Equal Opportunity Disappointment

Two weeks of political conventions.  First the Republicans in Tampa.  Then the Democrats in Charlotte.  Both gave making their case their best shots.  It seemed to me there was one overriding theme—the middle class.  What is best for the middle class, staying the course or a change in direction?  I found myself disappointed all the way around.

I will admit that I often feel the middle class is something I only have a tenuous grasp on.  The housing downturn was not kind to me.  I rarely think of net worth as a concept that applies to me, but such as it is, it is mostly tied up in residential real estate.  Or perhaps I should say it was tied up in real estate.  Now, it is sort of not there anymore.  I ought to be, and am, concerned about what is good for the middle class.  After all, that is what is in my best interest.

And so, for that reason, I can certainly see why both our political parties would make their pitches to the middle class.  If nothing else, there are more of us than there is anything else.  A stable democracy depends on a stable middle class.  We are the backbone of the country, after all.  One could well argue that what is good for the middle class is good for the whole.  But, you know, it would be every bit as possible to say the same thing about the rich, and indeed, in other years, we have.

Twenty years ago Democratic strategist and Bill Clinton campaign manager James Carville famously reminded his team, “It’s the economy, stupid!”  This year, the strategists on both sides must have emblazoned on the walls, “It’s the middle class, stupid!”

I suspect that is the demographic on which this election will turn.  I wish it were faith.

I think it is equally possible to be a Christian and be a Republican or a Democrat.  But what I don’t think is that it is possible to be a faithful Christian and be only, or even primarily, concerned with the middle class.  The Christian issue may be the economy, but it is not the middle class.  It is the poor.

I know I’m hopelessly unrealistic here, but what I wish we could have is a convention when we asked ourselves what is best for the poor.  And then I wish we would vote accordingly.  One might decide to vote for the Republicans or one might decide to vote for the Democrats, but the question would be who has the best plan for the poor.  Isn’t that what the Christian platform ought to be about?

What I wish we would see is a Christian leader stand up and say that the moral imperative was about the poor, stand up and say that the priority of God is the poor, stand up and say that the widow and the orphan and the alien are particularly favored by God.  What I wish is that the Church would call the politicians to account on behalf of the poor, not on behalf of itself and not on behalf of its own pocketbook.  All the talk about moral righteousness in the platforms of either party seems just babble otherwise.

I realize there are those who would say otherwise, but being a Christian citizen, it seems to me, is about asking this fundamental question:  what policies are best for the poor?  What policies are best for peace?  What polices are best for reconciliation?  What policies are best for the care of creation?  And then it is about acting and voting accordingly.  I don’t know how to answer those questions.  That is for each of us to decide.  But what I believe with all my heart is that these are the questions that faith must have answered. 

I found myself equally disappointed by both the conventions in failing to ask them.  This may not be smart politics.  It may not be smart at all.  But here’s what I think.  It isn’t the middle class, stupid.  My sisters and brothers, it’s the poor.

Peace,

+Stacy

The Greatest Adventure

You have heard me say it many times.  Adventure is good for the soul.

The greatest adventure of my life began thirty-three years ago this past Saturday.  It was the anniversary of the day Ginger and I were married, August 11, 1979.  It was, by the way, the hottest day ever recorded in the history of South Carolina.  As is typical for that time of year in the South, it was a day graced by a late afternoon thunderstorm.  I could see the steam rising from the still-wet slate steps of the church when I arrived, just before I ran up them to avoid getting wet and slid all the way to the door narrowly averting complete disaster.  And it has been an adventure from that moment on.

 

It has been an adventure that has been some of what I imagined it would be when I made vows about the rest of my life at an age I couldn’t possibly have had any idea what that meant.   We have made a home in nine different places, including twice in New York City.  On more than one occasion we have put everything on the line for what we thought we were called to do.  We have traveled together, and didn’t wait for old age to do it, including a trip to Paris for the weekend, to Korea to pick up our first child, and to Amsterdam to introduce our children to something important to us (it helps to have worked for Delta once upon a time).  We’ve gone whale watching in Hawaii (I think, though I’m not sure, that we actually saw one) and walked on the pink sands of Bermuda.  We’ve been to the equator and sat at an outdoor café in Copenhagen late into a night during which the sun almost never set.  We’ve had tea at Buckingham Palace and attended a reception with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I’ve been the proud spouse at a dinner honoring Ginger for being one of the three teachers of the year in the Atlanta public schools.  We’ve waited by the telephone together when search committees were meeting to issue calls.  We’ve made plans to be missionaries in South Africa and changed those plans to answer a different missionary call in Eastern Kentucky.  Those were all part of the adventure I thought I was getting into. 

