The Trappings of Success

by Sean Murphy

Scripture

2 Chronicles 26:16

But after Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall. He was unfaithful to the LORD his God, and entered the temple of the LORD to burn incense on the altar of incense.

Observation

If the term "Rock Star" had existed in Uzziah's time, it almost certainly would have been applied to him.    Scripture tells us that at the tender age of 16, he became king over all of Israel.   As king, Uzziah quickly became a powerful military leader racking up victory after victory on the battlefield.  He built several large towers (verse 9) and even rebuilt to his specifications, entire towns (verse 6) which had been demolished during his war with the Philistines.  Uzziah became very wealthy with abundant land and scores of people working for him.  Soon, he was a famous celebrity, known throughout the world for his power and wealth (verse 8).   Uzziah was living a charmed life.  A life filled with achievements that most of us will never even dream about.

But unfortunately, as Uzziah's success grew, so grew his ego.  Somewhere along the line, he decided that he had no more need for God or His Law.  In direct violation of the Lords command, he entered the temple to burn incense.  (This was only to be done by the Priests.)  When confronted by a group of Priests, instead of repenting, Uzziah became enraged and screamed at them.  His arrogance had reached a point where he actually believed that he was above obeying Gods Law.  As we read on, we see that Gods judgment was swift and harsh.  Uzziah died a leper.

Application

This tragic story rings so true in my life.  A little bit of success brings with it a lot of temptation.  When I experience success, my flesh often begins to tell me that I achieved the victory on my own;  That maybe...just maybe I don't need God as much as I thought I did.  Yet scripture repeatedly warns us against such an attitude (See James 4:6, Romans 12:3, and others.)  The proper response to blessing is to draw closer to God, with thanksgiving.

Prayer

Father when you choose to bless me with success, may I seek you all the more.  Protect me, Father, from the idea that any success that I experience somehow came from me.  Help me to realize that just as I need to be prepared by you for hard times, so I must also be prepared by you for the good times because it is those very moments of smooth sailing, victory, and comfort that can be the most dangerous to our walk with you.  Amen.

 

 

Christian Worldview for First Responders

 

A Blog

 

By, Clarke T. Cayton

 

What is it about the work of emergency responders that creates such a tight bond between peers? I suppose most obvious would be the mutually shared experiences of intensity that require dependency be placed upon one another. But other factors as well I believe are at play. There seems to be a common linkage binding most responders together through shared culture, behavior, language and worldview. Now, not everyone enters life in the service with this commonality, but to develop trust and confidence in peers there must be a melding of community mindedness. In fact, we work very hard at demonstrating the how to's and what for’s to the newbie’s. It may not be that the way we do it is the only way, or even the best way, but it's the way WE DO IT. And to be one of us, it will be the way YOU DO IT. The acceptance and integration of the new guy hinges on this ability to integrate, adapt, and embrace this community and its way of doing things.

 

This bonding of peers creates a closeness and understanding that will sustain its members through the inevitable trials and hardships that come through a life spent in professional emergency services. As we say, we take care of our own.

 

But what happens when the community we look to for direction and guidance does not promote that which is healthy and good for our own personal success and survival? I am sure every department would agree that strategically in place there are training exercises, safety equipment, and tactics to ensure that everyone comes home safe. But what does your department have in place to ensure that everyone comes home well? Responder health requires there to be mechanisms of recovery and maintenance that go far beyond mere physical safety. And the cost of this negligence is being paid at a premium.

 

Consider that in our peer group it is more likely that one of us will die from suicide than in the line of duty. That collectively, most will have a life expectancy that is a decade less than the national average, and that our marriages are twice as likely to end in divorce. These are issues that cannot be ignored, and unfortunately the ignorance began with neglecting our responsibility to promote that which is good and right within our professional peer group.

