Solomon's Nightgown

Down home in Reevesville, in the field where we used to play football, my father has planted daylilies. That sounds a little tame. Imagine enough yard space for at least 6 boys to have a lot of room for a football game. Now, imagine that space full of flowers. What word comes between garden and farm?

It is very close to peak daylily season in Reevesville. When last I was down there, Dad gave me a few plants to bring back home with me. I have decided to be his discount outlet store, so I loaded the car with 32 plants to find good homes for west of "the swamp".

The one thing I have learned about daylilies is statistics. Every variety of the flower has a pedigree and a detailed description that rivals the information on the back of Topps baseball card from the '80's. Here you can learn if you plants are evergreen or dormant. You can get a good estimate of how tall the stalks (scapes) will be and how big the blossoms will be.

Over the last 15 years, Dad has moved over 600 varieties of daylily through the "farden". When I was raiding the clearance aisle, he pointed out one in particular, lending some statistical analysis, "Take that one, it's real pretty."

Yesterday evening, I noticed something odd about this plant. I had to go look it up--turn its "card" over. The daylily known as Tuscawilla Taj Mahal is evergreen, throws right, bats right, hit .387 in it's last year in the minors, and it's NOCTURNAL. The unusual thing I saw was that at 7:30 p.m. it was starting to open. I checked it again at midnight, and it had opened more. At 4:00 a.m. it was in full bloom.

Jesus told his followers not to worry. "Consider the lilies of the field, "he said, "They neither toil nor spin, but I tell you the truth, even Solomon in all his splendor was not clothed like one of these." It is so easy to give in to anxiety. It is so easy to let our fears paralyze us. We have heard it's always darkest before the dawn, but scientifically, we know it is darkest at midnight with 6-7 more hours of dark to come. Having hope as followers of Jesus means that we hold on to that hope when it would be a whole lot easier to be hopeless. Even in our own darkness, it's a great help to know that there are lilies that bloom at night. "Will He not much more clothe you?"

The Mission Mezuzah

Over the last 5 weeks our church has been studying what it means to be a missional church.

Missional? Is that a word? According to spellcheck on Word it is not. But the word comes from South African missiologists who don't like to put h's in Jo-n, so I'm not too worried that Microsoft does not yet know the term. My favorite definition comes from Rick Bennett who says that it is being the presence of Christ on purpose. Another Baptist friend added the being a missional church is being the presnce of Christ on purpose for the sake of others whether anybody joins your church or not. That last phrase scared my Sunday school class a little.

One thing I have said for a long time is that we preachers need to preach "to the benediction". By that I mean that even our worship services are commissional and that each week we come to a point of sending our churches out to meet and pastor their own individual churches. This makes the benediction a time to bless (ordain?) the shepherds of a number of flocks.Our preaching should always imply and at times overstate that we are the ones Jesus was talking to saying, "Go therefore . . ." And he probably did it holding up at least one hand.

One of this week's devotional lessons asked the question, how do you go about proclaiming Christ's love? The answer? "Any way imaginable is possible when your heart is wiling to have your life transformed from self-centeredness and given to God's power and plan."

This devotion prompted 4 questions that I think we should ask ourselves daily.
Where will you go today?
What will you do today?
Who is waiting for you help today?
How will you go about proclaiming Christ's love?

Maybe we should ask them before we get out of bed. Maybe we should post them by the door and read them before we walk out to our days. Perhaps they should be encased in a Missional Mezuzah to remind us we are, as the Blues Brothers so richly proclaimed, "on a mission from God".