Oh yeah? Prove it!

I had a fantastic discussion with a bright young man this weekend that really gt me thinking about how I approach some parts of my life.  His answer to why he felt okay with doing something was that no one had been able to show him that the Bible told him not to.  I found the statement to be extremely profound on multiple levels.

Initially, I was put into a place where I was trying to rack my brain about places in the Bible that pertained to this young man's choice and how I could use these versus to give a hand.  I also was a bit disturbed to come to the realization that I probably did not have the full capability to give him enough versus to help him make a decision.  That brought on some feelings in me about how much Bible I am reading myself.

But, as I let the whole scenario sink in, the true revelation of the situation came to me.  That realization was that all people are inherently flawed.  I know this is not a new concept and I acknowledge that it has been covered many times, in many churches, across the country.  It was only when I allowed myself to go deeper that I came to know how that might be the answer in this situation.  If people are flawed, then why would we rely on them to solely give us God's intentions for our lives?  Is it their responsibility to give this information?  And, if so, how accurate will it be?  I do NOT contend that someone teaching the Word of God is going to be bad and/or wrong.  However, I will contend that the living, breathing Word of God is meant to be taught by the Spirit, ad well as human teachers.

In the end, I need to be seeking what God wants for me.  As much as I wanted to give him the answer, the more I was compelled to tell him to go find it for himself.

I think God is kind of funny that way.  Any revelation that I receive usually comes out of my mouth to someone else before it comes to me.  Almost as if God is putting the other person there for me and tricking me into believing that I am the one helping.  I think we as Christians can become a little lazy and dependent upon the teaching of others and we tend to lose our own natural skepticism and curiosity.  We should then rely more on what we find and what the Spirit reveals to us to help us make those tough decisions.

Objects in the Rear View Mirror

So many times I find myself driving in my car and noticing, for the first time, something plainly obvious.  My first instinct is to try and explain that house, or tree, or maybe that store by trying to convince myself that it must be new.  However, it very quickly becomes clear that whatever I have noticed has been there quite a while.  I very clearly remember hardly ever noticing any 2003 Toyota Camrys on the road before my wife and I purchased one.  From the day we purchased it though, every other car was a the same year, make, and model.  In fact, they were all the same color white as well.  Scientists would tell you that this is due to a brain function that causes us to become more aware of things in which we are familiar with. I would tend to agree with that.  But I would also add to that.  I would add that we tend to pay more attention to the things that are important to us in our lives.  Once something has made an impact or has become the object of our desire, we will pay more attention to it.  We will seek that thing out and constantly be on the look out for whatever it is.

 I say this because I notice that when I am not looking for Jesus, I hardly ever see Him.  He becomes that house that I tend to notice only when He is obvious, but mostly I have no clue that he is even there.  I drive along, oblivious to everything but what I care to notice.  It is only when Jesus becomes the object of my desire that I will then search for Him in whatever it is that is going on at the time.  Like the Ferrari that is close to the top of the world for anyone that knows anything about cars, I cannot help but notice Jesus if I covet him with just a fraction of what I covet that car with. 

The sad part is that I do not live my life this way enough.  I tend to foxhole Jesus and search relentlessly for Him when I need him instead of when I want Him.  The truth is that this world is set up to blind us to Him and it does it's best to keep us as occupied as possible and distract us with meaningless wants.  I fall victim to this constantly.  I wish I could say that I am always thinking about Jesus and that He is the focus of my entire life.  But, that would be a huge lie.  But my Christian walk has never been an easy one.  That's not to say it hasn't been good because it really has.  Easy, well easy is another story.  But, I do learn more each and every day.  God comes swooping in and cracks me across the head (no hard feelings, I require it) and shows me the next step to take.  My next step is to begin to change my focus.  To change what it is that I am constantly looking for.  I have to learn to take what my heart desires and put that as the what I am always in search of as I look around.  Who knows where I will find Him?

Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind

I tend to helicopter parent from time to time.  I want to be able to see my kids, know what they are doing, and I feel as though my eye on them is what keeps them safe.  If you are a parent, then you will understand that need.  It is an uncontrollable will that is ingrained within you.  You are unable to be settled without knowing your children are safe.