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By, Chief Greg Dagnan

 

I was in charge of a small not for profit organization with a staff of around 25 employees. Our mission was to interview child sexual abuse victims and then provide appropriate follow up with advocacy, medical services and therapeutic treatment. A tough job for everyone involved. When I took over at the agency, everyone I worked with was a friend. I found it difficult to be assertive with people that I liked and respected, so I kept letting things slide. Someone would step out of line and I wouldn’t address the issue. I had made a habit of occasionally walking up to the front office a half hour to an hour before the end of the day. I would tell people to go home early and I would stay to handle calls and walk in traffic. I thought it was a great gesture of kindness to the employees. One day the weather was bad and ice was forming on the roads. I was going to let everyone leave early but I got tied up on an important phone call. By the time that I got to the front office it was only 20 minutes until quitting time. I went up front to tell employees they could go and one of the them actually complained in an unpleasant way that they were only getting to leave 20 minutes early. Furious, I told the employees that they were not leaving early and that they would never leave early again. I stalked back to my office incredulous. Only then did I realized that by not addressing legitimate disciplinary problems I had created a big ugly monster. I started holding employees more accountable that day. Did they all hate me as I feared they would? No! As a result of more accountability the employees were happier, the organization was happier and I was happier.

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Christian Worldview for First Responders

 

A Blog

 

By, Clarke T. Cayton

 

I believe worldview is at the core of everything that we do; what we say, how we act, decisions that we make, and ultimately how we live our lives. There are many influences that shape our worldview such as our personal history, our family history, our community, our education, our media exposure, our social influences, and our faith beliefs. Because every day presents us with new experiences that we have not encountered before, our worldview is constantly morphing and adjusting to new realities as we discover what this world is all about.

 

There are two dynamics that exist when it comes to Christian Worldview: The first is that we believe the Bible to be the authoritative truth of God. Meaning the content of scripture is a revelation of absolute truth. This then means that when the Word of God speaks about family, faith, community, church, marriage, raising children, professional calling, or any number of topics it is God revealing the truth about how each is designed to function within His creation. If God then is the ultimate source of truth, then we must interpret all our personal experiences through the lens of truth He gives us in His Word.

 

The second dynamic of Christian Worldview is that to truly understand our worldview we have to look at the way we live our lives. For the management of our existence is a direct reflection of what truths we really hold to. Every behavior can be traced back to a belief. And if we find certain behaviors to be inconsistent with what God's Word reveals to us about how we should live, it is a reflection that we have not taken hold of its practical life-giving truth. So while every new experience reshapes our worldview as we discover new realities around us, we also must take these new experiences and filter them through the truth of God to discover their ultimate reality. Only then will we attain a Christian Worldview that is continually being transformed in truth, and thus providing us with a framework of existence that will inspire us to live lives that are consistent with the will of God.

 

All of the casualties produced by a life in professional emergency services, I believe can be traced back to a worldview conflict; which means encounters that these first responders participated in left them in a state of conflict and confusion, where they could not reconcile the realities of their professional exposure and personal experiences with ultimate truth. And anytime ultimate truth is removed, rejected, or neglected, God is removed, rejected, or neglected. And since we know God to be the source of all life, His absence produces death in all its various forms; social isolation, addiction, divorce, abuse, infidelity, burnout, suicide, and many other tragic results.

 

Each one of us must ask ourselves this question daily:

 

'Do we really believe, that what we believe, is really real.' ~ Dr. Del Tackett, The Truth Project

 

The answer of course can only be revealed in our lives.

 

Responder life is hard.

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By, Cindy Sigler Dagnan

 

Either my husband or I would have been with our children approximately 359 days out of that year. However, it was the other six days which consumed me with guilt.

 

In celebration of more than a decade of marriage and the four children for whom we tenderly care during the remainder of each year, we selfishly went on a cruise for six blissfully child-free days.…

 

The income tax refund check arrives and with it I pay the cruise fee, five months in advance. It’s a pittance compared with what we’ve spent on school supplies, shoes, clothing, braces, toothpaste, apple juice, animal crackers, training wheels, training bras, sports junk and three kinds of lessons. But I’m smitten with guilt. Surely we could do something more practical, more urgent with this money.

