relationships

Celebrating the Return of the Wifis and Interwebs

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I have interwebs again at the crib. Sure, it may be the slowest connection in the western hemisphere, but I am connected. And that is not a complaint. That is an observation based on how long it took to upload The X-Files on Netflix.

I am celebrating with a good quote from C.S. Lewis on what it means to become yourself by becoming more like Jesus:

“The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully.

He made them all. He invented— as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him.

The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop.

What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas.

I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

Reminders for When That Mid-Life Crisis Hits

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homer

Maybe it will hit in the middle of the night.

Maybe you’ll wake up and wonder where your life has gone and what you’ve done with it.

Maybe you’ll have that pounding in your chest and that overwhelming anxiety, scared that you’ve wasted your one and only life up to this point.

Maybe, just maybe, you feel like it’s too late to make anything of yourself and that you’re doomed to mediocrity.

Remember this: not everything that pops into your head is from you. The father of lies can be incredibly sneaky about pushing little fabrications into your mind about your identity and your purpose.

If you let him, he’ll have you believing that you have no purpose or worth. That your life doesn’t matter. That it’s too late to change and become who you might have been, that best self you always dreamed you might be.

Let your Abba Father speak truth over you. Hear Him call you Beloved, not out of anything you’ve done to earn special merit or out of any outstanding character traits that you possess, but simply because you are His.

Let your Abba Father remind you that you have supreme worth because you are created in the image of God and because Jesus paid the ultimate price for your redemption.

That’s what counts in the end.

Not salary.

Not titles.

Not awards.

Not accolades.

But simply living out of being the Beloved of your Abba and letting that love define who you are and what you do. If you end up with everything you could possibly want, everything the world says you need, and miss out on God, you have nothing. But if you end up with God and nothing else, you will have found everything that truly matters in the end.

Just think about that for a while.

 

 

Easter Sunday 2015

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File Apr 05, 9 15 22 PM

“It is good for us to remember that this stone was rolled away from the entrance, not to permit Christ to come out but to enable the disciples to go in!” (Peter Marshall)

“A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act” (Mahatma Gandhi).

“God proved His love on the Cross. When Christ hung, and bled, and died, it was God saying to the world, ‘I love you'” (Billy Graham).

“But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross” (Bono).

For me, Easter is a bit harder to prepare for than Christmas. You don’t have nearly the commercialism of the season constantly reminding you that the day is coming. Also, Easter isn’t on a fixed day every year like Christmas.

Most of all, Easter isn’t quite the feel-good story that Christmas is. You don’t have the cute little infant being cradled by loving Mary as a doting Joseph watches on. You have the gory spectacle of the cross and the death of an innocent Man to deal with.

But you need both, I think. You can’t have the Greatest Story Ever Told without both the virgin birth and the death and resurrection. If Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin Mary, then He’s not qualified to die for anyone’s sins but His own. If He isn’t raised from the dead, then we are still stuck in our sins and just as hopeless as before.

So I love both seasons. More than that, I love how Advent comes before Christmas and Lent comes before Easter, giving us time to prepare our hearts and minds for what it all means.

This year, Easter means that no life is wasted. It means that every life matters and every single person ever born matters to God. It means that your and my identity doesn’t come from honor rolls or bank accounts or resumes, but from Calvary. At the core, who I am is the Beloved of God, who proved that He thought I was worth dying for on that cross.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, there are only 263 days left until Christmas.

 

 

Easter Saturday

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tomb_closed

I suppose it was a quiet day for the disciples. Not quiet in the sense of anticipation and hope but more in the sense of resignation and despair. They had seen their Messiah crucified and buried in a tomb.

It was over. All their hopes and dreams for the future went with Jesus into that tomb and the future that presented itself was as bleak as the black sky over Golgotha that afternoon.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a state of grief where there are no more tears to cry, where there’s a quiet calm after the storm. Where it feels like you’ll never feel happiness or laughter ever again. That’s where they were as they stared at the massive stone that a legion of Romans had rolled in front of the tomb where Jesus lay. Even if they wanted to, all twelve of them couldn’t have budged that stone from its place to steal the body of their leader and Lord.

Yes, they had seen Lazarus alive and joking around after being in the grave four days, but this was different. Lazarus had been ill and died in his own bed. Lazarus hadn’t been brutally beaten and whipped within an inch of his life before being forced up the hill to his own crucifixion.

