sorry i missed the point of life again

I don’t know why I keep coming back to this idea and question of “why are we here”, maybe I feel like I keep missing the point.  Can I really be this dumb and blind?  I find an answer, it satisfies for a few moments and then it goes away or at least the my answer isn’t heavy enough to move the weight of reality.  Life seems to make sense to a lot of other people or at least they seem to have a direction and answers that makes sense to them, but for the life of me I still don’t get living or even why finding an answer to this question matters so much to me.  Right now we are alive, all of us, I know it.  Lots and lots of individuals moving around with some sort of organization to accomplish their thoughts and dreams that run about in their head.  People are paying bills, having babies, thinking about major decisions, yelling at people they love and driving faster than the speed limit.  But why…..for what purpose?  Not just for the immediate purpose of the moment, but for the whole of it all, why you get up in the morning.  If life is unimportant or there is no real point to life other than to let science  run it’s course, for me to love my family as we grow old or to become efficient at a certain task before dying; that thought tends to make me feel like life could be a little bit insignificant or at least I am.  This is over simplified, and I understand some of what a statement like this can mean to someone other than me.  I am not trying to be arrogant and tell you your life or your children’s potential doesn’t really matter much, I don’t know actually.  Everyone will certainly remember all you have done generations after you have died, which is why we are all on Amazon waiting for the release of your memoirs.  But right now other people are dying that matter less.  Kids, elderly, middle-aged people who don’t live forever, and I haven’t seen many with a t-shirt that says I made sense of this existence, killed it and here is the simple conclusion.

Maybe this is why I have this obsession with God and religion (man’s attempt to explain God).  God seems big enough to keep me asking and wondering what else.  It really has been the only endeavor to give up some rationale and explain why the hell I might be here or why you are here with me.  But honestly the sentiment God must be saying is now so distorted and confused from the over complication of information, ideas and enlightenment of the churched and unchurched.  It’s impossible to have a conversation with a human and not have thirty or forty other possibilities of what they might be saying as it runs through your mind.  (That must be one reason we have so many conflicts with each other.)  Is it possible to hear what God is saying or has said?  And how do you figure out what is God saying, if He says anything?  Is God really yelling at us, “Hey, get your shit together.  Here are ten rules that will allow me to control your life and take every ounce of joy and fun away from you?  Oh and if you don’t I am going to send you to hell”?  Or is God really implying, do what you feel like and don’t worry about any details, I love you bunches because I am only capable of love.  Those seem to be the two camps people pitch a tent in if they have an opinion about God.  God is either a jerk or impotent with the spectrum of variety in between those extremes.  As I read the Bible, I don’t really see it  filled with a bunch of rules with consequences or God riding unicorns spreading universal love.  Even as I try to educate myself and interpret what God seems to be saying, there are still so many questions among the story that I am learning to find faith in.  Most of it reads to be about the lives of people I didn’t meet and God breaking into the story at different points to change it for the better.  But even that doesn’t answer or unify the answer to why you or I are here.  Don’t get me wrong I have thoughts on the answer and down the road that will could be worth sharing, but it’s definitely worth giving more time to thinking about it because it’s a really big question.

In your own words, I invite you to give an answer as to why life matters and how you came to that conclusion?  (Insert your explanation here with a reasoning for your theory)

undisciple

I spent the past few years in some confusion or rather a lack of clarity about what to do with this existence called life.  I have been working towards a direction, but I am not to the end result I started out to complete.  The confusion typically leads me to frustration and eventually to anger, but you can learn from conflict though it is painful.  I can’t say much has changed, life still has a lot of things I disagree with, but it at least feels like some things have become sorted, and as a result, I changed.  Even if your story doesn’t live to close to one that involves God, just being good at what you do and committed to a few things rather than too much seems to be a bit more impacting then just keeping busy before you die.  My cousin recently quoted, “Everyone has a part in the body, even if it is the middle finger.”

