choices

The Inner Laptop Monologue

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If you grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons like me, then you remember the ones where the main character was in a moral dilemma. Poof! An angel would appear on one shoulder with heavenly advice, and a devil would appear on the other, urging naughtiness (but not too naughty since this was Saturday morning television in the 80’s).

I imagine in my debate over whether to get a Macbook or a PC laptop that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs magically appeared on either side of me. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of the two is the angelic one. I’m staying out of that one.

I imagine the following conversation:

Bill: “Get the PC. They’re so much more affordable.”

Steve: “Anyone can go for cheap. Go for quality. All the hip and trendy people have Macs.”

Bill: “Seriously, Steve? Like you would know about hip or trendy. But think of this. Everything is so much easier with a PC. You never have problems with a PC?”

Steve: “Ahem. Need I remind you, Bill, about that imfamous Windows 98 debacle? Most people learn to cuss from working with a PC.”

Bill: “So they have to buy PCs more often. But you still end up spending less in the long run. Haven’t you ever heard of a sale?”

Steve: “Sales are for weenies. If someone wants a good product, they’ll pay to get it, whether it’s on sale or not. I could sell umbrellas to a desert mystic.”

Bill: “And such the modest man you are, too. Buy the PC. At least that way you can skip all the crappy parts of American Idol and watch the good parts.”

Steve: “Buy the Mac. Yeah. American Idol is weak this year.”

Bill: “By the way, Steve, aren’t you dead?”

Steve: “Hey, this isn’t my inner monologue. Why don’t you ask this crazy blogger guy to make up his mind about his laptop so I can go rest in peace and figure out how to get reception for my iPhone from six feet under.”

Thanks a heap, guys. That was helpful and informative. Oh wait. No it wasn’t. Guess I’ll just eat some chocolate and call it a day.

 

Seeking

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“What I’m trying to do here is get you to relax, not be so preoccupied with getting so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep yourself in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met. Don’t be afraid of missing out. You’re my dearest friends! The Father wants to give you the very kingdom itself” (Luke 12:29-32).

In this passage, Jesus is telling His disciples to seek the Kingdom rather than after food and clothing and other needs and wants that tend to crowd our lives. I heard a really good sermon today about what seeking in that context looks like.

To seek after something is to set your heart on it and make it the most important thing in your life. When you seek after things, whether they be possessions or money or relationships or any other material things, then you tune your hearts to worry.

Are you setting your heart on a relationship or the possibility of a relationship?

Are you setting your heart on money or how to get more money?

Are you setting your heart on gaining influence and privilege and power? On making a name for yourself? On knowing and being seen by the right people?

There are so many things that can be good things that can lead to worry and frustration if they become the main thing. A good thing that you make the most important thing is an idol if that is anything other than seeking after God and His kingdom.

If you seek the Kingdom of God, His complete rule over your life and all that He is and does for you, then you will find that He takes care of the very things you were worried about before. You will find all your needs have been met without you  having to scramble all around after them.

You can tell what you’re seeking by what and where your treasures are. You can tell what you treasure most by two things: your checkbook and your day planner. If you’re like me, you just got very convicted at the thought without even having to look. You know what and where your treausures have been, and they have been anything but heavenly.

But tomorrow is a good day to start over and start seeking the right things, like God and His kingdom. Or better yet, today is an even better place to start. Like I’ve said before, it’s never too late to turn around and start over and be who God made you to be. Never.

Deep Thoughts

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Sometimes, you get a little philisophical driving home from a movie after midnight. You think deep thoughts, or at least I do.

Sometimes, I look back over what I thought I needed. I look back over what I thought I had to have to make me happy. I see that person I desperately wanted to like me, that would make life complete. I am so thankful that God said no to some of my prayers. I’m thankful He let me experience a little hurt to save me from a greater agony of getting what I thought I wanted only to find out it wasn’t what I needed.

I have come to the place where I can see that person I thought was for me and see them finding happiness with someone else and not only be happy for them, but pray for their success and joy. I can be glad when someone else gets what I wanted, when someone else has handed to them what I worked for.

Because it’s not about me. It’s not about me finding that special someone and starting a life together.

It is about Jesus. It has been, is, and will always be about Him. The verse says that I must decrese so that He may increase. I must get out of the way so that He can get in the way. I must let my dreams go, so that His dreams for me and the world can come true.

If Jesus never did one thing more for me than save me, then I would still not have enough lifetimes to properly thank Him. Not even an eternity of thanksgiving and praise would be enough. If I had used up all my blessings already (as one pastor put it), then I would be good.

So, I come to you Jesus with open hands. I hold all my relationships and possessions not with clenched fists, but with open hands, palms facing up. If you leave them in my care a little longer, You are good. If you take them away, You are still good. If all I get from You is You and the next breath of air, that will be enough.

Jesus, You are enough.

Amen.

New Year’s Days

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Today I was reminded once again of a great truth. It’s not just once a year that we get a new start with a clean slate; each day is a fresh start and a new chance. As it says in Lamentations, every morning, God’s mercies are new and His faithfulness is still just as great as it was the morning before.

