“Each one of here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them – we can love completely without complete understanding” (from A River Runs Through It).

This is a letter I wish I could have written or something I wish I could have said to two of my uncles while they were still alive.

I think about you quite a lot now that you’re gone. I still feel the void whenever the family gets together at the annual reunion and I keep expecting each of you to come walking up the driveway with your distinctive gaits. I can still hear your laughter and see your smiles.

I would tell you that I loved you. I don’t think I told either of that while you were living, but I did. You were different from each other and from everybody else, but that’s what made you special. You were you.

I would tell you that I have so many questions. Like how did you figure the whole uncle thing out? And have you heard the Beatles Mono Box Set?

I would tell you that I was so very proud of you. You each had hard lives and made some bad choices, but you never gave up. You both fought to the end. I never appreciated how strong you were then, but I do now.

I’d give almost anything to have one more conversation with both of you and be able to tell you the things I can only write now. I think that in the end, despite all your failures and mistakes and bad choices, you ended up as heroes in my book. And I think in God’s book, too.

I can hear Jesus telling you, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You held on and never gave up. You believed in me through every possible storm and never stopped fighting. Enter into your rest.”

Being spiritually mature means being obedient. A friend of mine I was chatting with just now said something like this: God doesn’t call us to be mature, but to be obedient. I think he’s right. Obedience leads to maturity. We try to be obedient and leave the results to God.

That being said, if I am seeking God and following after the heart of Christ, then I don’t need praise. I don’t need to be constantly recognized, approved, applauded, patted on the back, etc. I don’t need to be the center of attention or even to be noticed. I come to the place where pleasing God is enough. Where I am willing to walk alone if need be.

I am a recovering co-dependent. So much of how I viewed myself for so long depended on how I perceived how others saw me. And I saw rejection from others. I see now I projected my own feelings of worthlessness onto others. Those people you are so worried about what they think of you are probably wondering what you think of them. We are all insecure at some level.

If I am faithful, it shouldn’t matter who keeps up with my status updates on facebook. I won’t be obsessed over how many comments and “likes” I get. It won’t matter whether I get 50 people to read this blog. . . or 5. .  . .or sometimes 1. Even if that one person is me! My job is to do what I believe God has called me to do. Period. Be faithful and obedient. God will take care of the results.

That’s all I got for tonight. I am feeling sleep-deprived. But thankful. I am thankful for my family who loves and supports and encourages me. I am thankful for all my friends who know me and still stick around anyway. I am thankful that my Abba is still very fond of me.

Amen and amen!

I originally wrote this as a facebook note on January 20, 2009 after my grandmother passed away from Alzheimer’s.

Thankfulness is the anecdote for bitterness and self-preoccupation (thanks to Michael Easley for that one!) You can’t be thankful when you are always comparing yourself to someone else and envying what that person has that you don’t. Thankfulness means that I am not entitled, but that everything I have, including the air I breath, is a gift. Every person I have in my life is a gift and I should treasure every moment I have with them.

I struggle a lot with envy and bitterness. Those few moments when I am able to genuinely be thankful are sweet. When I am genuinely able to rejoice for that person who has something I wish I had, I am free. Those moments are getting more frequent lately, thanks to Jesus in me.

I think thankfulness isn’t something you wake up one morning having it mastered. You learn gratitude by reminding yourself to thank God for those little things– the blessings and the hardships, the surprises and the annoyances, when things go as planned and when things go awry.

Thankfulness means I surrender my idea of how my world should be and take my world as it is, the way God ordained it. Thankfulness means I acknowledge that God’s plans and purposes are way better than my own. Thankfulness means I have no rights but to deserve hell and that if God never did one thing more for me after saving and redeeming my life, He would be worthy of an eternity of my thanks.

The hardest part for me is to get that into my heart right now. I have to believe it even when I don’t feel it, because feelings can deceive. But God is always Truth. I am learning to rejoice in little everyday victories over small sins. I am learning to be patient with myself and give myself grace to be human and to fail. To realize that when I am tired, my thoughts and feelings get skewed and I shoudn’t trust them.

I plan on OD’ing on turkey Thursday and going into a tryptophan-induced coma. And trusting God with my life.

I’ve been a believer for a while, but I feel like I am going back to basics and unlearning some things I learned wrong the first time. Not that I’m placing blame on anyone or any church. I think we as American Christians have been taught wrong in some areas and have let our culture dictate our theology, rather than the other way around.

So what does maturity in the faith look like? Is it something that automatically comes with age? Is it all about being Super-Spiritual Bible Answer KnowledgeMan? Is it about being able to reach a place of spiritual superiority where you can finally look down on everyone else from your lofty devotional heights?

After reading The Calvary Road, I have some thoughts.

Maturity means humility. It means looking for fault with myself first and then in the other person. It means that even if the other person was wrong, my own reaction of anger, impatience, pride, etc. was also wrong. I have to own up to my own failings and not worry so much about the failings of others. But I also have to be willing to speak all the truth in love, even gently admonishing a brother or sister who has gone astray. But not until I have pulled that huge plank of wood out of my eye to see the speck in theirs.

