Mobile Post – No Small Talk

Emma

Emma will be four on April 9th and it is incredibly hard to imagine life without her, so cliche, but it really just wouldn’t be the same. She’s a super happy, well behaved, very loving, and amazing girl. She entertains herself and also plays with other kids very well, she enjoys both adults and kids her age and is a social butterfly.

I’m bias but I think she’s “perfect” in all the ways we pre-conceive for children… sure she has her moments, she argues, she whines, she does all the things kids do, but in the end she is my princess. When I think about her I rarely think negative thoughts, except maybe when I’ve just sad down on a peed on couch… and even then love is not in question.

I’ve learned so much about life, God, and humanity through this little four year old, her silliness, bed-time stalls, and temper tantrums all included. We love going on walks together, smelling the flowers, the trees (like above), and she loves just watching ducks swim around in a pond and being peaceful. Yet, then when’s with her friends she’s bouncing off the walls, running around, and having a blast, we love that she can adjust to her surrounds so well. She’s certainly thought this daddy many things about how God must feel and see us, and since we’re created in his image, it can only be that much greater!

No performance

One thing that I lose sight of so often is the awesomeness in the fact that I don’t have to perform, anything, at all, zero, for God. All I need to do is love Him and let Him love me. It’s in His love that I find discipline, repentance, forgiveness, humility, and servitude. To enjoy God in this way is great, but when I get pulled into the “faith by works” cycle it’s no wonder I lose who I am… there’s no freedom.

The worse place for me to feel the performance preasure is the “God talks” with co-workers, for some reason the performance button gets pushed, normally I play it cool, but I certainly don’t feel the anointing, or power, or eloquence that I do in other parts of my life. This performance button turns on fear too, it’s all tied together.

Time to relax, remember who I am, and know I can have the same confidence I have with my “job” as I do with my call. I didn’t gain that confidence over night, but I know that it’s here in me. Some prayer, some truth, and some worship for this area of my walk and I’ll be good to go… or at least falling forward!

The trouble thoughts

It’s always so much “fun” recovering from days where the performance button is pushed. Today was like that for me, nothing major, but just a few minor mistakes leading me to feel frustrated with myself.

In an environment with multiple simultaneous demands, interruptions, and the need for accuracy to save my poor co-workers from confusion and frustration, I have a hard time hitting the spot all the time. Worst of all is when it happens multiple times.

The trick in these scenarios is stepping into the truth that I’m just human, mistakes happen, I’ll slow down, make adjustments where needed and move on. My identity is not tied to my performance, this is a truth that is FAR harder to live out, and it’s one that I encounter all the time. If I want an easy way to stress out, be mad, be more frustrated, and treat poeple as non-human, it’s forgetting this vital truth.

When I get in the groove of performance then I actually start making more mistakes, covering them up, making excuses, and really just cause more problems. It’s a huge snow ball effect, one I don’t recommended….

My identity, and the original and true identity of all, is within the Kingdom, where Jesus says we are his children, and by that alone we are righteous, pure, and good. Getting into the Kingdom is not a performance game, so living as a citizen of His Kingdom requires nothing but unconditionally loving Him, loving others, and loving myself.

Listen, it’s always best.

So, I had wrote a rather long post about stepping into the Kingdom and how it takes knowing your true identity…. but you see… I didn’t listen.

Right after finishing it up on my phone, I had a momentary “thought” to save it as a draft. But instead I went looking for a good picture to compliment the post…. well now I have no post because I didn’t listen to that voice, that very kind and gentleman like voice, that told me I should save a draft first… because as soon as I found that “perfect” picture. CRASH, WordPress said “force closed”. End of story, game over.

You see, I actually had as feeling that I should wrote about listening earlier… but I didn’t really “feel” it… instead I had a great idea to pontificate about some idealistic thing like Kingdom living… well, the King gets His way. He was nice about it though, I’ll hit up the link on Kingdom living and identity soon enough.

Two weekends ago I was engaged in a worship experience that was just right… love, truth, and grace flowed into my spirit, perfect until… that darn voice.

