Where you are in life is not a mistake. God has you there for a reason.

It’s easy to complain and look for a way out of what you feel is a bad situation. It’s easy to want to quit.

But it’s better to look for how God is using this present circumstance to refine you and mold you and shape you and make you more like Jesus.

It’s easy to blame everyone else for your current predicament.

But it’s better to look for the people God has placed in your path as those who need to see God’s love exhibited through you. They need to see what you profess to believe lived out in real time.

The best part is that God never asks you to be anywhere or do anything unless He first empowers you to be there and do it. That’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. That’s where your willingness and availability meet God’s opportunity and a blessing is born.

“Cultivate the greatest confidence that, though you cannot see into your heart, God is working there by His Holy Spirit. Let the heart wait at times in perfect silence and quiet; in its hidden depths God will work. Be sure of this, and just wait on Him. Give your whole heart, with its secret workings, into God’s hands continually. He wants the heart, and takes it” (Andrew Murray).

It takes discipline to wait well. To wait in God’s way is not to do nothing, like sitting idly by the phone waiting for it to ring with a job offer or a proposal. It’s living your life, looking for how God is working in the world, and obeying what you already know. It’s preparing yourself to be ready with no hesitations or hindrances for when God’s call does come.

Above all, waiting is a continual act of surrender. The old joke about living sacrifices is that they keep crawling off of the altar. You have to keep putting your heart back on the altar, in God’s hands, to do with what He wants and wills. In no other place is it safe or secure.

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you” (Romans 12:1-2, The Message).

“If we wait till we have clear enough vision to see the expected end before we stay our mind upon Him who is our Strength, we shall miss an opportunity that will never come again: we shall never know the blessing of the unoffended. Now is the time to say, ‘My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed. I will sing and give praise,’ even though as we say the words there is no sense of exultation” (Amy Carmichael).

Faith means not knowing and trusting anyway. It’s being certain in the midst of uncertainty without knowing how everything will resolve. It’s knowing the end result but not how you will get there.

I love the idea of staying your mind on God. To me, it means you cease striving and working out every possible scenario in your head. To stay your mind is to release the illusion of control and have the simple faith of a child, knowing everything will work out for good.

May we choose every day to stay our minds on God and not on our circumstances or our problems.

“When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.

And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life. At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God; but the mind and, still more, the body receives life from Him at a thousand removes—through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements. The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will ‘flow over’ into the glorified body” (C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory).

In other words, the best is yet to come.

“Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” And he said, “Here I am, Lord” (Acts 9:10, ESV).

A lot more people are probably familiar with the Apostle Paul than they are with Ananias. If anything, when they hear the name Ananias, they immediately think of Sapphira and both of them falling down dead after lying to the church and to the Holy Spirit. I’m guessing that Ananias was a fairly common name, because this ain’t him.

This Ananias is the one that God chose to go and find Saul, also known as Paul, and be the one God used to heal Paul’s blindness. If you know the story, you know he had objections. This was the man who was doing everything he could to stop the early church, up to arresting them and having them killed. Now he was going to be one of the new leaders in the church?

Ananias could have said no. He could have been disobedient and gone about his normal life. He might have had a very ordinary and comfortable existence. But he said, “Here I am, Lord.”

I think of two other places where people said something very similar. I think of Samuel, a young boy living with the high priest Eli, hearing God’s call for the first time. I think about Isaiah, God’s prophet, called to testify to God’s people and to call them to repentance.

It’s a short prayer. It’s also a dangerous prayer. It means I give up my own plans and desires to do whatever God asks and go wherever God asks. It means total and complete surrender up to and possibly including laying down my life for the sake of the gospel.

It’s also the most freeing prayer. It means that I am making myself available to see God at work in and through me. It means that I get a front row seat at what God will do to move mountains with my simple mustard seed faith.

May that be our prayer.

Here I am, Lord. Send me.

