Youth Ministry Initiative

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1999

From Harold Masback, G.I.G.O" (April 25, 1999) at pages 4-5:

Think about our national security. We know that effective warriors must see and respond to stimuli differently than the rest of us. Nobody would assemble raw recruits, show them a week of “Nightline” shows on how warriors behave, and then send them into battle. No, we push them through an immersion course of boot camp drills to change the very way they see and respond to the world.
Keith knew he had to mount a rescue, but every genetic instinct of survival and every lesson of a selfish culture argued to stay down, away from the whistling shells. As Keith tells it, there was never a second from the beginning of the incident to the end when he wasn’t petrified. But suddenly all the drills, all the training, all the Army culture kicked in, and he saw, he saw not just the danger but also the duty to his men and the rescue plan they had often practiced. He charged out from behind the wall, helping to direct a rescue.

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1999

From Harold Masback, Clouds and Dwellings" (February 14, 1999) at pages 8-9:

Now this meeting house may not look like much of a famous battlefield, but it most assuredly is, and the battle is raging even as we speak. Our Puritan forebears fought a life and death battle against the idolatry they perceived in the institutional religion of their time. The very name “Puritan” came from their zeal to purify the Church of England of all vestiges of idolatry. Archbishops, creeds, crosses, saints, statues, holy days, cathedrals, stained glass windows, these are all concrete human fabrications which, at their best, can point our hearts to the mysterious, transcendent heart of God. But they all also bear seeds of idolatry. Our human yearning for knowledge, control, and relationship always risks slipping into worshiping the concrete symbols themselves rather than the divine truths to which they point. We kiss the archbishop’s ring, we pray to saint’s statue, we save our prayers for the cathedral. And so, the Puritans stripped them out. When the Puritans built our first meeting house in New Canaan, they took pains to make it look just like any other home. No steeple, no cross, no pillars, no stained glass windows, no statues; just a 30 by 30 foot house on the corner where Park Street intersects St. John Place. They didn’t even call it a church; they called it their “meeting house.” And here, front and center and elevated above all heads, was the only concrete connection to God they acknowledged: God’s Holy Word in Scripture. But like Peter, we yearn for concrete manifestations of the holy, and our second Meeting house had a steeple, and our third meeting house has pillars and fine moldings. And sometime during the last 100 years, we have even added back in a temporary cross.

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1998

From Harold Masback, Living on Praise Street" (November 15, 1998) at pages 3-4:

Have you ever gone back to visit your childhood home? Whenever I’ve gone back to an old home there has been a bittersweet tension. On the one hand, the house, the yard, the streets are all familiar enough. On the other hand, I can’t shake a sense of strangeness. The streets of endless baseball games now seem too narrow; the yard of epic touchdown catches now seems too tiny, and the terrifying sledding hill now seems like a bunny slope. It’s my old home all right, but it doesn’t feel like my home anymore – it feels strange. Then I spot my old climbing tree, and it’s still got most of its old limbs, and I can see myself up in the crows nest – no I can feel myself up in the crows nest, and suddenly it feels like home again.

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From Harold Masback, The Grattitude Attitude" (October 11, 1998) at pages 6-7:

We were all at the local pool one day when my daughter Katy was about three years old. As she sat on the edge of the pool she announced, “Swim by myself, Daddy!” Now she didn’t have any idea how to swim, so I said what any honest father would say, “Of course, sweet pea, I’ll hold you while you swim by yourself!” “By myself, Daddy!” “Of course, sweet pea, I’ll just hold your hands.” “By myself, Daddy!” So I let her go, and without one stroke, without one kick, she sank like a rock to the bottom. I looked down, and there she sat on the bottom – just looking up at me through three feet of water. She wasn’t moving and it was plain she wasn’t going to move. After a couple of seconds, I reached down and pulled her up, bracing myself for either hysterical tears or a grateful hug. Of course, Katy gave me neither, she just glared at me furiously and shouted, “I said, ‘By myself!” That self reliance is a wonderful human capacity. Within a week Katy was swimming by herself and she taught herself to read pretty much the same way. But over decades our self reliance can cheat over into spiritual self-centeredness. We forget that it is God who created us, God who shaped us in the womb, God who gave us breath and strength and wit. We forget that we are creatures and imagine that our strengths are our own doing. Self-centered rather than God-centered. Prideful rather than grateful.

