers and truly invest in their students. Plus they volunteer in their church communities, and always help others in need.

I can think of no better mirror of the great man my dad was than the stories my siblings and I live in lives of service.

Miami, Money, and Popcorn

My cousin, Richard, runs a sports radio station in Houston, Texas (KGOW, you can stream it online at www.1560thegame.com). His lovely wife, Laura, helps run the station which, I'm sure, blurs the line of work life/home life a bit. I think that might be why Laura has been encouraging Richard to find a different creative outlet on the weekends...so he doesn't spend their weekends at home creating stuff for work. So, Richard started writing these little essays about people in his life. The essay below is a tribute to my father. I'm sharing it now, in honor of Father's Day and with gratitude that my dad's role as a father figure didn't stop with his own children.

MIAMI, MONEY AND POPCORN
MY UNCLE ED KIMBALL

My Uncle Ed was my favorite uncle. At least that is what I always told him when my other uncles were not within earshot. He was a wonderful, loving man that always took a special interest in me growing up, and enjoyed my updates as an adult in the business world.

He was a Miami Man like no other I have known. All of my aunts and uncles, my mother and father, and some cousins attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Out of all of us, Ed was the proudest. Following the football and basketball programs (home and away), checking on the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, and proudly supporting Tom O. Hawk, a colorful bird mascot which I inhabited for two years; Ed loved him some Miami. When the big house in Middletown where he and Marilyn raised my cousins Beth, Sue, Ned and Emily was empty, Ed and Marilyn moved to a condo in Oxford.

He was an international tax accountant by trade, but he taught me some of my first lessons about money. When I told him I was reading Trump: The Art of the Deal, he asked me to check in with him after I was done. After telling him how much I enjoyed the book, he deconstructed Trump and his ego to reveal that Trump’s father was the source for a lot of the Donald’s claims to money, ego and fame. When I told him before graduating from college that I wanted to be a millionaire, he broke down the tax implications, interest, and just how far I could get with a million dollars. I realized that being a millionaire was going to be a lot of work.

And any time our families got together, which was quite often, he would make the kids popcorn. We’re not talking about a little bowl for each child. We’re talking pots and pots and bowls and bowls, until every kid was stuffed. What fun.

I miss my Uncle Ed every day. But as I look around my home study at all of my Miami memorabilia, as I stand on the edge of being financially comfortable, and every night that I make popcorn for my wife Laura and my children Jack and Grace, I take comfort in that we are still getting a kick out of each other.


I am blessed to have had a dad like my dad. The older I get and the more people I meet, the more grateful I am for my father who played the father role in so many ways to so many friends and family. Thanks, Rich, for sharing your memories of Dad and for being a great dad to your children, Jack and Grace.

My dad passed away in October 2007. I miss him in some of the same ways Richard does. I just popped a bunch of popcorn last night for a trip to the Drive-In with friends- and thought of Dad. And, I miss him with all my own special memories of him.

Prayer Pact

The power of prayer is amazing. Just the concept of prayer is mind blowing. We can talk to GOD, almighty creator of everything, anytime and it's called prayer. And when two or more are gathered in prayer, it's exponential. Some days I'll just thank God for prayer, plain and simple.

I keep a prayer journal. It's full of raw, honest, prayers. I have been keeping a prayer journal for several years, so I actually have several notebooks full of prayers. I noticed that there is at least one theme that I've been praying about for a couple of years. They are prayers for myself, for something I desire. Recently I had a conversation with a friend where we discovered we have both been praying similar prayers for ourselves for that something we desire. And we discussed how redundant it seemed and that we felt a little selfish for it. So I proposed a pact. Beginning that day I started praying for her for that desire specifically and she started praying for me for that. We both felt it was easier to pray for each other for that desire instead of always praying for ourselves. And after a few days we shared what we noticed.

What we noticed was mostly little shifts in perceptions. We were both having insights we hadn't had before in the area of this desire. Neither of us got an immediate concrete result. Yet we knew the pact was working. We were thinking in unprecendented ways and realizing deeper internal beliefs that affected our outward behavior. After the first couple of weeks I noticed my prayers for her were less intentional and more like random thoughts and quick little prayers.

Then I got this message from my friend, Stacie, on FaceBook:
"I'll be praying" sounds good but when daily stuff takes my mind of it, it gets lost sometimes. I want to try to make my prayers deliberate and am going to use my blog to do so. Wanna join me? ;)"

I was immediately inspired! And Stacie has written some awesome blog posts since then. You can check them out at www.faithandart.blogspot.com However, all my initial inspiration has faded momentarily. I know it will return. I've just been distracted. But in the meantime, something I can always offer is a good ol' plain ol' prayer. And in God's eyes, there is nothing mundane about it. He listens always. He is good all the time. Let us pray:

"Lord, thank You for the gift of prayer. Thank you for giving us such a simple way to engage You and Your Holy Spirit. When I pray, I can acknowledge You for Who You ARE and know You created me and love me. I can confess anything I have in my life I know does not honor You and know You forgive me and love me. I can thank you for all Your blessings and know that You gave them because You love me. I can ask for whatever I think I want or need and know You hear me and love me. And prayer can be silence, filled with Your presence and basking in Your luscious love. And when I pray, I pray with faith in Your faithfulness. Amen."