My youngest son is only a month removed from turning eight years old.  To date, I had not allowed him out of my sight, with the exception of very close friends and family.  Last night he was able to come with me to Youth Group and attend the Hallowee..... wait, um.....  Spooky party we had.  During the Spooky festivities, it forced me to allow him to go off and hang out with a lot of people that I know, but whom I do not KNOW.  I know who they are, maybe some background, and have even spoken to most of them.  But the majority I do not intimately KNOW.

This situation brought up a couple of feelings inside of me:
#1 - The inherent need that God has to keep us safe, coupled with his deep wanting for us to make our own choices.
#2 - My own contentment to go about my life with as few deep relationships as possible.

I want to address #2 first.  If you are a major rule follower, just try and get over it for a moment. I very carefully choose who I have a deep and sharing relationship with.  The more of these relationships that I attempt, the more I am either hurt or disappointed by others.  Is this my unwillingness to be let down?  Or, am I not able to trust that, once they have let me down, they will be able to recognize this and acknowledge it appropriately?  Maybe it's just laziness? What if caring for others is just too much work?  The idea that I am a selfish person also comes to mind.  I don't really want to get into all of that sometimes.  If I am really honest about it, I feel like I just don't have the guts.  An old friend of mine, Heath Hood, was someone that I allowed into the private part of myself that very few people area allowed.  When I say very few, I mean he and my wife were literally the only ones that I trusted that much to give them everything I had (good and bad).  It is now just my wife.  Heath ended up dying of a heroin overdose in a crappy motel and was left there by the other druggies who did not want to be there when the police finally showed up.  I knew he was not doing well.  I knew things were not good.  I NEVER fathomed that outcome.  Maybe that's the crux of the whole matter?  Maybe knowing that the ones we love are the ones that can surprise us with the biggest and worst surprises.  His death scarred me very deeply.  It scarred me not in the "Hey, what's that scar on your arm?" kind of way but more in the, "I don't take my shirt off so people won't see the hideous gash in my chest" kind of way.  So I fend people off, wanting to go deeper, all the while rubbing my fingers across my scar and reminding myself of how much it hurt.

As for #2?  Letting go of my son for minutes at Youth Group was nerve racking!  If I was God, I would be handing my son a book when he was born and telling him to do what it says.  I would then send him into a world that tells him that my book is a fairy tale fantasy, dreamed up by liars and cheats to create a society of docile sheep and rich, swindling pastors.  I cannot imagine what God goes through having so many children and caring so deeply about all of them.  My ability to understand the depth of His feelings is so minuscule, but He gives me a glimpse through my own son.  I can almost hear him whisper to me, "I trust you with My kids.  Take care of them".  That really is our mission isn't it?

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

"I love me some me!" - Terrell Owens

Isn't that the truth!  The longer I have been a Christian, the more I have begun to realize the constant ebb and flow associated with my own selfishness and desires.  Like a huge war for my attention, the battle wages within me with each side taking and giving back ground.  I am not some total jerk who walks around, touting myself as all high and mighty, looking down upon all the little underlings in the world.  It's a subtle, nondescript, underlying fear of losing my own importance.  As if completely thinking about others might somehow diminish my own significance in the grand scheme of things.  It all sounds so funny from the outside, but inside it is a choice that I so badly want to make.

 I firmly believe hat God will make it possible for you to do anything.  I do not believe in God snapping his fingers and changing you into someone completely different.  I believe that His Holy Spirit allows you to become who God wants you to be.  However, the bulk of the work is ours. The Red Sea did not part on it's own.  God did not come down out of the heavens and blow on the water, splitting it in two.  Moses had to raise his staff.  Noah would have died with everyone else had he not built the ark.  In fact, God did not even give him an ark, instead he was told to build it with a set of instructions.  Let's be honest, Ikea could possibly be a Christian store if you look at it through the lens of the story of Noah.  Both stories are usually told as stories of faith and the huge things God can do in our lives.  I always have felt as though they are a story of how God works in our lives, through our willingness to be changed and transformed from everyone else to people of true change for God.

