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[Silence] A lady who I had not met before came in. She was deeply concerned about a particular issue. We sat down and she began to explain her concern about that issue.

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After she explained it, she said, "I'm deeply concerned about it, but I want to know what I can do about it." And that was not an unusual question, people being concerned about issues and asking what they could do, so I gave her several suggestions. And I said, "You know, here's some starting points that you could do about this particular concern." About a week later, she wandered back

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in the office and said okay I've done those now what? And I began to get a little suspicious and I said well okay let me make several other suggestions to you. So I gave her about two months work and sent her on her way and said here are some things that could make a real difference on this issue if you really

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care about it. About three weeks later she wandered back in the office and said okay now what? That's when I began to realize that here was a lady whose expression of her particular gifts were not going to be denied. She was going to express them. For our speaker this evening, you might have considered it life on the interstate. Things

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Things were on cruise control. Daddy was a minister. Mama was a loving, caring Christian. Everything was moving right along like things were supposed to move along.

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Put it on 55 and put on the cruise control and head on. school, voice training, training at the very prestigious Pasadena Playhouse. Everything moving in the way and in the direction that things were supposed to move for a Christian young lady.

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Senator Jobe, the time of change, of turmoil, happened to coincide with the time of marriage. years of emotional upheaval, a very distinct emotional movement into depression and to the edge, to the edge of suicide. A very distinctive kind of experience where that decision had almost been made, and the phone call from a caring person almost unknown to her. A similar

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experience by her husband. Not reconciliation, turmoil, depression, movement, consideration of suicide. The experience. Something happening. Reconstruction, new hope, new excitement, new possibilities. Something happening with God. What can I do to express it this week? Well, here's some ideas.

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Got those done, what now? Well, here's some more ideas. How about a radio program? Okay.

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Finally, there was a book. Let's have a banquet. Then there were some more books. The richest lady in town.

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About how daddy used to talk about how rich they really were because they had a relationship with Jesus Christ. Now there are 17 books. One of those books, His Stubborn Love, became a film series.

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And that film series has now been seen by over three million people. The latest book is He Began with Eve. She's receiving an honorary doctorate from Massachusetts Pacific University. I think she's pleased with that.

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I think the exciting thing is that she's the first woman that they've ever given an honorary doctorate too and she is the first woman commencement speaker that they have ever had. What do I do now, Phil?

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Well how about trying these things out? They're just some folks who once they see the hope and the opportunity are not going to let their gifts be denied. And I'm delighted to present to you one tonight who's found innumerable and exciting expression of those gifts, Joyce Landorf.

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[ Applause ] >> Well, I love to ad lib and I'd like to take what he just said and just run with it and do a whole new thing but I won't subject you to that. I'm pleased to be here. It's cold in Texas. I have to talk about the weather. Thank you Howard for

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your beautiful remarks and thank you Ken for your music. Ken, Ken never, there seems to be never any small talk about you Ken. You get right to the nitty-gritty. Carl Sandburg said, "Life is like an onion. You peel one layer off at a time and sometimes you weep." And I think Ken's music and Ken's words get right to the

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peeling off of the onion. And sometimes they make us weep, sometimes they smite us with conviction. But I took your music personally tonight. I hope when you hear somebody as great as Ken, as such a great artist, you feel fortunate that you lived in the same time when he did, that you could be in an auditorium, that you could hear him

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in person, that you could see him. And also, I hope you take it personally. I hope you pretend that nobody else is in this whole room, that he's giving this benefit concert just for you. Because if you do, you will hear God speaking to you. He spoke a number of things to me. I don't think I'll forget the phrase, "We are two separate people."

