Happy January …., whatever ….!

It’s a new year, it’s a new day.  Thank God.  We have all just spent several weeks since Thanksgiving celebrating many different aspects of our lives on earth, most of which are related to our faith.  For Thanksgiving, we give thanks (to God) for all the bounty of things we have been provided with.  Then comes Christmas where we throw a huge birthday party for the coming of the Christ child.  Then comes New Year’s eve when we party hardy all night long, stay up way past our bedtimes, and get all excited about – the calendar resetting.  Huh?  Seems kinda silly when you think of it that way doesn’t it?  So what is the big significance of the difference between December 31^st and January 1^st?  For some of us it means a whole new year of vacation days have been allocated (woo-hoo!).  Or maybe it means a new year of health insurance benefits are available.  None of that did it for me so I did a little Google time on why we celebrate it, and came up with this from new-years-day.com:

The celebration of the new year is one of the oldest holidays. Many believe it was first observed in ancient Babylon about 4000 years ago and that it marked the first New Moon after the Vernal Equinox. The Babylonian new year celebration lasted for eleven days. How did New Year’s Day move from the summer to the winter? A good question, especially since the spring is the season of rebirth, of planting new crops, and of blossoming. Today New Year’s Day is January 1st.  The month of January was named for their god, Janus, who is pictured with two heads. One looks forward, the other back, symbolizing a break between the old and new. The Greeks paraded a baby in a basket to represent the spirit of fertility. Christians adopted this symbol as the birth of the baby Jesus and continued what started as a pagan ritual. Today our New Year’s symbols are a newborn baby starting the next year and an old man winding up the last year.

Wow.  I did not know all that.  But I do have a suggestion on how to totally change your perspective on all this.  If the symbol today is of a new born child coming in, and an old man going out, then I submit to you that this is a holiday we can celebrate every day of every year!  One of the basic tenets of the Christian faith is that God creates a new man (baby) on the day of salvation, and the old man (sin nature) is done away with.  That occurs when we make a decision to follow Christ.  But what about after that?  You can get that rebirth anytime on any day you want it.  I do not mean another salvation experience, that is a onetime thing, but God has promised us an eternally full well of Grace that we can access anytime, any day.  Some of you will know I do this every time I take communion, I get a “fresh batch of Grace”, and a forgiveness and rebirth of sorts.  But you do not have to take communion or do anything else for that matter to have a rebirth.  You can do it every day, just by telling Him to give it to you.  Awesome.  I need it man, I need it every day.  Maybe we should name it “New Grace Day”?

So happy January 4^th everyone.  And happy January 5^th, 6^th, 7^th and so on.  Gonna be a lot of partying for me this year as I celebrate rebirth and re-commitment whenever I need it – how about you??

Happy New Grace Day!

Connections

People rushing hither and thither.  Some running and looking excited, some just look tired and bored.  Tall people, short people, people of all races and ethnicity.  Everybody going somewhere, and they all depend on the actions of others to help them get there.  Some are alone, some are with others, but they all have one thing in common. Wanna guess where I am and what it is they have in common?

If you guessed the Atlanta airport, you are right.  Man oh man are there some funny looking people here (I know – I am one of them!).  As I watched them, I realized that they all have something in common.  They are all looking for a “connection”.  I liked that word, so I looked it up on my handy dandy iPhone.  Connection means, “The action of linking one thing to another”.  Okay, that makes sense, I see lots of people linking up around here with planes taking them somewhere they want to go, but it raised a larger question for me.  What am I connected to?  What do I want to connect to?  Of course right now I am wanting to connect to a plane to take me home to my wonderful wife and daughter, but I have lately realized that I want more than that.  I want to be connected to people, and have us work together to connect closer to God.  There have been a lot of times in my life where I was pretty alone, and it was by connecting with others I came through it.  I believe we all need that, and a while back I decided I wanted more of it.

So a couple of weeks ago, I got intentional about making some connections.  I got involved with a new process at  my church called “Huddles”.  Huddles connects 2 or 3 men together to help each other be accountable.  Accountable to God, to themselves, to their family and friends, etc.  I have met twice with one of my Huddle “connections”, and I have to tell you I have really, really enjoyed it. We have now invited another man into our group, and I really look forward to connecting more with him as well.  It just feels like it’s gonna be good!  There is a process for ladies as well called “Tangles”. 

Well, gotta go make my plane connection, so I will leave you with this verse:

I Cor 14:26 – “When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.”

Sounds like we need each other, huh?  So go!  Get connected!

Life with no email ….