And so, I have been struggling with God telling me that I need to stop worrying about me and get to His work of worrying about others.  Not, He did not shine down rays of sunshine, burn a bush, or even come as a booming voice in my ear.  Instead he uses the Holy Spirit to unsettle me, stir my emotions, and give me the feeling that I am not where I should be with this.  We all have that experience, don't we?  "I should do something about that", your spirit says to you "it should not happen."  So that's where I am today.  I am being stirred to start giving more to others and let God take care of me more.  The response, moreover the result is going to be up to me.  He has given me the ability but I cannot expect Him to change it for me.

Mo Money, Mo Problems

So it's been a while since I last posted on my blog.  After I started this, I decided to take some time and really analyze whether or not having a blog was something that I was willing to put the time and energy into.  It was necessary to make decisions as to whether or not I wanted to be serious about it, or just throw down some thoughts from time to time.  After careful thought, I think that this is something I was meant to do.  So, onward we go...

Last Wednesday, I spoke to the Middle School students about God's freedom.  While doing so, I felt led to not so much get into the freedom part, but more into our responsibility in that freedom.  You see, God sets you free by allowing you to get away from whatever it is that has it's grip on your life, heart, or time.  He then allows you to set yourself free by removing  away the shame and guilt associated with that very thing.  But, it then becomes our responsibility to stay in that freedom; to sort of live within the house that has been carefully built for us.

I asked for the smallest student to come forward.  I began to hand him objects, make him wear huge articles of clothing of mine (small kids in size 13 golf shoes is pretty funny), taped his ankles together, and gave each thing a label such as lying or pornography.  It made doing a simple task of carrying a chair become nearly impossible.  As he illustrated my point, I was taken back to my days of restraint.  The days where outside forces had control over my movements and shaped my ability to live life.

The young man who was my poor victim er... volunteer was then allowed to begin removing these things from his life by giving them to Jesus and being forgiven for them.  I did not want to stop at that point, because I feel like Christianity too often stops there.  You're forgiven, you're free, go get 'em tiger!  Every student was given fake money.  On the opposite side was the word restraint. It was important for them to see that something can be intentionally made to look like something else, in order to make the person feel like it is real when really it is worthless and empty.  Why?  Because that is everything in this world that we hold near and dear to our hearts.  All the possessions, money, power, appearances, pornography, drugs, and wants are all so carefully crafted to look like something that they are not.  They are intentionally made to look like things that will fill you up, when they are merely made to make you feel more empty and wanting more.  And we purposely go back to these things.  We purposely pick all of the objects back up, put the bulky clothes back on, and tape our own ankles together because we so quickly forget where and who we are in God.

Why would we do this?  Because we are broken and fragile.  We are empty and hopeless.  At least, we are these things on our own.  We become like a cancer patient who starts treatment, begins to feel better and then stops treatment, merely because of the outward feeling.  The whole while, not paying attention  to the fact that the cancer still exists and needs further treatment.  Maybe we even decide that we can now beat it on our own?

On Wednesday night, I looked at the fake money that I had gathered from the students.  On the back were the things restraining them from God that they had written down.  "Selfish" "Forgive my Dad" "Being with the wrong people" "Pornography" "Girls" "Boys" "Sex" "Homosexuality"  Those were just SOME of the restraints that these Middle Schoolers had.  Life is even more complicated and hard to navigate for students than it ever has been.  Students have access to things that their parents never had.  Not good things, destructive, life altering things.

