beloved

Transitions

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I’m in career transition. That’s the politically correct way of saying I’m out of a job. It sounds much better than saying that I got tossed out on my lazy rear.

It’s hard when part of your life that took up so much of your time is now gone. It’s difficult when that routine you’ve gotten so used to is suddenly thrown out on its ear and you feel like you’re in free-fall.

According to Ephesians, those who have come to put their faith in Christ are in a transition of sorts. A life transition.

You who were once without a hope in the world now have an eternal, imperishable Hope that will never fade or fail.

You who were once strangers and outcasts that nobody wanted are now adopted sons and daughters of the King of the Universe and heirs to Heaven.

You were once captives and slaves to your addictions and bad habits and fears are now free to finally and truly be yourselves.

You who felt worthless and without value now know that you are priceless in your Abba’s eyes and that not even the life of His own Son was too high a price to pay for you.

I know what it’s like to feel unwanted and unloveable. I know what it’s like to feel that you don’t matter to anybody and that nobody would miss you or even notice if one day you were gone.

I also know what it’s like to finally believe what Jesus says about me and to begin to live it out. To have people speak life and healing into me on a daily basis and be able to do the same in return.

The best part of the transition is that in God’s eyes, you are already there. You are already holy and perfect and blameless. He sees you as His masterpiece and loves you like you had never messed up to begin with.

Remember that it’s a process and sometimes you won’t feel like it’s working, but it is.

Remember that no matter what, you are still your Abba’s child and He is still very, very fond of you.

Random Saturday Night Ponderings

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I had a really good night. I ended up playing volleyball and partaking in some high quality oreo cheesecake. The fact that such a thing as oreo cheesecake even exists makes the world a better place to live in, don’t you think?

One of the discussions was about who we would want to play us in a movie about our lives. I picked John Cusack (with Mark Ruffalo a close second). My friend picked Jennifer Aniston. Friend, you have chosen wisely.

I love those kinds of nights where the conversation is good and not too serious. Where I am not always paranoid about saying something wrong or stupid or just plain lame. Where not everything has to be ultra-spiritual religious talk, but can still be edifying.

I think even in those times we can still mutually bless and encourage and challenge one another. We can still walk away better people, more compassionate and more understanding and more like Jesus.

If you’re like me, then you know how blessed you are to have good friends who bring out the best in you, who bring out the God-colors in your world and remind you that you really are the Beloved and Favored of God.

And yeah, I recommend the oreo cheesecake if you ever find it on the menu. It’s that stinkin’ awesome. In fact, it should have its own federal holiday. A National Oreo Cheesecake Day. I declare that June 8 is that day.

May you have a blessed night and remember once more that your Abba Father is fond of you and will be singing over you all night until you wake up in the morning.

Dollhouse: The TV Show and My Thoughts From It

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Dollhouse was a fantastic show with a very unique concept that ended way too soon.

The concept was that people “volunteered” to have their own memories and personalities erased and became blank slates that could be fitted with other personality imprints to be lovers, assassins, companions, or whatever else the very, very rich and well-conntected clientele wanted.

The concept is technologically far-fetched, but in some ways it happens on a daily basis.

People spend so much time trying to be what other people want them to be, to fit the image that parents or spouses or significant others put on them, that they too often forget who they really are.

Maybe you became someone else to please a boyfriend or girlfriend and gave away something precious to you. Maybe you became someone you used to dislike to gain the approval of so-called “friends” who wouldn’t have liked you for you.

Maybe you have a whole collection of masks that you wear during the week: the pious one for Sunday, the ambitious one for Monday through Friday, the anything-goes one for Saturday night . . . . until you feel completely fragmented.

1 John 1:12 says regarding Jesus, ” But whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, He made to be their true selves,       their child-of-God selves.”

The way to get rid of the masks and the role-playing is to let Jesus tell you who you really are. After all, He’s the one who saw you in your mother’s womb and knows you intimately, more than you know yourself.

In Him, you find your true identity as a child of God and find your true purpose and meaning in being a part of what He is doing in turning the upside-down world right side up again.

I’ve said it before, but no matter what names anyone else has called you or even what you’ve called yourself in anger and frustration, the only name that ultimately matters is the name God in Jesus has given you and calls you now– BELOVED.

May you and I live in that reality and show our world the way out of the dollhouse.

 

Forgiveness

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Tonight, Mike Glenn talked about forgiveness at Kairos. He said forgiveness is releasing the other person from the expectation that they can fix the wrong and the hurt they caused you. He said forgiveness is when you are no longer defined by the pain and the hurt and the grudge, but by the love of Jesus.

He added that Jesus said to him once, “You can hold on to the hate for the person who hurt you or you can hold on to My love, but you cannot hold on to both.” When Jesus whispered, “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing,” He was praying for those who hurt you. He was also praying for you.”

We are called to forgive. Jesus said the Father would forgive you as you forgave others. When you don’t give forgiveness, you can’t receive it and you stunt the work of the Spirit in your life. Every single one of us needs to forgive and be forgiven.

But what if the person you most need to forgive is yourself? What if the person you need to learn to live with is you? What if you’re scared to death that if someone else ever knew you like you knew yourself and knew all the dirty, petty, angry thoughts you keep hidden, they would walk out on you for good?

I have been way too hard on myself in the past and projected on to other people my own self-rejection. I thought that no one could ever really know me and still like me. But the love of Jesus broke through and changed me and changed how I saw myself. It transformed how I saw others, no longer through my own insecurities, but through the grace of God.

The key is to believe what God says about you. It’s to believe that God loves you and chose you and calls you BELOVED. The key is to receive God’s forgiveness. If God chose to forgive you of something you never in a million years could have paid for, then it’s time to forgive yourself.

