Be Thankful: It's Not About Ferguson

It's not about Ferguson...  

And on Thanksgiving Eve(and always) I'm thankful for that!

There will always be a Ferguson... or an ebola... or a Crimea... or an Isis...or a Ray Rice... or a Pistorius trial... or a Benghazi... or gay marriage... or gun violence...or someone trying to take our constitutional rights away... or a conspiracy theory... or an NSA scandal... or an Obama... or a Bush... or even further back an OJ...a Vietnam... SOMETHING! 

In a few months it will be something else that everyone is upset about, that we don't even know about yet.  But, to some extent, it's all the same thing with different clothes on.  There will always be issues that are unpleasant (maybe even miserable) to at least some, and I'm not here to state opinions on any of them specifically.  But these issues quite often become nothing more than anxiety filled and hate feeding distractions.

If you are a Believer, could we consider (myself included), that if we claim to be followers of Christ, we should be more concerned with the Bible than the Constitution?

Maybe you don't care about the "big" things everyone else cares about.  Maybe those things don't weigh you down.  Maybe instead, you have your own personal "Fergusons" in your life, that distract you from the path to change. 

More likely, if you're like me at all, you have personal Fergusons and everyone else's Fergusons fighting to take you in deeper than Oculus Rift.

Ultimately the opportunity for another Ferguson will be there as long as sin is here, and sin will be here, as long as we are.  So how do we deal with it?  How do we add life to our lives, and ultimately to those around us?

Let us seek to live mature lives.  At first, I'd say that most of us would think we're pretty mature.  But let's look at it.

Immaturity takes the sin and shortcomings of others, mixes it with the successes (or lack of consequences) they have and uses it to puff ourselves up in comparison, thereby justifying ourselves and our own sin and shortcomings. This creates in us a victim mindset that we deserve more good than we have, and are, by comparison, less deserving of what "negative" circumstances we have.  It seeks to preserve itself by diminishing others, and may me manifested in a search for "justice" externally in cases that don't even involve us.   It leaves us always scrapping for approval and love, which never allows us to fully accept praise or blame for our actions.  It calls us to build walls and isolate our hearts. 

Eventually we can drop the "by comparison" point from our mindset and feel like we inherently deserve and have earned better than the hand we've been given, or on the other extreme that we are useless and devoid of purpose, without hope, and alone.  There is no thanksgiving in this, aside from when others we deem as undeserving of their lot are brought to a place in standing with our view of them. 

The more we live in immaturity, good things in life become viewed as "payment" for what we've already earned, rather than unearned blessings.  We are not thankful for them, but rather we have an "it's about time" mindset, and rob ourselves of even the joy of the thing we've experienced.  Immaturity can be dressed up and disguised, but it is exhausting and joyless at it's best; vindictive, hateful, and miserable at it's worst.  It's always seeking more, and not truly thankful enough for what it has to experience real joy. 
 
Immaturity thrives in the subjective, in the directionless, it blows in the wind like a tumbleweed in the desert... dry and alone, it's only fleeting hopes in mirages that aren't really there.


But what of maturity?

 
Maturity calls us to take our own shortcomings and use them to motivate us to be humbled, lifting others up with love, truth, grace, and mercy following their sin and shortcomings.  It knows our identity is not defined by our perceived successes or failures, while not leading us to a place that we excuse apathy.  It implores us to lift up others by means of a proper view of ourselves. 

It ignites us to have hope for and see potential in others.  It allows us to be thankful in all things, because it's driven by a proper perspective.  It allows good things to really be a gift, rather than a payment for our "good deeds" "FINALLY" arriving.  It allows us to properly grieve our losses.  It even guides us to be thankful for the successes of others and to mourn with those who mourn, because it frees us to no longer view them as competition, but rather fellow humans as much in need of grace and mercy and love as we were, are, and will be.  And it allows us to do this genuinely, not just because we feel like we "should".

It doesn't incite us to excuse wrong doing, but it doesn't give it too much power.  It is evident in a sober-minded and appropriate in evaluation of ourselves and others, because it is driven by something beyond itself and it's peers.

Maturity requires proper perspective and proper perspective requires an absolute standard.  None of us are the absolute standard, but there is One who is.  If we claim to follow Him, but live chasing mirages in the dessert, we'll dry up there, thirsting...  Living lives devoid of the Water of Life until our bodies are as dead as our souls.  I urge you brothers and sisters...Ask yourself and answer honestly...

Does my life and attitude to my current circumstances(or a portion of them), those around me, circumstances in our country or in our world reflect maturity or immaturity? 

If the latter, no need for condemnation, just drink of the Water of Life.  The more you drink of it, the more scales will fall from your eyes so to speak, and your mirages with disappear.  Then your eyes will truly be opened to love, joy, and peace.   Then you can be truly thankful.

We live in a dry land, but even IF we've been living in immaturity, we can be a wellspring of life, and your life can bring love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control... the fruits desperately needed in a hungry world.

Breaking Good Hearts (SQL)

You could have done an entire World Race, 11 months, since this happened... Some people did. So… 

I’m a little tardy, but hopefully, it’ll be a better blog than it would have been, had I typed it in 2013.