Happy Father's Day

Father's Day is always a good reminder for me of what being a father really is.  I have often felt that it's a day to reassure myself that my job to reflect God to my children, so that they will have a proper understanding of who God really is.  To be as though a lens to view God through.  If I do poorly, then they will see Him poorly.  Conversely, if I do well, their vision of God will be a positive one.  After going to church at Kessid today, I was able to achieve a much different perspective.  My job is a very singular one.  That being said, the simplest of tasks is never the easiest, are they?  My ultimate job is to be me.  To lay my life open to God and those around me in order to show my children what it's like to be a child of God, not show them God.  If they can learn to be themselves and to be dependent upon God, then they will gain the understanding of God that I have always tried so vainly to emulate.  But how?  God will be the one to show them.  He will be the one to lead them and walk them through who He really is.  Be teaching them to be open, obedient, and honest I will be allowing them to be more open to this relationship on their own.  They can then be better equipped to develop their own relationship with God and not my skewed version of who He is to apply in their own lives.  I guess the best way that we can all be fathers (and mothers) is to be broken and needy for the one who loves and created us.  We need to be wiling to show that not okay is really totally okay and that as long as we strive for God, the rest will fall into place as it should.  So dads and moms, take a break and take the time to show how not okay you really are and how much you really need God to your kids.  Maybe we can start a generation who can all start sharing their need for God and that they could share with each other how they are not okay too.  Maybe it would begin to stop the fake hallway smiles in church, or possibly it could begin to break the chains of secrecy that have been passed down through the generations.  Who knows? 

Failure IS an option

To be authentic, I suppose I must not only include my victories in my journey with God, but I must also divulge the complete and utter failures as well.  If I were to merely include all of the times I was what God wanted me to be, well this would be a rather thin Blog.  I would probably post something every six or seven days!
Today was my day to take our wonderful little dog, Lucy, to get a few shots.  We use a mobile veterinary service that doesn't cost very much, but you have to wait in line with a lot of other folks.  Today was by Orchards Feed Mill and I found myself behind 10 other people waiting to have our dog looked at.  I was in no mood to really interact with anyone, so I stayed off to the side by our car.  I did not have some terrible look on my face that told people t stay away, it was more a general ignoring of everyone around me as to not interact with others.  Don't act like you haven't done it.
A friendly man in his early to mid 60's was able to slip into my safety net and began to strike up a conversation.  As disappointed as I was to have to acknowledge another human being I managed to make eye contact.  It was at that very second that everything began to change.  As my eyes drew up from the ground, his left hand immediately caught my eye.  On top of the man's hand was what looked to be a purple blister approximately the size of a dime in diameter.  Although odd, my eyes lifted still.  When I got to his face, the large bandage on his left cheek was very noticeable.  It was around six inches long and four inches wide.  It obviously cover a large patch that was still barely bleeding.  I knew it was skin cancer.  No need to tell me.  No need to ask.  No need to get involved.
His friendly Santa Claus beard and random cuss words were actually quite charming.  Have you ever had an older man drop a few "S" bombs, but since he's an old man it turns out to be kind of cute and nostalgic?  That was this guy.  Old school and hardened; yet friendly with inviting eyes.  We spoke about our dogs for a bit and I was rather relieved that we did not dive into any really meaningful conversation.  That was until he explained that he had been an Electrician for 41 years and had "never worn a hat" during that time.  He stated that now, every time he went into the sun, he got terrible spots on his skin.  The dodctor had removed one just yesterday to see if it was cancerous or not. My spirit cried out so loudly that it could not be ignored. "Pray for him" I could feel it like it was a real voice.  I did not pray for him.  As a matter of fact, I told myself that I wouldn't; no way, not now.
Relieved to be past the hard conversation, the man walked away for a bit.  Much to my dismay however, he was back within minutes.  He spoke more about his possible cancer and I pulled back even more within myself.  I began wrestling and fighting the thing within myself begging me to pray for this man.  Finally, he was called up and I got the break I so desperately longed for.  But, they could not help his dog's particular condition, so he took the time to tell me about that on his way out.  One last chance that I ignored and fought.
As I finished with Lucy and turned my car on, the Christian music station I had left it on was still playing. "If I speak God's word with power, but have not love..." You know how it goes.  And God smacked me like a ton of bricks.  I had the opportunity to show how much faith I had in God, but I managed to stay so selfish that I passed up the opportunity to pour into someone else's life.  It would not have cost me anything.  I had the time.  Where would I go?  It would not have cost me any money.  It could have made more of a difference than money ever could.  But, I did not.  Faith without works is dead.  It exists, but it is not doing anything.  It's not breathing, living, making an impact.  It is still faith, but no one see's the buried, dead and rotting faith.  They will only see my living, breathing, loving faith.

