We got caught up in living ARTFULLY and haven’t really written much from our Proverbs readings. Maybe it’s that most of the proverbs are self-explanatory and don’t need my extra verbiage!

I do like Proverbs 24, which opens with something June and I have built a marriage seminar around:

Through wisdom a house is built, And by understanding it is established; By knowledge the rooms are filled With all precious and pleasant riches. (Proverbs 24.3, 4, NKJV)

• Wisdom
• Understanding
• Knowledge

Maybe it’s applicable not only to marriage before but also this move! We’re working to fill the rooms (appropriately) with furniture and artwork – “precious and pleasant riches.” And it takes wisdom, understanding, and knowledge to do it right. It our family, most of that is supplied by June! I just hang the pictures where she wants them.

We are beginning recognize July 20 as National Moon Day in honor of the first moon landing, July 20, 1969. I remember it well, and I was privileged to meet several of the astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin about whom I wrote two blogs. Please check them out:

• Magnificent Desolation
• Humility

Buzz Aldrin preparing to salute the flag after the first moon landing

The moon landing was a magnificent achievement by tens of thousands of people over a remarkably short period of time: it was less than seven years from President John Kennedy’s “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech until the first manned landing.

We choose to go to the moon. We chose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept. One we are unwilling to postpone. And therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure that man has ever gone. – John Kennedy, September 12, 1962

“That goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” There’s power in attempting something hard…together, something God recognized way back at the building of the tower of Babel:

And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” (Genesis 11.6, ESV)

Are there worthy goals to attempt today? Either as a community of nations, the United States, or even the Church? It would require unity…which we’re not good at today at any level.

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4.1 – 6, ESV)

This blog originally appeared July 20, 2023.

Today we look at the last item in our living ARTFULLY series: “Yielded.” When I first developed this acrostic, it was ARTFUL, ending with “Loving.” Then I added “Life-giving” and therefore needed the “Y” to finish it out. “Yielded” seemed like a reasonable choice. After all, submission to God is a concept taught throughout scripture. For example,

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. (James 4.7, 8, ESV)

But when I went to attach a scripture to the overview I presented last week, I was surprised that “yielded” is hard to find. In fact, it seems to be only in the King James’ version of Romans 6:

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. (Romans 6.12, 13, KJV)

So “yielded” is a given. The question is, “Yielded to whom?”

Several of the ARTFULLY values need that clarification:

• Abiding…in what or whom? One can abide in sports and give one’s life to following a particular team. On a church mission trip once, I sat in front of two guys on the bus and listened to them discuss the Auburn University football roster. They went through it by player number – each guy’s position, how good he was, where he was on the depth chart, etc. WITHOUT anything in front of them! Those guys “abided” in Auburn football.
• Focused…on what? Again, it could be anything. A lot of folks in this country are focused on making money and buying as many “toys” as they can.
• Yielded. When I developed ARTFULLY, I assumed “Yielded to God.” But Romans 6 says we have a choice:

Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? (Romans 6.16, KJV)

So let’s resolve to…

• Abide in Christ
• Focus on His Kingdom (“Your Kingdom come”)
• Yield to him (“Your will be done”)

Some of it is right there in the Lord’s prayer!

Join me in living ARTFULLY

• Abiding
• Rejoicing
• Thankful
• Focused
• Unattached
• Loving
• Life-giving
• Yielded
  

I’m not writing about all of my living ARTFULLY elements, just the ones that might not be obvious. So I’ll skip Loving and go to Life-giving. Here’s the list again:

• Abiding
• Rejoicing 
• Thankful
• Focused
• Unattached
• Loving
• Life-giving
• Yielded

I see Life-giving as what we do when we’re trying to help someone advance in their spiritual life. Jesus presented Paul’s mission that way. Here’s how Paul tells it:

And I said, “Who are you, Lord?” And the Lord said, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand upon your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to…

• open their eyes, so that they
• may turn from darkness to light and
• from the power of Satan to God, that they
• may receive
  • forgiveness of sins and
  • a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.” (Acts 26.15 – 18, ESV, bulleted for clarity)

If that’s not life-giving, I don’t know what is!

