i am presently sitting at gate 120 in the international terminal at lax, waiting to board my plane to hong kong, and subsequently jakarta, indonesia.
i want to introduce you to my new friend bob, who i just met here at the airport.
bob is 21 years old, from bowling green, kentucky and is on our flight to hong kong, then connecting to the philippines for a mission trip he is on there with international mission board. bob will be in the philippines with 5 others for 2 months, serving the people there and spreading the gospel. this is bob’s first time out of the country, and he is about to be in a foreign country, minus pretty much every comfort he knows, for two months, to tell people about Jesus.
My team will be involved in general evangelism with the people of Camotes Island including children and adults. On some days will be having backyard bible studies, playing with the kids, having bible studies with the adults, hopefully playing some Philippino basketball, maybe even planting some rice with the farmers of the region. I will just say that I can’t wait. I know that God is going to take care of me just as He has taken care of me so far. I can’t wait to see what God has in store for my life this summer.
I just want to make sure that this summer is all about Him, and not about me. This summer will help me focus on Him and loving the people of the Philippines. I won’t have television, sports scores, internet, electricity, running water, warm showers, refrigerated food, juice, disc golf, or any of the things that I enjoy in my life. But I will have no distractions. I will also have kids to love on, adults to share the word of God with, teenagers to play sports with, farmers to help on the farm, and new friends and God to lean on
i feel very blessed to have met bob tonight. as you are reading this, say a prayer for him and his team as they prepare to embark on this trip. i encourage you to pray for protection, provision and favor for him and his entire team. thank you.
“this be the realest thing I ever wrote for sure, after this a lot of folks wont like me no more…” - lyfe jennings
the dictionary defines ‘jaded’ as “tired, bored, or lacking enthusiasm; typically after having too much of something”.
yep… i’m jaded, alright. this is going to be a mind dump, so bear with me…
“i wonder if the gospel of love has become the gospel of being right” … dan merchant (author/writer/director of ‘lord, save us from your followers’)
i grew up in a horribly dogmatic and legalistic abomination, i mean denomination. =) i spent the first 25 years of my life surrounded by people who had a warped view of the salvation experience and who were quick to send a lot of people to hell if a strict religious code was not adhered to. they were so concerned with being convinced they were “right”, that in the process they weren’t really loving anybody. i left that church a little over 8 years ago, but in a lot of ways, and for a lot of reasons, i am still coming to terms with various aspects of that whole experience and continue to try to reconcile it with where i am in my life today. religion sucks.
before i go any further, i want to say that i am not angry, and i am not bitter… but if you will indulge me being totally honest here on my blog… i am tired.
i love Jesus and i want my life to reflect the character of Christ to those around me. i want to be an instrument of the grace that I so desperately need every day of my life. the ‘body of Christ’ is beautiful, man! i have been blessed to travel extensively and have met some of the most amazing and beautiful disciples of Christ all over this country and all over the world. so don’t get it twisted… i love the church… but “church”? yeeeeeaaaah… i’m pretty much not feeling it at the moment.
i’m not the only one. i often have these conversations with a few close friends of mine who are also on the same page. “church” isn’t cutting it for our generation. we desire to be a part of a thriving faith community that is making a difference in the lives of those in our respective spheres of influence.
to be fair, i do know that there are churches out there who are doing it… they are doing exactly what I am talking about… they are the hands of feet of Christ, love and justice in action that is the heartbeat of Jesus. but sadly enough they are few and far between.
i believe that the heart of God is for real live faith, love and community in action. however, in my life, i have seen a lot of people whose lives revolve around the sunday morning experience as if it were the apex of what it means to be a christian in america… who are satisfied to be “church people”… but outside of their sunday morning gloriously euphoric spiritual expression, they are having zero effect on the world around them once they walk out the doors.