They had seen the finality of the final moments where Jesus commended His Spirit to God in a loud cry. Truly, it was over. There would be no more parables, no more stories, no more miracles, no more crowds.

It’s easy for me, having read the rest of the story, to rush past this day. But for those who were there, there was no rest of the story yet. Just a grey sky and a dark room and a dead Messiah.

Yet early in the morning, just shy of daybreak, everything for these disciples and for the rest of the world was about to change forever.

 

On a Rainy Good Friday

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158901.hrain2

I drove home in a monsoon. Or it felt like a monsoon to this Middle Tennessean. The picture above is a fairly accurate depiction of what I saw through my own windshield– not much at all– as I motored down the interstate. Twice, a passing car splashed a lot of water on my car and I literally couldn’t see anything for a few seconds that felt a lot longer than a few seconds. I gripped the steering wheel, prayed hard, and kept going.

I think I even passed through a small amount of hail, which I can safely say with almost 98% certainty was a first for me. I’ve never seen so many cars pulled over to the side of the road under overpasses to wait out the deluge. But I trudged onward, slowly and cautiously.

I was nervous, but not panicky. I figured that God was more than able to get me through the rain and it had to let up sooner or later. No rain, literal or figurative, can last forever.

On another Good Friday, there wasn’t a whole lot of sunshine. It was both literally and metaphorically one of the darkest days in the history of humanity. Jesus had breathed His last on the cross and they had taken Him down to be buried in a borrowed tomb.

I can read about it knowing the rest of the story, but for those living it in real time, they had no idea that a resurrection was coming. Those disciples who had fled during Jesus’ arrest had witnessed the crucifixion from afar. Or maybe they hid out and received reports from those who were there, Either way, they had seen their world end.

I’ve been there. I’ve been in places that felt like dead ends and wondered how I would ever get back.

But Easter is about a God who knows the way out of the grave. And though it may be Friday, Sunday’s comin’!

 

Maybe My Favorite Line From a Song Ever

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u2

“I can feel your love teaching me how
Your love is teaching me how to kneel, kneel” (U2, from the song Vertigo).

I discovered this line today. It’s odd that after listening to a song hundreds of times that one particular line that you’ve missed can suddenly catch your attention. This was Tthe line from the song Vertigo from the U2 album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

This line makes a lot more sense if you see it as God’s love rather than human love. I can say from my own personal experience that the love of God has taught me to kneel, not just as a posture, but as an action reflecting an attitude adjustment in my own heart.

True love of any kind is ultimately about surrender. It’s not what I want but what you want that matters, especially when it comes to the love of God. True love says, “Not my will but Thine,” which is a lot easier to pray as a line from a rote prayer than as an actual declaration.

Only those who have experienced God’s love can truly surrender their wills and lives. Not those who have read about or know facts about God’s love but those who have seen and felt and touched and been transformed by it.

So, yes, God’s love is still teaching me to kneel. To let go of my own desires so I can receive God’s much grander and wilder desires for me. To let my own plans and dreams crumble into dust so that my life can be a blank slate where God can dream His dreams for me and in me.

I say all this like I’m actually good at it, but I’m not. I’m much too stubborn and I cling to my will far too often for my own good. But thankfully God is far more patient with me than I am with God (or with me for that matter).

I’m learning how to kneel.

 

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Epiphany

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sbemh

“There’s no present like the time” (a great line from The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel).

My life hasn’t gone the way I planned. In fact, for most of my life there really hasn’t been a plan. My first job when I moved to the Nashville area fell into my lap in a stroke of providence and blessing.

I can say that while I haven’t always gotten what I wanted, I find I always got what I needed just when I needed it.

Tonight, I saw the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the sequel to . . . you can probably figure out the title to the first movie. It was just as good and clever as the first.

I remember when I heard the line that I quoted, my brain wanted to reverse it and have it say, “There’s no time like the present.” That’s how I’ve always heard it and that’s what I hear when people are wanting you to act NOW and buy NOW and decide NOW.

But truly, there is no better present than the time you’re given. There’s no better present than the present. You only get one today and never a do-over on yesterday (unless you happen to live inside the movie Groundhog Day).

So take it all in. Be sure to pay attention. For me, it means noticing the beautiful cloud formations in the sky on the way to work and actually paying attention to the scenery on the drive. It means stopping for a moment to breathe a prayer along the lines of “Thank You, God, for this life, and forgive me if I don’t love it enough.”