“It is with extremely heavy hearts that we share the news of the passing of Bill Garner, Steve Tucker, Tyler Patterson and Tyler Springer.

All were beloved members of Harvest Church and their loss currently leaves us without the proper words to articulate our grief.

As of our last report, Kennon Vaughan is in stable condition in a Texas hospital.

We ask for your prayers and kindly request that the families of all involved are given the proper space to grieve at this time.

We will provide more information as it is received.

We covet your prayers.

The worship center will be open from 6:30 to 8:30pm to gather for a time of prayer and mourning with Harvest elders, staff and fellow members.

‘But we do not want you to be uniformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others who have no hope.’ – 1 Thessalonians 4:13″

I saw this post earlier today and ever since then my heart has been heavy. I can’t begin to comprehend what these church members are experiencing and feeling right now, especially those family members. It’s just too much.

I know that one of them was the lead pastor, one was an executive pastor, and I believe the other two were elders. I know that all of them died except the pastor, who is currently in critical but stable condition.

I also know that this kind of grief would be completely overwhelming if I didn’t have the hope of the resurrection that Jesus offers to all who love Him and serve Him and follow Him. If this world is all there is, then these deaths are a tragic waste and nothing more. But if there’s a heaven awaiting us, then these men are already in the presence of Almighty God, hearing the words “Well done, good and faithful servants.”

They know in full what we only know in part. They see with their own eyes what we long for and hope for in faith. Their faith has been made sight.

But still those left behind still grieve. They still have an ache and a void that nothing on this side of eternity can ever fill or take away. Even Jesus, knowing full well how He was about to raise Lazarus shortly from death to life, still wept over his friend being dead in the tomb. Grief and loss and tears are part of life in this beautiful but broken world.

So I join in with so many others and pray God’s perfect peace over the families, friends, and fellow church members of these men taken so suddenly. We pray that God can take this tragedy and turn it into something good and glorious, that many eyes would be open to the frailty of life and the need for a Savior.

One day, everything broken will be made whole, all that is wrong will be made right, and all that has been lost will be restored sevenfold. One day, we’ll see the big picture and understand how God was able to weave the darker threads of tragedy into the final beautiful tapestry of God’s eternal plan.

This quote is one of those things that I really, really like . . . and I really, really don’t like.

If we’re doing bad news then good news, then the reason I don’t like it is that I don’t want to ever be uncomfortable. I don’t want to ever be inconvenienced. I want everything to always go smoothly as I transition upwardly and eventually toward heaven.

But the reality is that if I want to be more like Jesus, then those selfish and complacent parts in me need to die. I can’t just repress the part of me that I don’t like. It has to be crucified and put to death. And as must as I’m not a fan of crucifixion and death, that’s the truth of how I get to be more like Christ.

That includes the guy who cut me off in traffic, the internet connection that went down at work, the printer that wouldn’t print. That’s all those little annoyances that get under my skin and make me want to say very non-Baptist words and think very unJesus like thoughts. But those are what get me closer to Christlikeness.

It’s dumb to pray for something and then get mad when God actually gives it to you. But that’s what you and I do when we pray for patience, and then get mad when our patience gets exercised and tested. That’s what happens when we pray to be more like Jesus, and God takes us through the painful yet necessary process of refining through difficult people, trying circumstances, and nothing going to plan like we thought it would. But the end result is that we do look more like Jesus at the end of the day.

“There is a twilight zone in our hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves-our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and our drives-large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness. This is a very good thing. We will always remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That’s a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility, but to a deep trust in those who love us. It is the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born” (Henri J.M. Nouwen).

If we are followers of Jesus, we need to be in community. A pastor I know once said that the first person you lie to is yourself, so you need other people who will lovingly tell you the whole truth, not just the parts that you want to hear or that make you feel good about yourself.

The old saying is true. There are no Lone Ranger Christians. Heck, even the Lone Ranger had Tonto. The most dangerous place for a believer to be is in isolation. Whether from shame or pride, the tendency is to withdraw from others when life gets tough, but that’s exactly when we need others the most.

