Murmurs

These feelings, these ideas, these urges drive me mad.  Someone murmurs to me one picture of life, and another murmur paints a radically different landscape.  Both have benefits, both have dire consequences, and inside, my mind fights for both.  My soul craves and desires, my spirit longs for life, and my mind is the battlefield.

From time to time these murmurs are blurred voices from the past, pulling on hooks which are buried in scar tissue and that when pulled bring about only a faint pain – a pain that is nondescript and dull, without a specific story, simply a feeling.

When I follow these whispers I always end up in a black void around me, unable to distinguish my mind, from my spirit, to my soul.  A void where everything, even the great things in life have faint significance and any light that shines has not a place to reflect, it falls flat.

Yet even though this void seems endless, full of pain, gnawing, and miserable endless muted open wounds – a light still pierces the darkness until it is absorbed into my spirit and filled once again.  Beginning as a faint and distant pearl of light, it spirals down, glimmering as sunlight on a diamond.

It is this mystery that is the gift, it is this gift that is increasingly more difficult to receive, over and over, and over again.  Yet it is this gift, this light, that brings a hope and purpose to this world and a life in the next.  For if I ever forget this gift, if I ever stop accepting it then I will have lost the love that is in the light and I will cease to truly live.

Your revolution within me

In the beginning I heard your voice of acceptance and I believed in your grace.  On the mountain you poured your love on me and showed me your ways.  There were plethora points for your hand to heal.  In those first few years you built my faith.

As I went down the mountain I lost sight of your hand.  I kept looking and looking and asking why the darts kept flying my way.  Why were the images of my past driving my days?  Why in spite of my closeness to you I continued to be pulled away.  Around each twist and turn I saw the enemy and with each fight I grew weaker and weaker.  Where does my faith finally win out over the lies?  When will I finally be relieved of the torture?

I stand here and worship you for each day, some full of dark some full of light.  I praise you for the light, and I praise you for the dark, for in the dark I meet your grace.  You pour out gifts, blessings, and opportunity, in spite of my wickedness and my transgressions.

Only because I choose to believe in your love for me, do you choose to pour out more on me, and I turn it back to praise.  Even when I fail to give thank, and fail to honor you, and choose to fall, you still pour out.  I do not deserve, I do not even try, all I do is stand in awe.  May I always tap into your revolution within me.

New job and open doors

About a month ago I began thinking about why I had so much anxiety in regards to work, while I like the job, the tasks, that I do for my current employer, I really did not see any opportunity to move forward, not that I would with just about two years to go before the big move, but there wasn’t even the ability to move laterally and do something different if I felt like it.  Then some decisions and issues with the company began happening, shortly after our return from Kraków in October – and these things just added to the list, all of it in the area of employee-care -basically there was none.

I began praying and asking God for an open door, I didn’t post my resume anywhere, I didn’t knock on every IT firm out there – I simply prayed and God reminded me of one place…

So, I checked out a company that one of my former co-workers (form my current employer) is working for now.  And they had a position listed on their website – so I applied.  I contacted my old co-worker and he gave me a good reference – a few days later I had an interview, then a week later a final interview with the CEO.  On Saturday they gave me an offer, I counter offered (too much of a pay-cut even with the benefits being so much better) they came back with a very reasonable offer.  So starting on December 5th (strange a Friday, but gives me a good full week of real work instead of HR stuff) I will be employed by Smarsh, look at their website to get an idea of what they do.

Finish life update – back to the regularly scheduled program – oh wait – there hasn’t been any.

Dear Church Member,

Shared by TravisM

Amen – Make it so!

Check out the original here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/RagamuffinSoul/~3/460026558/

(This is not written to anyone in particular. Rather to every church member of every church out there)

You may like the way your worship leader sings.
You may like the way your worship leader looks.
You may like what your worship leader says.
You may like the songs your worship leader writes.
All that is dandy.
It is great to feel those nice, pretty, shiney things.

But it is not about you.

It is not about your likes, needs, and comfort at all.
The reason they stand before you is to lead you to a place of unabandoned worship in your Savior.
The reason they stand before you is to display to you a lifestyle of worship that God has called you and them into.
The reason they stand before you is to CHALLENGE you that your level of praise to God Almighty should take a step up.
The reason they stand before you is because God Himself, has called them, TO LEAD YOU in worship.
This means that you need leading.
So stop staring at them, and start following them.

Get The Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus to lead worship at your church if you’re in it for kicks and giggles.
But if you are in it to be led…
Swallow your pride and follow your leader.
Los
My Thought’s For The Worship Leader…Click Here

Priority creed

Knowing my priorities in life has been the number one prevention of stress in life, that is when I actually stick to my priorities.  My number one priority is my relationship with God – this means I make a point to be disciplined in knowing God and letting God know me.  The second priority is with my wife – when my relationship with God is right it helps me be the Godly husband that flows out of a right relationship with God.  My third priority is to my family as a whole – when Alexis and I are right, our household is right, and together we can minister with compassion, love, and righteousness to others.  From there flows everything else, ministry (missions, young adults, small group, etc), friends, work, etc.

Yet what does a priority look like?  How do I actually live these out as priorities?  The most tangible way for us has been to actually schedule each priority out.  I take my relationship with God and put Him on my calendar first – for me that looks like studying His word (so I put it on my calendar to do this each morning), being on a worship team (this is personally my number one way of connecting intimately with God), and making my daily decisions prayerfully.  Then the rest of our calendar is filled based on our stated priorities, in order, and one does not supercede the other, nor do other random things that seem to fly at us from all corners.

And in other news this is my 1,001st post since November of 2002 – neat!

USING THE "S-WORD" IN CHURCH

Shared by TravisM

Our culture has a lot of issues tied to money – give this article a read and see what creative solutions there may be.

