LRC, Houston - the weekends-free church in Houston, Texas

I have been increasingly drawn to St. Francis Of Assisi. I guess that I’d have to give credit to Richard Rohr for that. I’m not sure of all the reasons why. Yes, I do love animals. No, I don’t like poverty. Yes, I did like the movie of his life. No, I don’t plan on wearing a tunic or going barefoot. Of all the great attributes he embodied, I am impressed with the LET IT BE lifestyle.

LET IT BE is a natural enemy to our ego!

Men struggle the most with this concept. We are FIX-IT-MEN! We would rather go fix something that isn’t even broke than listen to our spouses talk about what’s broken or not. Men are cause oriented. We want to go to war. Moms want to bandage the knee of a child. It’s not a totally a pure division between men and women in this area, but it’s obvious. Let me expand this to our culture we live within.

LET IT BE runs into the fist of win-lose. We are seeing increased polarization in almost every area of life; however, the Republican-Democrat divide is a symbol for where our nation is. Re states versus blue states is just the garment that we wear most often. But, we have many other clothes in the closet.

Good people line up on either side of issues that they think are life and death, and if need be they’ll kill you to prove their point. Maybe not physically, but emotionally. You see this polarization being played out as follows: white vs. black, pro-choice vs. pro-life, rich vs. poor, liberal vs. conservative, gay vs. straight, Protestant vs. Catholic, denomination vs. other denominations, East vs. West, and so on.

LET IT BE!

Why do we think we need to convert everyone to OUR SIDE? Why do we feel everyone that disagrees with us is WRONG? Why do we make such JUDGMENTS? Why do we think we have to FIX what we think isn’t right? Since it was Richard Rohr who introduced me to this concept of St. Francis, let me end with this statement that Richard wrote in honoring his father (Richard Rohr Sr.) that embodies this concept in the last line.

“My dad made the heavenly Father believable and trustworthy, and freed me to love and imitate the good fathers of history, and to ignore the false patriarchs who will fall without my pushing.” Tonight I will meet with a group of men in a discipleship training program and I can only pray that I and they can somehow grasp how critical our roles are in this world of being natural and spiritual fathers. And once there, just to LET IT BE!

Can you join me in that prayer, and that journey?