That expected part of the adventure, though, turned out to be small potatoes, a very small part of the adventure it is to choose to spend one’s life with another.  The big adventure turned out to be looking at my bride in her wedding dress for the first time, a moment I remember with the greatest clarity long after most of the other details have faded.  The big adventure turned out to be what it felt like when the social worker told Ginger that a baby boy had been placed with us and she couldn’t remember how to get to my office to tell me about it.  Or watching through the night by a monitor keeping track of every one of our infant son’s heartbeats in the first few hours after he had been diagnosed with bacterial meningitis.  Or holding each other when we heard that our other son, not yet even home for the first time, had pertussis half a world away. 

The real adventure had to do with the stresses of over-extended credit cards.  And signing the first mortgage papers and contemplating what it meant to look 30 years into the future for the very first time.  And getting my first benefits notice from my employer informing me of my “normal” retirement date at which point I would have 41 years of service. 

The real adventure turned out to be in what is way less than exciting.  It turned out to be getting to a point where we completed each other’s sentences.  It turned out to be waking up in the morning together to find out which new muscle hurts.  For that matter, it turned out to be just in waking up in the morning at all. 

The real adventure has to do with discovering I really am my father and she, her mother.  It has to do with discovering that she could choose to do one thing and I something else, without either of us being threatened.  It has to do with realizing my life really is not adversely affected even if she never does learn to load the dishwasher right just as her life goes on even when I put the toilet paper roll on the holder the wrong way (at least I put it on the holder). 

The real adventure is in trying to determine, over the whirring of my own CPAP machine, whether the snoring next to me is coming from Ginger or Annie (an important difference as the answer elicits different responses).  It is in struggling to decipher what Ginger has just said without having to ask that it be repeated for the third time.  It is in discovering new over-the-counter medications for ailments not previously known to exist. 

The real adventure turned out to be in the quiet.  The real adventure turned out to be sharing the same favorite place, a cottage in the mountains of North Carolina, the beauty of which is that there is nothing there to do.

The real adventure is learning that relationships, even long ones, are not things that can ever be taken for granted.  The real adventure, to my surprise, isn’t in achieving anything or going anywhere.  The real adventure has something to do with learning to empty oneself for another, to die a little to self and be born in a new and unexpected way somehow more whole and alive than before.  It is in the lesson of self-giving for the sake of love, and finding that it is in self-giving that I become more who I really am and certainly more true to the image of God.

The reason the everyday ins and outs of being married for thirty-three years are such an adventure is that they are the closest most of us get to the life of God, the self-sacrificing life of God founded on love alone, the Trinitarian reality that the Father is not the same as the Son and that the Son is not the same as the Holy Spirit, but still the Father is no less God, the Son is no less God, and the Spirit is no less God.  The risk that makes adventure so exciting, so much an opportunity, and so much to be desired turns out not to be a financial risk or a risk of life and limb.  It turns out to be a risk of the heart.  It turns out to be a risk of self. 

I realize that not everyone has had the good fortune to have an adventure like this.  My parents did not.  Few of our friends do.  It is an adventure that turns out to be a fairly rare thing.  It is an adventure that is extremely fragile. 

But it is also an adventure, the opportunity for which is renewed over and over for all of us.  It is renewed for those of us who have been at it for thirty-three years each and every day.  Our thirty-third anniversary, which was Saturday, was not a certainty as late as Friday.  Our thirty-fourth looks a long way off from here.

