religion

My kind of protest

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You’ve probably heard of the pastor in Florida who was planning to burn Korans on 9/11. Or the Afghans who are burning tires in protest of our protests. On any given day, you can pick up a newspaper and read of a protest or a picket or a rally against for for any number of things. Here’s my idea of a protest: love.

“You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you” (Matthew 5:43-48).

I’m not talking about feel-good warm and fuzzy love, or flowers and candy romantic love. I am talking about Love that changed the world. Love that caused Jesus to lay down His life for His enemies. I’m talking about turning the other cheek when someone strikes you. By the way, I learned from someone that in Roman culture, it was considered shameful to strike someone with either your left hand or the back of your right hand. So, turning your cheek is saying in fact, “You will either have to shame yourself or back down.” It is a non-violent protest. It means that my love is stronger than your hate.

I’m talking about when someone asks for your shirt, you give him your coat as well. When some forces you to do something you don’t like, not only do that thing, but go beyond what he is asking and go the extra mile. I’m talking a lifestyle of generosity. Giving your life away every single day. Dying to your rights and coming alive to the Kingdom of God. So love your enemies and pray for them. Pray that God’s love would change them into allies. Remember that God’s blessings falls on us all, regardless of whether we are good or bad or ugly. And without the grace of God, we are all ugly and wicked. All of us.

Lord, show me one practical way I can live out Your love toward my enemy. Let Your love conquer my hate, and Your grace overwhelm my pettiness. May I be Jesus not just toward those I think deserve it, but to everyone, especially the undeserving, because I was once undeserving, too.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

And now for something completely different. . . and random . . .

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Here are some thoughts I had on the way home from the Greek Festival.

1) As I was watching the Greek dancing, a little voice in my head said, “You don’t learn to dance by watching other people dance. You learn to dance by dancing.” And every dance starts with taking that dreaded first step. You don’t learn to live by watching other people live; you learn to live by living– taking risks, learning from failure, and laughing at yourself. You don’t learn faith by reading about it or studying the meanings of the various words used for faith in the Bible, you learn by trusting (or “faith”-ing”) God. By a moment by moment declaration of surrender and trust in God.

2) As my favorite philosopher, Ferris Beuller, said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop every once in a while and look around, you could miss it.” If you are all about living life and warp speed, you miss all the little things that make life worth living. Take time to smell a rose or watch a mother play with her newborn or marvel at a sunrise or breath in the night air. Wherever you are, just be in the moment. Just be. Find a quiet secluded spot and listen for that Still Small Voice that spoke worlds into existence.

3) I’m borrowing this from a friend. The next time you are tempted to get aggrevated or irritated at something or someone, ask yourself one question (not “Do ya feel lucky, punk?”). Ask, “Is this something that Jesus died for?” Did Jesus die to make traffic move more smoothly, or to make the office copier operate jam-free, or to make all people nicer? Then why do those things make me angry. No, wait. They don’t make me angry. Nothing can make me do anything, but I choose to be angry. And I can choose not to be. Jesus died not for the deserving, but for the very undeserving, of which I am one. If I want to be like Jesus, I need to show grace toward the people that cut me off in traffic, the copiers that won’t copy, and the meanies of the world.

4) Remember that no matter how hard it is to love someone who has hurt you or let you down, God showed that such love is possible. True love will never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up on anyone at any time, because God never, never, never, never. . . .etc. . . . gave up on us. True love, or agape love, is impossible, but I have learned that God is really good at making the impossibles into possibilities. So love each other like your life depended on it. Love like you want to be love. Love like God has loved you. Let God love you and love through you.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief. Make me a vessel through which You can pour out love to a world desperately in need of it. My life, whether I live one more day, or 100 more years, is in Your hands.

He giveth more grace (featuring a surprise guest blogger!)

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Ok, not really. It’s still me, but I am including a bit of poetry (not mine) in this blog, because it so profoundly affected me when I heard it tonight at Kairos Roots. Here it is. May it affect you like it did me and make you more thankful and grateful to our great God! Here is her story and then her poem will follow (I copied and pasted her story. Shh! Don’t tell anyone!)

“Annie Flint was born in the Johnston home where she lost her mother, then shortly after lost her father too and was raised by the Flint family. After she graduated from college, she contracted arthritis in one of its most crippling forms and lay in bed for not one or two years, but for decades of her life. And if that wasn’t bad enough she lost control of her internal organs and to her utter embarrassment had to live on diapers for many years of her life. And if that wasn’t humiliating enough she began to become blind and cancer began to take its toll…according to one eyewitness, who wrote a book(called Making of the Beautiful), the last time he saw her, she had seven pillows cushioning her body from keeping the sores from inflicting indescribable agony.