the great christian paradox seems to be this… that we are quick to go to great lengths to profess our christianity, but yet do so little or nothing to act on that profession. i must wonder, when did we trade in being disciples of Christ for being “christians”? when did we trade in talking with people for talking at them? when did we trade being the church for doing church?
i am not a pastor, a priest or a theologian. i am simply someone who loves Jesus and who legitimately struggles with whether or not my life is a consistent enough reflection of the new life that i have been freely given. i don’t have all the answers. in fact, by comparison i probably have very few of them. i’m just saying something’s missing… i love Jesus, i’m just not sold on all the stuff that we’ve put in between him and us… so yeah… jaded.
i just finished watching an advance copy of “lord, save us from your followers”, a documentary by dan merchant and it got me on this page tonight. it releases june 13, and i am sure you will be hearing a lot more about it very soon. i watched the last 30-40 minutes of the film through tears, thinking “my God, people are hurting, and we’re… in church…”
you can stream the entire film online for $6.99 now. if you are a pastor, show it to your congregation. if you are a parent, show it to your children. challenge those around you… get the dialogue going where you live. be the catalyst to get the people around you off their ass and into the real world… living, loving and looking like Jesus. part of me was a little afraid to post this, but you know what? i’m tired of acting like i don’t really feel this way… tired of acting like i’m not tired. so, let the discussion begin…
“what made Jesus of nazereth the greatest lover in history is that he really knew then and he really knows now what hurts people… the loves and hates, hopes and fears, the joys and sadnesses of each of us…Jesus knows what hurts us. not only knows but, knowing, seeks us out – whatever our kind of poverty or pain, however we weep, wherever we feel unloved.
if you read the gospels carefully, you find how fine-tuned Jesus is to our loneliness, our frustration, our emptiness, our cynicism, as well he is to our joys and to our consolations; that he really know what hurts the human heart.
it shows up all throughout his public ministry on earth: with a sinful woman, the home of simon the pharisee, the woman who washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, with the adulterous woman in danger of stoning, with the thrice-denying peter, with the 23 year-old john in the upper room, with the widow weeping on the road to calvary, … it shows up in all those passages which describe Jesus as ‘having compassion’.
the greek verb ‘splagxniðzomai’ is used 12 times in the 4 gospels and is usually translated into english as ‘he was moved with compassion’. however, because of the poverty of our english vocabulary we really don’t capture the etymological meaning of splagxniðzomai, and depending on which translation of the bible you may use, it may say ‘he was moved with pity’, ‘he felt sorry for them’, or ‘his heart went out for them’, but they all miss the deep emotional flavor of this greek verb, … which is derived from another greek term meaning ‘bowels’, ‘intreals’ and ‘intestines’… the deepest parts of a person from which the strongest emotions such as love and hatred arise.
when you read in the gospels that Jesus was moved with compassion, it was saying that his gut was wrenched, his heart torn open, and the most vulnerable part of his being laid bare. and Jesus says to us, don’t ever be so foolish as to measure my compassion for you in terms of your compassion for one another.
when we speak of Jesus, as Emmanuel, as God with us, we are saying the greatest lover in history really knows what hurts us. There is absolutely nothing that Jesus does not understand about the pain that hangs like a darkening cloud over our lives.
if you are crying out and longing for a hand to touch you, an arm to embrace you, lips to kiss you… longing for someone who is not afraid of your cynicism, your skepticism, your indifference, your shallow faith, your inconsistent discipleship, … there comes a sacred man who says, ‘it’s ok. i understand, i am here, i am with you, i am for you, and your pain reverberates in the depth of my own being.”
