A couple days ago I started a new devotional on the YouVersion Bible App. I’m always doing a devo through the app in addition to my morning quiet time because they’re so quick and applicable. I found this devo called “The Overwhelmed Challenge” by Perry Noble and it’s been a nice time for me to dwell on trusting in God.

Do you really though? If you’ve ever sung Martin Nystrom’s “As the Deer”, you’ve sung the lyrics above. But did you really mean it when you sang them? Do you really love God “so much more than anything.” I’ve sung these words several times throughout my life and I can honestly say that for the first time in many years, I actually meant the words when I was singing this recently.

As humans, we are inherently flawed. Let’s not get into a theological debate about this. I believe that you and I are born sinful and remain sinful for the duration of our life. Fortunately, we have a God that overlooks our inherently sinful nature and forgives us with the redeeming blood of Christ. But don’t get confused. You are sinful. I am sinful. We are sinful.

With that sinful nature, we have a tendency to place people and/or things above God. I’ve spent the last 8 years with my ex-wife above God. I had a relationship with Him. I loved Him, worshiped Him, prayed to Him, read His word, and listened for His call but I did all of this with the subconscious mindset that He was #2. It was so subconscious that I didn’t even want to recognize or admit that it was true. I wanted to do what God wanted me to do and be in His service, as long as it fit into the scheme of making my ex-wife happy.

During the early parts of my separation, I found myself asking for God’s help and healing. I was asking for Him to work in my life and lead me the way He wanted me to go…as long as it would bring my wife and me back together. The problem is, God doesn’t work like that. We have the free will to follow His path or another path and He will not force us in either direction.

I’ve taken the blinders off. I’m no longer following the path of what I want. I still ask for God’s help and healing but now I’m also asking for His direction, without the stipulations. I’m determined to place myself completely in His hands. I’m determined to figure out exactly what it is that God wants for me and from me and see that come to fruition.

We serve a loving, forgiving God that wants to see us living fulfilled lives within His purpose. Whatever He has in store is far greater than anything we could ever imagine. It’s seems foolish to want to limit our own potential by thinking that our imagination is greater than God’s realization.

I’ll leave you with two verses that have gotten me through a lot of the past few months. Be encouraged. God has a plan for you and for me. Just make sure you love Him “more than any other, so much more than anything.”

This morning I ran my first 5k. Something I’ve been wanting to do for 2 years but always had a reason or excuse not to do it. Now, as I’ve been training and preparing, all my friends who are experienced runners have been warning me not to start off to fast or try to keep pace with everyone else. “Just steady your pace to what is best and comfortable to you,” they’d say. I was mentally ready for that race to start and when I did…I took off. I looked around and thought I was doing a great job. Keeping pace with just a few others and doing my own thing.

Special shout-out to one of my favorite persons in the world, Jim Wilson, for running it with me!

On December 26th of last year, I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw. Not necessarily that I hated myself but I definitely hated the way I looked. I’ve spent most of my life a little bigger than average. In high school and college, I wasn’t exceptionally overweight but I was bigger than is healthy. Since college, I allowed myself to get comfortable and balloon up to a high of 249 lbs. I dropped some of it in a failed diet attempt but wasn’t even close to being satisfied.

“You can get fired, dumped, dumped on, and pulled through the eye of a needle, and still feel held by the container of joy — the truth of your existence.”

When I was a child, my parents would make me eat my vegetables. The nerve of them. Eating vegetables didn’t make me happy and I wanted to be happy. I didn’t care what was good for me or the long term ramifications of not eating vegetables, I wanted candy, not vegetables, and nothing could convince me otherwise. Of course, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that my parents only wanted what was best for me and changed my tune, especially with my recent decision to change my fitness lifestyle. But isn’t that all too often how we approach life? I want to do/be/experience/try what makes me happy. The problem with that mentality is that happiness is fleeting. People can spend their entire life being “happy” and still feel completely unfulfilled.

Happiness is really selfishness to some degree. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be a happy person. And I’m certainly not saying that I never pursue happiness. Running makes me happy but I do it every day because it’s good for my health…and that’s what happiness should be, a secondary function of why we do something.