The same is really true for everyone.  It doesn’t matter, I think, whether previous adventures have ended badly.  Adventure calls nevertheless.  Legal definitions of who can be married and who can’t, I have no doubt, do not matter at all.  The adventure is one of living in community, whatever form that may take in our lives, whether that be with one other, with a family of whatever definition, or a chosen community.  Lifelong relationships, I’ve learned, are not for sissies.  Growing old together turns out to be the greatest adventure of all. 

Peace,

+Stacy

Episcopal Church Is Radically Faithful to Its Tradition

Space does not permit a correction of the numerous factual points I could dispute in Jay Akasie's "What Ails the Episcopalians" (Houses of Worship, July 13). Instead, I offer a spiritual correction.

The church has been captive to the dominant culture, which has rewarded it with power, privilege and prestige for a long, long time. The Episcopal Church is now liberating itself from that, and as the author correctly notes, paying the price. I hardly see paying the price as what ails us. I see it as what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Many years ago when I was a parish priest in Savannah, a local politician and disaffected Episcopalian began a conversation with me. In that case the subject was homosexuality. It could have been any of the things mentioned last week as our ailments. "I just think the church should not be governed by the culture," he said. I replied that I agreed with him, but that "I just hadn't noticed that the culture was all that hospitable toward gay people." He stammered. "Well, maybe not here in Georgia."

The Episcopal Church is on record as standing by those the culture marginalizes whether that be nonwhite people, female people or gay people. The author calls that political correctness hostile to tradition.

I call it profoundly countercultural but hardly untraditional. In fact, it is deeply true to the tradition of Jesus, Jesus who offended the "traditionalists" of his own day, Jesus who was known to associate with the less than desirable, Jesus who told his followers to seek him among the poor. It is deeply true to the tradition of the Apostle Paul who decried human barriers of race, sex, or status (Galatians 3:28).

What ails the Episcopalians is that this once most-established class of American Christianity is taking the risk to be radically true to its tradition. There is a price to be paid for that. There is also a promise of abundant life in it.

Peace,
+ Stacy

Baits

I spent a lot of weekday afternoons in college trying to organize games at an inner city park in Greenville, South Carolina.  “Park” gives the wrong impression.  It was more of a vacant lot, mostly dirt and lots of trash.  There was an asphalt basketball court complete with rims without nets.  There was no equipment except what we brought with us from school.  But the park did have an abundance of kids with nothing to do. 

One day I was there when it had just rained.  The worms had been brought to the surface.  As long as there’s a God in heaven, kids will be fascinated by worms.  So were these inner city kids, but they did not actually use the word worm at all.  To these little boys playing among the trash, worms were known as baits.  Baits were for catching fish. 

I have never looked at a worm again without remembering that worms are baits, and I have wondered how this applies to what Jesus said about fishing.  I think the point might have something to do with the importance of what things are used for. 

Nothing has much value if it isn’t used for its intended purpose.  Worms don’t have much value to an inner city kid if they aren’t used to catch fish.  Not much else has value if it isn’t used as God intended.  Nor do we, and our intended purpose is to be God’s agents in restoring “all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”  It is what we do.  It is who we are as baptized people.    

And, it seems to me, if we aren’t using all our resources for that intended purpose, they aren’t of much value, either.  Trust funds and endowments and investments and diocesan commitments and pledges and real estate and parish halls and office buildings and whatever else we have, after all, are only baits.  No matter what fiduciary duties we attach to them, they are only baits.  In fact, our duty is neglected when what we have been entrusted with is not used for its intended purpose, sharing.

Jesus said he intended us to be fishers.  (Mk. 1:17)  I don’t think he meant holding the pole or casting the net, either.  I think he meant us to be baits.  We are, after all, known by what we’re useful for.  And to be useful for their intended purpose, which is to be baits, those first disciples had to leave the nets behind.  I doubt that felt safe or comfortable.  I suspect it felt like no small adventure.  At least I hope it did.  And I’m pretty sure that’s just the way it is with being a disciple, which is what we’re here to be, baits for the reign of God, for God’s reconciling love, for nothing less than the salvation of the world in exactly the same way those kids at the park hooked me.

Peace,

+Stacy

Posted with the permission of Center Aisle

                                   

Mission and Redemption

I had not been Bishop of Lexington very long when the need arose to relocate the diocesan offices due to the Cathedral’s needs for more space due to a nicely expanding ministry.  We went looking for space. 

