#250 Celebrate Good Times

Yesterday, March 20, was Hofman Family Day™. See, back in 2020, my younger daughter, Mia, was born seven weeks early. She spent nearly six weeks in the NICU. Tess and I lived at the hospital and slept at the Ronald McDonald house for a month and a half. Due to sickness and the beginnings of COVID-19 restrictions, my older daughter Lanie, ended up spending about half this time in Wisconsin with my parents and my in-laws. I was a wreck for a lot of that time. By my standards, I cried pretty often and pretty easily. Every moment I spent away from Tess or Lanie or Mia hurt like slicing off a piece of my heart. And no matter what I did, I almost never felt like I had made the right decision. (You can read a lot of my ongoing thoughts from that time by using the archive to look up blog posts from February and March 2020.) March 20 was the first day that all four of us were finally at home together. March 20 was the day I began to feel (at least close to) whole.

So Tess and I decided that March 20 would forever be a Hofman family holiday. On March 20 we would be together. We'd eat our favorite foods and get dessert and do whatever our kids wanted to do. (Yesterday we got ice cream and went to the park, and—at Lanie's request—we had McDonald's for supper.) And we would remember. We'd remember the difficult days of separation and loneliness. We'd remember the initial (and thankfully, mercifully short) period of wondering if Mia would even survive. We'd remember the frustration of just wanting to be home. But most of all we'd remember that God brought us through. He walked beside us. He delivered us. He made Mia healthy and strong. He kept Lanie happy through all the changes. He pulled Tess and me out of all the uncertainty. God brought us home together. He enabled us to find rest. He caused us to heal bit by bit.

I've told this story before. All those pieces are probably scattered throughout different earlier posts. But I think it's important that I tell it again. In the Bible God instructed His people again and again to remember what He had done for them. He urged and even commanded them to tell the stories of His faithfulness and all His wonderful deeds, to teach those stories to their children. When Christians gather for worship, this active remembering is a key part of what we do. We retell our story with God through Bible readings and prayers and liturgical forms and testimonies. We cannot forget all that God has done for us. And we need to celebrate, too. So often life is hard and messy. But God is good, and He makes life good. He takes care of us, and He gives us hope. Celebration reminds us that God is here, that Jesus has triumphed, that we truly are blessed. Celebration helps us to enjoy what God has done for us and what God has given us. Every moment I sit with my two girls on my lap is a gift. Every time the four of us sit down to eat together is a gift. Every night we all go to bed in the same house is a gift. We longed for these things, and God gave them to us. So yesterday we remembered, and yesterday we celebrated. There is no one like our God.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#249 I Believe I Can Fly

I was born in 1991. That same year Nintendo released the video game Super Mario World in the U.S., and my dad got a copy when he bought a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. So it's more than fair to say that I grew up with Super Mario World.

At first I simply watched my dad play, holding the extra unplugged controller in my hands while pretending to play along with him. Before long I started to play myself, jumping up and down along with Mario. I played that game over and over and over again, and the minutes turned into hours, piling up over months and years of playing. Slowly I got good enough to clear a few levels, then a few a worlds. Eventually I defeated Bowser and rescued Princess Toadstool. Then I found all the secret exits and earned that special little star on the file selection screen.

As I grew up I kept on going back to Super Mario World. Some of my friends got newer home game console systems, but until my parents picked up a Wii during my high school days, I only had that old SNES plugged into a TV in our spare room. I had a few other games, especially when my uncle Sam passed his collection on to me, but I never enjoyed any of them as much as Super Mario World. Finding that cape and flying with Mario just didn't get old. And there were so many ways to play through the game. Playing a level with dinosaur pal Yoshi was a very different experience than going solo. Having a cap or firepower opened up new possibilities. I could play through levels in a nearly endless number of orders. I could use secrets to make the game easier or ignore them to challenge myself. No matter how good I got at the game, it never became boring.