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2998

From Harold Masback, That's The Spirit" (May 31, 1998) at pages 4-5:

The Spirit can work in you with a soft but insistent voice, revealing to you that your life is empty and meaningless, all the while nudging you to the door that will open to new hope and new meaning. The Spirit can give you the courage to say “yes” again to life, even after experiences of disease or betrayal or loss have moved you to say “no.” The Spirit can show you that you have hurt somebody deeply, but it can also give you the right word, the right gesture to heal the rift between you. The Spirit can help you love, really love, someone you profoundly dislike. The Spirit can overcome your tired surrender to your rut, and bear you back onto the path of your calling. The Spirit can transform moods of aggression and depression into stability and serenity. The Spirit can give you the strength to throw off irrational fears and give you the courage to take on the anxieties that flow unavoidably from the uncertainties of life. The Spirit can give you a sense of purpose and peace in the midst of ordinary routine, and it can give you unexpected joy in the midst of mourning or sorrow. The Spirit can throw you into a hell of despair about yourself and then give you the certainty that life has accepted you just when you felt totally rejected, and when you had rejected yourself totally. The Spirit can give you, in fact only the Spirit can give you, the power of prayer – for every true prayer – with or without words – is a work of the Spirit speaking in us and through us. If you have ever experienced a power working within you revealing, healing, restoring you in any of these ways -that’s the Spirit! These are the works of the Spirit, signs of God’s Spirit working with us and in us. Can you really say that you have never been touched by the Spirit, never supported by the Spirit?

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From Harold Masback, The One Thing" (May 15, 1998) at pages 1-2:

We were visiting with my grandfather over a summer weekend. Swimming in the pool, playing baseball, fidgeting at the dinner table. The way I remember it now, the question came out of nowhere. In the midst of a meandering conversation, Grandpa simply turned to me and asked, “Skippy, do you know what grandpas are for?” I can still remember how my face flushed at the intimacy of the question. As my mind fumbled for an answer, I kept watching his eyes for a tell-tale twinkling, a tip off that a punch line was on the way – or that he was going to fill the void of the silence with his own answer – or that anything at all was going to come along and rescue me from the question. But he just sat there, holding me gently, but firmly, with his gaze.

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1998

From Harold Masback, A World Turned Upside Down" (April 1, 1998) at pages 5-6:

Which brings me to my second lesson, a lesson I learned from my wife. Around 1988 I found myself squeezed between increasing responsibilities in my growing law firm and increasing responsibilities in our growing family. But I was at least as cocky as most young lawyers, and the solution seemed simple enough: what I lacked was time, what I had was money: what I needed to do was to buy time with money. So I hired a driver to drive me down to the office and back so I could work in the car, and I hired a personal assistant to pay bills, file papers, pick up my dry cleaning and the like. But I was still over-extended, so I sat down with Amy and said, “You know, I’m really on to something here. I think we should expand the assistant’s responsibilities to give us more help. Why don’t we ask her to prepare personal correspondence, help with shopping and cooking, and watch the kids a couple of days a week?” You know, stupid me, I really thought Amy was going to go for this plan, particularly since I had so craftily slipped some of her stuff onto the list, . . . but she wasn’t buying. I argued on and on about the logic of trading cash for time, about the highest end use of my vocational talents, about the external outcomes of chores done and kids cared for. But Amy pretty much ended the debate with one of those lines only a spouse can deliver really well. She said: “You know what the problem with your plan is? You ‘re trying to subcontract life.” “You’re trying to subcontract life.” Now I don’t think Amy meant the plan wouldn’t succeed in the external outcomes like getting the laundry picked up. And I don’t think she meant nobody should ever pay for domestic help. Working couples have got to get child-care if they are both going to work, and I’m guessing many of us have had some help with yard work or household chores or childcare. What Amy was onto was that the rules of career development don’t necessarily apply to the rules of life-development, that you can only subcontract so much of life’s humble chores before what you lose will be the humble joys and textures of life and love itself. We are inevitably shaped by which experiences we embrace and by which experiences we avoid. It would be only natural that a life that escapes all the humbling, time-consuming, selfless tasks of attending to loved ones will most likely end up prideful, impatient, selfish, and inattentive.