Happiness should be a secondary function of our pursuit of joy. How do we find joy? Well personally, I think we find joy by finding what I call our “sub-purpose”. I think everyone on this earth has two general purposes:

1. To glorify God in everything we do

2. To spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Those are blanket, all-encompassing purposes. It’s why we were created. Now, I also believe that we each have individual sub-purposes that fall under both of these purposes. Some people have the sub-purpose of being a leader, some are administrators, some are comforters, etc. You can also think of these as “spiritual gifts” of sorts. What personality traits do you have that make you, you? What makes you stand out?

Once you figure out your sub-purpose, you have to figure out how you can use those in a way that glorifies God as well as edifies your life and the lives of others. For example, I’ve discovered that my sub-purposes (or “spiritual gifts” as the test I took termed them) are evenly scored between leadership, exhortation, and discernment. This didn’t really surprise me as I love teaching people. I love pouring into others lives and I love challenging people to think deeper, go beyond the surface. And I’m always evaluating everything. Literally everything. Like I said in an earlier post, I’ve been accused more than once of over-thinking things. Because of these sub-purposes and my passion for music and youth, it’s only natural that I serve in music and youth ministry. I get great joy out of what I do. And that’s to what it all comes back: Joy.

Stop pursuing what makes you happy. It’s disillusioned to think that success in life is about making yourself happy. True success is about finding alignment with the will of God and glorifying Him. It just happens that a beautiful side-effect of finding that will be happiness and fulfillment. And even more importantly, don’t let others have any affect on your joy. When you allow others to affect your joy, you’re giving them god-like control in your life. Search for your joy in God’s call on your life. And eat your vegetables.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 28:19-20 (NIV)

“And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Acts 2:21 (NIV)

“But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior” Titus 3:4-6 (NIV)

“Truth spoken without love is condemnation; love spoken without truth is compromise; but truth spoken in love is accountability.” Lloyd Ziegler

Post-Easter, many people are on their spiritual high. They’ve been to church, they’ve mixed their “Christ-cocktail” with worship, fellowship, and a sermon, filled it to the brim and now they can sip on it until it’s empty right around Christmas. It may empty before Christmas and they may or may not choose to come back and refill before then. Either way, you can pretty much count on them coming back around Christmas, other than that, don’t have high expectations.

As someone who works in ministry, this pisses me off. Not at the person. At the church. Why? Because we allow it to happen all too often. We allow people to think a lukewarm relationship with Christ is acceptable. We are scared to offend, to scare away people and their money. We are afraid that using a harsh tone might be misconstrued as “not being Christ-like”. Christ called us to love. He called us to be merciful and full of grace. He called us to be righteous through His redeeming blood. He called us to share all of these things with others too. But He also called us out to preach the gospel, His gospel, His truth. And it’s important that we remember that there is a difference between being a lover and being an enabler.

It’s should not be the church’s (we are the church) priority to focus on money, numbers, appearances, and enabling for the sake of these things. Yes, we need money, numbers, and appearance to operate as a business, but it should never be the focus. The church’s priority should be people and spreading the message of Christ.

People need Christ. Plain and simple. We all need Him. It’s literally the basis of our entire belief system, or it’s supposed to be at least.  Without Him, we perish; with Him, we attain mercy, grace, and righteousness. And it’s the church’s job to see that connection made. We aren’t doing our job by bending over backwards to offer contentment and complacency with a water-downed gospel. Our message needs to be engaging and attractive but it must not become these things at the price of truth.

My challenge for you and myself is a renewed focus on spreading the message of Christ. We need to share it with those who don’t accept it and we need to encourage those who do accept it to keep their “Christ-cocktail” not just full but overflowing. Isn’t that our real job anyway?

I’m sure you’ve heard the song “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell. You may not realize you’ve heard it from the name but if you listen to it, you’ll instantly recognize it. The song’s famous line “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got until it’s gone…” is mostly intended to reflect concern over caring for the environment vs. industrialism. Now it’s somewhat of a cliche phrase used in all kinds of “loss” circumstances. I wonder how often people look at the reverse perspective though. I wonder how often people lose something and it opens their eyes to all the other things they’ve always had.