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. (John 6.35, ESV)

And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1.9 – 14, ESV)

I added Unattached to my Artfully Living List…

• Abiding in Christ
• Rejoicing 
• Thankful
• Focused
• Unattached
• Loving
• Life-giving
• Yielded

…because I’ve been working on what Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, called “Indifference.” Since “indifference” doesn’t start with the “u” I needed, I’m calling it “unattached.” Ignatius defined it as:

Being detached enough from things, people, or experiences to be able either to take them up or to leave them aside, depending on whether they help us to “to praise, reverence, and serve God” (Spiritual Exercises 23). 

I like to use the Apostle Paul as an example:

Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.  I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.  I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4.11 – 13, ESV)

A friend pointed me to Paul’s counsel to the Corinthians as another example of Unattached:

This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. (1 Corinthians 7.29 – 31, ESV)

This move has been a good time to practice this discipline. For one of our granddaughters, we’re leaving the only house she’s ever associated with us. She’s making a documentary of her experience with the house, and she asked me, “How do you feel about leaving this house?” I had to tell her, “It’s just a house. We’ll create a home in the next house where you will be welcome.”

When I wrote about giving away MY childhood rocking chair, a blog reader responded, partly in jest because of my advanced age:

I can’t believe you gave away YOUR childhood rocker!! That’s an antique!!!

But it’s not hard to give something away if (1) you don’t need it, (2), you’re unattached to it (our theme), and (3) you have no place to put it!

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6.19 – 21, ESV)

POSIWID?! Bob, is that a typo? No, please recall that I promised yesterday a way to think about what our focus actually is, not what we say it is. POSIWID is a term introduced by Stafford Beer in the early 2000s:

The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does (POSIWID).

Not what we say it does or what we hope it does but what it actually does. Beer wrote:

There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. – Wikipedia: The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does

For example, if you observed a church over several weeks, what would you say its purpose is? The church might have a mission statement tucked away in a drawer somewhere, but what would your observations about the church’s activities lead you to believe its mission is?

I posed that question to a leader in a Christian mission, and his immediate response was something like:

To get as many people to attend the Sunday morning performance as possible.

Exactly. What about the average American Christian? Or you and I? Do we live that differently from our neighbors? Another formulation of POSIWID is the familiar adage:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. – Wikipedia, DuckTest

Back to focus. What’s yours? What’s mine? Maybe we need to look at our behavior to find out. Jesus said it first:

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. (Matthew 7.15, 16, ESV, emphasis mine)

Back to the acrostic I developed a few years ago for living artfully:

• Abiding in Christ
• Rejoicing 
• Thankful
• Focused
• Unattached
• Loving
• Life-giving
• Yielded

We talked about Abiding on Sunday, then took a break to honor Sara McDaniel, June’s piano teacher, who embodied not only a lifestyle of investing in others but also a life completely focused on music. Faced with the challenge of a single mother raising two boys, she worked hard to put bread on the table: she had a full private studio, she performed, she taught at the college level…all music, all the time. Focused.

Focused: it’s the next practice I want to talk about. The apostle Paul was focused:

But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3.13, 14, NIV)

As the late Navigator Skip Gray used to say:

Paul said, “This one thing I do. Not, these 14 things I dabble in.”

As I was putting books on the shelf in our new home, I noticed The One Thing by Gary Keller. It opens with the proverb:

If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.

The movie City Slickers with Billy Crystal is worth watching for the one scene between Billy’s character, Mitch, a 40-year-old guy in a midlife crisis, and Curly, the tough cowboy that’s managing the cattle drive Billy and his friends have signed up for.

Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?

Mitch: No, what?

Curly (holding up one finger): This.

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean nothin’. [Sanitized slightly for a Christian blog!]

Mitch: That’s great but, what’s the one thing?

Curly: That’s what you gotta figure out.

What’s your one thing? What’s mine? I’d like to think mine is the motto of The Navigators:

To know Christ, to make him known, and to help others do the same.

But if you watched my life, would you conclude that? Reminds me of something my son Mark shared with me a year or two ago that I haven’t written about yet. I think it’s profound and speaks to this discussion. Stay tuned.

But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD. – Joshua (Joshua 24.15, NIV)

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. – Jesus (Matthew 6.24, NIV)

June and I both studied piano from the age of 8. I quit lessons during my senior year of high school. June still studies! On June 1, her beloved teacher, Sara McDaniel, passed after an 18-month battle with a rare cancer.

Yesterday, we attended her memorial service where the pastor shared the succinct summary of Sara’s life given by his church’s music director, Shazia Ali, one of Sara’s adult students:

Sara made career musicians.

