Men are shy. They are competitive. They are proud. Therefore, they hide. Most believe in God and are fascinated with Jesus, but they need a safe place to meet. These men's wives go to church, but they stay at home. In the last year, we have been trying to put together a safe place for men at Epiphany. We have made some headway, but there is still a long way to go. We are using the Building Brothers materials put together by Dan Schaffer. The philosophy is right. The men who have had the experience of the first phase are pumped. It's time for a blast to all the men. Its hard to know how to reach the shy. I think visitation is in order.

Off the road, finally. Tonight I read several pieces in Christianity Today that made me think about the pursuit of God.

Eugene Peterson, the poet and theologian who wrote The Message, an elegantly worded bible paraphrase, wrote on the necessity to slow our pace and not be in such a pressurized hurry to engage in spirituality, a word he hates. He believes that the pursuit of God in Christ is usually not that flashy. He points out that the occasional ecstasy of the saints of the church is often a huge surprise to them. He gave an example story of St. Theresa of Avila feasting in the kitchen, gnawing on chicken bones. When asked what she was doing there chowing down, she reportedly said, "When I eat chicken, I eat chicken. When I pray I pray, I pray." Some days our pursuit of Christ is mundane. Yet it seems so right. Yet, in the between moments, bracketing our prayer, our lives are so unexceptional.

Allistair McGrath has an article, a book digest actually, on the twilight of atheism. Why hadn't I noticed how out of gas atheism had become. It was so obvious, now that he points it out, that there is no intellectual vigor in atheism that is not directly attributable to the energy of being opposed to Christianity. There's nothing else there!

But the piece de resistance was the article on revival in France! This is not a typo. French evangelicalism is thriving. Christianity is being restored in the home of secular humanism. It was so exciting reading about the street evangelists in Paris and their experiences. Christianity Today is very broad, unlike Touchstone. It reports on Messianic Jews in Paris as well as charismatic Catholics, who use evangelicals as religion teachers in what were Catholic churches. I think the French can respond to holiness. They need an affective Christian worldview to tear through the intellectuals. Come Holy Spirit.

My prayer and meditation suffered on my trip and I had a serious slip in the Internet category in Boston that garbaged up my computer with a pesky parasite. Pray for me.

I'm reading Michael Medved's autobiography Right Turns. It is a wonderful peek into a complex and delightful man. His secular upbringing with intellectual Jewish Democrat parents could not have prefigured his current Orthodox Judaism and Republican activist present. His Yale undergraduate peace activism and Democratic campaign work, including friendships with William Sloane Coffin, Hillary Rodham and others could not have led to a complete rejection of liberal ideologies, but it did. His chance encounter with an Chasidic rabbi who, when he wasn't even sure he believed in God, strapped phylacteries on his arm and forehead amid hebrew prayers which led to a spiritual "charge" of energy which led him to establish the ritual phylacteries as part of his daily routine was not characteristic of an intellectual, but rather a man of the heart. I recommend it.

Road Ruminations
This week I will be in DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston...raising money and flushing out channel partners for my company (www.myfinancialadvice.com ). My conversations with my partners includes discussions of our expectations for the future. What if we run out of runway and this great idea never works? (None of us seriously believe that this would happen, but there is a finite probability that it might.) When will we reach the tipping point that transforms our company from innovative and clever to enormously successful and the center of an epidemic of growth in financial services to help the middle income. Well, we just can't know the future, can we? What all my partners know, is that I have always maintained that the success of our company is up to divine Providence. The arrival of market demand, technology, advisor acceptance, industry readiness and positive expectations, enormous industry and public press success, a completely competent development team and this week's trip are the environment associated with a pending tipping point. The date and time and dimension of the "tip" are up to God and will happen on His time, not ours. Praise Him with drums and cymbals, with the lyre and harp.

Ashes to ashes.

Imposition of ashes has always been part of my life: as a Roman Catholic child and youth, as an adult Methodist and currently as an orthodox Anglican. To me, ashes are always a reminder of death. At my age (60), many who are dear to me have "crossed over". I think of past Ash Wednesdays, of the family feeling of going to church to "do our duty", of priests who have made the sign of the cross on my forehead, of incense and chanting and prayer and kneeling before God, of Holy Days of Obligation, of meatless Fridays, of Lenten fasts.

Ashes are also an opportunity to wear my faith in public, which I have always enjoyed. When nuns and priests started wearing street clothes, I thought that they were chasing approachability at the cost of being a visible presence in the communities they touched. I know it must be hard to walk that line. But, I want visibility of the church on its terms, not on those of the world. I want people to know that I belong to Christ and to have them "deal with" whatever that means to them.

The difference between good church health as indicated by good financial statements and actual health and presence of the Holy Spirit is stark. Our days at Chevy Chase UMC come to mind. There, the financial condition of the parish was never in question, but the good health of the church fluctuated. At our dear Epiphany, a light truly shines in the darkness. Worship is holy and directed to God, not to anyone else. Pulpit magic comes from our young rector. As a parishioner stated last week, when you leave the sanctuary with regret, wanting more, things are very healthy.

Last night, a Dr. Peter Schneider, one of four panelists on a CSPAN discussion on US/International relations viz. a viz. the war on terrorism, gave a prognostication with an interesting terminology twist. Eschewing the red state/ blue state labeling that applies to domestic US voting patterns, he internationalized the political classification, coining different terms. In his view, the correct international terms should be "godly" versus "worldly" citizens of the US or Europe. Schneider believes that Europeans and "worldly" citizens of the US would become closer and closer in the coming decade, while "godly" citizens of the US would become more alienated from Europe. I think he is correct and I welcome the change in terminology. Will others?

Each month brings us closer to the segregation of the flock foretold by Christ.
Come, Lord Jesus.