When OJ and I were dating, I moved to Tacoma, WA, to be near him.  I couldn’t find a job I liked, so I started a mobile paint touch-up business with the help of some old acquaintances of my dad’s.  They had just discovered their potential as a franchise, and were offering to get me off the ground for $2800.  I had no concept how incredible this opportunity was, but at least I had (barely) enough sense to take it.  Little did we know this small step would support our family for more than ten years, and generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

When OJ got out of the army shortly after our marriage, we again faced the job question.  “For lack of anything better,” he took over my business.  I was pregnant with our first child.  We had no idea, in the context of history, what it meant that a couple of twenty-somethings could just DO something like that, generate a comfortable lifestyle, buy their own home, acquire way too many vehicles, employ others, and own their own company free from the interference of government or corporate control…we were CLUELESS, despite our expensive college degrees.

We were SO clueless, that we actually despised our little business.  It sort of embarrassed us, and we perceived it always as a sort of “stop-gap” before we got to something REAL.  Why?  Because we were highly-educated Americans, a sort of “cream of the American crop,” if you will.  I had been a philosophy major and OJ had a computer science degree he had used as a Captain in the US Army.  Running around in paint-spotted clothes, working with used car managers who may or may not have gotten their GED’s, operating out of our car (NOW I realize:  ohmygoodness, the LOW overhead!), smelling fumes, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, WORKING WITH YOUR HANDS were not VALUES to us.  They were anti-values.  They were offensive and embarrassing.  I currently want to knock my head against the wall for how clueless we were.

It’s not like we were alone in our cluelessness.  We were part of a system.  I think of all the times that OJ tried to employ a young man who desperately needed a job, and he wouldn’t think of taking it, looking instead for that corporate opportunity.  Or he headed back to community college in search of whoknowswhat?  Or when we were trying to sell it and offered it below market value to friends who had families to support, only to have them be totally blind to the opportunity.  Again, tempted to knock my head against the wall.

But God was graciously opening our eyes to the values and paradigms that had completely deceived us, puffing us up with knowledge but leaving us, when it came to real life, somewhat stupid and useless.  How the system would take our gifting and capacity and ensure that we adhered to values which would squander them.  A value system that elevates knowledge and the mind, unaccountable to questions of usefulness or production; a value system run on passivity.

Note:  I am using story after story to highlight these issues in the natural world, particularly with men and boys.  I am always going to point to how these things are just pictures of what happens in the spiritual (REAL AND ETERNAL) world.

A while ago, we were seeking the Lord for how He would lead the men OJ was discipling, and He gave us a picture that turned out to be a template for what He would do with the men for the following year (or maybe years?).  In the picture the men were seated in a classroom.  At the front of the classroom was an instructor with a huge chalkboard on which he was writing notes on every aspect of gardening and farming.  Out the window, the men could see their plots of land:  fallow, scattered with rocks and stumps, and untended.  Every day, they would come take notes about farming and learn from books about farming, with no attention being given to their land.  The instructor couldn’t see the land outside.  He was a fountain of information, and was satisfied that he, at least, was active.  He was blind to the men’s turmoil and futility.

The picture was from El Roi, the God who Sees.  The God who sees His men and understands why they are in turmoil.  The God who would restore, would Father, would train His men to farm unto beautiful, abundant fruit, but who first had to address what was completely normal to them.  Religious systems in which information and revelation is confused for fruit, and the God’s purpose (the men themselves) is lost in the pleasant certainty of religious instruction.

Remember yesterday’s story of the Mr. Fix-it’s who never taught their sons to use a hammer?  “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on,” says Prov. 16:26.  For most of human history, the need to survive and acquire food would ensure that a) a man could not be totally passive, as the proverb implies, and b) he’d have to pass on at least those productive skills to his sons, or he’d have to feed them and theirs, too.  History has never seen the widespread wealth and indolence of this American moment in history, where when we talk about struggling to put food on the table, we mean because the flat-screen takes up so much room.  Our generation (about 30) perhaps was one of the first in which fathers could have genuinely felt that their skills were not useful to their sons.  Hopeful that they would be bankers and brokers instead of farmers and builders, they could have even meant well handing their sons’ development over to the education system.

This is a profound picture of the state of the church.  At some point, being a farmer or a soldier (analogies of the Christian life Paul uses in his epistles) became passé, and being a speaker to conferences, a missionary to the foreign, a bishop over the dioceses, a writer of books, a worship leader and numerous other positions that were more easily acquired and seemed more significant, became the thing.  A church historian could tell us when the strange idea called seminary was formed, after the fashion of the University.  Or when the word church ceased to refer to the the elect, and came to mean a ritual weekly gathering organized around a lecture.  There were better opportunities for those so inclined than the doggone dirty work of discipleship, of fathering, in which one man trains another in how to (in keeping with the analogy) farm unto beautiful fruit.  Why not let somebody else train the churches sons?  Oh, how very easy it is to teach God’s people what, once you’ve released the burden of whether or not they know HOW!!!

Well, now I’ve gone and done it.  :)  Next:  Malachi 4:6