 

Two weeks to go and I make final arrangements which sound, well, final, with my mother who will watch over them while we are gone. Despite the fact that she and Daddy raised my sister and me reasonably well and with no missing parts, I leave her five typewritten pages of instructions. Bedtimes. Who’s allowed over to play. What they can have for snacks. [Don’t know why I bother with that one; Mimi always lets them have junk]. What songs to sing to the three-year-old and what her favorite stories are. I even remind her to brush their teeth! At the bottom, my husband and I type our wishes for the girls if anything were to happen to us. The oldest reminds us to be careful. “ ‘Cause, seriously, Mom. Bad things happen on cruise ships.” Greg signs his with a flourish; I sign reluctantly, smudging the letters with big round teardrops.

 

While packing, I am trailed by children who eye me somberly, occasionally make tackling motions around my knees and who alternate between ignoring me completely or covering me in kisses. It doesn’t matter. The cold shoulder and the overpowering affection both pierce me with remorse. It will be good for you to get away and remember that you are somebody’s wife, I remind myself. I fold one bright new sundress, purchased especially for the trip and wonder if I still remember how to do this – not be a mother.

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Christian Worldview for First Responders

 

A Blog

 

By, Clarke T. Cayton

 

First of all, what is worldview? In basic terms, 'worldview' is simply the system or framework of ideas and beliefs that we use to interpret the world around us. Everyone has one (whether we recognize it or not). And each individual’s worldview is unique to them. Worldview is formed through various channels of influence. From the inception of our life, we began to formulate an understanding of reality. Upon our birth we were naturally drawn to our mother because of the bonding that we had already experienced while in the womb; you've heard that newborns can easily distinguish the sound of his or her mother’s voice and identify it as safe and nurturing... These are early stages of worldview development. And with each new experience our worldview is formed, altered, and molded into what we refer to as 'reality'.

 

If in fact our mother does continue to care for us, feed us, and clean us, our worldview of 'mother' will be fostered as one of natural compassion and love. However, if a child's mother neglects these responsibilities, the child will become detatched and estranged. This reaction has the potential to create significant psychological and emotional issues in the future development of the child. The point is this: As human beings we are incredibly sensitive to our environments. All the information our senses gather is ultimately processed and becomes the building blocks of how we understand and view the world around us. Thus, worldview.

 

So why is worldview important and how does it affect our life as emergency services professionals? Well first it's significant to again say that each of us comes into the responder life with a view of the world that is unique to us. And remember, worldview is the system that motivates our decisions and behavior. For some, it may be that you or a family member were helped in a crisis situation by a first responder and forever you were impacted by that event and the hope they gave you. This experience then translated into a deep desire to be able to do the same for others. This would be an illustration of how worldview as an experience in reality is translated into an expectation and ultimately an expression.

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By, Clarke T. Cayton

My wife has been an Emergency Room Nurse for 2 years now. She works 7P to 7A, 3 nights a week. For about the first year of this arrangement, I always found it interesting that for the most part I could tell how my wife’s shift went by how much noise I heard from the kitchen when she got home. The clanking of pots and slamming of cabinet doors was a good indicator for me that I had some quality listening time in my future. Sure enough afterthe kitchen was spotless and the neighborhood wide awake, she would come to me, throw herself on the bed and either burst into tears or swear to me that she would never go back to that dreadful place.

Lucky for me, I am a Crisis Chaplain and Professional Stress Management Consultant specializing in Field Traumatology and Compassion Fatigue, so I have all the answers and know all the tricks. Haha, right. I would typically just hold my wife and let her cry and vent. Not much else I could do. Or so I thought.

We have been married for 5 years now and have learned a lot about what it means to put one another first, and in many ways we make a pretty good team. This being so, there are times when I find that what I am hearing from her, isn’t always what she is saying to me. So I made a commitment to listen to my wife a little sharper. And what I heard changed my life, and hers.

