Random Thoughts

· Proverbs is a great way to start the day

· My mouth runs way too far ahead of where it should be

· God is so very good

· There is so much information flooding me every day nothing soaks in

· Mornings are so much more fun now that I am older

· Love the art of a good conversation – wish I had it

· I am educated way beyond my obedience level

· The statement “I had nothing better to do..” is used different then what it says

· When was the last time I drew a picture?

· Kids are great because they believe anything can happen. When did I stop?

· I need a mentor

· I have actually cheated on my golf score when playing alone

· So many different languages but all laugh the same way

Losing a Friend

One month ago today, I got the call. The one you always fear but never see coming. The news was bad. My closest friend had a sever stroke. My college roommate, confidante, buddy, brother from a different mother and thirty-two years of friendship was down for the final count. A brain tumor that no one saw until it had left just a body slowly trickling away for the final days.

Sitting alone with him in the hospital room, I knew all the things I claim to believe about God. Omnipotent, works beyond my understanding, perfect love, sovereign rule, trust, faith, His universe means not mine, etc. But those things are much easier to believe when dealing with simple things like traffic causing the clock to move faster then you can or a store being out of your favorite brand of ice cream or even losing of a job to no fault of your own. Those are the trails God has equipped me to do. Those are the times I hang on to the fact that there are undeniably things much bigger then my little world. God has slowly taught me these lessons over and over throughout the years.

But this was different; there was not a 'fix' or 'work around' solution to the problem. This was not an “everything will be alright” moment. There was no reason under the sun a good, decent, god loving, 51-year old man dies. No rational for two young boys who will spend the remainder of their life without a father. No explanation that would make this add up.

I have always hated the question of WHY? It really never matters much after something goes wrong unless it makes it not happen again. This was certainly not one of those times.

“It is what it is.” “Play it where it lies.” “One day at a time.” “Shake it off”... All of those words are how I normally navigate the world but they contain absolutely no meaning when you talk to your friend on Saturday, see him lying in a coma on Monday and feel the hole rip open in your heart as he departs on Thursday.

God doesn’t pass out too many true deep friendships in this life and when you loose one… it cost you. It cost down to the deepest part of you.

I can truly say I am so thankful to be hurting right now because every ache is directly proportional to the amount of life we shared together – like college life, the first job, finding the right girls (after spending a lot of time checking out the wrong ones), marriages, kids, maturing, holidays together, weekends at the lake, football games, lots of golf or just hanging out. However, most importantly over the past few years we each found our way back to relationships with God. A truly amazing experience.

Deep morning comes from deep loss which can only come out of deep friendship.

Thank you my friend.

Thank you God.

The Sea

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine De Saint Exupery

How often do we as Christians wrap ourselves in the details of building the ship instead of casting the vision of the endless immensity of the sea? If God's endless immense love is not communicated then the acts of discipleship in ones life will never find their target. I blush at how often I have beat the drum of reading the Bible or finding your quite time or getting involved in service but spent too little time kendeling a desire to be like Christ.

What is it like for even a small moment in time when my heart is touched by God? Why does the creator of an entire universe allow me to draw near? Where does this amazing peace come from when everything seems to fall apart around me? What happens when my eyes open to see what God is really doing around me? What does it really feel like when God connects my heart with another heart to share their load?

That is what I need to find out how to say. Then reading the Bible, quite time, service, solitude, worship and prayer will be joyous simple tasks that build the ship to float along on God's endless sea.

Yes, Lord

When you give your life to Jesus it really is just your first ‘YES’. It is the beginning of a life of saying ‘YES’ to God. Saying I trust you with my life. - Erwin McManus

A true Christian life is a long series of yeses to God. We should always be ready to say YES! The first yes means very little without the next one and the next one and the next. Aren’t the acts of discipleship simply preparing a heart to listen and respond ‘YES’? If I sit back in the glow of my first yes to Christ and never listen for God’s direction or follow the path Jesus laid out, what purpose have I served? The hard heart is one who refuses to say yes and rejects that God’s infinite understanding of life can be trusted to do what is right for me.