When I left home for college, Super Mario World came with me. I've brought it with me through moves to seminary and two different churches. Now I fire it up once in a while to show it to my daughters. After thirty years with this game, I still can't get enough of the soundtrack, the variety of backgrounds and level designs, the sprawling world map. After a couple of half-hour sessions, my muscle memory comes returns, and I still haven't forgotten any of the secrets, so the game quickly becomes second nature once again. Playing Super Mario World makes me feel like a kid. At this point I'm sure I'll play it until that game cartridge wears out, and I'll savor every moment of it.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#248 Dad's Dilemma

On Saturday, my family had to run some errands. As we drove down the road, Mia got Tess's attention and made it known that she wanted to listen to "The Wheels on the Bus." I was driving. My music was playing. Unlike my dear two-year-old daughter, I had absolutely no interest in listening to "The Wheels on the Bus." I've heard the song approximately 4,215,877 times since I became a father. The version that Tess has downloaded on her phone features children doing that shout-sing thing that little kids do—you know the thing that's adorable when it's your own children but is pretty painful to listen to someone else's kid is doing it.

Anyway, Mia's request to listen to "The Wheels on the Bus" landed me in the midst of a dilemma I often find myself in as a dad. Do I tell my daughter no and carry on with what I'm doing or do I give in and let her get what she wants? I want my kids to learn that they can't get everything they want, and even when they do get those things, they can't always get them as soon as they want them. So that makes me inclined, at least at times, to tell them to wait or to simply say no. But I also believe that there are many times when I as a Christian father need to sacrifice my own self-interest in order to righty love and serve my children. So which is correct in this case? I'm not often sure. I know that I'm very capable of trying to justify my own selfishness under the cover of teaching my daughters some life lesson. But I also know that my kid isn't going to die if she doesn't sing "The Wheels on the Bus" for the fourth time that day. Wrestling with my own sinfulness is hard enough. Trying to do that while also not teaching even more sinfulness to my kids is even harder. I'm sure I screw this kind of decision up over and over again. So I'm trying to be a little more self-critical and aware of my own motivations. I pray that God in His grace will not only help me grow but also make me want to strive to grow day by day.

And, for what it's worth, after four or five more songs, I let Mia listen to "The Wheels on the Bus" one time before returning to my music. Hopefully that was a decent decision.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#247 Young Pastor

"You're pretty young to be a pastor." I can't tell you how many times I've heard that in my career. When I first started out, I definitely understood. I was twenty-five years old. I'd gone straight from high school to college to seminary and then entered full-time work as a minister of the Word. I was about as young as you could expect a pastor to be.

But now, nearly six years later, I'm finding the comment more and more amusing. I still understand it to an extent. The people who tell me how young I am are probably just meeting me and don't really know how old I am or how much experience I have. I look pretty young (though I always wonder what these people would think if I didn't have my beard—I'm significantly younger looking then). But I've been doing this for a while now. I'm serving my second congregation. I've got two kids at home. I'm not a fresh-faced seminarian anymore. In fact, I turned thirty-one last week. I'm definitely not old, but I'm excluded by those who "don't trust anyone over thirty."

The thing with the "young pastor" comment is that I'm never quite sure what people mean by it. Are they complimenting my youthful appearance, or are they wondering if I'm really qualified for the job? Despite the fact that most of my seminary classmates were my peers, it seems most people I meet assume a pastor is going to be older than I am. (Maybe they never think too much about pastors starting their careers or have a lot of experience with pastors who enter ministry as a second career.) So I smile and laugh and move on with my day. I'm not losing any sleep over strangers being surprised at my age and/or my job. But I have to say, it won't bother me when these comments eventually go away.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#246 How Many?

I was a mathematics major in college. All my life I've referred to my chosen area of study as math. But when I was a young adult I encountered other English-speakers (people from places like England and Australia and New Zealand) who called this academic field maths. At first I simply thought this was strange. Certainly maths is a reasonable abbreviation of mathematics, even if it doesn't seem quite as natural to me as math. But thinking as a mathematics major, I don't really like "maths" as a term. I took a whole lot of mathematical courses in college—calculus, real analysis, geometry, algebra (both linear and abstract), probability and statistics—but one of the main things I learned is that these weren't different subject matters. Mathematics is one thing. Think of a tree: the branches may go in very different directions, but they all grow out of one trunk. That's the way mathematics works. There aren't many maths; there's a singular math. I think calling mathematics "maths" can be misleading. "Branches" such as algebra and geometry aren't truly separate, even if we tend to look at them one at a time. The branches connect and overlap in all sorts of surprising and beautiful ways. All the math we know is just part of a greater whole.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#245 Say Goodbye

Over the weekend I conducted a funeral for a member of the previous congregation that I served. (That congregation is currently without a pastor, so I got the call and was happy to do it.) In the past five years or so, I've done over a dozen funerals for church members there. As time has gone on, I've gotten more and more comfortable leading and helping to organize funeral services. I can walk families through what to expect. I can suggest songs and Scripture passages. I have a good sense of how I like to write a funeral message.