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1997

From Harold Masback, Was Blind but now I See" (October 26, 1997) at pages 2-8:

Our Gospel scene opens near Jericho, five miles west of the Jordan River and a little more than fifteen miles northeast of Jerusalem. The ancient city of Joshua’s famous battle was in a ruinous state; Herod the Great had built his magnificent Winter Palace in the new city, and the new Jericho had prospered. Surging out of the city gates came a throng of pilgrims setting out for Jerusalem and the Passover celebrations. Some children skipped ahead, outrunning the shouts of their parents, followed by old and young, rich and poor, temple priests and penitents. Somewhere between the vanguard and the stragglers there was a knot of travelers jostling for position around the young Jesus of Nazareth. And there he was in their midst, walking deliberately, calmly – gesturing as he answered questions. His manner was centered, collected – he listened intently and answered patiently. When he turned to you, he turned with a steady gaze, a gaze that wasn’t so much piercing or questioning as it was fully comprehending – as if he understood both all you were asking, and all you were holding back. Just outside the gate sat Bartimaeus, a blind man. We know the description, and so we think we know his plight – but we don’t: He sees no face, he reads no book, he sees no child’s smile – no wheeling birds – no lover’s eyes. Sometimes he almost forgets that he doesn’t see – almost accepts darkness as the norm – almost accepts halting, groping steps as walking. It would be a heavy enough fate for a wealthy man, but it is a crushing weight for a beggar. Endless days of spreading your cloak on the ground and striking as pitiable a pose as possible -insults falling on your head more often than coins fall on your cloak. Bartimaeus had tuned his ear to the different sounds at the gate, but the approaching noise was something new: something less than the measured tread of soldiers, something more than the random shuffling of Pilgrims. He turned to it. Now came clearer the sounds of voices, and he cried out, asking what it meant. A child shouted back, “Jesus of Nazareth is coming.” The name shook the blind man to his bones. His hands clasped and spasmed upward as if in prayer. Of course he knew the name. Who didn’t? It was He who raised the dying from death. He who chased demons with a word. He who cooled fevers with a touch. Everywhere He went somebody got well. Everyone had heard the stories – the air was full of them. And doubtless Bartimaeus knew Jesus had put clay on the eyes of a blind man and restored him to sight. Of course he knew who Jesus was. More than that, Bartimaeus had promised himself that if he ever got the chance he would throw himself in Jesus’ path and seek a new miracle. Now, nobody experiences great sorrows on a level plane. Like seas they rise and fall: now more turbulent, now more placid. When they recede we murmur thanks that at last we feel free, but then they sweep back in, even stronger than before, flooding over our heads. Perhaps just this morning Bartimaeus could have laughed at his affliction, seeking perspective on familiar limitations. But now that the healer approaches, now that his sight might be restored, his whole being focuses on relief. Perspective, propriety, self-protection – they all drop away as his pulse jumps. He might be healed, he could be healed, he must be healed, now! He shouts out wildly, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me! Jesus, son of David!”- It was an uncanny title: it suggested Jesus was the messianic descendant of David – a man anointed with God’s power, but it was just ambiguous enough to avoid the fury of the temple priests in the crowd. No matter – it didn’t work. The crowd was outraged that this beggar, this outcast who couldn’t even see Jesus – let alone walk with him – would presume to distract Jesus from his teaching, and they sternly shouted him down. I doubt Bartimaeus even heard their rebuke: his one chance to regain sight, his one chance to regain real life was passing out of ear shot. His pounding heart took the whip to every fiber of his being. There wasn’t a single neuron distracted by appearances. He shouted all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” And just that quickly the scene changed. The Master had stopped. You can almost see the crowd tumble into one another as one by one they pull up short. A series of whispered questions ripples through he crowd, “What is it? What’s going on?”