In one of my recent posts, I discussed how easy it is getting caught up in and focusing on the negative in situations like the above. I talked about how important it is that we focus on the positive. One way I have found myself able to do that is taking a step back and seeing what I’ve always had and maybe never noticed before now. The other night, I went to dinner with some friends. They’ve been in my life for a good while now, since I’ve moved to Texas, but I’ve never really been exceptionally close to them. For most of dinner, I was texting with my ex-wife about some logistics of our divorce and that had me in a pretty foul mood. I was focusing on the negative. At some point, one of the persons with which I was having dinner had my phone and I kind of freaked out because I didn’t want them to see the ongoing conversation I was having. It was at that point that I opened my eyes to what was in front of me. I had spent the evening texting and focusing on things I shouldn’t have rather than enjoying the company of friends right then and there. I put the phone down and enjoyed a wonderful evening with some truly wonderful people.

Since then, I’ve hung out and conversed with these friends several times and I don’t think they really know how much of a blessing it is to my day. That’s true for multiple other friends and relatives as well. One of the greatest things that has come out of this situation for me personally was reconnecting with two people whom I love very much that I hadn’t spoken to in almost 9 years. I’m not going to lie, I sacrificed several friendships and relationships for my marriage. Not always because she asked me to, but because I allowed myself to be wrapped up in the one relationship that mattered most to me at the time. Joni Mitchell had it right that sometimes we don’t know what we have until it’s gone, but it’s important for us to remember that sometimes we don’t know what we have and of what we are capable until something else is gone. If we are willing to open our eyes, oftentimes we will find that it’s in our darkest moments that we can finally see those who truly love us most.

In Greek mythology (and the Harry Potter books), there is a creature called a Phoenix. There are many legends surrounding the miracles and powers of this bird but the most commonly associated legend is how it’s life is cyclical. It never ends. When the Phoenix is ready to die, it bursts into flames. Once it has dissolved into ashes, it is reborn out of the ashes, beginning it’s life again. While that’s a neat story, it’s certainly not what we as normal, mortal human beings can ever expect in reality. But wouldn’t it be awesome? Would it be great to have a redo button sometimes. Life isn’t going your way? Just start it over!

It’s easy to get caught up in what is going wrong. Not just when something major happens but also in every day life. We find ourselves naturally drawn to dwelling on the negative rather than the positive. That’s simply us being human. We are broken, sinful beings. We have to fight our natural urge to pass judgment, to criticize, to be negative. Some are better at fighting it than others but we all have that same base sinful urge. That is why it is so important that we fight against it. Early into my separation, I find myself completely caught up in the negativity. That’s perfectly normal and even reasonable. My life as I saw it was falling apart. However, I believe that something being normal or reasonable doesn’t necessarily make it acceptable.

We are called to be like Christ. We are called to model our lives after him. As we approach Good Friday and Easter, I’m inclined to dwell on the significance of His sacrifice. As Christ was verbally, emotionally, mentally, and physically assaulted, it would be deemed perfectly normal and reasonable for Him to say “Forget it. I don’t have to take this. You guys are on your own.” It would be reasonable because He didn’t have to take it and we DO deserve to be on our own. But it wasn’t acceptable. Not to Christ. He knew that focusing on Himself and the negative aspect of what He was going to endure couldn’t even come close to outweighing the positive.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to say that Christ dying on the cross was positive but it undoubtedly was. The image of the cross is deeply personal to me. I have two tattoos of crosses and a ring with a cross on it that I wear every day. This is strictly for my own edification. I look at the cross every day and think about the crucifixion. Not in a morbid or sad perspective, but with a mentality of love and mercy. I have life because of what the cross symbolizes. Much like the Phoenix, we have been given life out of death. And for that, I will choose to be positive in my circumstances. I will choose life. I will choose to keep my eyes on the cross.

If you really think about all the “ages” a person can be, there are so many that are insignificant when viewing it from a milestone perspective. At 16, you finally get to drive; 18 you legally become an adult and can vote or smoke (or 19 for smoking depending on where you live). At 21 you can purchase alcohol, and even 25 holds a milestone for hotel and rental car purposes. 40 and 50 aren’t really significant from any extra privilege stance but are milestones in themselves for how “old” someone is getting. I remember joking with my dad about turning 55 because he could begin getting senior discounts at many places.