You have a choice. You can choose pain and holding grudges or you can choose forgiveness and freedom and love. I think Anne Lamott said refusing to forgive is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. You only hurt yourself. Forgiveness is freedom to love and be loved and mostly, to be wrapped up by the love of Jesus.

I choose forgiveness every time. Lord, grant me and all those reading this forgiving hearts and fill us up with your love so there’s no more room to carry the hurts anymore.

Amen.

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.

You are the Beloved (A Henri Nouwen Quote)

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I had to post this because it spoke so powerfully to me just now. Here it is in its entirety from Henri Nouwen.

“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, “Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.” … [My dark side says,] I am no good… I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”

Meditate on that for a while and see if that doesn’t change the way you see yourself.

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.

My bucket list

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First of all, I’d like to know who came up with the expression “kick the bucket” and who first associated it with dying. I’m not losing any sleep over it, but it would be nice to know just in case I’m ever on Jeopardy or a caller on a morning radio show with a chance to win a fabulous prize. I’m just sayin’.

But for real, I do have a bucket list of sorts. It’s not written down, but I have one item on my bucket list. Only one. My one bucket list wish is to hear Jesus say to me at the end of my road, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” That’s all. To please Jesus is not only on my bucket list, it is my bucket list. That being said, I pretty much suck at it. Most of the time, I try to please just about anyone and everyone else before I even attempt to please Jesus.

Still, that’s what I want. More than anything else. Sure, I’d like to see Scotland or meet Bono. And for the record, I would try skydiving, but I have a burning desire to NOT DIE! Plus, I’m not really keen on heights, which is pretty much a prerequisite for jumping out of a plane at 1 gazillion feet in the air.

I want to make Jesus proud of  me. I want to be His hands and feet and serve Him every chance I get, whether He be the person at the cash register at Publix or the homeless man on the corner looking for spare change. I want my whole life to be one big THANK YOU note to Him.

I think I’ll get there. In fact, I know I will, because Jesus told me that He would never leave me or forsake me. He said He would finish the good work He started in me. When He sees a heart that yearns to please Him, He honors that.

So I probably have the shortest bucket list on the planet. Just hopefully not the shortest bucket.

My two cents on spiritual warfare

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A group of guys and I have been watching a DVD series on spiritual warfare by Chip Ingram called The Invisible War (and yes, that was a shameless plug). It got me thinking about the mindset of so many American believers (including me) regarding the whole topic of spiritual warfare. Plainly put, either most of us don’t believe there is an war going on with an enemy that is constantly seeking our destruction. If we believe, we sure don’t live like it much of the time. Again, me included.

The war is real. The enemy is real. In this world, we are not tourists on vacation, or passengers on some kind of luxury cruise, but soldiers engaged in battle. Our ignorance of the battle and our enemy can only do us harm. We need to wake up to realize that we are under attack. But here’s the best part.

The battle is already won. Chip Ingram said, “As believers in Christ, we don’t fight FOR victory. We fight FROM victory.” That’s the good news (which is why it’s called the gospel!). But there is still a battle.

We fight back by putting on the armor of God as described in Ephesians 6: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit. We should pray these on every morning and pray these for each other on a daily basis. We should pray with eyes wide open to the spiritual realm, asking God to give us eyes to see the battle around us like the Elijah prayed for his servant when they were surrounded by the Syrian army. We should pray for discernment and wisdom. Most of all, we should pray at all times to be Spirit-filled and Spirit-controlled, taking every thought captive and submitting them to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

We must fight together. If you are fighting the enemy on your own, apart from other believers, you may succeed for a season, but you will ultimately grow weary and faint. You will stumble and fall. You need other believers praying God’s protection over you, encouraging you and keeping you honest.

We fight ultimately with one weapon– LOVE. Not as a feeling, but as a decisive act of the will. We fight by showing that Calvary’s love is stronger than hate and that love overcomes anything. Chip Ingram said, “Love is giving to another person what they need the most when they deserve it least.” Love is doing whatever you can, even to your own detriment, for the good of the beloved. It means dying to yourself and your rights and own ideas about how the world should work.

So live with eyes wide open, hands raised, side by side with your brothers and sisters in Christ. And remember that the battle is already won and that we have overcome!

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Another prayer from Henri Nouwen (with my own commentary added)

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“I pray tonight for all who witness for you in this world: ministers, priests, and bishops, men and women who have dedicated their lives to you, and all those who try to bring the light of the Gospel into the darkness of this age. Give them courage, strength, perseverance, and hope; fill their hearts and minds with the knowledge of your presence, and let them experience your name as their refuge from all dangers. Most of all, give them the joy of your Spirit, so that wherever they go and whomever they meet they will remove the veil of depression, fatalism, and defeatism and will bring new life to the many who live in constant fear of death. Lord, be with all who bring the Good News. Amen.” (Henri Nouwen)

As the old saying goes (or maybe a new one that I just made up), when you can’t think of anything original, borrow and steal from smarter people than you. Actually, this prayer of Henri Nouwen’s is my prayer, said better than I could ever say it on my own, for my friends who are going out and making disciples of all nations, starting in Nashville and ending up in the uttermost parts of the earth. You inspire me to want to do a lot more than I’m doing right now.

Who knows what God has in store for me or you or anyone? I’ve learned that whatever it is, it’s usually way different than what we thought it would be, and way better. So go with it. Jesus calls us to die every day to our rights and desires and dreams and hopes, so that we can live in God’s greater dream for us. As Oswald Chambers wrote, “Trust God and do the next thing.”

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.