SO for the last two days my email account I use for like …, everything, has been down.  I feel so out of touch, plus it is my work email so I have been up all night last couple nights working on and worrying about it.

I was once asked if I could have been born in any time period of life, when would that have been.  I do not know what year it was, but I want to live in the time where you sat on the front porch as a whole family, whittled and talked and watched the kids play.  Simple.  Uncomplicated., low paced. Restful.  All those things I want in my life but cannot get most times since things come at me faster than I can handle them.  Come to think of it, I want my porch on the beach like the picture here.

I wish God would do this:

Mark 4:39
He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

How did it get like this? Is there a way to slow it all down and still be a part of society?

Here I am …, but why?

“Here I am…., On the road again.  Here I am…., up on the stage”.

You may recognize a few of the words from the Bob Seger song, “Turn the Page”.  This is what came to mind when I sat down to put keyboard to blog today.  Go check out the lyrics on that link, it could almost have been a song about blogging. 

It has been a while since I posted a blog entry, and I keep hearing Mandy Thompson tell (nag?  Encourage?) me to just stop and write, so here I go.  I thought I would just dive in and try to explain why I even want to blog my personal thoughts, since the words I blog seem to come from a place I do not readily connect to at a conscious level. Okay – that sounds strange, even to me.  What I mean by that is that I seem to have around 4 or so actual different levels of thought:

• Public – These are the thoughts I have that I communicate verbally.  They are wayyy too guarded.  Think about it – you do this too, hide your real thoughts.
• Private – Only for my own consumption.  Sorry – you would freak out if I shared those with you.  #tmi
• God stuff – I know he hears all the thoughts, but sometimes I have specific conversations (thoughts because they are not always verbal), where I think differently and more honestly than I even do internally to myself.  And yeah – he talks back to me.  I hope that freaks all you atheists out.
• Blogging – I try and mix all the above up into a written form that I want to share.  Why?  For one thing, I want to get your input, but it doesn’t matter if I do or not – just better if I do.  Secondly, I want to help you elicit a little honest thinking as I try and be relationally real at an appropriate level.  So if it makes you think a little bit…., Yayyy.

What comes out in my blogging category is a real hodgepodge of what is in my head, so can be wildly different from day to day.  But in some strange way it all comes together in a reasonable manner – or at least to me it does, your results may vary there.  It just serves a real clarifying purpose for me, as I try and organize my thinking.

So there – that’s why I am here, on the stage.  Weird, or does it make some sense to you?

del.icio.us Tags: Blogging,Bob Seger

Connecting thoughts to words

Oh my how I struggle with this.  I need to spend more time doing the oh so therapeutic spilling of my thoughts into this blog.

What I truly do not understand is why it is so hard to stop and take the time.  I enjoy it — I really do, but when it comes time to do it, it feels like a chore.  I make it worse by following people like Mandy Thompson, who totally makes me sick when I look at the apparent ease with which she is able to push good thoughts out into blogdom.

I struggle on …..

Heart exam

Christmas is in just a few days, but I am not gonna talk about that.  Can we just chat a bit instead?  I wanna get in your heart for a minute.

At a restaurant this weekend, I witnessed an obvious family argument.  It was such that it literally stopped all conversation around it as people watched the drama unfold.  The end result of it was that it unsettled the attitudes and the hearts of many people around them and literally sucked the joy from the room for a moment.  It was sad to see, and it spread grief to others so quickly.  For a moment, it made my heart heavy, and at Christmas time, that really annoyed me!

I have mentioned this before, but my good friend and pastor Jay Hanson is often heard asking the question, “What is the condition of your heart?”.  I want to ask that question of each of you today, and I want you to think of it in terms of what is deep inside, especially during this holiday season.  Jay asks a couple of companion questions as well:

-    Is your heart glad (light) or sad (heavy)?
-    Why?
-    Has someone hurt your heart?
-    Have you hurt someone else’s heart?

These simple questions can help you get closer to where you are in your spiritual life, and understand how your own heart condition can affect those around you.  By stopping and examining what is really in your heart as only you can do, you can make incredible progress spiritually and relationally.  If you do this examination on a regular basis, you can approach most things with a calm sense of peace that will take you to all the right places and decisions.  Discuss the condition of your heart with God regularly.  You will never hear anything from him except the truth, and he is the Great Healer of hearts.  I love this verse from Proverbs:

Proverbs 4:23 (NIV):
Above all else, guard your heart,  for everything you do flows from it.

