I was reading an article today that made me wonder why it is so hard to break out of the cycle of activities that so many think define us as Christians. The article commented on a mother who would read a chapter of Proverbs to her kids at breakfast and their family would always attend a weekly corporate worship service. I’m sure that more was inferred when the article states, “Now, having modeled Christian faith before her children…” Because, is that really it? If you pray, and read your Bible and “go to church”, is that how we display our faith to our children and to the world?

I want my kids to see that I have an everyday relationship with Father as real as I do with them. I talk to him, I share stories about him, I talk about how he might be leading our family in important decisions. I want them to see how we give of any money we might have to help friends who are in need. I want them to see how we care for people, call them, visit them, or even just hang out with folks. I want them to see how everything we say and do is “modeling our Christian Faith”.

Don’t you? Do you want your faith to be encapsulated in the things we deem spiritual? Did Jesus? Was the extent of what he taught, “Be good, read your Bibles, pray, and make sure you ‘go to church'” Was that it? Didn’t he teach us that the Kingdom is so much more ordinary. More common. It’s like a farmer who scatters seed. It’s like a mustard seed. It’s like, and it’s in every part of life. Whether you eat or drink, do it all for his honor. Every part. Do we really want to relegate it to the sections of life that are “spiritual”?

I believe that is a heresy. I may be labeled a heretic for saying that, but historically, I think it already was called a heresy. It’s more accepted today. Separating the “spiritual” from the “carnal”. The Gnostics did this. (Please pardon my dusty historical archives. I studied this over 10 years ago in a Greek History class at SUNY Buffalo… so the exact facts will be a bit stale perhaps…) They believed that the Spirit was good and the flesh was evil. Anything that was for the flesh therefore was sin, while anything of or for the spirit was godly. This was a heresy. Jesus was not afraid of our flesh, he wore it. He made us body and spirit. We are both. With a soul mixed in for good measure. To deny that is lunacy… and perhaps heresy.

So today we keep ourselves from R-rated movies, we don’t drink, we don’t smoke, we don’t listen to anything that isn’t labeled “Christian” by the music industry (who is making a killing by promoting such “labels”), we don’t swear, we don’t hang out with anyone who does those things – except of course under the auspices of “ministering” to them.

“You have died with Christ… so why do you keep on following the rules of the world, such as ‘Don’t handle, don’t eat, don’t touch’?” – Col 2:20-21

Paul said we don’t live by restrictions or rules anymore. We can certainly choose to restrict ourselves for the benefit of others (Rom 14), but for our benefit or for God’s we don’t live by those rules anymore. (See Galatians below.)

Why then do we act as though we still do?

God wants to do life with us, and us with him. He wants us to plug into him and live every moment with him. Our Christian life does not fit inside our neat and tidy boxes. That is where we come close to, or sometimes cross over into the boundaries of religion. Religion is not life giving, freeing, and grace-filled. But kingdom life is.

I want to model that for my kids, and for my neighbors and for my friends. I want my family to know that I love God and I love people. That’s what Jesus said he wants from us, and that’s what I intend to give. I read my Bible. I do something similar to what most Christians would call praying. I can even be found at the occasional corporate “worship service”. But that in no way defines my faith. It’s even somewhat superfluous. It’s fun. It’s good. But it’s not what I want my kids to think life with Jesus is all about.

“No, O people, the LORD has already told you what is good, and this is what he requires: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” – Micah 6:8

“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind. And, love your neighbor as yourself.” – Luke 10:27

So if reading my Bible, and praying, and going to church is how I can be a model of Christian faith. Doing what those verses says must make me a super model!

I wanna be a super model!

“Of making many books there is no end.” – Ecc 12:12

Every once in a while I am overwhelmed as a writer by the sheer volume of written material available to the reader. Everywhere you go, especially now with the internet, there is an enormous amount of information and opinion available on any given subject.

So what is a writer to do? He must write, yet who will read? How will anyone find what has been written among the myriads of collections of prose already published?

Today I was checking through some Amazon.com pages and came to my book page (A Journey Shared) and was reminded how small my one tiny project is in the vast sea of options for the avid reader.

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,454,957 in Books

This is an interesting link I found a while ago. If you are at all a Mac enthusiast (like us) then you might be interested. It’s an hour long TV show about the Mac from TWENTY years ago! The clothing and hair-dos alone are worth clicking the link… 🙂 But, besides that, it’s pretty fascinating to see how much we could do back then, and how little we could do! Crazy!