What I began to hear was not that she hated her job or despised the abuse of the emergency healthcare system, but that through her passion to help people and her commitment to nursing excellence, every night she would put herself on the line and give it all she had. This level of investment requires an immense amount of commitment and sacrifice, because to be honest the environment ofthe ER is rarely wholesomely rewarding. She was coming home physically and emotionally exhausted every morning, completely spent. Compassion level on ‘E’.

Oh, and the clanking in the kitchen? Yeah, that was my fault. See my wife had spent the last 12 hours going above and beyond; wading through blood, vomit, bad attitudes,and verbal abuse. All because she cares about people.This is the definition of compassion, and by morning her fuel is just gone. So what happens when a fatigued wife comes home to a less than spotless kitchen after busting her tail tending to all the needs of everyone else but her own?

Exactly.

So I tried something, I decided that if she was going to lay it on the line for the sake of others for 12 hours, I could probably take a couple of minutes and wipe down the counters, hang the towel back on the rack, and clean the junk off the kitchen table. Guess what, she doesn’t come home in a tirade anymore. Because her reaction wasn’t one of an especially bad night; sincemost nights are bad nights. But instead, a reaction to being in an environment where she constantly bore the responsibility to fix,help, care and make better, only to come home to an environment that needed more of the same.

When I’ve asked her about this she tells me, “You have no idea what it means to me to come home and know that everything is done, it’s all put away, it’s all clean, and everything that I feel responsible for, you have already done for me. All the stress is just released, because home is now my shelter and my rest.”

Here is the key: When home is a refuge and a place for recovery, the fuel of compassion gets refilled and the courage to face the world, no matter how ugly, is replenished.

Just so you know, none of this is taught in any stress management course in the country. Thoughyou will find it in God’s Word.

Want to be able to support your responder spouse when they are worn out from serving others?

Just serve them.

Listen to what they are really saying. And grant them rest.

This is stress management.

It’s also called love.

In order to better understand how Responder life is structured it is very important to understand what Insiders are and what role they play. Responder Life Insiders are men and women who are already in the first responder culture. Usually they are First Responders themselves. Our goal is to train and equip these Insiders to help fellow responders to have healthier marriages and families. An insider is someone who... 1. Knows the first responder culture (could be a chaplain, chief, spouse, first responder, or even a pastor who knows the culture.) 2. Understands and wants to reach the first responder culture in order to build thriving families, who can be transformed by Christ. 3. Is equipped with the tools and resources to help reach out and build healthy families. We provide the tools necessary for these insiders to be advocates and resources for other responders to gain the help they need to build a vibrant marriage. Chris Green

Recommended Book of the Month

If God is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil

by Randy Alcorn

Review by Sean Murphy

Several years ago, I worked at a local gym as an assistant manager. One Tuesday morning in the fall, I walked out of the personal training office and noticed an unusually large number of people gathered around the television set in the lobby. "Last night’s Monday Night Football game must have been a good one." I thought to myself believing that they were watching highlights from the previous nights contest. As I approached the group however, I quickly realized that they were not watching sports highlights. They stood there silently, their stunned faces locked on the screen. I looked at the TV to see what they were watching and my life, like the lives of every American, changed in an instant.

It was September 11th, 2001.  On the television was an image of the World Trade Center in New York City. A column of smoke rose ominously from one of the towers. A banner at the bottom of the screen informed me that a plane had hit the building. Little did I know that in a few minutes, a second aircraft would hit the other tower, dashing the hope in my heart that a confused pilot had simply made a terrible mistake. The day would get worse. Soon, would come reports of a fire at the Pentagon which we would learn after a few more minutes was caused by a 3rd plane crash. Finally, a report would air of a plane down in a field in Pennsylvania. The fourth and final plane brought down by terrorists. The images broadcast over the airwaves in the next several days are unforgettable to all who witnessed them: people jumping out of the towers to their deaths rather than being burned alive, distraught family members frantically searching for missing relatives, their faces contorted with grief as they came to the realization that they would most likely never see their loved ones again; victims covered in blood, dust, and drywall wandering the streets of New York in a daze; story after tragic story of wives, husbands, sons and daughters being cruelly ripped from their families.When we think of tragedies like 9/11, hurricane Katrina, or even lesser known events such as a child dying of cancer, believers and unbelievers alike often begin to wonder, "If God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good, why did he not stop these things from happening?" It is a fair question. It is a question that we, as believers, need to know how to discuss even though we cannot ever completely answer it. Randy Alcorn tackles this difficult and age old topic in his new book, If God is Good – Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil.