We looked at an old furniture store.  It’s attraction to me is that it was located in Lexington’s primary Hispanic neighborhood and it had enough room to house a diocesan hospitality ministry for cancer patients and their families from Appalachia.  It was more money than we wanted to pay.

We looked at office parks.  Too depressing.

There was one vacated bank branch in the most hideous 1960s architectural style with a façade, appropriately enough, of turquoise mosaic.  Too tacky.

We kept coming back to an old house at the corner of Martin Luther King and Fourth Street.  It had a number of advantages.  It was cheap.  That’s always an important church consideration.  Though old, it was solid as a rock structurally.  It had both character and historic significance.  It was more than enough space for us and had the potential to house a number of growing diocesan ministries.  It placed us in a great location for mission.  Our presence there would be a stabilizing force in the neighborhood.  The neighborhood was definitely under- served.  The city’s second largest Hispanic neighborhood was nearby.  Its address was a plus.  Locating the diocesan headquarters on Martin Luther King Boulevard was itself taking an important stand.  It was conveniently located to the Cathedral where many diocesan events took place. 

It also had some disadvantages.  It may have been sound structurally, but needed no small amount of work.  The character of the neighborhood made us wonder if everyone would feel comfortable coming there at night.  There was parking lot paving that would need to be done, and the city had some challenging rules regarding drainage. 

But none of those was the biggest problem.  It wasn’t just an old house.  It was, in truth, a classic Southern ante-bellum mansion from the 1840s.  It had once been part of the Henry Clay family.  Given its history, it occurred to us that it may well have been built using slave labor.  This caused a great deal of concern.

So I decided I need to go and have a conversation with our historically African American congregation, St. Andrew’s, which was located just a block away.  I went with some concern about their reaction to what their new bishop was suggesting. 

I explained the situation.  They listened patiently.  There was a brief silence.  “Bishop, if you take that house and use it for mission, it will redeem it.” 

We proceeded.  Mission House, as it is now known, houses much more than the diocesan offices.  It also houses the offices of Reading Camp.  In fact, it is the site of an urban reading camp itself, during which the large downstairs parlors are transformed into themed classrooms where children left behind get caught up to grade level in reading.  It is the location for Church under the Bridge, a spiritual home for the homeless every Sunday afternoon.  English as a second language classes take place there.  Many community groups use it for meetings.  The neighborhood arts center uses it for classroom space on occasion.  It has earned its name I would say. 

     Quoting from the Prophet Isaiah, Jesus described his own mission this way:

          The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has 
          anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has 
          sent me to proclaim release to the captives and
          recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go
          free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. 
                                                               (Lk. 4:18-19)

Mission House was not about doing good works.  It was about participating in God’s saving mission to bring good news to the poor, to release those who are captives, to restore sight to the blind, to free those who are oppressed, and to announce God’s favor to God’s people.  As we followed along the path Jesus saw as his own, we in turn were allowed to participate in God’s own salvation.  To participate in God’s mission is to share in God’s own redemption. 

Jesus did not only describe his own mission in terms of the words of Isaiah.  He taught that to share in that mission was itself a redemptive activity.  “And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.  The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.  Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”  (Lk. 4:20)  Every mission opportunity before us is to fulfill this very Scripture.  As did Jesus.

I know this Scripture was fulfilled in Mission House.  A few years after the dream of Mission House, its presumed history notwithstanding, came to be, I got a call.  It was from two prominent members of St. Andrew’s, both important lay leaders in their parish and diocese, and one of them a very high-ranking official of state government.  Might it be possible for them to host a reception at Mission House, they wondered, for their 50th Anniversary, they wondered.  Of course it was.  I was honored to attend.  It was an event that neither they eyes of those whose hands had most likely built the house, nor the eyes of those dressed in hoop skirts going up and down the grand staircase, could certainly never have imagined.  “If you take that house and use it for mission, it will redeem it.”  On that day, the Scripture was fulfilled in my hearing.
Peace,

+Stacy
 

E Pluribus Unum

The Great Seal of the United States was approved by Congress on June 20, 1782.  It was a project on which Congress worked for six years.  After all, in 1782 there was nothing better to do.  There were many proposals and much bickering along the way.  Some things never change.

