The Grand Design

Well here we are again with known stories to make sense of it all. Working our way through the book that Ruth and I published a couple years back entitled Known Finding Deep Friendships in the Shallow World. Today we're going to talk about the grand design what we designed for. I discovered this pretty profoundly almost 20 years ago. There's been no more dramatic day in my lifetime nationally than what we call 9-11, September 11, 2001. And Ruth and I were in Washington, DC. I was about a mile north. We were about a mile north of the Pentagon when that plane went into the Pentagon after the horrific happenings of New York City in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. One thing on that day became crystal clear. And I'll just tell you about it in this chapter. Chapter two, the grand design. If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together, African proverb. Something terrible has happened in New York City. Those chilling words ended my Tuesday breakfast with a group of government and business friends in a state le old residence above the Potomac River. We got to a TV just as United Airlines flight 175 out of Boston's Logan Airport exploded through the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Within the hour, the crashes in Washington, DC in Shanksville, Pennsylvania became terrible exclamation points to the original news conveyed in one-tourced sentence. The United States is under attack. It was September 11, 2001. The combined death toll from New York City, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside would number 2,977 men, women and children from more than 90 nations. Hundreds of people known to be in the Twin Towers were never found vaporized, gone. Precious few images bring instant emotion like the sight of smoke and flame, billowing from scores of scorched windows into that blue September sky. As I write, that video runs in my head. It is unbelievable still. Standing in that elegant Virginia home, the terror engulfed us. No one was able to stop it. This was no movie. It was real. Hour by hour and for months afterward from the mouths of survivors, we would hear what played out on the top floors of the North and South Towers. As the towers became furnaces that turned steel beams to liquid and spewed noxious smoke up stairwells, some trapped by burning jet fuel leaped from windows. It is for me the most haunting memory of that wretched day. And from the hundreds who remained fighting for air and exit from those fiery prisons in the sky, two kinds of calls went out. God helped me. And honey, I don't think I'm going to make it. That day and those calls changed how I heard Jesus. Jesus cried out like that when he himself faced death. He cried to his father, my God, my God. Why have you forsaken me? For his killers, father forgive them, for they do not know what they're doing. To the repentant thief and new friend, I tell you the truth. Today you will be with me in paradise. And to his mother, Mary in the beloved disciple, John, dear woman, here is your son and to the disciple. Here is your mother. We know what he said and to whom the question is, why that reflex? He was a rabbi carpenter in his early thirties who spoke with authority and healed the sick, small town man from the hills above Galilee. He confounded the power brokers both religious and political. His words and actions were challenged at every turn. Disciples and critics followed him everywhere. He wrangled the religious leaders simply by eating with the wrong people. It violated their sense of purity, not only the wrong people, but at the wrong place and never at the right time. Fast forward to today and the crowds he attracted would make him a YouTube sensation. Twitter would go nuts. One day, or perhaps several because this exchange is recorded in three of the four gospels in slightly different ways. He has asked the big question, teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus replied, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. Now, I have always understood those words as a commandment, the commandment, but 9-11 changed that for me. On that day, it became crystal clear. We are designed to call on God and call on each other. On that one day, I recognize that the great commandment is great because it fits with what I am designed for. I actually have the capacity to respond to it. Highborn or lowborn male or female, all the colors of the human family, from Cape Town to Calcutta, from Barrow to Beijing, you and I are built to reach out to God and to others. It is our deepest instinct. The great commandment really expresses the grand design. Sometimes, the cries to God and another person are so close, they can almost be one and the same. They come from your built-ins, neurotransmitters in your brain that fire in nanoseconds, receptors that link you to God and the humans you love, even if you are not convinced God really exists. In your peril, you call on Him. And in the next instant, you speed dial family and friends. The biblical notion of loving your neighbor is yourself. When said in the same sentence with loving God, infuses it with unique power. Does the love response in both directions come from the same place in us? Can loving my neighbor actually mean that I am loving God? Is this a toofr? I think it might be. The neighbor, in practical terms, starts with the one closest to me and works its way outward, family, friends, colleagues, and so on. But Jesus pushed the boundaries. When asked, who is my neighbor, Jesus responded with the story of the good Samaritan, C. Luke 1029-37, which recasts the idea of neighbor by challenging the listener to be one. Jewish practice would naturally define a neighbor in technical terms to be a Jew or proselyte to Judaism, but Jesus took the Jews to a new and different place by defining neighbor as the one farthest out, the Gentile, the great unwashed, his approach blew the doors off their traditional understanding. He said, your neighbor is the one right there, you know, the one you can call, or see, or touch, or the ones you meet on a jam stairwell saturated with a smell of burning jet fuel, a stairwell soaked in fear. On 9-11 people who had never met before were bonded together for the rest of their lives. No one