In Christ, every day can be a New Year’s Day. Every day is a chance to put failures behind us, take the lessons they taught us, and move into a future free from the weight of the past. Every day is a chance to choose to walk in the path of wisdom and righteousness.

So even if you have already messed up and blown all those resolutions, don’t sweat it. January 2 can be your New Year’s Day. Even if you screw up the week or even the entire  month, you can still proclaim the next day as your spiritual January 1 and start over.

You can choose to renew friendships you have let fall by the wayside. You can choose to get out of your comfort zone and serve those who have less than you. You can choose to start developing those disciplines of prayer and Bible reading. You can choose to trust God more radically and more completely than you ever have in the past.

You can choose to let go of old hurts and forgive the ones who hurt you. You can choose to learn to say no to the good to make room in your schedule and your life for God’s best. The point is that you can choose.

The Bible says, “Choose this day whom you will serve.” That means every day you choose. Even every moment of every day.

I love the saying that success is never final and failure is never fatal, that courage is what counts in the end. No matter the mess you’ve made of your life up to this point, it’s never too late for a new beginning. And just because you won today doesn’t guarantee a victory tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a new day to choose whom you will serve.

A friend taught me this morning prayer: Lord, I come to You with empty hands. If all I get from You is You and my next breath, that will be enough.

So let tommorrow be your January 1 and choose Jesus.

My New Year’s Wish for You in 2012

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This poem, written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, seems just as appropriate and relevant today as it did in 1945 when Bonhoeffer wrote it while in a Gestapo prison in Berlin. This poem is my prayer for you this first day of 2012 and every day after.

“With every power for good to stay and guide me,
comforted and inspired beyond all fear,
I’ll live these days with you in thought beside me,
and pass, with you, into the coming year.

The old year still torments our hearts, unhastening:
the long days of our sorrow still endure.
Father, grant to the soul Thou hast been chastening
that Thou hast promised the healing and the cure.

Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving
even to the dregs of pain, at Thy command,
we will not falter, thankfully receiving
all that is given by Thy loving hand.

But, should it be Thy will once more to release us
to life’s enjoyment and its good sunshine,
that we’ve learned from sorrow shall increase us
and all our life be dedicate as Thine.

Today, let candles shed their radiant greeting:
lo, on our darkness are they not Thy light,
leading us haply to our longed-for meeting?
Thou canst illumine e’en our darkest night.

When now the silence deepens for our harkening,
grant we may hear Thy children’s voices raise
from all the unseen world around us darkening
their universal paean, in Thy praise.

While all the powers of good aid and attend us,
boldly we’ll face the future, be it what may.
At even, and at morn, God will befriend us,
and oh, most surely on each new year’s day”

Choices

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Life is full of choices. Some hard, some easy. Somtimes you get to choose between the better of two good things, and sometimes it’s between bad and worse.

You can choose vanilla or chocolate, although in my mind there is no choice there. Chocolate wins everytime, especially when peanut butter is involved.

You can choose Coke or Pepsi, or be like me and like ’em both. Or just be healthy and drink water.

In 2012, I think there are some choices we must make that will determine how those around us view our faith and how much or little it means to us.

You can choose to walk away from someone who’s struggling, or you can choose to walk the extra mile with them. You can choose to bail when the friendship takes work, or you can be like Jesus, the Friend who sticks closer than a brother or sister.

You can choose bitterness and anger, or you can choose to forgive. You can hold on to hurt until it consumes you alive, or you can release it and live the freedom God meant for you to live.

You can choose the safe and the known and the comfortable, or you can choose the road less traveled. You can seek out familiar friends and places and stay exactly like you are, or you can find Jesus in the hurting and broken and lonely and friendless and walk away changed and more like Christ.

You can choose to seek approval and affection and attention and always be striving to make people like you, or you can choose to seek first God’s kingdom and His approval and find out that people will be drawn to the difference they see in someone who is content with who they are and what they have.

You can choose to serve the gods of power and success and prosperity and fame and the in-crowd. You can choose to worship at the altar of money, sex, food, consumerism, and self. Or you can say, “As for me and my house, we will serve only Yahweh.”

To not choose is itself a choice. So choose life. Choose the narrow road that leads to life in the fullest sense, and not the broad road that leads to the death of your own identity at the hands of what you think everyone wants you to be. Choose Jesus, because He first chose you.

 

Taken, Blessed, Broken, Given

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lifeofthebeloved

“During the meal, Jesus took and blessed the bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples: Take, eat. This is my body” (Matthew 26:26).

I’m in the middle of another Henri Nouwen book and I am loving it. He more than any other writer (except for maybe Brennan Manning) always seems to speak to where I am right here and now.

He says, “To identify the movements of the Spirit in our lives, I have found it helpful to use four words: ‘taken,’ ‘blessed,’ broken,’ and ‘given.'”