As I hear more and more about who God is and what God does, which in turn helps me to comprehend a little bit of who that makes me, it has shown me how and where I don’t live up to the example and intention I had set out to become.  A hypocrite I think is the word you use, I find myself never being able to be a great dad or at least the dad I want to be; nor the business owner, husband, writer or leader either.  In one way or another, I found that we all become the hypocrite; unless your dead.  Some are better at hiding it and some care more to defend it.  But we all set out with an idea one day and since have missed some part of the mark.  I wouldn’t even say you don’t need to verbalize the point before denying it, more simply you think it a good idea and then walk away from it.

I used to feel bad about that, you know making mistakes, even ashamed.  Really I still do, but now guess I have to come to accept it as part of my personality and the personality of others.  I agree that I make enough mistakes that aren’t in line with what the expectations were to become, but I also don’t think that disqualifies me or anyone else from having opinions we hold as true just because we don’t line up perfectly.  I normally end up always seeing things from my perspective, but think I am starting to be more opened up to allow other perspectives (especially God’s) to be a player in that game.  Someone mentioned empathy and maybe even loving, I quickly mentioned they were wrong and that I will have none of that.  It’s not so black and white anymore (this is a huge statement for someone who knows me) and there is a lot of issues with timing and communication that keeps us from working well together all the time.  That  differs from the past where I would follow the culture I grew up in or try to look good to those who knew me well.  Kids are another great perspective changer.  When some of who you are, then becomes reflected in someone else, it should at least cause you to pause and look at what your life says.  Especially as a dad, what you communicate to your kids verbally, behaviorally and unintentionally matters.

So maybe the past few years really just helped me clarify what direction or even what questions to ask to find direction with the time, resources and energy which exist before death.  We all want to be the one who makes the choice for that timing, but honestly life doesn’t work that way.  That being said, there have only been a few people I have met who get up in the morning and desire to suck at life, though with enough objection or resistance in life I might be that guy too.  I don’t know what you are trying to get out of living, I assume you are good people who want life to be somewhat simple and comfortable.  I bet there are some that want to put the moon in a bottle to sell it for a killer profit, and then some of those people want to just give it away to all the children that don’t have a moon of their own.  Some of us may just need to be current to what is going on in the lives of people we won’t meet and some of us will spend life only thinking about the people in front of our eyes.

So my end goal is to follow Jesus.  I get that isn’t a common world choice, and I don’t need to debate the point of why you should or shouldn’t either.  But you, like me, will follow something be it your heart, money or the statement “you will follow nothing”.  Mumford and Sons says “where you invest your love, you invest you life”.  I want what I love in life to matter, and not because I think it matters.  There have been choices that seem to be in the direction of trying to follow Jesus that I made within the past few years.  I give credit to this as God working his plans into my life and seeing it as grace directed towards my life and not simply figuring something out and arriving.  I can’t take credit for what happens, good or bad, when I didn’t make a lot of other choices to get me there.  I didn’t choose plus six foot height, where my parents would live, why someone wants me to paint their house or not and certainly didn’t pick my kids from a litter of puppies.  So life becomes a wonder again, like the thing my kids are, the thing I have been working at trying to figure out in hope to gain some control.

I would say now that I am becoming accepting to the idea that I don’t have as much pull in my own life as I thought I did, even excited.  I see evidence to support the idea, but definitely not a 3-dimensional example for everyone to see.  I make a lot of mistakes which is why the thought of not making my own choices would be exciting.  “You can’t fail if you don’t try.”  Usually I am too busy with “important” things like searching the internet or deciding what the next purchase will be to make life fun again or dreaming that we had some extra money to buy something with.  Those things, that if I held them up against the candle which is life, I start to shudder at the meaninglessness of them.  It’s pretty overwhelming to even think about how inconsequential I can be.  The prizes of the past have fooled me one too many times, and I know at the end of the rope isn’t a pot of gold or a box of chocolates.  Really it is just a box, some nicer than others or maybe just a hole in the ground.  I get that most objects, technology, people, vacation plans or careers won’t be the long term answer, so there has to be a lot of pain that is left to come among the upswings too.