—– brennan manning (excerpt from “he knows what hurts within us”)
i traveled to jamaica this week with the group, and during our group devotions before we went on stage in montego bay we were talking about fear. 2 timothy 1:7 was referenced (”for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind”). basically, if God has empowered us with this ‘power, love and a sound mind, why then do we still fear what it is that we fear?
after some discussion about the ‘fear factor’, the question was posed to everyone “what would you do differently if you didn’t have the fear barrier in your life?”
wow.
as we went around and shared about the fear in our lives, some spoke of public speaking and personal evangelism while others talked about things like family issues and bugs. =)
when i was asked the question, my answer was that i would act upon and make life decisions much quicker and easier, without fear of what the outcome or results may be. regardless of how it may appear, i am someone who tends carry things a little too heavy at times, and can tend to live in the ‘what if’ zone a little too much… ok, maybe a lot too much. i’m not there all the time, but sometimes it’s quite the struggle to stay out of that zone.
what if they disagree
what if it’s not popular
what if it doesn’t work
what if it ends up like last time
what if i fail
what if i am misunderstood
what if it looks bad
what if it’s not enough
what if i’m not ready
what if i am regarded with contempt
what if, what if, what if… all these what if’s!!!!
it is my experience that trying to move past these type of paralyzing thoughts without understanding where they are coming from is like spiritual shadowboxing, and we do a whole lot of ‘resisting the devil’ type stuff, but don’t focus a lot of attention on the fact that we have indeed been enabled and equipped with power, love and a sober, sound and vigilant mind… but we’ve got to use it. being able to move past this kind of fear involves a clear understanding of the authority and sovereignty of God in your life and being able to lean more on that than on the ‘what if’s’, and lean a little more every day…
i certainly don’t have it all figured out, but i am piecing it together every day… learning to stand more on the perfect love and security that Christ gives than on the false foundation of fear that is so easily focused on.
what is the fear factor in your life? what is it that you can see yourself doing if you didn’t have to contend with the fear barrier that you crash into with unsettling regularity? and what are you doing about it?
one night a friend asked his handicapped son, “daniel, when you see Jesus looking at you, what do you see in his eyes?”
after a pause, the boy replied, “his eyes are filled with tears, dad.”
“why, dan?”
an even longer pause. “because he is sad.”
“and why is he sad?”
daniel stared at the floor. when at last he looked up, his eyes glistened with tears. “because I’m afraid.”
the sorrow of God lies in our fear of him, our fear of life, and our fear of ourselves. he anguishes over our self-absorbtion and self-sufficiency. richard foster wrote, “today, the heart of God is an open wound of love. he aches over our distance and preoccupation. he mourns that we do not draw near to him. he grieves that we have forgotten him. he weeps over our obsession with muchness and manyness. he longs for our presence.”
God’s sorrow lies in our refusal to approach him when we have sinned and failed. a “slip” for an alchoholic is a terrifying experience. the obsession of the mind and body with booze returns with the wild fury of a sudden storm in springtime. when the person sobers up, he or she is devastated. when I relapsed, i had two options: yield once again to guilt, fear and depression; or rush into the arms of my heavenly father — choose to live as a victim of my disease; or choose to trust in abba’s immutable love.”
When the world welcomes us in,
We’re closer to Heaven than we’ll ever know.
They say this place has changed,
But strip away all of the technology
And you will see
That we all are hunters,
Hunting for something that will make us okay.
Here we lay alone in hospital beds,
Tracing life in our heads;
But all that is left
Is that this was our entrance and now it’s our exit,
As we find our way home.
All the blood and all the sweat
That we invested to be loved
Follows us into our end,
Where we begin to understand
That we are made of love,
And all the beauty stemming from it.
We are made of love,
And every fracture caused by the lack of it.
“You were a million years of work,”
Said God and His angels, with needle and thread.
They kissed your head and said,
“You’re a good kid and you make us proud.
So just give your best and the rest will come,
And we’ll see you soon.”
All the blood and all the sweat
That we invested to be loved
Follows us into our end,
Where we begin to understand
That maybe Hollywood was right:
When the credits have rolled and the tears have dried,
The answers that we have been dying to find
Are all pieced together and, somehow,
Made perfectly mine.
We are made of love,
And all the beauty stemming from it.
We are made of love,
And every fracture caused by the lack of love
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