I had never thought about it that way before. I never looked at Jesus breaking the bread at Passover and made an analogy to my own life.

We are taken (or chosen) by God who loved us from the start. We are blessed by Him with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms. We are broken by our own sin and the broken and marred world we live in with so much poverty, injustice, and inhumanity. We are given to be God’s hands and feet to bring healing and justice and compassion into the world.

I read somewhere that my life is loaves and fishes. Remember the ones that Jesus used to feed the 5,000? In and of myself, I can’t do much. But if I am blessed and broken and poured out, God can bless so many more through me.

News flash: God takes and uses broken lives, scarred hearts, screwed-up pasts, and promises left unfulfilled. He can use anybody. In fact, He more often than not prefers the outcasts and nobodies and failures to be the ones to turn the world upside down (see the 12 disciples for examples).

Lord, may I be taken by You, Who chose me before I was born and gave me the name Beloved, and blessed with as much of You as I can stand. Break my heart for the things that break Yours and then give me out to those in need.

PS The book I’m reading is Life of the Beloved. Expect more blogs to come out of this. I’m not even halfway through. And, to throw in yet another shameless plug, go buy or download or pilfer or ingest this book as soon as humanly possible. It’s that good.

A prayer for my future wife

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Here I am, thinking about you again and wondering if you’re thinking about me. I have come to the point where I am finally starting to give up striving and trying to make my own plans and my own timing work. I am starting to learn to rest my mind and my heart in God’s plan and His timing. As the name of the book I just got in the mail says, I Gave God Time. That’s all He needs to pull off the biggest miracles– time.

So I pray that your heart is at rest. That you are comfortable where you are and not striving like I have been most of my life. I pray your heart is captured and captivated by Jesus and that you are so enamored and enraptured by His love for you that He becomes everything to you and every other thing in your life falls back into its proper place.

I pray that you are fully coming alive to all that God made you to be. That you know where your beauty comes from and that you treasure your femininity as a gift from God. I pray that your loveliness comes from a Christ-filled countenance and a heart full of compassion and kindness.

I pray that your heart is being set free to love. That all your fears and insecurites are driven away in the face of the Prince of peace, and that peace will rule your heart and mind. I pray you look at every heartache and heartbreak as a means of molding you into the woman who will completely dazzle me.

Waiting is hard, but the longer the wait, the more we will treasure finding each other. I can’t wait to be your husband and do all I can to be a part of  unveiling your true beauty for the world to see. I am waiting for that day, letting God transform me into the man you deserve.

Until then, take courage, dear heart. The night seems long but dawn is just around the corner. Hold on.

A Christmas letter to my future wife

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image

I’m still waiting for you. And did I mention the whole “not good at waiting” part? More accurately, how badly I suck at waiting? I’m getting better, but I am still very impatient 95% of the time. But I know that this waiting will not have been in vain when I meet you.

I keep thinking of our firsts– first kiss (obviously), first snow to hold hands and walk together through, first night in front of a roaring fireplace, first time we’re both snuggled under the same blanket. . . . so many firsts that are yet to come. The best part will be that we didn’t give up and settle, but held out and found out that miracles do still come true.

I am leaning to stop looking for you with my eyes, and look for you with my heart. I will look for you not through my own eyes, but more and more through God’s eyes. I want to fall in love with your compassionate heart and your tender spirit. Your beauty will be Jesus inside you shining through for the world to see. Or at least for those who have eyes to see.

Remember no matter what anyone tells you you are, you are a daughter of the King. You are royalty– a princess. Don’t let anyone ever treat you as less. You were worth every drop of Jesus’ blood not because of anything in you, but because Jesus set His heart on you and declared you worthy.

I think I am slowly but surely becoming the man who will capture your heart and be worthy of your love. I have bad days when I strive and fail and I have days full of grace when I am finally weak enough to let Jesus do it all. That’s all I can do.

I am thanking Jesus for you in advance and thanking you in advance for being faithful to Jesus and never giving up on me. I’ll be thinking of you a lot this Christmas.

Bedtime thoughts

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Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-40).

That’s it. Love God and love others.

But for you to love God, you have to know the reality that God already loves you. For you to love others as yourself, you have to love yourself. Ultimately, you can’t do it. Well, I will only speak for myself here and say that I can’t love God or anybody else, even me, on my own strength. I need Jesus in me, pouring out His agape love, or else I am empty and cold and love-less.

Sometimes, God calls you to love yourself as you love your neighbor. Sometimes, it’s easier to love someone else than to love that person you hang around with every minute of every day. That person who looks back at you in the mirror with accusing eyes that speak of all the impure thoughts, mixed motives, and selfish ambition.

That’s when you and I have to believe what God says about who we are over what we see and think and feel. As a friend of mine told me once, “What you think and feel will lie to you.” But God never will.

God is true. God is love. And God loves you.

And you have all the power of Christ that overcame the grave in you. You have His perfect righteousness that covers your own wretched self-righteous rags of filth.

So be free to love. Love God, love others and love you.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.