We are all very familiar with the product.  The seal is dominated by a bald eagle with spread wings bearing a shield with thirteen red and white stripes bound together by a blue field on its breast and bearing arrows in its left claw and an olive branch in its right, which the eagle is facing.  In its beak it carries a scroll on which is written the original motto of the United States:  E Pluribus Unum.  Out of many, one.   

Here is the interesting part.  E Pluribus Unum is no longer the motto of the United States.  It was replaced in 1956 by “In God We Trust,” which entered our national life as an expression, memorialized on the newly minted two cent coin, in 1864.  It became our official motto 92 years later.  And do you know why?  1956.  It was the height of the Cold War.  “In God We Trust” was a reaction to the threat we perceived from Communism, which is officially atheistic.  In the face of what we perceived as a threat, we as a country opted for a religious expression instead of one that was perceived to be secular.  It was at the same time, by the way, that we added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase “so help me God” to the standard form of the oath taken by federal judges.  Paper money began including the motto “In God We Trust” about the same time, in 1957.  

It is not surprising to me that when Congress decided to discard something “secular” in favor of something “religious,” it would have no idea what it was doing.  In truth, there is nothing more religious than E Pluribus Unum.  It is the epitome of what we celebrate today, Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday in the church year devoted to a doctrine instead of an event in the life of Christ.  Our understanding of the Trinity is that important.  We must not lose it, as we are sorely tempted to do when we let our fears get the better of us.   

In the midst of the Civil War, the phrase “In God we Trust” first entered our national consciousness on a coin.  In the mist of the Cold War, we traded away something very important, the reality that there is no real unity, at least not what the Gospel means by unity, in uniformity altogether.  It was at least as serious a threat to the ideal of the United States as what we so feared at the moment.  Leave it to Congress.  

Unity has everything to do with the tension between the concept of the many and the concept of the one, the tension at the very core of the concept of the Trinity.  The fundamental tension that was present from the very beginning of the life of the Christian community was, as it has always been, the tension between individuality and togetherness.  It was the very same tension at the very beginning of our life as a country.    The Founding Fathers (I wish I could say the Founding Mothers and Fathers, but the truth is pretty much otherwise) held these two realities together.  The anti-Communist anxiety of the 1950s pushed us toward abandoning that, toward leaning one way rather than the other.  Trinity Sunday, and the Sunday of Pentecost, which immediately precedes it, leads us in another direction, the recognition that the importance of the togetherness, the one, must, must be balanced against the importance of the individuality of the parts.  The orthodox Christian understanding, in fact, is that the unity of the whole depends equally on the individuality of the parts.  It is an admitted paradox, as truth often is.  

It is exactly the same thing St. Paul speaks about in the first letter to the Corinthians, right before the famous passage in which he speaks about the meaning of love.  He says:  “Now there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.  To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.  To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.  All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually—individually—just as the Spirit chooses.”  Later in the same chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul wraps up his argument about unity and diversity by again emphasizing the foundational importance of individuality.  “Now you are the body of Christ and individually—individually—members of it.  The unity is founded on the individuality and not in opposition to it.  

But in a world that is as anxious and fearful as ours is, the greater danger is to the importance of the individuality than it is to unity, to the forces of togetherness that are counterfeit relievers of what makes us vaguely uncomfortable or just downright afraid, whether that be evil empires abroad, or phantoms in the mountains of Afghanistan, or things that go bump in the night.  The spiritual danger we face, and the spiritual danger our country faces, is in sacrificing our individuality to the idol of uniformity.  

It is no wonder at all that all over America on September 12, 2001 the slogan that appeared everywhere was “United we Stand.”  And I will be the first to tell you what a comforting affirmation it seemed.  And as good as it made me feel at a time when I felt like I might never feel good again, I realize that it was not comfort in the true sense of the word, which  means to fill with strength.  Huddling together in fear is quite a different thing than to fill with strength.  What I wonder about sometimes is where we would be if, in the face of that horrible time in our national life we not created the Department of Homeland Security but instead created the Department of Homeland Adventure.   