But, despite all that, I wouldn't really say that funerals have gotten easier for me. In some ways I dread them a bit more. That's because the longer I've gotten to know someone as her or his pastor, the more difficult it is for me to say goodbye. I did some early funerals for elderly church members who had battled dementia since before my arrival. While I certainly felt for the families in their grief, I didn't really have much personal sadness. I never really knew the individuals who had died. But doing the funeral for a person whom I've seen week in and week out for worship or with whom I've had many good conversations in the nursing home is tougher. I have my own sense of loss, even if I obviously wasn't as close to the deceased as a spouse or child would be.

I think funerals are an incredibly important part of my job as a pastor. They are a wonderful opportunity to minister to people in very difficult circumstances. Funerals can go a long way towards providing closure or helping in the grieving process. But learning to love the people I serve means funerals won't ever really be easy.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#244 The Bible Isn't Really Tweetable

I encountered a sign like this as I was going around my community last week:

(That's just a picture I found online—I'm not even sure the sign I saw had those exact words in that order.) I reflected on that sign for a while. I thought about trying to engage with each of those statements from the perspective of my Christian faith. But the more I thought about that, the less I thought that was a good idea. While a sign like the one pictured above is easily readible due to its few words, it also can raise a lot of questions because there aren't very many words. For example, what does the homeowner mean by "Science is real?" What does the signmaker mean by that? What do I think when I read it? Is it a statement about climate change, vaccination, subatomic theory, all of the above, none of the above? It can be hard to know what people mean when we condense our opinions down to something that fits in a tweet. I'm pretty confident each of the statements in the picture above could be explained in ways that I would agree with, and each could be explained in ways I would disagree with.

So I next started thinking about what I would put on a sign if I was going to post some sort of creed or statement of belief in my front yard. But that got tricky quickly. By my count, that sign up above has only 26 words. The shortest Christian creed I've learned—the Apostles' Creed—has 115 words in the translation I'm most familiar with. Even taking just the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism (What is your only comfort in life and in death?) gives me 120 words. I'm going to need a big sign or some small font.

Alright, so what if I pivoted away from helpful but humanmade summaries of faith and went straight to the Bible, God's Word? Well, what verse or two summarizes the message of the Bible? John 3:16 is a popular choice; it has 26 verses in my preferred translation (the NIV): "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." That sounds pretty good at first, but that verse doesn't stand on it's own as much as we think it does. For example, who is God's Son? What does it mean to believe in God's Son? How can believing in God's Son be enough for someone to receive eternal life? If we really want to understand John 3:16, we need to have a sense of at least the entire book of John—or at least learn from someone who does.

The thing is, the Bible isn't really tweetable. We're not supposed to engage it one verse at a time. I believe the Bible is different from every other book because I believe it is inspired by God. But like any other book, the parts of the Bible have to be understood in context. Taking a statement from the Bible like "God is love" (1 John 4:8 and 1 John 4:16) sounds wonderful—and often is. But we can't understand God's love apart from the stories of His faithfulness to His chosen people, His just anger against human sin, and His incredible grace in Christ Jesus. The Bible is a unit; the different parts help explain each other.

So often I think we Christians read and use the Bible in ways that are at least a little dangerous. We find a verse by opening the Bible or searching a corcordance or typing in some keywords online but don't stop to think about the context in which that verse occurs. We read short little sections of Scripture without considering how they relate to the bigger picture of their individual book, much less the whole Bible. I know I've done it. Certainly we can memorize specific verses to comfort and help us, and we can reference short sections of the Bible, particularly as a helpful shorthand in talking with other believers. But when we seek to understand God through His Word or to teach our faith to others, we owe to ourselves and to God to cover the whole story. The Bible doesn't read like a dictionary where each verse or paragraph is independent. It all hangs together. So before we put a verse on a sign or tweet a sentence out, let's seek to understand and be ready to explain what it really means.

Grace and peace,
BMH