O Lord, prepare me to hear without doubt and act with out stipulation.

Beyond the Sun

This week, I will start leading a group through a look at Tommy Nelson’s study of Ecclesiastes (A Life Well Lived: Living with a Perfect God in an Imperfect World). Always love this book of the Bible even though it seems so bleak. I guess it because we get a chance to share the wisdom of Solomon and who else has received God’s gift more abundantly. Solomon had more wisdom, wealth, influence, power and everything else then any of us will ever have and he comes to one conclusion over and over and over again…it is all meaningless. No matter what we do under the sun we end up right where we started, dust.

Life is a treadmill.

Get up, cup of coffee, breakfast, shower, brush teeth, drive to work, …, repeat, repeat, repeat. Even when we break up our routines with the special things like holidays or vacations, those are really just repeats done on a less frequent basis. No matter how much I cut my hair, do the laundry, trim the lawn or rake the leaves, I am relegated to repeat.

Ah, but maybe we live for the pleasures of life. Solomon walked through the world of pleasure on a truly epic scale. He blew the doors off with countless parties, a thousand women, grand building projects, multitude of servants, along with more gold and silver then he could count. Everything his mind could conceive - he did. He had the resources to do anything his heart desired. He undertook one of the world’s great experiments and actually tried it all. And yet his words still echo, meaningless.

The chase for more and more and more and more never reaches the conclusion we are after. The consuming focus on this momentary visit to this place called earth has never changed the results. Wise or fool, rich or poor, driven or lazy, all come to the same outcome. We die, our friends gather and remember us for an hour, grab a sandwich on the way back to the office then by the next morning everyone has returned to the treadmill. Our stuff is handed off to someone else and the wind blows through and it was as if we never existed. As Solomon found out, everything under the sun is meaningless.

So why do I love this depressing look at life? Because the wise Solomon did find an answer in his experiment. He shares with us an antidote other then a leap from the nearest tall building. He tells us simply - Enjoy!! Enjoy what God has given you. The simple things like eat, drink and work. These really are where the physical world actually makes sense. Then spend a moment and find God in these gifts. The answer is found when we look beyond ourselves, above the horizon and beyond the sun. John 10:10 says it best, Christ brings the difference between just the existing and the chasing of the meaningless, to how we were truly created to live. He removes the futility from the soul and brings about the purpose we are actually dying for. By removing love of creation and focusing it instead on the Creator, we quit settling for the temporary and reach for the eternal.

Go beyond the sun.

Treasure

With all my heart I have sought You;
Do not let me wander from Your commandments.
Your word I have treasured in my heart,
That I may not sin against You.
Psalm 119:10-11

How this burst within my soul this morning. When have I last sought You with ALL of my heart? Where was I looking? Have I truly treasured Your word recently?

Oh I love the great verses, the ones that inspire! The ones that surely I must have right because I have heard them a thousand times. But what about the rest? How often the goal has been the stroll through the word not the hunt for treasure.

What to do with words that are deep and require time to dig. The ones that involve coming to a stop and getting down on my knees. Too little time, too much effort. Leave it lay! Surely there will be more up ahead.

No, the Psalmist sought You - not the end of a chapter. He clung to the entire word like a gem of great value. Never would he put it down for fear it would be lost. He understood the value.

The same treasure is still here thousands of years later. Placed within reach but it is requires responsibility to seek it, find it, hold on to it - not letting it slip from our grasp. Could there be anything of greater value then to catch just a facet of God’s magnitude and glory found in His word? Sell everything else - obtain it.

Establish Your word to Your servant,
As that which produces reverence for You.
Psalm 119:38

Change

Another New Year. Why do we use the change of a calendar to motivate change in us?