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Oh, my, are we two separate people. I love you. Some of you love me. We have a love affair going because of the bonds of Christ, but we are very separate people. We need reconciliation in our lives so badly it shows. We wear masks. We don't let anybody really see us. And if we are brave enough and have enough guts, we stand up and we

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say, "This is really how it is." In 1890, Amy Carmichael wrote her first book. Some of you love Amy Carmichael. I do. I love her poems. I love that woman. She was a missionary to India and she was just really super. But her first book was banned. Her first book was not accepted by the Christian community. It told about her life in

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India and the name of the book was "Things as they are" and we couldn't handle it. They banned it before a year was up and nobody ever read the book after that. She told it just like it really truly was in India at that time. And because her report was not glowing, was not "ta-da", was not just really out of sight, the Christian community said, "I don't want to hear about

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that. Don't tell me about that." And so we become two separate people. We walk in our own shoes and not in anybody else's. I read a thing not long ago that says, "Please hear what I'm not saying." Some of you already, I can tell by the little ripple, have heard it. "Bear with me." It bears repeating. It says, "Do not be fooled by me. Do not be fooled

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by the face I wear, for I wear a mask. I wear a thousand masks, and I'm afraid to take it off and none of them are really me. Pretending is an art that's second nature with me, but don't be fooled for God's sake, don't be fooled. I give that impression that I'm secure, that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my

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name and coolness is my game, and the water's calm and I'm in command, and that I need no No one. But don't believe me, please. My surface may be smooth, but my surface is my mask.

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My ever-varying and ever-concealing mask. Beneath lies no smugness, no contemplates. Beneath dwells the real me in confusion, the real me in fear, the real me in aloneness. But I hide this.

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I don't want anybody to know it. I panic at the thought of my weaknesses and fear exposing them, and that's why I frantically create my masks to hide behind. They're nonchalant, but sophisticated, to help me pretend, to shield me from the glance

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that knows. But such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only salvation, and I know it. That is, if it's followed by acceptance and if it's followed by love. It's the only thing that can liberate me from myself, from my own self-built prison walls,

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from the barriers that I so painstakingly erect. That glance from you is the only thing that assures me of what I can't assure myself that I'm really worth something. I don't dare tell you this.

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I don't dare. I'm afraid to. I'm afraid you'll think less of me. Oh, you'll laugh at me and then your laugh would kill me.

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I'm afraid that deep down I'm nothing, that I'm just no good and you will see this and you will reject me. So I play my game, my desperate pretending game with a facade of assurance with a trembling child within.

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And so begins the parade of masks. The glittering but empty parade of masks and my life becomes a front. I idly chatter to you in suave tones of surface talk. Surface talk.

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I tell you everything that's nothing. So when I'm going through my routine, please don't be fooled by what I'm saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I'm not saying. Hear what I'd like to say but what I cannot say.

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I dislike hiding, honestly. I dislike the superficial game I'm playing, the superficial phony game. I'd really like to be genuine and spontaneous and me,

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but I need your help. I need your hand to hold, even though my mask would tell you otherwise. It will not be easy for you.

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Long felt inadequacies make my defenses strong. The nearer you approach me, the blinder I may strike back. Despite what books say of men, I am irrational. I fight out against the very thing I cry for.

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You wonder who I am? You shouldn't. For I am every man and every woman who wears a mask. Please don't be fooled by me, at least not by the face I wear.

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So we stand two separate people, Ken. Even when we're in the body of believers, we stand by ourselves. And then we talk about reconciliation in the family when even in the body of believers, we're not reconciled.

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And how can we, how can we make our initial reconciliation with God? Mine happened when I was 25. How can we make that and then never make it with the body of believers around us and never make it in our own families.

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Why do we wear these masks? I'm not a good enough psychologist to know. But I know that we need to be reconciled to each other.

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How do you do that? I have just a few ideas. And they're not even worked out yet. But my life is in process.

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And I suspect yours is too. I don't care how old you are or how young you are, what your education is. I think we are all in process. I don't think I've met anybody that's arrived.

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I would like to think I've arrived, but I haven't. I'm still running for the bus. The bus driver sees me and he speeds up. I have not arrived.

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I want to be reconciled. But part of the reason why I stand as a separate person and you stand as a separate person is at one point in our life we've gone to someone and we've been open and we have been honest.

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The reaction was unbearable. They rejected us. Amy Carmichael took a big chance in 1890 when she wrote about things as they really are.

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And we Christians, the Christian community, the body of believers, couldn't buy it, couldn't take it. They wanted to know that things were glorious in India. They wanted to know that everything was all right with Amy.

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They wanted to hear about the conversions and the numbers of souls that was run into the community. Instead, she told it like it really was, and we couldn't handle it. She never wrote another book called "Things as they are."