was debating ethics or religion, no one was questioning motive or asking about family tree. Relationships are built three ways, through natural chemistry, over time, or under pressure. That day, as time was running out, pressure mixed with compassion and courage created a twin tower's family. For the rest of their years, they will remember the shock and the smells, the faces, and the screams, the panic and the uncertainty. Then they will remember a face, and a touch, and a phrase. Come over here. Take my hand. I've got you. Let's go this way. God helps. The need to be with others in times of crisis is so fundamental. We don't even think about it. The instinct to reach for family members or close friends is reflex. It is often the difference between life and death. On July 31, 1976, some friends of ours with their young children were enjoying themselves at a Colorado vacation cabin in Big Thompson Canyon. The canyon is a narrow jagged slash in the face of the Rockies between Estus Park and Loveland, with an elevation drop of about 2,800 feet in 30 miles. About 5 pm, a thunderstorm began dumping heavy rain, high up over the headwaters of the Big Thompson River. The front didn't move, just sat there. By 9 pm, 12 inches of rain had fallen, and in one terrifying moment the night was shattered by a 20-foot wall of water exploding down the canyon toward unsuspecting vacationers. That night, more than 140 people died, and some bodies were never found. Our friends Ray and Jan heard the horrific sounds and felt the earth shaking. When Jan told the story, she said, the water roared in our cabin trembled violently. The kids terribly frightened. All piled into our bed. We held each other and prayed, thinking we were all dead. The one thought we had was, if we're going to go, we're going to go together. We write of these calamities to make a point, but most of our lives aren't lived under threat of imminent death. We live in the routine, the day-to-day humdrum of life. We reach out in many different ways, and under many different circumstances. Our approaches to God and others are as varied as our own DNA. But our need to reach for God, and reach out to others, is not connected to our personality type or preferred method of communication. We can't say, oh, that's for verbal people, day up, do it so well. The reflex is visceral. It comes from a place of need that sometimes is framed in words, but always is framed in thought, and sometimes, even in action. Consider how young children often greet a parent as mom or dad walks through the door after work. I like to call it a grand design move. And I remember it well, when I stepped through the door after a long day of work, my three-year-old daughter, Jenny, would run to me ice sparkling in with a winning smile. Then she made her move, arms high over her head, she hollered. Up, daddy, I dropped what I was holding and reached for her. A dad never forgets the feel of a moment like that, the spontaneous closeness. If I feel this way as an earthly father, how much more must our heavenly father revel in that move and that cry? Up, daddy, we are designed for the move. As we look up to God, it naturally leads us to look over at each other, but we need to get that first part right. C.S. Lewis portrayed fallen man as bent, that is, he is looking down and therefore can't get life right. Leanne Payne simply said, the unfallen position was as it were a vertical one of standing erect face turned upward to God in the listening-speaking relationship. It was a position of receiving continually one's true identity from God. To follow that metaphor, when we look down, we totally miss what we're designed for. In writing these thoughts, I realized how ironic it is that we live in a time in the history of mankind called the digital age, an age defined by looking down. Hundreds of millions of us all over the world looking down, says he, as he sits hunched over his laptop, typing away, looking down. I joke just the other day that if they dug up our bones a hundred years from now, they'll find arthritic cervical vertebrae in our necks and overdeveloped opposing thumbs. Well, back to the metaphor. By definition, designed means intentional, planned. Life can corrode connectors into plead energy, but the architecture remains. Beneath your gift, skills and achievements is a grand design and it is this. You are not created to be alone. You are created to be together. As you look toward God, you begin to recognize that design. So I want to stop right there in the reading of the book for just a moment and introduce you to a friend who knows about design. His name is Michael Foster. He is a world class architect from Arlington, Virginia. We've been friends for more than two decades. I love his work. Love him. And he knows what it's like to be shaped by circumstance, things that you didn't know you were designed for, but you found out you were designed for. And I just like it to meet him. So here's Michael. I was just asking you how you were doing health wise because some years ago you went through a tremendous challenge. And miraculously, you are with us for which I'm grateful. And I said that your voice reminds me of a cross between Sean Connery and James Earl Jones without the accent. And you said that was a kind thing for me to say. But that was the nicest thing I've ever heard about this voice. But actually, this voice is my reminder of how blessed and grateful I am because I didn't sound like this until I had a chance to have so many people like you and others pray for me. And doctors give me lethal doses of chemo and radiation to help me through. Stage four cancer tumor that I'm sure without prayer and radiation. They would have been right. And they told me I had about six months to live. But I'm grateful for this reminder that God had other plans for my life. And I'm healthy as a horse. But now I just have this cool voice to show for it. I tell people that how many years ago was that Michael? That was about nine years ago. Nine years ago. Six months, nine years. And God's time, it's all one thing. Yes, boy, you're not the truth. Well, so you are an architect. You are an architect of the first order. When I say architecture, would you, can you just give me a definition of architecture? Is there