There are no easy answers to the problem of evil and suffering and If God is Good does not pretend that there are. This nearly 500 page book looks at suffering from almost every possible angle. It begins with a section on understanding and defining the problem of evil and suffering. Alcorn defines the dilemma this way: "If God is all good, then he would want to prevent evil and suffering. If he is all knowing, then he would know how to prevent it. If God is all powerful, then he is able to prevent it. And yet…a great deal of evil and suffering exists. Why?" The next section in the book is on understanding evil -- how evil came into the world and how it is related to the suffering that we experience now.

Many non-Christians believe that the existence of evil is proof that a good and all powerful God does not exist. Alcorn spends the third section pointing out a number of problems with this argument. In section four, Alcorn argues against minimizing Gods attributes as an answer to suffering. He does a great job of pointing out our tendency to "defend" God -- all the while unintentionally denying his characteristics that make him worthy of our worship. An example of this approach would be a Christian counseling a grieving friend that "of course God did not plan for your husband to get killed in Iraq." This sounds nice on the surface but by taking this approach to suffering, the counselor is really presenting a God that is not all powerful or omniscient – a false God. As an alternatvie, Alcorn presents a God who "works all things (even evil and suffering) together for those who love him and have been called according to his purposes."

Section 5 presents evil as a part of Gods story of redemption. Alcorn writes, "We value in story the conflict we avoid in life." And "The greatest character virtues we know would never appear in a story without evil and suffering." He is here making a point that is a theme throughout the book: That although evil and suffering are bad, God can and does use them for good (see Romans 8:28). One of the ways that God does this is by using evil to bring out character traits in us (such as perseverance, courage, and generosity) that would not be possible in its absence.

In Section 6, Alcorn tackles the difficult question of Gods sovereignty versus our free will. Questions such as "Did God know that the fall would happen?" and "If God is all powerful and in control of the universe, are we really responsible for our bad decisions?" are discussed. In section 7, he goes on to look at 2 eternal solutions to the problem of evil: Heaven and Hell. Section 8 was a section that changed my thinking about suffering and evil. The section talks about the limitations that God puts on the suffering we experience. Going back to the example of 9/11, Alcorn writes "In the collapse of New York’s Twin Towers, fifteen thousand people came out alive. While this doesn’t remove the pain felt by families of the nearly three thousand who died, it shows that even on that terrible day, suffering was limited." A few sentences later, he goes on to ask, "Might God be limiting sin all around us all the time?"

Section 9 talks about how suffering can be used for Gods glory and section 10 outlines other reasons that God allows suffering including character building, making us more Christ like, and for the good of others. The last section of the book contains practical ways to live meaningfully in suffering.

One of the things that impresses me about If God is Good is the quality of research that was put into the book. As he does with all of his books, Alcorn embarked on an exhaustive study of scripture and of many quality theological writings that have been created over the centuries as he did his research. However, he also made the book very personal by interviewing some real experts in the area of suffering : Everyday people who have endured bereavement, failing health, financial woes, persecution, and periods of faltering faith, yet still maintain their walk with Christ.

I truly believe that If God is Good is a book that every Christian should read. It radically changed my view of evil and suffering. It does not give the "easy" answers or trite platitudes that all too often get thrown in the direction of sufferers. What it does give is a deep discussion of the subject of suffering and of faith in its presence. Alcorn acknowledges and respects the pain that we all go through while at the same time giving us reason to hope that "our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." (Romans 8:18). Read this book. Better yet, find a family member or close friend who is going through a hard time (you probably will not have to look far) and read it together with them. This is a book that has the ability to change your view of God, of this world, and of whatever difficult situation you may find yourself in. For believers it should be required reading.

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