. . . and then quiet. The Bible doesn’t say Jesus replied, or looked around, or summoned a disciple. It just says: “Jesus stood still. Jesus stood still.” The phrase conveys a majesty of the moment. You can see the crowd looking at each other expectantly, craning their necks to see, wondering why the procession had stopped. But there in the epicenter Jesus stands still. He doesn’t have to look around: he knows that cry, he knows that tone. God had heard it in Abraham’s voice. God had heard it in Jacob’s voice. God had heard it in Moses’ voice. God had heard it in David’s voice. From the first time the first human cried out to God with all his heart, God has known the ring of fervent prayer. And every time God hears it, He stands still and listens, and then he answers. Jesus answered only, “Call him here.” And now the very crowd that rebuked Bartimaeus relays back the summons, “Take heart: get up, he is calling you.” You know, you can read that “take heart” as congratulatory, as in “Good news: get up he is calling you.” But you can hear a cautionary note as well. Other translations read, “Take courage: get up he is calling you.” Bartimaeus had cried out for an encounter with the creative power of the universe – and now he was going to get it. He was going to get God’s full, unpredictable, unbounded, life-changing presence. A little courage was in order. And who would have been surprised if Bartimaeus had just pulled his cloak more tightly around his face and prayed for the procession to pass on? But he didn’t. “So throwing off his cloak he sprang up and came to Jesus.” Throwing off the cloak that was a beggar’s net for money, throwing off the cloak that shielded him from the crowd’s spittle, throwing off the cloak that blanketed him on cold nights and shaded him from the midday sun, throwing off the cloak that hid his sightless eyes, throwing off the cloak that was the last refuge of a broken heart and soul, “he sprang up and came to Jesus.” Free of every encumbrance and free of every means of support “he sprang up and came to Jesus.” Now Jesus knew what Bartimaeus wanted – everyone in the crowd could see he was blind – but Jesus asked him a question anyway, the same question Jesus always asks when we come to him: “What do you want me to do for you?” Maybe he wants to gauge the timbre of trust in our voice. Maybe he wants to know whether we’re asking to be healed in our souls or just in our flesh. It’s the same question Jesus had asked disciples James and John just a chapter before. “What do you want me to do for you?” Of course, disciples James and John got it wrong, asking for positions of power, but old, blind, beggar Bartimaeus gets it right. He knows the one thing. He knows what he wants from the bottom of his heart. He wants to see, but not just to see, he wants to really see, to see with real eyes, to see with spiritual eyes. What does he choke out? “My teacher let me see again” Actually the word “teacher” here is a translation of the Aramaic word, “Rabbouni,” and “Rabbouni” connotes a sense of “My Master” as well as “My teacher” – so another reading of this verse might be “My Master, let me see again.” Do you see the shift in titles? No more formal, canny “Son of David,” Bartimaeus’ heart now whispers, “My Master, let me see again.” It’s a sentence you can turn inside out, “My Master, let me see again.” Or “I see. I want to be your disciple again.” “I see. I want to come home again: home to Eden, home to Canaan, home to the Father.” Then Christ spoke and it was done. The same Christ who by a “word brought forth the light in the morning of creation, now by a word brought dawn to a blind man’s eyes.” [ See “The Blind Restored to Sight”, Henry Ward Beecher, December 22, 1861, for this quotation and the narrative approach to the passage taken here] Jesus said simply, “Go, your faith has made you well.” “Your faith has made you well.” No one has ever put their soul’s trust in Jesus who did not find in him more than he has promised. Paul called His Spirit, “the power at work within us . . .able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” [Ephesians 3:20] And where did Bartimaeus go? “Immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus on the way.” Mark’s readers knew what that meant: “following Jesus on the way” meant following Jesus all the way to Jerusalem and the cross; it meant becoming one of the “people of the way,” the name given to the first Christians. And what did Bartimaeus see? He saw what Peter had missed just two chapters before, that Jesus’ Messiah-ship meant not political triumph but suffering, sacrifice and resurrection. He saw what the rich man had missed just a week before: the rich man had clung to his riches and gone away sad; Bartimaeus threw off his cloak and sprang up to salvation. And Bartimaeus saw what James and John had missed just days before, Jesus’ greatest gift is not the privilege of power but the miracle of spiritual sight.

