prayer

A Prayer for My Friends Tonight

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God, I bring my friends before you tonight. I know that You know what they need better than I do and even better than they do.

God, they are burdened and heavy-laden with work and with school, with spouses and with romantic relationships, with family and friends.

Grant them Your perfect peace tonight and enfold them in Your arms so that they can feel You near to know that You are just as near when they can’t feel You.

Grant them the joy than transcends circumstances and events, good or bad. Joy that can only come from You and that other people can only attribute to You.

Give them wisdom in their friendships. Bring people into their lives who will draw out the God-colors in them and inspire them to hunger and thirst after righteousness and to above all yearn for Jesus more than life itself.

Remove the people who hinder them being who You called them to be. Lord, even me, if I am a hindrance to Your work in their lives. Give them the grace to let the people go who You take out of their existance.

Above all, give them a single passion and vision: to follow hard after You, regardless of what it costs or what anyone else around them thinks. May they see only You and love only You. May their love for others be Your love flowing through them.

Lord, cause Your face to shine on them and be gracious to them. Take them to the lowliest people and let them be Your hands and feet to those who will never be able to repay what You do to them through my friends.

I pray for success and prosperity and good fortune for my friends. More than that, I pray intimacy and a deeper, wilder love for You, even if it comes at the expense of success and prosperity and good fortune.

Thank You for my friends. May they know how grateful I am. Much more than that, may they know each and every day and all through the night how You love them and how fond You are of them and how You call them beloved and how You are their Abba Father. May they each hear the sweet sound of You singing with joy over them in the deep waches of the night.

That’s my prayer for them tonight. Amen.

Why I Am a Fan of Henri Nouwen

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solitude

“In solitude we can slowly unmask the illusion of our possessiveness and discover in the center of our own self that we are not what we can conquer, but what is given to us. In solitude we can listen to the voice of him who spoke to us before we could speak a word, who healed us before we could make any gesture to help, who set us free long before we could free others, and who loved us long before we could give love to anyone. It is in this solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the result of our efforts. In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared. It’s there we recognize that the healing words we speak are not just our own, but are given to us; that the love we can express is part of a greater love; and that the new life we bring forth is not a property to cling to, but a gift to be received” (Henri J.M. Nouwen).

Henri Nouwen wrote that every single person ever born deals with aloneness, because every single one of us is unique and no one else will ever have our exact problems and issues and hang-ups and phobias.

He said we can either see our aloneness as a wound and thus turn it into loneliness or view it as a gift, where it becomes solitude. In solitude is where we can learn to be still and quiet and know that in truth, we are never really alone. God is with us.

Solitude makes us better people, better neighbors, better friends, better spouses, better lovers, and better disciples. We’re not clinging to each other out of a desparate need to not be lonely, but because we are finally comfortable with who we are in the times when we are alone with no noise to drown out our own thoughts.

That is my own wording of what I’ve been reading in The Only Necessary Thing, a compilation of Nouwen’s thoughts on living a prayerful life. Seriously, if you don’t read another one of my blogs, but read one of his books, I will be supremely happy. He’s that good.

That’s all for tonight. Let me know what you are reading that touches you deeply at the soul level. Maybe it’s a book that will do the same for me. And may the God of the earthquake and the God of the thunder also be the God of your silence and the God of your solitude. 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.

When the Lights Go Out

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lucynarnia

I was en route from Memphis recently, listening to a book on CD, as all well-seasoned travellers do. It was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, book 5 of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. It was read by Derek Jacobi, by the way, in case you were dying to know.

In the book, the Dawn Treader sails into an island of darkness. It’s a place where fear rules and all nightmares come to life. Lucy is at the top of the ship, watching as the crew tries vainly to escape. In her desperation, she says, “Aslan, if you ever loved us, help us now.” The answer to her prayer is an albatross who, as he flies by her, whispers, “Courage, dear heart,” in Aslan’s voice. He then leads them out into the sunlight.

I bet you’ve been in some dark places in your life. You’ve felt trapped in the valley of the shadow of death, where no light or hope can get through. You’ve been searching for a way out, but all you find is more darkness, more despair, more hopelessness.