So here are a few links:
Stream The Video…
View ALL available video format links

Argh!!! These people make me so crazy! Why do some people think we can solve all the world’s problems through more regulations and oversight?

Yes, the story of the little boy who died on a Disney ride is sad, but it does not mean that we need to slap lots of legal requirements on all theme parks. What is it about our country that loves rules so much???

Read more here:

Disney Death Spurs Calls for Oversight

A few years back, we were planning a return trip to Colorado. We loved our first visit out there, it was just way too short! We pounded out more gigs than we had days there if I recall. Crazy! But every one of them was great, and we met some great people along the way as well.

So, one year later, I began calling and e-mailing to put together a return trip. My first course of action is to call the folks who specifically invited us back. They said, “Just call and let us know when you are coming again!” So, I did.

After a week or two, with no response to my calls or e-mails, I thought, “I guess I should try again!” So, I did.

Being a few years ago, I do not recall the specific order of the events, but I tried several times up front (this was the fall of 2002, only months after we had been there earlier that year) and then had to take a break as it was the Christmas season – our busiest season of the year.

When the new year rolled around, the Colorado trip entered my mind again, and my jaw just about hit the floor as I remembered that I had not heard from anyone about this trip. NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON. These were people who wanted us to come. Really! They did! These were people we kinda knew. Not just random, blind-call strangers. Whoa. That was weird.

So, I tried again. 🙂

Guess what happened? NOTHING! Not a single response. When I called, I left messages. When I e-mailed, I heard nothing in return. Nothing. Very strange.

It was at this point that I finally had a thought. “Hmm… what if God is trying to tell me something?” (How about that for paying attention?) 🙂 So, I told him, “OK… I’ll try one more time, and if there’s no response still by Friday, we’ll do something else.”

You have to recall, at this time, that was our only income. We were newly on our own (with no support financially from a church or any other source of income) and gigs were the only way I knew that God would provide… or so I thought at the time. And, at this point we were only weeks away from when I planned for us to leave! So, saying to Him that if nothing works out I would “do something else” was a bit scary. Not many places would be available for gigs… how would we pay the rent?

I did trust him, so I waited.

You probably have guessed already what happened that week. Yep! Nothing! Not a single response. I couldn’t believe it!!! It was nuts! But something else happened later that week. I started thinking of a TON of places that had asked us to come, but we never got around to following up on that because they were all scattered about in random places. That did not make it easy to plan a smooth tour to visit them like our Florida trips or West Coast trips. But these places were a very strong thought in the front of my brain, so I started writing them down.

As I was putting these dozens of places down on paper, I realized this was what God wanted us to do instead. I could tell that was from him. So I stopped and made sure that’s what he was saying, and he confirmed as much in me. So, that Friday that I agreed to go a different way if nothing happened – and nothing had – I kept my word. I said to God, “OK, we’ll go with your plan!”

Not an hour later, the phone rang. It was Rick from a church in Colorado. He called to say how busy he had been and that he was so sorry he had not been able to call back. Then he asked when we were coming out, and told me he wanted to plug us in wherever he could when we were out there.

And I laughed!

I told him most of the story, and he agreed with me that perhaps God had something different in store for us. Something better. So, I told him we would call again another time, but for now, we needed to check out this other avenue.

To further and finally confirm that God was behind all of this, I called a few of the places that had come to mind earlier. We were only weeks away from the now open weekends that I was calling about. That is definitely not enough advance warning for most of the places I was calling. But, as you may have already guessed, every place I called was not only excited to have us come, they needed us to come in two weeks. Within only a few days I had filled a calendar that I was trying for months to fill according to my own grand schemes. Amazing.

So, God just absolutely closed the door. Completely. I wish he was always that clear. But even still, as all of that fell together, we were not really sure why not Colorado? It seemed like a fine plan to us? When looking back on the whole time later, we also noticed that because we had not left for a big chunk of time as we were planning to do, God dropped a house in our laps! Right next door to some great friends of ours and in perfect condition, at a price we couldn’t afford, but somehow were able to… again… amazing.

We had great plans, but God’s were greater.