I am NOT in control

I worked with Middle School youth for a while and took a break for the past year to spend more time with my family.  At the time, my job was long hours and high stress, so what I had left after that was very little in terms of time and energy.  God gave me a new job and I now have the time to begin going again.  I felt led to go back, but I planned on starting back up in the Fall, as I always have a better plan for my life than God does (you will being to notice that sarcasm is my friend).  Since I drive my stepson to Youth Group on Wednesday I figured why not go on Wednesday anyway and hang out, I mean how deep could I get sucked back in by one week?

I have felt very led to be a part of one student's life, who was in my Dunes cabin in 2012.  I had heard that he was not doing well at times and I really felt like I was the person who should be there for him.  Instead of bullying my way into his life, I made a conscious choice to let God put me where I belong.

You will have to understand that this is not the usual route that I take in life.  I am very independent.  Like to a fault independent.  I almost never trust God to put me in the right place at the right time, as I am one to try and ram my own plan down His throat.  At times, I believe He allows me to do what I want and fail, but He ultimately protects me and my family from myself.  Take for instance my job search.  I applied many places and only received ONE response; ONE!  Not to toot my own horn here, but I have solid work experience and my resume looks like a million bucks.  But, again, ONE response.  That response was from my new career.  The one that allows me more time with my family, less stress, better benefits and less pay.  The one that I never would have thought I should have.  I was always focused on making more, not giving more.  It was one of the first times in my life that I honestly and truly stepped out on faith by making myself not only available to God, but making myself vulnerable to Him as well (more about that later).

But, I digress....
SO, I go back to Youth Group, play my favorite game of all time (the only game that I have ever been injured at (if you don't count Chuckball or Dodgeball) called Welcome to Masquerade.  You get to pick people up off of the ground with brute strength and everyone comes out sweaty and somewhat bloodied.  Don't worry parents, your students likes getting tackled at full speed by a 200lb grown man, I promise.  After that fiasco I again, made myself available, by asking where I was needed for small group time.  The group that I met with was amazing!  A hodge-podge of 8th Grade guys who should never get along let alone share personal thoughts with each other.  But, somehow God just makes things work doesn't He?  It also just so happens the the aforementioned student would be in this age group.  Yeah, I know.  Although, there is more! One of the 2 male leaders is not returning this next year and it would leave room for someone to lead the group.  Freaky, isn't it?

Let's just get down to it though.  I don't know if I will end up with this group or not.  I might never see the student that I feel led to ever again.  In fact, this might not have been about God putting me where I belong at all.  I think the experience was really about vulnerability.  Funny that it would be about that, as this blog makes me nervous because it too makes me vulnerable.  You see, I can trust God all that I want.  I can believe in Him, know what He says is truth, know that I will go to Heaven someday because of Christ.  However, I never want to be vulnerable to him.  What I mean by that is that I know what it's like to be let down and hurt, broken and ashamed; to put myself out there for someone who won't give back.  Somehow, that worldly view tends to skew my view of what God will do as well.  When I made myself vulnerable to him, He is the one the became more available to me.  So backwards, but makes so much more sense now.

Intro... Hi!

I first need to give a shout out to Logan Thompson.  He did what I have always wanted to do in writing a book; two in fact! He told me that he originally started with a Blog and I became more than inspired in my own desire to write a book and share some of my experiences as a messed up, broken, and battered Christian.  The Holy Spirit has long given me an unsettled feeling of the need for a new style and understanding of God's church.  The idea that church is a place of rules and regulations, not to be questioned, but merely to be followed is an environment that I grew up in and is the main reason that I never liked church in the first place.  My wish is to start a movement within the Christian faith of the true free will that God has granted us through Christ.  Will I be suggesting that Christians should do whatever they want?  Hardly.  Instead, my life should be a huge "Thank you!" to the one that has given me the freedom.  But, I also want to try and break down some of the misconceptions that I see and bring you into my world, in order to maybe find something that you can relate to and apply to your own life.  A sort of trial and error on my part. Thanks for reading!