This is Why

On Friday I got to witness a spontaneous and authentic precious moment. My friend Stacie is an artist and she co-organized an art show for Good Friday with another artist named Teresa. The focus was to show the connection between art & faith, and the creativity within each of us given by our Creator. The event took place at Compass Church in a suburb of Cincinnati. And given the context of the event, a Communion station was available. Stacie’s seven year old son, Sean, asked why it was there. I know Sean has seen people take Communion before. But when his dad, Rusty, explained that it was Good Friday, and taking Communion was a way of remembering that Jesus broke His body and spilled His blood for us, Sean was upset. In fact, Sean started to cry.

Stacie and Rusty are faith-full parents and they had told their two sons about Easter before. This seemed to be the first time it was all sinking in for seven year old Sean. Stacie and Rusty did not take this lightly and seized the moment to talk to Sean and answer his questions about Good Friday and Easter. It was getting close to 9 p.m. and the art show was winding down, but there were still lots of people around and other kids running, playing, and doing their best to create distractions. But Sean’s attention to his parents and their attention to him did not waver for at least 15 minutes while they had their intimate moment. I was not a part of their moment, but for a few sweet minutes I was within earshot. My heart swelled with gratitude for the moment and God’s love.

Sean was having a hard time understanding how Jesus could have come back to life and that He still lives. Stacie and Rusty told him it was normal to struggle with that concept. They explained that is how faith works. It takes a leap of faith for anyone to accept that as truth. No matter how old a person is, the idea of a human being tortured and killed, yet rising from the dead, and his burial tomb being found empty seems unreal. Adding to that the fact that it ALL happened because God’s love for us is deeper than any love we can experience from any other human. It’s a lot to grasp. Yet millions of people all over the world from all sorts of backgrounds, ages, levels of intelligence and variety of talents have taken that leap of faith and we are all living proof of God’s perfect truth and grace.

Sean’s honest reaction to the news of Good Friday and Easter was embraced and addressed by his biological mother and father. The bible tells us that our Heavenly Father rejoices over us and delights in us. I know God was rejoicing over Sean’s questions and delighting in Stacie & Rusty’s surrender to the moment. It’s in these moments where I am blessed to be a witness that I KNOW my Redeemer Lives! And this precious moment I just shared? THIS IS WHY I have faith and praise God’s perfect truth and grace.

Grace inside a Sound

I have a habit of relating song lyrics to books, movies, prayer requests, television, events at work, and life experiences. Most of the time, the lyrics make a silly connection to whatever occupies my brain. Every once in a while, I feel more inspired. The week the new U2 CD came out I was reading the book of Luke. When I heard these lyrics:

These days are better than that

Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn

Every day I have to find the courage

To walk out into the street

With arms out, got a love you can’t defeat

Neither down or out

There’s nothing you have that I need

I can breathe, Breathe now

I couldn’t stop thinking about the lines below from Luke. These lines are from a section titled “Lambs in a Wolf Pack” where Jesus sends 70 (or 72) men out carrying nothing but a few toiletries and the simple charge to knock on doors and say “Peace” to whoever answers. I am quoting from The Message translation with highlights for emphasis below:

“When you enter a town and are received, eat what they set before you, heal anyone who is sick, and tell them, ‘God’s Kingdom is right on your doorstep!’ When you enter a town and are not received, go out in the street and say ‘The only thing we got from you is the dirt on our feet, and we’re giving it back. Did you have any idea that God’s Kingdom was right on your doorstep?’ Sodom will have it better on Judgment Day than the town that rejects you.”

LUKE 10: 8-12

“The one who listens to you, listens to me. The one who rejects you, rejects me. And rejecting me is the same as rejecting God, who sent me.” The seventy came back triumphant. “Master, even the demons danced to your tune!” Jesus said, “I know, I saw Satan fall, a bolt of lightening out of the sky. See what I’ve given you? Safe passage as you walk on snakes and scorpions, and protection from every assault of the Enemy. No one can put a hand on you. All the same, the great triumph is not in your authority over evil, but in God’s authority over you and presence with you. Not what you do for God but what God does for you- that’s the agenda for rejoicing.”

LUKE 10: 16-20

For me, the lyrics above from Breathe bring extra depth and life to the story above from Luke. When I abide in God’s truth, I find grace. And if I share God’s truth and I’m rejected, I have the peace, strength and courage of God’s Kingdom to say, “There’s nothing you have that I need, I’m neither down or out, I have a love you can’t defeat, so I can breathe.”

