Stone of help. That’s what Ebenezer means.

It’s a Bible name. For a rock.  Samuel sets up a stone between Mizpah and Shen. He calls it Ebenezer. He says, “So far, God has helped us.”

That’s the end of the story. It started with Israel being tired of what was happening in their spiritual lives. They felt like God had abandoned them.  They came to Samuel who said, “Duh.”

Actually, he said, “Quit following so many gods, covering your divine bets. Pick one. Pick God.”

So the people came to Mizpah for a prayer meeting. It was actually more of a confessing fasting mourning meeting, led by Samuel. They spent the whole day telling God that they were ready to focus. (And tossed their idols.)

And then the Philistines showed up.

The Philistines had been picking on the Israelites for a long time. That was part of the reason for the sense of abandonment. They heard that Israel was gathered and figured this was a perfect time for a lesson.

And Israel said to Samuel, “Keep praying. God might listen to you.” And Samuel did. And God did.

A loud thunder. A huge explosion. An enormous sonic boom.

And the Philistines took off and Israel followed.

And Samuel set up a stone to say, “God did it. You didn’t. All you did was turn to God twice. Once to repent, once to trust.” And Samuel spent the rest of his life helping them understand what this meant.

This is the 500th post at 300wordsaday.com. Some have been reruns. My friend Paul has written several and Rich has helped with a couple more. It seemed right to stop and leave this little stone as a reminder of what God has done for me these past several nights.

And then keep teaching.

On Sunday, we were talking about church. At church.

In our discussion, I was going to ask, “How many of you have bad experiences with church.” My guess is that most of the 20 or so people in the room would have raised their hands. And then I was going to say, “Me too.” And then I was going to ask us to list specific examples of good experiences with church.

I should clarify my language. I don’t mean good experiences in church: great concerts, wonderful sermons, fabulous potluck suppers. I mean moments when church, defined as people who are committed to loving God and loving each other, actually lived that.

It is easy to identify the problems with institutions, with organizations, with ourselves as members of organizations. When one of my friends says, “Love God, hate his fans,” I completely understand. I hate me too, sometimes.

But in a letter to a church, Paul says,

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

Paul doesn’t indicate whether he means general concepts or specific actions. And often, we can take these words to mean vague feelings of truth and nobility. But what if we started to look for specific examples of people acting in admirable ways?

What if we looked for those moments where someone would not have had to act in a caring way, or could have stuck to their own agenda, or might have had reason to not forgive an action. And then, in that moment, that person said, “following Jesus means forgiving.”

What if we looked everywhere to collect those moments in the scrapbook of our heart?

Then, what if we did everything we could to cause them?

—

I’m curious. How would you have answered my question about specific examples of good?

Humility is an interesting challenge. How do we get out of the spotlight? How do we do things in ways that don’t call attention to ourselves?

I suppose this thinking was triggered by having spent several conversations during the past couple weeks looking at Paul’s story about how Jesus humbled himself. (I talked about it last week in a post called Concrete.)

This morning I had a chance to wrestle with practical application of the idea of humility, and I write about it with full awareness that it look pretty unhumble

This morning we had a guest speaker in our two worship services. Because I have worked with him, I did the introduction.

In the first service, after the usual biographical details, I said that eleven years ago he and I had talked about my future, a conversation which led me to my current day profession as an associate pastor. I choked up a bit as I said it.

It was completely true information. It established my relationship to Steve and Steve’s to me. It was, I suppose, a public way of saying thank you. It also put me right in the middle of the introduction.

In the second service, after the usual biographical details (the same ones as in the first service), I said, “… and he really really really loves Jesus.”

When introducing someone who will talk about God, doesn’t it make more sense to define his relationship with God than his relationship with me? To the extent that Steve is more credible than me with this audience, why steal strokes for me?To the extent that I am bringing Steve credibility with the people that know me more than they know him, why drag our relationship to the center?

Maybe too much analysis. I know. But maybe fine-tuning matters.