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She was smart. She knew it wouldn't sell, but she never wrote like that. Instead, she bided her time out, and eventually she wrote, and she did indeed tell it like it was, things as they are.

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But she had been severely burned by the body of believers. And maybe reconciliation was never possible for her, I don't know. How do we translate the New Testament? It is over and over again, the scripture after scripture, we are to love one another.

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I have a whole bunch of things somewhere in this pile of notes. Well, it's not in that folder. But a whole bunch of scriptures that say exactly what we should do. We need to love each other.

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We need to, we need to listen to what Jesus said, "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." So we go around in our family, in the church, in the body of believers, and in our present day related family, mother, father, children, and all that, and we say, "Well, if we just

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say I love you enough, then that'll work. That'll be it. That'll do it." I'm working on a little thing in my head and I was telling a new friend tonight about it.

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I think that's somewhat the lyrics, the song. It is important for us to say to each other, "I love you." It's important for us to say, "God bless you." It's important to say, "Tuesday I was praying for you."

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This is the lyrics of the song. These are the verbal assurances. I hope that that will bring reconciliation between us. I hope it'll make you feel loved.

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I hope it'll make you feel appreciated. But I think that's just the lyrics. I think the music is found in something else. And we can hear all the lyrics in the world.

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In a counseling situation, I say to a man, you know what she really wants to hear? And he says, yeah, I know. She wants me to say I love you.

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And so I say, well, have you ever said it? "Yes, I've said it." And I say to the wife, "Would you like to hear him say it?" And she says, "Oh, yes."

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And he turns to her and he says, "I love you." "Is that what you want? "Does that make you happy?" And she goes, "No, no, no, no.

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"That isn't exactly what I want. "He's saying the right lyrics, "but there's no music underneath it." She wants to hear the music.

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Reconciliation doesn't seem to come with just the lyrics. That's why it's not enough to walk up to a single parent in your church who is struggling beneath the weight of single parenting, who is dying because she's got two kids and she does not know how she is going to survive.

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And we walk up to her, "It is not enough for reconciliation to say, 'God bless you.'" It is not enough. That's just the lyrics. That's not the music. She'll hear the music when you say to her,

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"I, um, I know that single people and single parents don't eat right." "I know that because a single person told me that once." A single person says, "Nutritionally, single people eat absolutely for the birds." And single parents are even worse.

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They never make a complete meal. Most of the things they make are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They don't sit down to eat their meal. Single people eat totally different than married people.

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are nutritionally way out on a limb. So the music that we say to them, the lyrics is I love you, I care about you, what can I do to help you? The music becomes the moment when I say to them I made a roast last week, or yesterday, not last week. On second thought it probably was last week. Life expectancy of Tupperware is six months, you know, five

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months. I made a roast yesterday, how's that? I want to send over half of it to you for you and your kids. And she looks back at me and she says, I haven't cooked a roast in four years, ever since the divorce. Oh really? Yeah, I never have time, I never get to the market to get one and if I do, and I put it in the freezer and I forget about it and it dies a freezer burn and

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and and I I just can't get to it my kids would love it my kids would really love it it inspires her to to put vegetables with it and potatoes and and to make a salad and possibly the first cake she's made in a long time or she tells one of her kids hey here's a box read it you know how to read sixth grade level on

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on the back of Betty Crocker, read it, make it. The music begins when I follow the lyrics of "I love you, I care about you" with some practical suggestions. I think that the New Testament calls us to be affirmers.

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My hairdresser is not a Christian. She went to Dallas with me when we did the film series in 1981. She's never been to a Christian meeting in her life, much less one of my seminars,

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and she had to sit through six of them that day while we filmed them. She did my hair and my makeup. Changed her life, she's never been the same since.

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And she came out of the first session just going. And I said, "Linda, what's the matter?" And she said, "I'm never going back in there "without a box of Kleenex."

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God changed her life, and she, I went in to have my hair done once, And she said, "Well, where are you going to this weekend?" And I said, "Well, I'm going back to Dallas."

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And she said, "Oh, you're going back to that same church?" And I said, "No, I'm going for the CBA convention, Christian Booksellers Convention, and I'm the main speaker for the thing." She said, "What are you gonna talk about?"