In the midst of all that, she wrote this beautiful poem:

‘He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater,
He sendeth more strength when the labors increase;
To added affliction He addeth His mercy;
To multiplied trials, His multiplied peace.

When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources,
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.

Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision,
Our God ever yearns His resources to share;
Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing;
The Father both thee and thy load will upbear.

His love has no limit; His grace has no measure.
His pow’r has no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus,
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again!'”

Annie Johnson Flint

Last Thoughts on the Beatitudes

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Obviously, I’ve had the Beatitudes on my mind for some time now, having blogged on each one individually for the past several days. The question that remains is how do they all fit together. And what is the purpose? Ok, so I lied about only having one question. Sue me.

How do they fit together? It seems like they are all describing one person. A believer.

What is the purpose? If it’s a to-do list, I’m sunk. I can never make myself be poor in spirit or meek or any other of these things. The same goes if it’s a list of to-be’s, as in you should be all these things if you are a believer. Then what? I heard someone say that the Beatitudes are what it looks like when the Kingdom of God breaks through in a person. When God’s reign is manifested in an individual.

Well, then. How can we seek for a Kingdom breakthrough? By seeking the Kingdom. “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33). And the Kingdom is nothing more than God Himself, God ruling over His creation. So seek God first, and everything else will fall into place. Make Jesus your first– your only priority– and you will have found your purpose.

Again, I like how the Message puts it: “Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.” Steep your life in God. Let every part of your life be filled with every part of God. Let every thought, breath, word and action be a living prayer to Jesus. Live with open hands and open minds toward all that God has for you.

Jesus, be thou my vision, as the old hymn says. So fill me with Your Spirit that all I see is You and how You are working in the world. So inhabit my senses that my heart breaks with what breaks Your heart. So enrapture me with Your love that everything else fades away.

Amen.

Not a good weekend

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I’d have to say honestly that this was not a good weekend  for me. I relapsed into some old issues of co-dependency and lack of trust. I found out that I am not nearly as strong or wise or good as I once thought. I felt as though I were under spiritual attack all weekend.

I also found out that God can still use broken people. I was reminded that His grace covers all my weaknesses. I know that God is good and that He will never give up on me. One day I will  be who I’ve always dreamed and hoped and wished I’d be. I will be everything God has dreamed for me. In the meantime, I am still Abba’s child. He still loves me as if I always did what was right and loved people the way I should and lived out of hope and not fear.

The best part of the deal is that tomorrow is a clean slate. Every morning His mercies are new. Thank you God for a love that never gives up and for hope that never fails and for grace. Especially for grace.

Praying the Blood

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Jesus, I believe You. I believe Your blood has covered all my sin and vanquished every lie and broken every chain. You have overcome, and the victory is won! I am more than a conqueror through You who loved me.

By the power of Your blood, I renounce the lie that I am alone and that no one wants to know me or hear what I have to say.

By the power of Your blood, I renounce the lie that I don’t measure up or have what it takes and that I am just in the way.

By the power of Your blood, I renounce the lie that I have nothing to offer and that I might as well not even exist.

Jesus, You don’t come to me to tell me the truth. YOU ARE THE TRUTH! You don’t come to show me the way. YOU ARE THE WAY! You don’t come to give me a better life. YOU ARE MY LIFE!

You make my brokenness beautiful and my woundedness a balm of healing to others. You don’t make me good, or better, or my best. You make me ALIVE!

I will never ever find the words to tell You how good You’ve been to me. May my life be a living prayer of thanksgiving back to you. Amen.

Some things I have learned what it means to care

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out-of-solitude

First of all, everyone should read the little book, Out of Solitude by Henri Nouwen, which is the basis for this blog. It’s only 63 pages and you can read it in an hour or two and be radically changed.

Care at its core means “to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with.” It means weeping with those who weep. It means sharing joy and laughter. It means that I come out of my protective shell, become vulnerable and step into your world. It means that I realize that there is no one anywhere that I can not identify with if I am honest with myself. I have it in me to be kind or cruel, honest or a liar, warm-hearted or cold-blooded, etc. It means that I don’t have to give the right answers or even give answers at all. I can sit with someone who is hurting and cry with them and let that be enough.

One old saying that I like goes like “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Jesus is the best at this.

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

Henri Nouwen writes, “By the honest recognition and confession of our human sameness we can participate in the care of God who came, not to the powerful but to the powerless, not to be different but to be the same, not to take our pain away but to share it. Through this participation, we can open our hearts to each other and form a new community.” A “fellowship of the broken,” as he calls it.

