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How to Trust

March 23, 2011 in Faith, My Life with 5 Comments

I have a thing with trust. I’ll just put it out there. It is naturally difficult for me to trust. Then add a few bad experiences over life where trust was violated, intuition failed and you have hyper-mistrust.

I have been aware of it for a long time but am having to face it again. So much of it is forcing yourself to do rational thinking. When all the facts say its okay to trust and when your gut says its okay to trust, there is still that irrational, self-preservation cry in the back of your mind that screams “Don’t do it! How many times do you have to be hurt in order to learn your lesson? Are you an idiot?” You know the voice is irrational and you don’t want to listen to it but on some level you also know that you’ve been at this fork in the road before and you didn’t listen. And once again, you stand at the fork in the road but with another scar or two and a heavier load of baggage then the last time. There is a bad taste in your mouth and as you look to the left and then to the right, you secretly wonder if you even have the strength within to try this one more time. Continue Reading…

Frantic Search

March 22, 2011 in Faith with 6 Comments

“Unless the soul is fed and exercised daily, it becomes weak and shriveled. It remains discontented, confused, restless.” – Billy Graham

I have truly felt discontented and restless recently – floundering as I try to function without meaningful and quality time with God. Rollo May says that “the ironic habit of human beings is that we run faster when we’ve lost our way.” It is just like the classic scene in a movie where some guy is running in the jungle, swinging away at vines and leaves in front of him. He has lost his way and the more lost he feels, the faster he runs inevitably causing him to be even more lost than he was before. God has forced me to stop the last couple of days to just breathe, to take a look at where I’m at and how I got myself here. These past weeks I felt like I was spinning out of control from the inside out. I can handle my outside world being a little chaotic (as it usually is) but when my soul is chaotic, I am restless and franticly running in circles. Continue Reading…

What the World Needs Now

March 21, 2011 in Faith with 1 Comment

… is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. Not just for some, but for everyone.”

I was reading about a church plant, Imago, the other day in the book, Blue Like Jazz. In the book, author Don Miller talks about their humble beginning and the difficulty they experienced in growing because of their focus internally. Then the group committed itself to simply loving others because they deserve to be loved. No other agenda, no other motivation, no outreach plan for the church. Just love. In a short time. their community grew and within two years, they have grown to over 500 members. Now, the number here isn’t important but the reality of what happens when we honestly and genuinely love is. Nothing clearer in Scripture than this, right? Love God, love others.

But it isn’t easy, is it. Loving others is messy and complicated and scary. These are nonnegotiables if you are going to love others. But so are joy, care, being understood and new understandings.

“To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.” – Rollo May

Whatever love you are talking about, this applies. Eros, Philia, or Agape. To love another human – whether in a passionate way or a brotherly/sisterly way – is an opening to the negative as well as the positive. It is because it involves humans with human nature and human depravity. But to not love is shutting the door to the positive – to blessings and intensities that we would miss completely. The old adage: “It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.” And to not love means we miss a whole dimension of God that can only be fully understood or known through vulnerable love with one another. Everyone must weigh the risks for themselves but as one who used to be self-protected in this area, let me say with honesty that it is worth it to love and with the help of the Spirit, it is possible to come through any hurt to the other side which is a stronger, wiser member of God’s family.

I am committing myself to loving others more authentically, more compassionately, more Christ-like than I ever have before. Why? Because they deserve to be loved. No agenda, no manipulation. Just love. My prayer is that one day at a time, God will change my heart to match my will to love and that one day I will wake-up and realize that God has done an amazing heart-change in me and to love is no longer a concerted effort but rather way of life-breathing for me. I love without thinking and if I stop loving, I cease.

Jesus Hitchiker

March 11, 2011 in Faith with 2 Comments

Last Sunday*, I gave Jesus a ride. He was a middle-aged woman with a yellow backpack and a cane walking north on Highway 63.

Flickr: Charles Landry

I almost missed him. After finishing the second service at church, I was running late for a meeting in Ashland, a little town 15 minutes away. Speeding up the highway, I was on him before I knew it. I quickly recognized the woman walking with her thumb outstretched as the woman who had visited our church earlier in the day looking for help. She was passing through mid-Missouri on her way from Portland, Oregon, to wherever the road took her. After one night at our local shelter, she was forced to look for help elsewhere. So she came to the church.
One of our members visited with her and gave her some warm food. He came and found me and asked me what else we could do. I was getting ready to start our youth group so I told him that the shelter she stayed at was the only shelter in town. There weren’t a lot of options for her and that if she had a way to get to Columbia – a larger city 30 miles away – they had several shelters. If she needed another day, we could put her up in a hotel and try to help her to Columbia on Monday.

I went on with my teaching duties and never heard anything more about the lady.

Until I saw her by the side of Highway 63. Continue Reading…