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And I said, "Affirmation." And she said, "Oh, that's great. What's affirmation?" And I said, "Well, that's when I come in here, Linda."

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And I say, "Linda, I am so glad to see you. You are gifted in hair. are gifted in making my hair behave. And I tell you, I need a miracle today. You're not Oral Roberts, but I need a miracle. Do my hair, you know. Do something with me. Look

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at me, I'm bedraggled. My hair is fine, it won't do anything, you know. And I say, that's affirmation. I come in and I tell you that I think you're the greatest hairdresser in the world and I come back week after week and I pay my bill just to tell her she's good is lyrics but to go week after week and then to talk to her about it to encourage her that's

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the gift of affirmation and that's the music that's providing practical love. I get a lot of mail, about 600 a month. That's completely unsolicited mail. And one of the letters came not long ago,

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and I marked it in yellow marking pencil. This woman writes, "I feel very strongly that there is a much needed book about irregular people in the church family."

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She's talking about people who continually bug you, people who usually-- my book on irregular people is about the person you are related to that drives you absolutely stark raving, angry, mad right up the nearest wall every time you're with them.

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You consider suicide seriously after every Christmas dinner that you have with them. And she's talking about irregular people in the church family. And she says, "I want to share one of my irregular people with you in the church." He's a man, very outgoing, very friendly, who can quote Scripture frontwards and backwards.

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He's taught Sunday school and sang very loudly and walked all over other people for years. He spouts Scripture to back up his right to do so, saying he was interested in people's well-being and he's always serving on one board or another. He's always letting people know his willingness to serve.

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And the new or the immature Christian sees all the outward demonstration of Christianity, which has propelled him into positions which allowed him this position to become a judge. He leaves people in quite, in a quiet heap of his damnation. She goes on to tell me all the things he's done in their, in their inner family to her

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daughter. This man who sets himself up as an agent of a reconciliation. The Bible calls us to be agents of reconciliation. A friend of mine last week threw a word at me.

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It's a word you'll know. It's a word I've always heard. It was the word evaluator. And it triggered off into me a whole stream of things.

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I think the New Testament calls us to be affirmers, but what we think it's saying is that we ought to be the evaluators of the world. In marriage, what happens when one person becomes the evaluator? It's the most destructive thing in the world.

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What happens in a church situation where one man, like this man, becomes the evaluator as opposed to the affirmer. The separations get larger and we are alone again. Two people alone.

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Two people separated. The relationship can't grow. The relationship can't even function. We are evaluators.

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I've had TMJ for going on ten years now. And that's a joint problem with my jaw. Temper mandibular joint stress dysfunction. And I would love it if the majority of the letters were from affirmers, but they're not.

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The majority of the letters that I get about my jaw are from evaluators. They evaluate my spiritual condition. They evaluate my faith. They evaluate the sin that has obviously got to be in my life, otherwise I wouldn't have

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this problem. They evaluate everything about me and they never affirm. And I think, am I alone in this? Or do you need affirmation as much as I do?

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I think so. I talked tonight with a seminary student's wife. She gave me a little list of things that happen to you if you are a first year seminary student. It's a list that I never saw before except that I have.

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Military wives have given me the same list. Pastors' wives have given me the same list. It's a universal list. And what it's saying most of all is, "Please have confidence in me.

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Please affirm me. Please tell me that it's worth the struggle. These seminary students are paying their dues into a very, very exclusive society. They're paying their dues into a very, very suffering part of our community.

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To be a pastor, to be involved in theological things at this moment is probably one of the most difficult occupations in the world at this time. And if you don't believe me, find out how many people are leaving the ministry as opposed to how many people are going into it.

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Nobody affirmed them. Nobody said, "Hey, I know seminary is rough. I know there's no money. I know that the prestige is nil.

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I know that I know the background that you came from. And I know now that you're here, you're just a number. And you're just getting through in Greek, and you're just getting through Hebrew, and maybe you're not getting through Greek and Hebrew.

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And you've been told that God has a wonderful plan for your life, and you're scared you know it, and it's not wonderful at all. [BLANK_AUDIO]