As we all get ready to celebrate Christmas, approach it with a healthy heart, and guard it jealously!  If you work on getting that healthy, just think of all the hearts that will be uplifted – just because you made sure yours was light.

Merry Christmas – may God grant you a light and merry heart this year!

Reflection

Mirrors give off a reflection.  I bet you knew that already.  Why do we use mirrors?  Because we do not have the ability to clearly see an image of ourselves OR see what is behind us.  Christmas is a time of reflection.  It is a time when we stop, look into the mirror of the past, pause, think about the birth of Christ and what it means, and celebrate it with family and friends.  Okay–so that’s not anything original, right?  Well, let me give you a new way to think about it.

Every day we make decisions that can change our path for the better or for the worse.  Every conversation can strengthen a relationship or can tear it apart. During EVERY season of our lives, we should always take time to reflect.  We should stop periodically and examine where we are, take a look in that virtual mirror and see where we have been, where our decisions and actions have taken us.  Have you ever said or done anything and later found out it was the wrong thing or that it caused pain?  You found that out by reflecting, probably.  If you had never looked in a mirror of memories, you would not have realized it or had been able to see it clearly.  But, what do you do with your reflections?

Let me approach this another way and show you how to get even more value from reflection.  Since I am a computer guy, I think in computer terms sometimes.  In computer science, "reflection" is the process by which a computer program can observe and modify its own structure and behavior.  Did you catch that?  "Observe AND modify its behavior".  Ahhh, that offers a different perspective on reflections doesn’t it?  What if we did that in our lives every day.  What if we looked into the mirror of our past actions, and used what we saw to modify our behavior for tomorrow?  I’m not sure about you, but I have made some bad decisions in my past, and I really do not care to repeat them.  But, if I reflect on them and use that examination to modify my behavior, I bet that I will not make the same mistakes as easily.

So don’t pass through this Christmas season missing some really good results of your reflection.  Look at your family and reflect on how much time you have given them this year. Look at your job and decide how you may want to modify your behavior to be a better employee.  Look at the birth of Christ in the inner reflective mirror of your soul, and decide if you need to modify your spiritual disciplines as a result of that.

Life is a great thing.  Don’t pass through it without reflection – and modification.

Give up and embrace the battle

Well, it is about this time each year that we all get into the old battle of Christmas.  You know what I mean, it’s that honest desire to get back to what the holiday truly means, while all the while fighting the tide of commercialism, the “requirement” to get everyone on your list a gift (whether you really want to or not) and all the other miscellaneous society induced requirements of it all.  Are you as tired of it as I am?  Then I have a suggestion for you.  Read on.

Christmas is a fun time for a lot of reasons.  I know a lot of people like to do the shopping thing, enjoy all the lights, the parties, the tree, etc.  There is nothing wrong with liking all those things.  But (you knew it was coming, right) – how do we get back to that somewhere in your heart buried desire to truly connect to and honor the “reason for the season”?  I have a suggestion for you, and it fits nicely with this month’s theme we are doing at The Chapel on “Simplify”. 

Quit fighting the battle.  Just quit fighting – I mean it.  Quit trying to make this season be all about one process or another and simplify it by separating the two.  Address each area in its own right, but do not confuse or lose either one.  I know you are going to buy gifts, do the tree, and decorate the house.  That’s fine – do it to the best of your ability and budget, and enjoy the festivity of it all.   BUT, be very deliberate about intentionally making a plan to celebrate the birth of Christ and what that means to us all.  How you do it is up to you, but JUST DO IT in a meaningful and simple way with your family.

Need suggestions?  Well, you could do a daily reading, you could read about the songs of christmas, or how about spending time reading about the various traditions and how most all of them sprang from some religious beginning, yet have become so commercial.  Whatever your topic (Google is your friend here folks), just make a plan and DO IT.  I’m betting it will help you recover some of the lost effort of truly worshipping during this season, and possibly even relieve some of the stress.  Whether it is a daily time, a weekly time, or just a topic this year, just do it.

Make a plan – then let us know what that plan is and I will share it with others in a future blog post.  Tell me what you did, what you discovered and what God told you during this time.  It will help us all.  You can just post a paragraph on the one thing you will do this year.  Let’s see how many people take the challenge and what ideas we come up with!  Will you?????

I’m waiting for your post.

Be Thankful for Nothing

We are all thankful for something.  I can be just as thankful for the absence of something as I can the presence of something else.  Wait a sec – that was confusing wasn’t it?  Let me ‘splain then.