Sara was a concert-level pianist in her own right. During lessons, she would sight-read music it would take her adult students months to learn. She performed regularly with the Colorado Springs Chamber Orchestra and with members of the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, the Air Force Academy Band, and others. You can see a sample here. The playing starts about 1:35 in and goes for nearly 10 minutes.

But her lasting contribution was not in making music herself but in helping others make music.

Sara taught with a rare mix of precision and kindness. She guided her students with care, always encouraging them to find their voice. Her impact rippled through generations of musicians across the state and beyond. Besides teaching privately, she also taught at…Pikes Peak State College (formerly Pikes Peak Community College…. – From the memorial service bulletin

Let me pause here. She could have taught anywhere. She chose to teach at Pikes Peak Community in order to give students from less wealthy backgrounds the same opportunities as those more fortunate. She taught there since 1985. Continuing from yesterday’s bulletin…

After semi-retirement, she began organizing monthly recitals for her advanced older students.

Most of those recitals were for the participants only, but once a year, in December, we spouses could come.

I share all this to inspire all of us to invest in others. Jesus did, Paul did. Our best contribution will be the people who are making a difference after we’re gone. And make no mistake, we will be gone…

The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office. (Hebrews 7.23, ESV)

I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world…For I have given them the words that you gave me…I am praying for them…As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. – Jesus, John 17.6 – 9, 18, ESV

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. (2 Timothy 2.2, NIV)

Yesterday, I offered an acrostic on ARTFULLY as a complement to Sahil Bloom’s blog on Artful Living. The acrostic is something I developed a few years ago to encourage me in a few spiritual disciplines.

• Abiding in Christ
• Rejoicing 
• Thankful
• Focused
• Unattached
• Loving
• Life-giving
• Yielded

Let’s look at “Abide” first, and I don’t think I can do better than what I wrote almost three years ago…

Most of the uses of “abide” are in John 15: the vine and the branches (verses 1 – 16). Here are just a few observations with little comment.

“Abide”

• Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit…unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me (4)
• Whoever abides in me and I in him…bears much fruit. (5)
• If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away (6)
• If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask… (7)
• Abide in my love. (9)
• If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. (10)
• I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide… (16)

“If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away” (6) – best we figure out what abide means and do it!

If I’m not bearing “much fruit,” I’m not abiding. (5) (That’s basic mathematical logic: “IF anyone abides in me and I in him, he bears fruit.” Abiding => Fruit. Therefore, No fruit => No abiding.)

There are promises for those who abide:

• Answered prayer (7, 16)
• Love (9, 10)
• Joy (11)

This “abiding” section includes commands:

• Abide: “Abide in me and I in you…” (4)
• Obey: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love…” (10)
• Love: “This is my commandment that you love one another…” (12)
• Bear fruit: “I have appointed you to go and bear fruit…” (16)

A rich section. Books, probably libraries, have been written about it. But of all the metaphors Jesus used, this one of abiding as a branch does in a vine seems the most permanent. Jesus is the bread of life, but I can eat bread today and not eat bread tomorrow. He is the living water, and, again, I can take a drink or not. He’s the light, but I can close my eyes or open them. Abiding as a branch in a vine doesn’t seem like something one can turn on or off.

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples… (John 8.31, ESV)

And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming. (1 John 2.28, ESV)

Sahil Bloom’s challenge to live artfully (yesterday’s blog) reminded me of an acrostic I had developed to remember my life’s goals. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t reviewed it for a while, but I’m pleased that the acrostic brought the concepts right back to mind. (Such memory techniques work!) Here it is:

I want to live ARTFULLY. What might that look like?

• Abiding in Christ (John 15.4 – 7)
• Rejoicing  (1 Thessalonians 5.16, Philippians 3.1, Philippians 4.4)
• Thankful (1 Thessalonians 5.18)
• Focused (Philippians 1.27, Philippians 3.13, 14)
• Unattached (Philippians 4.11, 12)
• Loving (Philippians 2.1 – 5, John 13.34, 35)
• Life-giving (Philippians 2.14 – 16, Acts 26.18)
• Yielded (Romans 6.12 – 16)

It’s not a bad list. Maybe I’ll unpack some of them over the next few days.

Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her beasts; she has mixed her wine; she has also set her table. She has sent out her young women to call from the highest places in the town, “Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!” To him who lacks sense she says, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Leave your simple ways, and live, and walk in the way of insight.” (Proverbs 9.1 – 6, ESV – blogged on June 21, 2025)