“I’ve found grace inside a sound, I found grace, it’s all that I found, and I can breathe.” –U2, Track 10, No Line on the Horizon, Breathe

In the Zone

While hanging with my brother the other day, he mentioned a memory from when we lived in New Orleans. We lived in New Orleans for the first five years of my life, so he didn’t think I’d remember the event he described. I didn’t, but said that I did have vivid memories from New Orleans. He figured riding my bike with a cast on my leg was one, and he was right. This made me think about how important music was to me and one of my earliest memories of the impact music has had on my life. I just shared this particular memory in a FaceBook note tag craze titled “15 albums that impacted my life.” However, here I will segue into songs that I connect with deeply and put me in what I call THE ZONE.

Briefly, when I was 4, the boy across the street intentionally rode his bike over my legs, breaking my right leg. This put me in some sort of shock and I stopped talking. I was pretty much a zombie for most of the day. Several hours after we returned from the hospital, I was still unresponsive. So my mom put on the soundtrack to Oliver! Almost immediately I came out of my trance and started connecting with my family. Throughout the years, I noticed there were certain songs that would put me in The Zone where I felt a special deep connection that seemed beyond words of description. I could say the lyrics mean something special, but sometimes the lyrics don’t make that much sense apart from the music. Most recently the song that puts me in The Zone is “Moment of Surrender” on U2’s new CD. Below I’ve listed a few more songs that take me into The Zone. I have written about some of these in other blog posts.

*Whole of the Moon – The Waterboys
*Harvest Moon or Old Man – Neil Young
*Go on Through- Afro Celt Sound System
*Paradise or Idaho- The BoDeans
*Northern Star- Ollabelle
*Much Farther to Go – Rosie Thomas
*All at Sea or My Yard – Jamie Cullum (or his cover of High and Dry)
*In the Sun – Joseph Arthur
*Girl in the War, Wolves, or Temptation of Adam- Josh Ritter
*North Dakota – Lyle Lovett
*Mercy Street – Peter Gabriel
*Day of Reckoning – Robbie Robertson (or his original of Broken Arrow)
*Fragile, Dead Man’s Rope, or Mad About You – Sting
*This is the Day – The The (most recently used in an M&M’s ad, what the heck?)
*Beauty of a Dream- Thomas Dolby
*Protected- Tim Finn
*All I Want is You, One, When I look at the World, or An Cat Dubh – U2

Most people can relate to that “In the Zone” feeling. Surrendering to The Zone submerges me in feeling completely comfortable with truth, consumed by grace, and intimately loved.

Intimacy of Redemption

Last week the intimacy of redemption caught me off guard. I had only met the people I was with that night an hour before. There is no possible way I could have known how they would act as profound vehicles of God’s deep love and knowledge of me. They still don’t know. They didn’t notice the tears of gratitude trickling throughout the evening. While these new friends shared bits of their past to illustrate answers to simple questions posed, I felt Jesus surrounding me. The Jesus who knew how many men the woman at the well had been with when he told her he was the permanent remedy to her thirst for love. The Jesus who knew the hidden pains of the people who were about to throw stones at the woman caught in adultery. The Jesus who knows me intimately and redeems childhood pains both experienced and witnessed I thought were long buried. The next day I cried the tears I had tucked away when I withdrew from love gone astray. And then I sent an email to a couple of friends. Here’s an excerpt:

I don't know if I've ever told you about my brother and the troubles he's been in over the years. I can't really explain the deep & intimate healing I'm experiencing. This is healing only God could possibly know I needed. This is a depth of God's love I didn't even know I was missing. For some reason beyond my current comprehension, He is using these people to show me a tangible redemption that is somehow healing the pain I witnessed and experienced as a child growing up in the shadow of my brother. Pain so old I had totally dismissed it and swept it under the rug.

The movie “Bella” demonstrates the intimacy of redemption beautifully. Jose and Nina spend a day together, simply being together with no agenda. Their day together is prompted by a simple offer made by Jose to talk about an unplanned pregnancy troubling Nina. It’s really a typical day in NYC. I’ve had NYC days like that, but not for those reasons. I love those days when going with the flow reveals incredibly juicy fruits. In “Bella” Jose is struggling with flashbacks of a tragic event that changed his life. The movie is journey that shows the grace of a family’s love and how to accept hardships and truly count them as joy. Mostly, “Bella” shows how simple acts of love and friendship can provide deep unprecedented healing for all involved.

The perfection of God’s truth and grace will redeem all pain. Yes, even that one…the one we try to control by hiding it away. As I have been pondering the intimacy of redemption this week, these lyrics have played repeatedly in my head,

“At the moment of surrender, a vision over visibility…” –U2

The best thing about the intimacy of God’s redemption is that it requires nothing of us but a willingness to live in surrender to His Will.