I’m still learning never to take anything (or anyone) for granted. I hope I wake up tomorrow, but I can’t guarantee that I will because it’s not promised. The same goes for all my family and friends. Even my cat Lucy.

Savor your life while you live it. Don’t waste your time during the week pining away after the weekends and holidays and summer vacations. Each day is a gift that is good for only 24 hours and has a no-return policy. Open it.

 

Oh Brother

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I have a couple of confessions to make. I don’t mean the kind where I fess up to misdeeds or give you a “Woe is pitiful me” speech. I mean the kind where I let you in on how I occasionally do dumb stuff.

I’d been having trouble with my phone. At least I blamed my phone for the trouble I’d been having. I’d miss calls all the time and not hear (or feel) my phone ringing. I thought the old  iPhone 5 was finally giving up the ghost. It turns out I had somehow managed to have the “Do Not Disturb” feature on my phone activated for weeks without realizing it. FYI: if you don’t want to be annoyed by late night calls or texts, DO turn on this feature, but also remember to turn it off in the morning.

I have since restored the setting and I can now answer all those very important calls from all those very important people I’d been missing out on.

Also, I found out that my hand sanitizer has an expiration date. Or more honestly, HAD an expiration date of June 2014. I was unaware that hand sanitizer could go bad. Or at least not be fresh. Side note: does expired hand sanitizer make your hands dirtier or does it just lose effectiveness?

At the end of the day, I chalk things like these up to experience gained without too much lost. If those are the worst things that ever happen to me, I’m doing alright.

I’ve learned that you have to give yourself grace and allow for the occasional stupidity. As much as you pride yourself on being intelligent, you will inevitably do something dumb that will leave you scratching your head. It will happen. Take it from me.

As for the hand sanitizer, I plan on using it until it runs out and then moving up to the 2015 edition. I figure I’m only three months late.

 

You Are Not: A Reminder

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I’m about to repeat myself. Again.

I find I keep returning to the same themes in my writing over and over, probably because I keep needing to hear them over and over. Here’s one more reminder for the road.

You are not your worst fears about yourself– that you’re essentially unemployable and that you will never find out what you’re good at and be able to make a living with it.

You are not your spotty employment background or your so-so credit score or your monumental mistakes in the past.

You are not your history of relationship failures (or your history of failure of relationships).

You are not your failed marriages or your broken relationships with your parents (or children).

You are not who you were and you are not yet who you will be.

You are the Beloved of your Abba Father, the apple of His eye.

You are Forgiven, with a blank slate as clean as if there were never any bad marks on it.

You are a child of the One True King, despite your questionable family history and your own long list of personal quirks.

You are exactly where God wants you to be and He knows where you are and where He’s taking you. And trust me, you will get there one day.

 

My Bracket’s Got a Hole In it (But It’s Not Busted Yet)

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So far, so good. Not great, but good.

The last time I checked, I picked 72.6% of the winners correctly on the best bracket out of the ten I filled out for ESPN. The worst? Lagging behind at 1.4%. I couldn’t have done much worse if I had picked blind-folded or settled the games by flipping a coin (which I actually did for one of my brackets).

At this point, my chances of taking home the top prize for best bracket are the same as my Tennessee Titans winning the Super Bowl next year. Not good. But I still had fun and hopefully learned how to pick better in the future. And I found out yet again why I don’t need to pursue professional betting as a career.

But you will lose on 100% of the brackets that you never fill out. The guy whose bracket had 16 seed Hampton winning it all did better than the guy who had all the right teams picked in his head but never committed to pen and paper (or mouse and keyboard).

In life, you will miss out on 100% of the chances you didn’t take. I’ve found out the hard way more than once.

If I could go back, I’d probably make a few changes. But I’m satisfied with my brackets (none of which have officially busted as of this moment, 10:40 pm CST on March 27, 2015). I also believe that it’s never too late to start taking those proverbial leaps of faith and risks. Just because you were timid and afraid in the past doesn’t mean that you have to be that way in the future.

Just out of curiosity, what’s the best upset pick you’ve ever gotten right? I seem to remember once picking a 15 seed to knock off a 2 seed back in the day, but I can’t remember who it was and I have no proof that it happened. I recall it might have been Coppin State over South Carolina, but then again, I may have dreamed that episode.