Part of my new year is to challenge myself to write more and I might as well make writing meaningful to me since I will spend some time there.  So hence the post about trying to follow the goal to follow Jesus.  I say I want to follow Jesus, I think I even have enough failure in life to know I don’t really have much to offer or answer past trying to follow Jesus.  So in light of what options are left, Jesus makes some sense.  I hate to come to that point from such a humanistic mindset, but I don’t think I will get an angel bending over to show me the light or some other miraculous tangibility.  There is just something about this story that makes me feel ok on the inside.  A hope that something significant has happened and will happen again.  My life is still proof that something moves me from where I sat a year or two ago, physically and mentally.  I don’t begin or end with a love for Jesus, even though He is part of my life and I think about him.  Certainly wish I did.  I still just make choices, hypocritical to that leading, and try to deal with the remaining broken pieces that keep a reminder to me that I need something outside myself to get through life.

One of those broken pieces is relationships.  I don’t do well with communicating in the moment or beyond. I hold things back.  I don’t want to give up what scares me or the way I go about things.  Holding onto those things are easy and make sense to me.  Giving them up would hurt a lot.  If there is a hint that I may not get what I want out of something, I quit before I start or put it in the back of the closet for the day there will be enough time to deal with it.  Part of that is maturity and then part of that is self love, the rest is just other people who have the same bent.  I want to think I have the answer, more from fear than arrogance I hope.  It seems silly to think that if I knew an answer was certain, anyone else’s opinion would matter much.  More often I think I verbalize what I am thinking in hopes that someone would agree making it more concrete than before.  I’m glad people keep believing in their incomplete ideas, ideas they don’t even know how big they are.  People like Thomas Edison and Bill Gates Steve Jobs.  But people do matter and what they think matters even when it opposes mine.  Especially when it does, it shows me the care I have for myself over someone else.

My kids are young and don’t know a whole lot, but what they know matters.  What seems to matter more is that I can listen to what doesn’t matter and not try to correct with what I think matters, cause they aren’t perfect and I am not perfect.  That seems to be what love is about, giving up something.  I hope giving up becomes more regular for me than yelling at the kids cause what the kids say doesn’t make sense in my mind.  I do trust that the only way the end of life will work out is from Christ, whether I understand the depths of that statement remains to be seen.  I keep proving with many examples that I am worse off than I think, and that God knows this, and still sent Jesus to die in my place.  I want to follow a guy like Jesus who fights for the ones he loves even when that person doesn’t see it.  I want to be like the guy who is patient and suffers in waiting for other people’s mind to develop a little more.  It may end up costing me some comfort or at least press into my laziness.  But yes, because there is an example in Jesus to follow, I’m trying to mess my way into looking like that example.

The Celtic Way of Evangelism

The Celtic Way of Evangelism

“Christianity is almost reduced to accepting Christ as your Savior so you can go to heaven when you die, and between now and then you attend church, have a daily devotional, live a clean life, and “let” God meet your needs and attain your goals.” (p. 1618)

This amazing book begins to open even further the history of gathered and scattered church.  George Hunter shows how history of the Roman vs. Celtic way of church differs in reaching out to mankind.  The Roman version builds a church for people to come into belief before they can belong, where as the Celtic way meet people in their culture with hope of one belonging to invite into belief.  “Most churches today, however, expect pre-Christian people to be like church people culturally; they are expected to understand and speak the church’s accent and vocabulary, to share the church’s aesthetic preferences, to dress and look like church people, to vote like church people, to live their lives in ways that church people can approve, and so on (p. 1583).”  We see history repeating itself in today’s day, with most churches focusing in on a Roman styled approach to evangelizing the lost.  “At least 80 percent of our churches ignore two populations, year after year: the people who aren’t “refined” enough to feel comfortable with us, and the people who are too “out of control” for us to feel comfortable with them (p. 1749)!”