Maturity means brokenness. It means acknowledging that after all I’ve done for God, that I am still an unworthy servant. That my best works are stained with sinful motives and that my best intentions are chocked full of selfish ambition. Yet even in my unworthiness, Jesus calls me friend and can take my dross and turn it into gold. If I come to Him, confessing my filthy rags and holding out my empty hands, He will fill me up with so much of Himself that it will spill out all over anyone who is around me.

Maturity means seeking revival in my own heart constantly. I can never come to a place where I am satisfied with where I am. I must acknowledge that I am in desparate need of Jesus from the first moment I wake up to my last thought before sleep takes me. Revival means being continually cleansed from sin and filled with Jesus, a cup that runneth over.

Maturity means I don’t have a 50-year plan of saintliness and godliness, but I say, “Lord, I want to be faithful and obedient to You for the next 24 hours.” Somedays, it means, “Help me to just believe for this moment.”

I have not arrived, but I am on my way. I have not reached perfection, but I am a masterpiece in the making. I didn’t travel a thousand miles today, but I did take one step. Actually, more like 9 steps back and 10 steps forward. But God willing, I will take one more step of faith tomorrow. Maybe one day I’ll take that leap.

This is for you if you have wandered away from the faith or know of someone who has. This is a hymn by Robert Lowry, who penned such other hymns as “Nothing But the Blood” and “Shall We Gather at the River”. This expresses the Father God’s heart for all his children who have gone astray.

“Where is my wand’ring boy tonight—
The boy of my tend’rest care,
The boy that was once my joy and light,
The child of my love and prayer?

Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
My heart o’erflows, for I love him, he knows;
Oh, where is my boy tonight?

Once he was pure as morning dew,
As he knelt at his mother’s knee;
No face was so bright, no heart more true,
And none was so sweet as he.

Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
My heart o’erflows, for I love him, he knows;
Oh, where is my boy tonight?

Oh, could I see you now, my boy,
As fair as in olden time,
When prattle and smile made home a joy,
And life was a merry chime!

Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
My heart o’erflows, for I love him, he knows;
Oh, where is my boy tonight?

Go for my wand’ring boy to-night;
Go, search for him where you will;
But bring him to me with all his blight,
And tell him I love him still!

Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
My heart o’erflows, for I love him, he knows;
Oh, where is my boy tonight?”

I have a theory that goes something like this. When you’re in your twenties, pretty much the first thing you look for in the opposite sex is looks. Is he hot? Is she fine? I hear the talk about how a girl wants some rugged, handsome man to come sweep her off her feet and how a guy really wants the supermodel to go out with him.

When a girl says she wants to be persued, what she really means is that she wants a very specific person or type of person to do the persuing. All others need not apply. Guys for the most part only pursue the ones they consider very appealing and attractive.

I don’t think this applies to every single twentysomething out there, but I’d safely bet it applies to 95+% of the singles ages 20-29 out there.

When you get closer to my age, your thinking changes. Hopefully. You start to see beauty as not so much what the person looks like, but how he or she lives. Not so much cosmetics, but godly character make a woman beautiful and a man handsome. How they treat others and show compassion to the least of these makes them attractive. They aren’t nearly as concerned about being fashinable as about being faithful  and obedient.

Ultimately, the most beautiful part about any person is Jesus and the more He shines through that person, the more beautiful that person becomes. Apart from Jesus, all of us are dressed in filthy rags and stained with sin and are ugly messes. But Jesus loving us makes us beautiful again. The more you surrender yourself to Christ and lay down your life for Him, the more He shows in and through you. And there is nothing more attractive than that, in my opinion.

Jesus, make us more like You daily. Take our broken lives and make them whole, take the ashes of our messed-up world and make them into a beauty that will dazzle the world around us.

Amen.

For some odd reason, I was thinking about that part from Kill Bill Vol. 2 where Bill is describing super heroes. All the rest put on a costume, he says, to be the superhero and fight evil. That is their diguise. Superman, on the other hand, wears a costume, the suit and tie bit, to blend in. His regular clothes are the blue S outfit. In other words, for him being a hero is not something he becomes by putting on a costume, but something he does every day as a part of who he is.

That’s a hero. Not someone who tries to do great things, but someone who does what he does and performs ordinary feats in extraordinary circumstances. A hero is someone who has built a lifestyle of habits of doing good things and helping other people. They never consciously set out to be a hero, but to do their job. When that extraordinary circumstance occurs, they only do what they know to do, what they have done day in and day out.

In the spiritual sense, the heroes of the faith were (and are) not people who set out to be spiritual giants. They set out to be obedient and faithful. They cultivated a lifetime of making habits of obedience in small things and faithfulness with the talents God gave them. Then God brought the fiery furnace or the lions den and they responded by doing what they had always done– be faithful and obey God.

We are not called to be heroic, but faithful. We are not called to rescue the world (I think that job’s taken). We are called to be witnesses to what we’ve seen and heard and obey what God has called us to.

Jesus is the ultimate hero. His mission, astounding in its unwavering devotion and purpose, was to please His Father and to do and say the things God called him to do and say. He was perfectly faithful and obedient. He calls us to do the same. Love God, love others, trust and obey, no matter what. God may put you in a circumstance where you end up a hero, or he may call you to obscurity. Your and my response should be the same either way– trust and obey.

“There He goes – a hero. A savior to the world.
Here He stands with scars in His hands.
With love He gave His life so we could be free.
The Savior of the world.” (Abandon)