It was month 3 for S squad. I was with a couple of teams in Nicaragua. We were fresh off of our debrief, which was nice, but, make no mistake, Nicaragua was a difficult month, particularly from a squad leader perspective. Sickness swept across the squad, there were a lot of attacks of a spiritual nature, people wanted to quit and go home… some did and/or had to.

A lot happened, but that’s not what this was about.

This is about September day… and a lesson, though not exhaustive, that sticks with me.

Some of the healthier folks that day had gone out for door to door evangelism in another town. I was at the camp. Why I’d stayed I don’t completely remember, but as late afternoon rolls around and the visitation crew gets back.

I’m pulled aside and informed that something has happened. The situation is described to me, and a few of us agree that it would be best to pull everyone together to decompress and debrief.

Maybe you know what it’s like to see something that can rattle you, and maybe stick with you for a long time.

This day, they saw one of those things.

So we all gathered up, and the teams began sharing their understandings and feelings on the situation, recounting, among other things, their confusions, frustrations, and internal struggles from what they’d experienced.

All I knew to do was listen (which is often the best thing the “Fixer” in me could do, even if my actions sometimes fail to reflect that truth).

There were times in the conversation when I could have interjected, but thankfully didn’t. There was even a time when they asked me to speak, and perhaps I could have, but once again I felt a strong sense of… “This is not the time… I was not there… This isn’t my time to decompress...”

So I urged them to continue and that if I shared, I’d only do so after everyone else had expressed what they needed to express.

That time eventually came. And I do believe truth was spoken, but I don’t know that I would have been able to come to the realization I did, without all of their hearts being shared. And I don’t know that their hearts would have been able to be fully shared with any sort of “helpful interjection” on my part.

I don’t know how much that day sticks with those men and women, but I know some revelations have settled with me.

I won’t paint a picture of what happened. I feel like it would be dishonoring in this instance of what we’d agreed on, but, thankfully, not all lessons need a painted picture.

In life, particularly if you allow yourself to share space with suffering… if you allow yourself to step into situations where it’s more obvious that you’re out of control than your normal fallacy of safety…

…you’ll sometimes encounter things that make you feel inescapably helpless.

What does the well-meaning heart do when it faces calamity that it undeniably can’t fix, or the realization that even if it heals THIS “unfixable” issue, a million more are piled up behind it? Why does God put in us a heart to break for and fight against such sorrow, yet allow us to face these things to a degree that we’re impotent to prevent?

I propose that it’s, at least in part, to bring us to dependence upon Him, via the highway of brokenness, even in our good will.

….

Sometimes we try to heal… and fix… and love the broken as a coping mechanism, balance out our sin, or a way to validate our worth.

It’s, perhaps surprisingly, quite easy to have a self-centered motive in helping others.

We can fool ourselves into believing that we can pay the bill for our breath, or, in a more “holy” sense, provide Jesus with adequate “return on investment” for His sacrifice by fixing the problems of others, or having the right answers, or even something as cool as being a “conduit of freedom.”

But what happens when this well-meaning, yet prideful, heart inevitably comes up against problems to a scale it cannot solve?

It can feel immeasurably broken. It may even quit, either feeling helpless, angry at God, or both.

But… is it not reasonable, even probable, that the Lord allows those of us who follow Him to face this to provide for us an opportunity to surrender even our good deeds to Him. In doing so we surrender a bit more of an “earning” our way to heaven mentality, and open ourselves up even more to accept His grace and mercy for what they truly are…


Undeserved.  Unearned.  Undeniably Precious.

---

THAT should be enough… but wait… there’s more… At least!

Here’s what else happens. When we empty ourselves of the pretense of our own power in the aftermath of our brokenness and place our dependence on the Lord in something, we open the door to a greater level of His empowerment, particularly in that area

When we get desperate enough to get out of the way, we can get in “the Way.”

When we get hopeless enough in our abilities, and even the scope of our dreams, to genuinely cry for a miracle and/or vision that only God could provide, we put down the cloak of trying to be “God-like, (Father-Like)” and pick up the mantle of being Christ-like, and when we do that…we can be more empowered by the Spirit, to be able do “even greater works than these.”

The Lord wants to break good hearts, so that He can replace them with something better... hearts that Love Him. That's the only kind of heart that has anything of eternal value worth pouring out into this broken world.

The fuller our understanding of our own inadequacies, the fuller the appreciation of His adequacy.

The fuller the appreciation of His adequacy, the fuller the appreciation of who He is.

The fuller the appreciation of who He is, the fuller the appreciation of what He makes and values.

The fuller the appreciation of what He makes and values, the fuller the appreciation for ourselves and each other.

Understanding our weakness, is a great first step to understanding our true value.

And when we understand our true value, we are freed up to try to change this world in outrageous ways, even if we don’t succeed, because we love them for them, not from our own need to prove our value, because we already know our value.

And THAT is the path for us to get to a place where we are more likely to see the dead are raised, the sick are healed, the captives set free.

At the very least... we are the captives that are set free, and that's not a bad start.