So. Flash forward a little more than two years later. Here we are again. God continues to lead, providing means of income where I can certainly not take the credit. Leading us every step of the way. But at the moment, we are in the middle stage of the Colorado Effect.

God has closed the doors, and as yet we are not certain what he wants us to do. Money is so tight that we are consistently late on bills now. Not so late that we are getting calls or anything. Just… late. The money always comes in, and we so far always pay our bills, just not according to our schedule.

The best part was, a few weeks back I had this awesome idea! I took a look at the boxes and boxes of CDs that were sitting over in the corner of my office and I thought, “Those need a home!” I thought of all the people who love our music, and how they might want to help us out by buying a bunch of our CDs at a lower, bulk rate so that they could either give them to friends or even resell them for a small profit. I made an awesome web page that people could use, and presented it as a Memorial Day Sale that made it a festive, fun occasion.

The entire time I was putting this project together, God was gently saying, “It’s going to be just like Colorado.” I said, “I don’t CARE! I need money! This is a GREAT IDEA! I’m going to DO IT!”

Still, the quiet thought persisted, “It will be just like Colorado.”

So, by about 2:00am that night, I finally accepted that truth. I still told God that I needed to do it. I just needed to finish it and watch his prediction come true. I just had to.

So, I did.

And, by now you most certainly have guessed what happened. And again, you are correct…. NOTHING. Not a single response to my webpage and fancy e-mail. Not one, “Hello!” or, “Good idea!” or, “Hope it goes well!”. Nothing. We always get at least a handful of responses to our e-mails. This time, none.

By now, I was able to laugh with God and share the story with Jen of what He had told me. But I remain in the dark about what he really wants me to do. I can only continue on the path I am on until he lets me know a different way. I know he will. I look forward to discovering his better idea. 🙂

Have you been there? Have you had God completely stop you from doing some good thing you were trying to do? There was nothing wrong with our Colorado trip, or my cool Memorial Day Sale idea… God just definitely didn’t want that to happen. He had something better.

There was a time in Acts that Paul and his friends were traveling around telling people about Jesus and life in God’s kingdom, and God kept stopping them from going to a certain place they wanted to go. What? Why would he do that? Why would he stop them from telling people about life in Him?!?? After several attempts foiled by God, Paul had a vision of a man in another region asking them to come help. They knew that was from God, and went there immediately and were able to do some great things there.

Their original plan was not bad, God just had a better one.

Sometimes he says no. Sometimes he shuts the door. That almost always is at least annoying, sometimes it’s downright maddening. But as we learn to trust Father’s goodness, and his complete and unconditional love for us, we can see past the frustration and closed doors to the bigger scope of God’s plan. He has something more, something better. I am not completely there, but oh how I long to be. To live so free that I know every closed door, no matter how hard it seems, is really an open door to something even better.

Even better than Colorado.

Don’t you think that it’s interesting that there are late fees charged by services and creditors? And that banks charge fees for “insufficient funds”? Shouldn’t they actually cut you some slack, maybe even give you money instead of taking it if you have “insufficient funds”?

Makes sense to me…

🙂

I have just been finding it interesting that when money is more tight than usual, and bills are paid later because of that, I actually have to pay MORE money because of the tardiness. AND, if my bank account has a low average balance, I am charged for not having enough money! (Even as I type that it makes me laugh!)

Oh well.

“At the wonderful, tragic, mysterious tree
   On that beautiful, scandalous night you and me
 Were atoned by his blood, and forever washed white
   On that beautiful, scandalous night”

Lyrics from a popular worship song some years back now. We heard the song again this past weekend at an event where we were also singing. So, this morning, I was singing that chorus (above) in the shower, and I thought about the finality of what Jesus did on the cross. The words of the song say, “were atoned by his blood, and forever washed white,” and that’s what caught me. That mysterious word “forever”. We talk about it like it was another measurement of time, just as a minute or a second or even a year or a decade or perhaps as preposterous as the concept of a millenium. Who among us has experienced a millenium?

Do you remember when you were a child, and your parents would require you to wait for something you desperately wanted (perhaps some ice cream, on a hot summer’s day?). They might have said something like, “Yes, Johnny, you may have some ice cream, but you need to wait about five minutes.” We had no concept of what five minutes was! To us, five minutes was the same as 5 seconds, or 5 hours! (Often, our parents may have taken a bit of an advantage of that, knowing that to us 10 minutes could just as easily pass as five…) 🙂 So, after waiting for what we then may have deemed an eternity, we got our ice cream. And we learned a bit about the concept of time through experience.