Full article here: http://www.theooze.com/articles/article.cfm?id=2162

Go to church for very long, and you are bound to hear someone utter the ‘s-word’ in church. By that I mean stewardship. We often cringe when the conversation of increasing our giving comes up, especially in challenging economic times. Jesus challenges us to break away from the consumer-driven mentality that so permeates our culture and to embrace the ‘God-reality’ that he describes in the Sermon on the Mount. As we do this we find that our perspective on giving (and on life in general) changes. We put God’s portion aside first, regardless of the economy or other life circumstances.

Another creed series

From time to time I like to write about my “creeds” or personal beliefs if you will, and over the years these beliefs have changed, not dramatically.  I don’t believe they have contradicted themselves, they have simply developed and matured – and probably will continue to do so.  Even if they do contradict themselves, I pray that they continue to be based on my relationship with God and in agreement with the greatest commandments – love him with all of me, and love people with all of me.

So over the next few days I hope to take some time to address specific ideas and beliefs – some of which are of the controversial flavor.  For now take a look at my past creedal statements.

The Hansen Report: The Day After

Shared by TravisM

We have a lot to learn as Christians and what the Kingdom of God is really about – for me it has never been about America and never will be – I love being an American, I thank God for the freedoms I am given in this nation, but I live in God’s kingdom, and live by His principles, not man’s nor America’s.  We must stop trying to legislate morality, and begin expressing where true freedom comes from – knowing Jesus – and out of that real change will happen in the individual, and the fabric of our communities will change.

The following comes from: http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2008/11/the_hansen_repo.html

The view of America from Manhattan was pretty bleak on the morning after November 2, 2004. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, typically a levelheaded observer of world affairs, watched America become “two nations under God.”

“We don’t just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is,” Friedman wrote about the “Christian fundamentalists” who helped propel President Bush to reelection against Sen. John Kerry. “Is it a country that does not intrude into people’s sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn’t trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us—instead of dividing us from one another and from the world?”

The view north of Chicago in Evanston, Illinois, was even more ominous. Northwestern University adjunct history professor Garry Wills declared November 2, 2004, “the day the enlightenment went out.” No longer did America take after France, Britain, Germany, Italy or Spain. No, Bush’s America harbored “fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity.” In short, the new America shared more in common with Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Sunni loyalists. Christian fundamentalists, still fuming over the embarrassment of the Scopes trial in 1925, had finally enacted a jihad Wills dubbed “Bryan’s revenge.” Now these Christians would be able to impose their irrational, bigoted opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Thinkers like Wills could only ask: “Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?”

Four years later, perhaps Wills can answer this question more to his liking. If Sen. Barack Obama defeats Sen. John McCain on Tuesday, does that mean the Enlightenment’s flame has been rekindled? Has science won the tug-of-war with religion? Would Friedman conclude that two Americas have become one again?

Elections make intelligent people say and do unintelligent things. But they also make faithful people talk and act as if they had little faith. Focus on the Family Action is circulating a hypothetical letter from 2012 that explains how the United States has changed in President Obama’s first term. According to Focus on the Family Action, Obama rallied support from Democratic majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives to mandate same-sex marriage across the country, eliminate restrictions on abortion, and reinforce the wall that separates church from state. Each of these developments is plausible, given Obama’s track record and campaign statements.

But Focus on the Family Action goes further. They speculate that “Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity, Navigators, Baptist Campus Ministry, and Reformed University Fellowship have shrunk to mere skeleton organizations, and in many states they have simply ceased to exist” due to restrictions on “hate speech” including opposition to homosexuality. In response to new educational standards, many home-school families have emigrated to Australia and New Zealand. Some Christian publishers have gone out of business, since protests have led many chains and Amazon.com to ban their books. Christians can hardly work in the health-care industry, since they can no longer opt out of procedures that violate their consciences. On top of everything else, inner-city violence has increased, because private citizens of eights states can no longer bear arms.

Who’s to blame for this doomsday scenario? Focus on the Family Actions tells us that many evangelicals voted for Obama since they wanted change and didn’t understand his true agenda. Yet despite their culpability in the horror unleashed in 2008, “Christians on both sides should continue to respect and cherish each other’s friendship as well as the freedom people have in the United States to differ on these issues and to freely speak our opinions about them to one another,” Focus on the Family Action writes.

At this point, you might wonder where trust in a sovereign God fits in this scenario. Indeed, Focus’s hypothetical “Christian from 2012” writes, “Personally, I don’t know how we are going to get through tomorrow, for these are difficult times.” And yet the writer could affirm, “I still believe that God is sovereign over all history, and though I don’t know why he has allowed these events to come about, it is still his purpose that will ultimately be accomplished.”

Perhaps this profession of faith would ring true if the letter were true. But as a projection of conservative Christians’ greatest fears before the fact, the letter stokes fear and encourages faith in government as the ultimate arena for advancing the gospel and promoting biblical morality. It tempts Christians to hope and trust in government as if they were the very progressives Focus decries, the ones who have leveraged political power in recent decades to advance their social agenda with and without popular support.

The Sunday after Election Day, many evangelicals may feel as if they have lost hope. Some may rejoice with hope they never even feel in God. Maybe everyone will still be shocked by an unexpected election result. No matter what happens, pastors can reassure church members that “there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom. 13:1). No matter who becomes the next president, he won’t be more hostile to the Christian faith than Emperor Nero, who ruled over the Roman Christians who received this letter. And yet the apostle Paul told them “he is God’s servant for your good” (Rom. 13:4).

Faith is not blind hope that everything will turn out okay. This election will affect how Christians live among their neighbors for decades to come, for better and worse. But faith must at least lead Christians to leave the scare tactics to the skeptics.

 

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