The voice said “there’s a ripe group here, the harvest is now”. Oh man! I knew it, and he asked me to get that message to the speaker. I stalled, big time. The speaker was no less than 20 feet from me, worshipping as well, my heart was quick… but I was nervous… not exactly walking in my identity.

A song or two went on and then, it happened, the nice gentleman (AKA, God, our King) apparently laid the same message on our worship leader too. Dave (our worship leader) began praying for those that were ready to know Jesus. I knew I needed to still emphasize that prayer to Arlin (our pastor speaking that service)… but I never did. Even when I told my wife, and she gently encouraged me, something was frozen in me.

I know what I should have done, and I had an hour or so of “grrr I should have…..”, thankfully I also heard Him say “I still did my work”… and I’m sure He meant in me and in the ones who were ripe. Next time!

Oh but there is JOY!

In contrast to my musings yesterday… I just wanted to remind myself and whoever might still read this that there is JOY in choosing to make sacrificial decisions. Now, my tendancy, and I think many Christian circles imply this, is to live life with God as if every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So if I decide to be selfish there’s a negative, and if I choose to sacrifice, there is a positive…. However I don’t read that idea in Scripture nor do I really see that happen in my life.

No, instead I usually always have another decision after every choice I make. I can choose to follow what God is calling me to do and then choose to react in dismay and complain about the apparent loss (no joy). Or if I choose to be selfish and leave God out of the picture I always have the opportunity to bring Him back into the picture and live in grace (joy) and possibly avoid the negative… or not, and live out whatever consequences the world we live in has in store. There’s a lot more I could add to this, but I’ll leave that to some other post.

So no matter my decision, I really do have the choice to then experience His joy. The kind of joy that comes from trusting God in provision, love, relationships, and with my emotions and circumstances. Because every time I choose to make what looks like a sacrifice in my eyes I always experience more peace, more confidence in Jesus, ands most of all the joy that no matter the situation, in the end we will ultimately have ever-lasting joy.

Sometimes though this joy can seem, at best, elusive and many times at worse, non-existent. This is when I have to take action and turn to Jesus for further guidance, further confirmation, but mostly just lean in on His truth. When I remember that we are in a war, and take His truth into the battles, I always encounter joy that can not be explained. These days, more often than not, it is in simple songs of worship, simple prayers of honesty, and sacrifices of my flesh where I encounter the joy and victory that only my Savior, the LORD my God, Jesus and His Holy Spirit can impart.

Love, live, life?

I’m not quite sure what direction I want to go with this post but I’ll try to explain something that has been going on in my heart for a while now. It’s about how christian (maybe just Americans?) people handle decisions, how we make choices, and the things we weigh and use to justify our decisions.

If God is sovereign, if he’s our protector, and if he’s all loving…. then why do we let so many other items influence our decisions? I’m not talking about deciding what to eat for breakfast, I’m talking about decisions that have an impact on our relationships. Things that require commitment… many times instead of hearing “I think God is calling me to…. a new church, job, ministry”, whatever the case may be I hear things like… it’s safer for our family, it’s just more relaxing, the people seem more real, and my “favorite” God shows up more….. (myself included!).

That’s certainly not an exhaustive list, and at the same time God can certainly call us to do something or go somewhere and these other “good” things be true. But if our decisions and the way we communicate them are not about a work of God in your life… then are we living the Gospel? Jesus has some pretty straight ideas on what it takes to follow him… and a safe, clean, no risk life isn’t what I read. Leave your family, leave your possessions, sell everything for the common good of our brothers and sisters… share all. Those are just some of the things I read.

Now of course we don’t want to go off the deep end, because our decisions should never violate our Kingdom commitments, God, family, the Church community… of course living all of that out is a lot of work and discernment. Love first, love second, then make a decision. Let God’s voice lead our decisions, not the external issues. This doesn’t mean ignoring those issues, just don’t let them lead.

Basically, are our decisions putting trust into our LORD? Or into something else? Trust me when I say this… the enemy will devour and hijack you unless you take full responsibility to trust God AND be in active warfare with your LORD.