You feel your circumstances will never get better. You fear that nothing will ever change. You come to believe that your worst-case scenario is due to come true any day now. Your faith is at a low ebb and your fears are cresting and crashing waves that swamp you.

There’s a voice, if you are still enough to hear it, that whispers the same words what it whispered to Lucy. “Courage, dear heart.” It says, “Hold on. Trust in Me in the darkness even when you can’t find Me there. I am with you, with My everlasting arms underneath you. I will never ever let go.”

Don’t believe that you feel or what you think, but what you know. Believe the same God who has proved Himself over and over and Whose word is true. Know that He is with you and for you in your darkness. Darkness may prevail right now, but joy is coming with the morning.

A Daily Prayer of Mother Teresa

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mother teresa

I found this in the booklet that came with a Natalie Grant CD I bought today.

“Dear Lord, help me to spread your fragrance wherever I go.

Flood my soul with your spirit and life. Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly that all my life may only be a radiance of yours.

Shine through me, and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with my feel your presence in my soul. Let them look up and see no longer me, but only you, O Lord!

Stay with me, then I shall begin to shine as you do; so to shine as to be light to others. The light, O Lord, will be all from you; none of it will be mine; it will be you shining on others through me. Let me thus praise you in every way you love best, by shining on those around me.

Let me preach you without preaching, not by words but by my example, by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what I do, the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to you.

Amen.”

I would only add that while it is great to show God’s love by example, it will always be necessary at some point to use words, for how can anyone believe who has not heard? I think the point that Mother Teresa and Saint Francis of Assisi made was that you need both. Not just words without a loving example and not just a loving example without words. Lord, help me to be both today!

Amen and amen.

My Obligatory Charlie Sheen Blog

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image

Honestly, this is not another blog about how crazy Charlie Sheen is these days or how he needs help or any of that. If I were in his shoes, I might be acting twice as crazy. Plus, I’d probably be walking funny ’cause His feet are probably at least 2 sizes bigger than mine.

Actually, this is about a dream I had that starred Charlie Sheen. In my dream, I was about to cut the front yard when ol’ Charlie pulled up and asked if he could do it, because he’d never used a lawnmower before. His dream words, not mine. And that was it. I don’t know if it’s weird that I dreamed this or that I still remember the dream. And yes, I totally pulled a bait-and-switch blog on you.

Dreams always seem normal when you’re dreaming them. You never notice anything bizarre when you’re in the dream. You could be flying naked and be thinking in the dream, “Hey, I always fly on Tuesdays. And where did my clothes go? I’m pretty sure I was dressed when I left the house this morning.” Only when you wake up do you realize that what you dreamed about wasn’t normal. And I mean both the flying and the being naked part.

I think we do that in life, especially as believers. We tend live the same way, thinking that the way we think and act is normal, but only when God’s Spriit moves in and wakes us up, do we realize how abnormal we’ve been. So many live under the belief that it’s normal to feel defeated and discouraged and numb to your faith. It’s normal to not feel anything in worship. It’s normal to think that God must be upset with you and that your fellow believers don’t really want you around.

Only when God opens your eyes do you see that victory is the norm. You see that God sees Jesus when He sees you and He is very pleased with you. And those fellow believers you thought were ready to throw you under the bus? They may need to hear your struggle so they can encourage you or at the least empathize with what you’re going through. And once you start making worship about declaring the great worth of God because He deserves it, whether you feel it or not, the feelings eventually come back. I promise. But at that point, it doesn’t matter whether you’re super-hyped or barely able to sing the words. It’s still worship because it’s centered on a God who is able.

So yeah. I pretty much fooled you into thinking you were going to read a scathing blog about another Hollywood star gone wrong. All I have for Charlie Sheen is prayer and support. But for the grace of God, that could have been me or you. Or much worse. You and I need God’s grace just as much as any of the Charlie Sheens of the world. We needed just as much of the blood of Christ. And God is able to save all the Charlie Sheens. . . and us. . . to the uttermost!

Amen and amen.

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.

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.