I am broken and empty of anything God can use. I am full of myself and until I learn to empty myself of all that I think is so good about me and let God fill me with Himself, I can never truly care and serve. Until I give up the desire to do good make a name for myself and simply be available to people in need, I miss the blessing of seeing God really work through me. That’s what I want. That’s what I need. That is community.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Lessons Learned from a Life covered by the grace of God, Part 1

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I have learned a few thing in my time that I want to pass on:

1) Never try to figure out anything, especially people, when you are tired. I personally tend to drift toward the negative when I am exhausted and am not really good at being balanced or fair to others when I am worn out.

2) When you are inclined to judge someone’s actions, remember that there is at least one factor that you don’t know about that person that if you knew, would cast a totally different light on their actions. Also, remember that in the same circumstances you might do the same or worse. Which leads to the next point.

3) If you err, err on the side of grace. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Of course, use common sense and don’t be a doormat, but think of what you would be apart from the grace of God and then you realize that you have no place to give up on or despair of anyone (I totally stole that one from Oswald Chambers!)

4) Remind yourself that in life and the big picture, it never was, is not and will never be about you. It always was, is and always will be about God and His redemptive plan for the world. His will for you is always in context of His plan for the world.

5) Never go by first impressions, regardless of what the world tells you. Some of the best people I know who have impacted me were the ones whose first impression was unfavorable. I think you sometimes have to step out of what is comfortable and familiar if you want to find God’s secret blessings and surprises.

6) What is important in life, what I want you to remember, is not me or how well I write or how clever I am. You can forget all about me and if you remember that God loves you, that God is in love with you, and that God can take the worthless and transform it into something priceless, then I am OK with that. As one person said, I’m just a nobody trying to tell everybody about Somebody that can save anybody. That’s all I am, regardless of what my ego tells me.

What are some lessons you have learned? Share them with me, because I am always learning and God always has something to show me. Plus, we only grow and mature in the faith in community. You can never discover God’s will for your life by yourself, but only with other believers as you share yourself and your gifts to serve one another in love.

That’s all for now. More later.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Taking Back the Terms

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I’ve been thinking today a lot about certain words like radical, militant, fanatical and zealot. These days, those words seemed to be used almost exclusively with a negative connotation. I myself immediately think of terrorists or extreme right-wing militia groups who kill abortion doctors or church people who are always picketing something or other and chanting about how God hates this group and that group. I think it’s time we took these words back. Here’s what I mean:

Be RADICAL in serving others and sacrificing of all you are for the kingdom of Christ.

Be MILITANT is loving people as they are right now, warts and all, and living out Jesus to them.

Be FANATICAL in forgiving those who hurt, slander, and insult you; and in finding ways to display the grace of God to them (and to anyone else who has been written off as unlovable and unredeemable).

Be ZEALOUS in seeking the face of God wholeheartedly and in striving to know Him more and more all the days of your life.

I am more and more convinced that the life Jesus calls us to is radical, militant, fanatical and zealous. Anything short of that is unbiblical. This kind of life is something we can not do on our own. We need God’s power working through us. The good news is we have it. It’s “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Lord, fill us with your Spirit and give us the mind of Christ and live through us to the world around us. Make us your hands and feet, so that we may walk in your ways and go to the people You want to touch. May we see with Your eyes and feel with Your heart and go in Your strength.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Who speaks for you? (expanding on an idea I heard at Kairos)

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When the accuser of the brethren comes against you with accusations of your past, who stands up in your defense and speaks for you?

When other people judge you and make assumptions about you, who speaks on your behalf?

When the voices in your own head are full of condemnation and shame and guilt, who will be lone voice of dissent that will overpower all the other voices?

When you yourself have reached the verdict of guily with the maximum sentence of hopelessness and despair with no chance of parole, who will take your place?

There is one. He who sits on the throne at the right hand of the Father and who ever lives to make intercession for you. Jesus is the one who speaks for you. He is the one who took the blame for all the mistakes and blunders and failures, paid the penalty for those sins and make a spectacle of triumphing over the Enemy on the cross. When all these voices are giving you names (and you give yourself names I can’t print here), Jesus is the one who gives you a new name written on a white tablet that only He knows. And one day you will know it, too.

The One who knows the most about you– and has the most right to condemn you –doesn’t. The One who spoke the first words of creation and will speak the last words at the end of all things speaks the final word on your behalf: “It is finished.” No one else will ever be able to bring up accusations against you again. Jesus is your Advocate and He will never, ever, ever, ever, ever stop fighting for you.

I’ve always loved the saying that goes something like: “When the devil reminds you of your past, remind him of his future.”

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Thanks, Mike. These words were a revolution to my mind. I am thinking radically different than I was yesterday. Most of all, thank you, Jesus!