a defining sentence or two that would help me? Because we're speaking here. You know, I'm reading this chapter from the book that Ruth and I did called the grand design. And I'm talking about sort of God's architecture in our lives and his design. But what would just be a simple definition? Because I'm a simple guy, okay? Simple definition of architecture. The good news is you can't get it wrong because I let that question, let me just tell you why. I've been asking that question to young architects that I interview for 30 years to hire. And we've interviewed hundreds of people from all the major state universities in the Ivy League that have great architecture schools. And they all lined up coming through Washington. So we interview them. And that's one of my questions. And the truth the matter is, I've never heard the same answer twice. And I've never heard a bad or wrong answer. Really? Who? Architecture is the last of the Renaissance professions where it's got obviously art, science, math, engineering, but it also has philosophy, rhythm, you know, nature, environment. It has the humanistic elements of psychology, law, poetry. It has so many components that come together to shape buildings that then shape the physical environment and therefore shape our lives. Thank you Michael Foster and now back to reading the book. One final thought on 9-11, one of the most traumatic days in history and certainly in our lives. The events that day took me straight to my friends. Once I knew that Ruth was safe and we were together, I had one thought, where are my friends in the government who have the responsibility to respond to this attack? Although we had many friends throughout the city, three of them, John Ashcroft, Vern Clark, and Mick Kicklider, all had huge responsibilities in their respective agencies. The US Justice Department, US Department of the Navy, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. In the previous years, I had met with each of them at their offices and outside the workplace as well, just as a friend and hopefully an encourager. So often I would walk away from those times, saying to myself, how do they carry such great responsibility with such grace? I could never do that. And boy did I learn a lot from that conversation. Each of them was always open, always welcoming, and we would do what friends do, laugh and eat until stories and pray and on occasion find ourselves broken before each other and the Lord. I was desperate to find them by the end of that September day. Vern was in the Pentagon just a few hundred feet around the corner from the point of impact. In just a few short minutes, he lost 42 of his best and brightest colleagues. Despite the chaos, he was still able to move his team to a command center at an alternate site. He called me that evening. As it turns out, John was mid-flight on his way to Milwaukee when all planes in US airspace were ordered to land at the closest airport. His Justice Department plane landed refueled and immediately flew back to Washington the last miles under escort by F-16 fighters. We didn't connect till the next nine. A retired three-star army general, mixed role in veterans affairs was to execute the emergency plan they had in place in the event of nuclear attack. They have huge stockpiles of medicines and access to hospitals. Mick ended up overseeing those plans from a different state. I didn't find out where he was for nine days. In those hours and days, I reflected on the joy I had experienced with these three men over the years prior. John and I like nothing better than wolfing down large bowls of butter pecan ice cream while watching ball games in his family room on Capitol Hill. When he could find time, we drive to his farm in the Shenandoah Valley and hike the property or pick wild blackberries. Because he loves gospel music, I'd often go and sing all songs with him that we both had learned as boys. He'd play the piano with gusto, and I'd try to sing on key. Vern has really a fine golfer. Whenever we played, he challenged me to up my game big time. We share great stories about his dad, who had been my mentor when I was in my twenties in Illinois. He and his wife Connie were the quintessential host and hostess at their residence in the Washington Navy Artichristmas. They were so kind to invite us to that time of wonderful food, first-class music from a brass ensemble, and all around good cheer. Mick and I often met for meals at a local diner in each February. We would host small groups of international leaders during the days surrounding the National Prayer Breakfast in DC. We even took a fascinating trip to India once to meet some leaders that Mick knew. Reflecting on all those times with these men, I cannot adequately describe the relief I felt, knowing my friends were safe. To physically see the guys again some days later was terrific. It was good. It was right. It was the grand design. We are made for God and each other. It's a kind of coming home. We experience what Jesus dreams of when we say, all men will know that you're my disciples. If you love one another. So what does a God connected friendship look like? Ruth's thoughts. The guide instructs us carefully to be in groups of two or three. But willful, independent me, I choose to walk alone. So much easier, I think, to do it on my own. There will be no annoying confrontations, no obligating dependence, no second opinions, no risky relationships to slow me down. Instead, I find no honest challenges, no wholesome trust, no wise alternatives, no enriching friendships to grow me up. So next time together, we're on to chapter three from known finding deep friendships in a shallow world. And chapter three is called what's a friend? How does that work? We've heard about why we need a friend or friends, but how do we get started? What does that look like? And until then, if you wanted to check out dickfoath.com, it'll take you to our website. There is, too, a study guide that has some video introductions to each of the, I think it's eight lessons that we have there that you might want to use for a small group. So I'll leave that to you. Until then, remember this. Let's keep discovering that friendship gives both wings and roots to our lives. We'll catch you later. God bless. Bye-bye.