Perhaps there is benefit as we move toward a specific point in time to reflect and prepare if any real difference is going to be made from a resolution to transform. The end of each year stirs the need to evaluate where I have been and seek guidance on where I should have gone instead. I have to say 2007 seems to have been almost a year of “Spiritual A.D.D” for me. Any long term development was frequently interrupted by the next bright shiny object that distracted me. Ironically, I may have been more consistent in starting each day with Bible and prayer but where was the growth?

Discipleship, spiritual formation, Christian maturity, what ever one names it, requires a pattern of focus that seems just beyond my reach recently. Was it beyond my reach or was it really just my failure to stretch? This is not a science, nothing to chart or measure growth like the marks on the door frame when I was getting taller as a child. Just a question, “Am I different then I was last year at this time?” My heart aches at the answer.

Rhythm

Never have been consider one with rhythm. Even though the drum was my instrument of choice in the junior high band, my teacher never once mentioned that a protegee lay inside me waiting to be discovered. After all, the drum choice was more about not having to learn to read music then an actual passion for creating the beat. Have found little in the relationship between my muscles and nerves that show a gift of rhythm.

However, God calls me to a rhythm that has nothing to do with the coordination of my body and far more about the beat of my heart. Am I in rhythm with him? Is the flow of my life in line with His pace or am I once again dancing to the beat of my own drum?

God has given the natural world around us a rhythm. Spring/summer/fall/winter, morning/day/evening/night, sowing/growing/harvesting/resting, birth/child/youth/adult. These are God’s inescapable patterns.

However, I fail to find a pattern in my life when chasing the bright shiny bobbles that too often catch my eye. Look at all I have to get done today? What do I need to push aside so I can move forward? What other information do I need so I know it all? Who is ahead of me and what do I need to do to catch up? What new luxury do I need to impress those around me? Can’t everyone see how important I am? If they would just do it MY way they could be just like me.

Oh how the world needs my management and input. If I leave it alone for just a few seconds everything falls a part. Blindly I plunge ahead not comprehending, this is what breaks my rhythm. This is the way the world cuts me off from God.

When there are those all too short seasons of unbroken rhythm in my life, there comes a peace, a comfort and a joy that can not be explained except to know I am on beat with Him. Not that everything is perfect. Problems do not just simply vanish but the importance I place on them does. Romans 8:6

Jesus showed us the beat, the perfect life in rhythm with God. It does not come by managing the world. It comes when following the One who created it.

Margin

mar·gin [mahr-jin] –noun
1. an amount allowed or available beyond what is actually necessary: to allow a margin for error.

Margin has become a word often spoken around me the past few weeks. Books are not written to the edge of the page, is this the way life should be lived? Push it to the edge!!

To the edge with my schedule, where there is no margin of time to give away when someone is in need of it. To the edge living between right and wrong, where the slightest slip and the lack of margin can cause disaster. To the edge in my finances, where every dollar (even that portion given away) is committed leaving no margin to react to those God places in my path today. To the edge in filling my mind and space with a continuous something, not anticipating that most of what God teaches comes in the margins.

How I need margin. The wide kind of margin you find in a good book or Bible. Good publishers do not fear the use of paper. Allows for places to pause and take note of what is going on. There is so little room to stop when running along the edge and the first place to cut becomes the margin.

Lord, provide me patience and humbleness to remove my definition of what is absolutely necessary and give you the margin to define what it means to go “beyond the necessary” in my life.

A Year and Half Between Posts

Been sometime since I used the Blog tool on my computer. Was getting too wrapped up in writing to be seen instead of just a journal of what God was doing in my heart. Have no plans to post on a daily basis but thought it may be good to jot down a few notes now and then to see where this leads.

Writing often slows everything down and allows the Spirit to connect the things God is doing around me. Spend way too much time wrapped up with the dealings going on inside this skin that I easily become a blind man walking among miracles. How I pray God grants focus and wisdom to see the kingdom as it unfolds. May His glory be seen and His voice be heard.