We tend to think of "thankfulness" as just being thankful for things we DO have.  I have my health, I have a great family, a nice car, etc., etc.  But what about the absence of things?  I for example am thankful that I do not have a serious disease.  I am thankful I do not have a big pile of bills that I cannot pay.  Right now I am thankful for there being no major drama in my life! 

I have a silly head game I play when I have a pain of some type.  For example, if I have a toothache, I think to myself, " When this pain is gone I will be so thankful, and I will appreciate healthy teeth even more".  But do I actually ever follow through on that?  Not usually, because when the pain is gone, I forget it.  When my car breaks down I am always SO annoyed with it.  Then I have to take it to a car dealer to get it repaired, which is always a difficult experience.  But when I am driving down the road on a long trip, and my vehicle obediently and reliably takes me 500-600 miles in comfort, quietly and safely, am I thankful enough?  Rarely.  Ouch.

You see where I am going here?  As we approach a new holiday season with both Thanksgiving and Christmas coming, how thankful are we for the things we do not have to deal with?  Here is a radical thought process for your holidays.  On Thanksgiving this year, before you say your prayer of thanks, have each person share something they do NOT have that they are thankful for.  You may find some interesting things, but it will also make you more thankful for what you do have.  Go ahead – shake up the tradition a little!

Here is the one I really want you to hear though.  At Christmas, before opening a huge pile of new presents under the tree this year, why not pause, and thank God for something you do not have to worry about, which was the entire meaning of the day.  Know what that one is?  You do NOT have to pay the price for your sins.  God solved that problem for you, and continues to solve it for you every day as he gives you grace and forgiveness.  Jesus died so that you do NOT have to suffer the consequences.  If that sounds hokey or religious to you, then find someone who does understand that.  Because he DID have to, I DO NOT have to.  I am so thankful I don’t.  Are you?

Go ponder this one.  It’s very cool.

“Thankless” – A word exercise

Today’s article may be a bit long, but please hang in there for me, this is something very important both YOU and I need to do today. 

When I am trying to focus on a particular subject, sometimes I focus on what is the opposite to help me think.  Today I wanted to think through what the word “thankful” really means to me.  It was easy to come up with the normal platitudes of being thankful for my job, my health, my home, etc. (and I AM very thankful for those things).  But in order to think outside of the box a bit on this I decided to think about what the word “thankless” means.

Wow.  God really hit me when I approached it that way.  There are a number of ways we can approach this word, but the primary meaning I landed upon was the idea of not being thankful and examining the ways I am indeed “thankless” to the most important people in my life for what they do and who they are.  So excuse the personal nature of this article this week, but I gotta do this.  Here goes:

To my wife:

I have not made you aware every day of the love I have for you and I am sorry.  God in his incredible wisdom has and is using you to prune, hone, shape and help me through every day.  In my imperfection I get angry with you even though I know He works on me through you.  When you do all the small things that make life so pleasant I do not focus on being sure you feel loved as a result.  You serve God by being my wife every day, and He is pleased with your service.  Thank you for making my life better.  I love you.

To my children:

You have taught me so much.  You have taught me what raw feelings of love truly feel like, showed me that pride is not always a bad thing, and you have been used by God to teach me patience and what is important in life.  You help me focus and adjust my pace as I walk each day.  You give me joy I cannot possibly describe, and make me turn to God with smiles at times, and with pleading tears at others.  You are perfect people in my eyes, and in God’s.  Do not ever forget that.  Thank you for making my life better.  I love you.

To my mother and father:

Thank you for bearing the pain of me.  You have endured it in so many ways from birth even through this present day.  I have not been thankful enough to you or for you and I am sorry.  All through my life you have loved me when I was unlovable, suffered through my mistakes in spite of my ingratitude, and always made sure I knew your love was there.  You took the small moments of love I gave you and nurtured them and multiplied them for use when I would not give you more, but you needed them.  You have been a wonderful model for me as I raise my own children.  Thank you for making my life better.  I love you.

To my sister:

Please see above in Mother and Father section.  It applies to you too.  Even if you are a brat.

And to the rest of the people in my life:

Take all the above and apply it to yourself.  God has indeed made all things perfect, and I am thankful for you all.  Thank you for putting up with me, for helping me grow, and for helping me enjoy the gift of life God gave me.

This verse sums up what you all do for me:

Colossians 3:15-16: (NIV) Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.

Okay.  That’s that.  I did my part.  I told you earlier there is something YOU need to do.  Reread the above, and if you don’t get it on your own, well, send me an email and I’ll explain it to you.  Because God would want me to.

Thanks for reading.  Now go be thankful.