Gone stale…

I’ve let this Blog go stale… my bad. Honestly this is because I think too much about the (possible) reactions of others. It’s a catch 22, because I want interaction but I don’t want to be misunderstood or labled. A lot of assumptions are made when people read things…. or may just the large chunk of people who like to over-react (without gathering facts or at least attempting to have some kind of compassion for fellow humanity) on comments all over the web.

So my stale-ness is due to fear of being rejected…. ok I’ve admitted that… when will this beast just go away. It wont I need to allow it to be slain, and there’s only one person I know who can slain beasts like that.

More will come… soon!

Values

I like to have a review of my values from time to time. Many times values and priorities can be a little hard to separate yet I’ll just go with the flow and figure out the priorities later.

This is not an exhaustive list, rather this is more of a evaluation if certain spoken or desired values that I would like to make priority and be more intentional about.

Life with God: Currently I’m enjoying a good continuous conversation with God but I’m not including him in every aspect.

Marriage: The past 6 months have introduced a lot of fantastic things, feeling like we have a stronger friendship is one of the best pieces. I would like to see myself feeling more natural about it, but I guess having to think about it and be intentional has its benefits.

Church: This is probably the most lacking for me right now. While we are “there” on a very regular basis the community aspect of it seems harder and harder to live out due to people being so insanly busy that organic family-like community is hard to work out. We’ll be joining a small group soon and I have a lot of ideas and ideology that may be hard to not expect.

Humanity: Still very much stuck on living a life of compassion giving… our society culture do not cultivate the humananity focused and compassion I feel. God is people focused, why aren’t we?

More laters ….

Share your life more and gain so much more!

Acts 2:46 NLT

They worshiped together at the Temple each day, met in homes for the Lord’s Supper, and shared their meals with great joy and generosity.

Everytome I read this verse my heart grieves because deep down it seems so right and yet deeply troubling to actually live out. I long for it, both Alexis and I do, it’s exactly what we feel is the core to our mission in Poland. But the “how” is enormously bigger than us. Which it’s that very reason we contend for it.

Imagine life in constant connection with fellow believers, the support, the encouragement, the love. You might be thinking “yeah right, I can hardly stand an hour in church!” This might be true but let me provide some perspective.

You see, we’re not talking about living in a commune, we’re talking about living intentionally. Living near one another, meeting daily for mutual encouragement and teaching. That could be 2 people for coffee/tea or that could be 20 to pick up garbage around the neighborhood. It could be having a discussion about God on Facebook or it could be sharring our arts and talents with our surrounding community.

I think we have a hard time imagining such a life because we live in the world on a day to day basis and meet together once for an hour. So the majority of us are surrounded with world influences which drain us and bring us to our ends. Having our passion fanned by fellow believers each day, while different and probably at times difficult, at least will allow for God to move (assuming we are genuinely surrendered to Him). It’s kind of scary, yet who can be against us when he is for us?

Be intentional, love, give, live. Then we may be equipped to reach our world, energized, in love, and full of love that is beyond this world’s understanding.

The stuck thoughts

Sometimes it seems that my thoughts and ideas don’t really mean anything. Most of the time I figure most people probably don’t care and/or are not open minded enough to consider other ideas. Yeah, I know, jaded and cynical, honestly though within my sphere this is the general attitude. Please note I said general, I know awesome, open minded people as well.

So because of this jaded view many of my thoughts get stuck. This, my friends, is people pleasing at its best. Not able to pontificate my ideas and thoughts because I think others don’t care? Dumb.

I also sometimes can’t meet my own standards, for instance, I prefer to not get political mostly because I have strong thoughts and it seems somehow everyone else in my circle either doesn’t care or are the extream at one end or another. I prefer longer more fleshed out discussions and most of the time life doesn’t dish out the opportunity.

So all this just to say, there’s actually a lot going on in me, it’s just a matter of priming the pump and stop being so concerned about others. All while honoring my values to stay on the high road, honoring God, and respecting humanity.