We need to continue to approach culture and evangelism in different manners.  Most people don’t belong to our culture of churches, “There is no shortcut to understanding the people. When you understand the people, you often know what to say and do and how. When the people know that the Christians understand them, they infer that maybe Christianity’s High God understands them too (p. 261).”  Can we expect those who live for other gods, idols and messages to desire a culture that is frightened and ignorant to Jesus by a church who isn’t willing to initiate their own fears and prejudices?

Bibliography

Hunter, George G III. The Celtic Way of Evangelism. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000, 2010.

Bringing the Gospel Home

Bringing the Gospel Home

“The doctrine of common grace should influence our evangelism so that we talk about the goodness of the gospel, not just its truth.” (p. 68)

We all get somewhat nervous with talking to anyone about the gospel, especially friends or family we have a good standing relationship with.  Yet we know that the most important responsibility for our life and for someone else’s life is to know and enjoy God, so we cannot avoid the potential of jeopardizing the smoothness for awkwardness.  Randy Newman offers some very practical observations and stories to encourage initiating the gospel with others, speaking truth with love.  There is no compromise with the truth of God’s story, yet there are insights to some common misconceptions and convictions for some areas we may overlook.  “Our confidence can rest in the self-authenticating substance of our message rather than our ability to proclaim it.  We can be bold because God’s promises are true (p. 101).”

Common grace is a well positioned theme throughout the book and pivotal to changing our prideful stance on the people around us.  As believers of the living God, we often forget to remember that all of mankind is made in the image of God and therefore has some grace in which we can point to in the life of anyone.  “To be humble is to see ourselves as God sees us in Christ – hopelessly sinful but graciously saved, rebellious but redeemed, incapable of producing any righteousness on our own yet empowered to do all that God calls us to, appropriately bold yet taking no credit for the basis of that boldness (p. 136).”  Newman continually returns to the basis of what God has done and also how desperate we still need to be as followers of Christ.  The moment we forget that we are saved sinners we lose out on the courage and humility to proclaim God to another.

Newman, Randy. Bringing the Gospel Home. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011.

Marks of the Messenger

Marks of the Messenger

“People need to see the depth of their sin so that they come to a fuller understanding of the depth of God’s grace.” (p. 31)

There is a beauty about this book.  J. Mack Stiles takes the mystery of evangelism and ruins it for us all.  He not only removes the excuses we have fabricated to avoid being messengers, but encourages the proper handling of the gospel message.  Page after page, the logic from the foundational stones of scripture remove any doubt that Jesus has not only saved us, but enabled us to live out the mission of God.  “Go deeper into the gospel.  Don’t grow away from it – ever.  The real work of our spiritual growth is to allow the themes of the gospel to permeate our lives.” (p. 54)

Romans 1:16 states that “the gospel, is the power of God for salvation” and this book seems to open that verse up in many ways.  There is a sense from the beginning of this book, which it carries throughout, that the gospel message is vital to the salvation and the depth that message can infiltrate our lives.  “Understanding that a changed life is required to attest to true conversion also guards us from thinking that the only important event is the conversion event.” (p. 77).  This book warns us of misuses and common misconceptions.  It helps to clarify a life dependent of the gospel story, and how being so reliant shapes our usage and conduct with the message.  There is freedom as we learn or re-learn the intentional communication that will transform our lives to mimic our creator more clearly.

There are so many great quotes that can summarize this book.  I leave you with this one, “as evangelists we want to be people who are more concerned with our faithfulness in presenting Christ clearly than we are with results.  We want to be the kind of evangelists who take people more seriously than to manipulate them into a prayer of commitment.  And we want to be people who present the gospel with care, knowing spiritual lives are at stake.” (p.23)

Stiles, J. Mack. Marks of the Messenger. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2010.