Then do you recall the long trips to visit relatives? A twelve hour car ride was not even fathomable to a 7-year old kid. Every so often then, the question would inevitably make it’s way from the back seat to the tired ears of the adults in the front, “How much longer?” And no matter what the parent might choose to say, or how they might describe it, how could they convey the meaning of “About another 5 hours”? If that same child can barely grasp the concept of 5 minutes, how will they understand 3000 minutes?

But God says forever. Forever he will be with us. Forever we will live with him. Forever our sins have been forgiven.

And as if that were not mind boggling enough, consider the moment of our forgiveness. Does forever begin from the point in which we accepted Jesus’ offer of forgiveness? Does it begin the moment we emerged from the waters of baptism? Does it begin at our conversion, and then re-begin with each confession of ongoing sin?

The song suggests (and correctly, so) that it begins at the cross. We can not fully understand the ways that God works in and out of time, as he is definitely on a different plane than we. But, we can see that from Jesus’ own mouth, the work of forever forgiveness was completed at the time of his death. Just before he died, he says, “It is finished.” Did he mean his struggle? His life? Perhaps he was frustrated that the plan had failed? No. Jesus knew the end result. He knew that my forgiveness was taken care of – finished – at that moment in time. The whole thing gets weirder if you try to grasp the idea of Revelation 13:8 which talks about Jesus being killed before the world was made, or Ephesians chapter one where we are called “holy and without fault in his eyes” before the world was made. Yes, God definitely interracts differently with time than we do.

But revisit with me the idea from the top of this post. We are atoned by his blood and forever washed white. (Nevermind that the actual event occurred during the day, rather than the night. Just chalk that up to poetic license.) It was not a moment of my decision, or my will, or my effort, or my accomplishment by which I was “washed white.” It was not anything I did. That could not be clearer from scripture. It was instead an act of love and mercy and grace done by our measurements of time around 2000 years ago, but effecting eternity. Eternity future, and I believe eternity past. (From the verses mentioned above regarding the whole thing being done before the creation of the universe.)

Acts says that there is no other name by which we will be saved. And Jesus said he is the way to the Father, that there is no other. So what about all the people in Hebrews 11 who are declared righteous by God for their faith? Did they earn righteousness somehow that we can not? No, Jesus said quite clearly that he is the only way to the Father. So perhaps his death that occurred at a very specific time in our history was actually efffective even before it happened? When dealing with concepts like eternity, what in the world does it matter if it’s eternity forward or backward. Both are equally out of reach of our experience and intellectual comprehension.

The song reminded me that there is so much about our Father that I could never possibly understand, even with an eternity to learn from Him. But, it also reminded me that I really need to stop trying. To let him work in me the things that he is longing to do. Release the pressure of getting it right, or not messing up again and know that on that one “night” (day) in history, I was forever washed white. Forever.

What a concept.

I mowed the lawn today. I actually really, really enjoy that. It’s a definite change from what I normally do. It’s solitude. I usually listen to an audio book on the iPod as I do it, so my mind is engaged. (or, at times, silence is preferred, and that too is a wonderful break.) And after about an hour and a half, I have gotten a decent workout pushing the whirring lawn mower up and down hills and around trees back and forth all across our .25 acres of land — and it looks nice! That’s the bonus, the icing on the cake.

So, it was a nice start to the morning, and great timing! We have had lousy weather for the past 10 days (or more?) here in Palmyra. Sun beating down, temps in the high 80s to even low 90s. And dare you say that is not hot, do recall that the humidity is somewhere near the 100% level. 🙂 We finally had to install our window-mount air conditioners this week (which we were trying to not do all summer due to cash flow) because Alex was running a high fever and a little nauseous, seemingly due to the extreme heat.

Today was to be a welcome relief temperature wise (only in the mid 60s, and overcast!) but the forecast called for RAIN. The two days we get a break in the temps, we get rain all day! Well, I took my chances, as it was not raining at the time, and got the last swatch of land mown as the drops began to fall! I am typing this now on my porch listening to the calming sounds of light summer showers. Beautiful!

I love this weather!

We are definitely all different, eh?