Unity is not in opposition to difference.  And safety, it turns out, is only an illusion.  The orthodox paradox is that it is our unity depends on the precondition of  difference and our salvation much more in the our adventure than in our safety.    

E Pluribus Unum.   

Peace,

+Stacy

Change

My grandparents, William and Katie Belle, were remarkable people who lived in remarkable times.  Within their lifetimes the Wright brothers successfully flew an airplane at Kitty Hawk.  After thousands of years of human beings trying to do that, my grandparents were alive and read about it in the newspaper when it happened for the very first time.  My grandparents were still alive 65 years later when human beings set foot on the moon for the very first time.  And if they had stayed awake past 8:00 at night, which they did not, they could have seen two human beings walking on the moon via a live television transmission. 

Now as astounding as it is to have been alive for both the first flight at Kitty Hawk and the first landing on the moon, unfortunately my grandparents did not believe the latter had actually happened.  Their theory was that it had been staged at some remote location in Nebraska.  My grandparents, who never went outside the state of Georgia except the one time my grandmother went to visit her sister in Jacksonville, did not particularly believe in Nebraska either.  But they found Nebraska a whole lot more plausible than people walking on the moon. 

Within the lifetimes of these two somewhat skeptical farm people, the entire reality of the world was changed, both by the events they had seen happen, and even more by the rate at which that change had occurred.  Thousands of years to get to the first short flight at Kitty Hawk.  Just 65 more years to get to the moon.  It is no wonder at all that they didn’t believe it.
 

Whatever the rate of change my grandparents had to deal with, it is nothing next to the rate of change that our ancestors in faith must have experienced in Christ.  For century after century, the people of Israel had waited for the messiah.  And then, onto the scene comes Jesus of Nazareth.  It was a rate of change that made it difficult to believe.  And not surprisingly, as John puts, “although he had performed many signs in their presence, they did not believe in him.”
 

We know something about so much change that it becomes hard to believe, even if we see the signs live on television.  When change comes at a rate so fast we cannot take it in, it makes us anxious, unsettled, and fearful.  One of the ways human beings cope with so much change so fast and the anxiety that comes with it is to cling to what has been instead of what is becoming.  It is the same with the great moon landing hoax brought to us live from the most remote parts of Nebraska as it is with Jesus and his signs brought to us live from the most remote parts of Galilee.
 

Any rate of change that any human beings have ever experienced, like going form Kitty Hawk to the moon within one lifetime or even having experienced the presence of God in the flesh in Jesus is nothing, absolutely nothing, next to the rate of change we must experience in Easter.  In the instant of Easter, everything, absolutely everything changes.  Death is changed for life.  Sin is changed for freedom.  Alienation is changed for reconciliation.  In Easter, everything, the whole creation, is made new.  The powers, the principalities, the forces that corrupt and destroy our humanity are defeated.
 

Jesus himself is changed.  Jesus is so changed in the instant of Easter that Mary, meeting him in the garden on the first Easter morning, mistook him for the gardener.  Jesus is so changed in the instant of Easter that some of his disciples walked the six miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus with him and did not recognize him.  And even after the reality of the resurrection has begun to set in, Jesus is so changed that his closest friends failed to recognize him calling them along the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  In the instant of Easter, everything, absolutely everything, is changed.
 

As much as the historical events my grandparents witnessed in just a single lifetime changed the very nature of the reality they knew, as much as the signs the people witnessed within the lifetime of Jesus changed the very nature of the reality they knew, the event of Easter changes everything of the reality we think we know in the twinkling of an eye.  It is a change that is too unsettling, too disturbing, too unnerving to believe in because it changes the very nature of reality as we know it.  Easter is intended to threaten our reality.  It is no wonder that it makes us fearful.
 

We must choose whether to allow our fear to stand between us and the resurrection.  We cannot proclaim the resurrection and cling to what is old, to a reality that no longer exists, to a reality before the resurrection.  What we have got to do is live into change because at least until the kingdom arrives, change is the only way God has to work. 

Peace,

+Stacy