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1996

From Harold Masback, A Good Heart to Heart" (August 18, 1996) at pages 12-14:

We all have our own style of communication, our own way of speaking, and we will have our own way of praying in the garden of the heart, but just how heart-felt, unvarnished and direct prayer can be was brought home to a young chaplain named Ann Hallstein on her first day at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Harlem. She was called into the emergency room by a resident who explained that an eight-year-old boy had been brought in by his teenage mother. The boy had been shot in the head by the mother’s boyfriend and had no chance of surviving, but the team was working on him, while his mother and aunt sat nearby in a tiny closet of a room. When Ann entered the room, she saw the two teenager girls clinging to each other, plainly in shock and as vulnerable and alone as anyone she had ever seen. She sat down without a clue what to say. Any words that came to her seemed not only insufficient but profane. What could anyone possibly say to comfort a child whose own child lay lying in the next partition, dying of a gunshot wound to the head. While Ann fumbled and tried to react in some appropriate way, the door flew open and a neighbor of the two girls, large woman, about 6’2′ tall, blew in, filling the room with her presence. She grabbed the two sisters up by crooking her massive arms around their necks and pulling them to her, calling them her babies. And then, in a commanding voice full of authority she ordered Jesus to come into the room “right this minute, come in here Jesus, my babies need you, and they need you now, I don’t mean later, I don’t mean in ten minutes, I mean NOW! Get down here! Come into this room and comfort these babies! Jesus, Jesus, get in here now, there’s nothing anyone can do but you.” As Ann looked on with wonder and admiration, she felt the energy in the room change; calm came over all of them, and the young mother stopped crying and moaning. The neighbor continued to hold the girls in her viselike elbows rocking both back and forth as Ann stepped forward and joined in the group hug. They swayed there in one mass for 10 to 20 minutes. Ann lost all sense of time or place; all she felt was the love of this woman, and the love of God she had so forcefully called into the room. The neighbor hadn’t wasted a second fussing about in the public garden of appearances. She yanked open the gate to the heart’s garden so forcefully it fairly flew off the hinges. Moved by the spirit, she lifted the entire tragedy up and placed it on God’s altar with utter confidence. There was no “happy ending,” but God had been called with heartfelt, unvarnished and direct prayer, and he had blanketed those shivering girls with his presence and brought them his peace.

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1996

From Harold Masback, Curing the If Onlys" (June 16, 1996) at pages 2-3:

I want to share with you a poignant exchange that occurred last fall during a Youth Leadership Forum sponsored by the New Canaan Youth Commission. The forum brought together student leaders from the areas of academics, sports, arts, and student government along with some teachers, administrators, coaches and pastors who work primarily with youth. We started the day by reviewing the results of two needs assessment surveys that had been conducted by the United Way and the League of Women Voters. The surveys suggested support for building a Youth Center in town, and the discussion leaders probed for how the kids felt about this proposal. Perhaps there was an expectation that the young people would endorse the survey conclusions and help build support for the project. But, of course, one of the great things about the young people in this town is they always have views of their own, and they almost always surprise you with the strength and independence of their ideas. The kids said, “You know, the last thing we need in this town is another structured activity for youth. We don’t want one more building in town where we are supposed to report from 4:30 to 5:00 for some adult led discussion or activity. If anything, we want less structure. We want more time to be kids, more time to be with our families, more space from the relentless pressure to excel, to achieve, to resumé build for college. If you want to do something for us, build us some place we can just hang out with our friends. Build us a burger joint like on “Happy Days.” But don’t build us an adult-led “activity center.” Well, we responded the way you would expect caring adults to respond to such a heartfelt expression. The Youth Commission created a new forum for the kids to discuss and pursue means for reducing the press of “structured activity” in their lives. The young people appreciated the forum, but they soon concluded that, “you know, this isn’t really an issue we can address. We didn’t create the cultural pressure to produce, to resume build, to get into a good school. We’re kind of living out a dynamic set up for us by the adults in town. We don’t even know where we would start to try to unwind the dynamic.”

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