We need others to both encourage us and to hold us accountable. What we don’t need is an echo chamber where people always agree with us and our viewpoints and choices and never is heard a discouraging word. We need to have people who will call us out when we’re being less than honest with ourselves and others. We need to hear the hard, painful truths if we really want to mature and grow and not stagnate.

Besides, in community we better reflect the visible image of God to the world. While you or I may show an aspect of who God is, together, we show more of what God is really like, the way the many cuts and facets show off the beauty of a diamond or the different color panes show off a stained glass window.

We need each other as much as we need God.

I’m about to seriously date myself, but I was listening to a CD in my 1997 Jeep Cherokee today. Not streaming. Not playing an MP3. It was an actual, honest to goodness compact disc with music on it.

This one had a hidden track on it. That’s where after the last song listed on the album plays, then you get a few minutes of silence. Then you get another song. Only in this case it was just silence.

Life is like that CD with a hidden track. Sometimes you have to wait for the good things. You may not know what’s coming, but you wait. You can skip ahead, but you might miss out.

Typically, a hidden track will have about 4-5 minutes of silence. That can seem like an eternity if it’s your first time, but patience has its rewards. Your reward for waiting is an extra song.

In life, sometimes you have to wait for God’s promises. You don’t often know what those will be or when those will be, but many times you have the option of waiting or moving on and missing out. I’ve found it’s always better to wait than to regret.

You’ll never be sorry you waited.

This was too good not to share:

“When Billy Graham was 92 years-old, he was struggling with Parkinson’s disease. In January, a month before his 93rd birthday, leaders in Charlotte, North Carolina, invited their favorite son, Billy Graham to a luncheon in his honor.

Billy initially hesitated to accept the invitation because of his struggles with Parkinson’s disease. But the Charlotte leaders said, ‘We don’t expect a major address. Just come and let us honor you.’ So he agreed.

After wonderful things were said about him, Dr. Graham stepped to the podium, looked at the crowd, and said:

‘I’m reminded today of Albert Einstein, the great physicist who this month has been honored by Time magazine as the Man of the Century. Einstein was once traveling from Princeton on a train, when the conductor came down the aisle, punching the tickets of every passenger. When he came to Einstein, Einstein reached in his vest pocket. He couldn’t find his ticket, so he reached in his trouser pockets.

It wasn’t there.He looked in his briefcase but couldn’t find it. Then he looked in the seat beside him. He still couldn’t find it.

‘The conductor said, “Dr. Einstein, I know who you are. We all know who you are. I’m sure you bought a ticket. Don’t worry about it.’ Einstein nodded appreciatively. The conductor continued down the aisle punching tickets. As he was ready to move to the next car,he turned around and saw the great physicist down on his hands and knees looking under his seat for his ticket.

‘The conductor rushed back and said, ‘Dr. Einstein, Dr. Einstein, don’t worry, I know who you are; no problem. You don’t need a ticket. I’m sure you bought one.’Einstein looked at him and said, ‘Young man, I too, know who I am. What I don’t know is where I’m going.’

Having said that Billy Graham continued, ‘See the suit I’m wearing? It’s a brand new suit. My children, and my grandchildren are telling me I’ve gotten a little slovenly in my old age. I used to be a bit more fastidious. So I went out and bought a new suit for this luncheon and one more occasion. You know what that occasion is? This is the suit in which I’ll be buried. But when you hear I’m dead, I don’t want you to immediately remember the suit I’m wearing. I want you to remember this:

‘I not only know who I am. I also know where I’m going.’ May your troubles be less, your blessings more, and may nothing but happiness, come through your door. ‘Life without God is like an unsharpened pencil – it has no point.’

May each of us have lived our lives so that when our ticket is punched we don’t have to worry about where we are going.” (April Joy Burton Hooker).