The Least Used Tools

Somewhere along your journey with God, you may have already realized that one of his preferred roles is that of teacher or trainer. To follow Jesus is to essentially apprentice him in how to live life. Just like any apprentice, you learn a lot of the main skills you will need fairly early on since they are the most common tasks you will do. But as you apprentice longer, you learn some of the more obscure tasks necessary in only special or unique situations. It's not enough to say that these situations don't happen much, therefore I won't learn the skills necessary to handle them. No, it is good to know what you would or should do in the event they do come up.

Jesus speaks of many such virtues, the ability to love and the ability to forgive. These we definitely have the opportunity to use everyday. There are other virtues that Jesus taught about that many of us do not regularly have the opportunity to use. Jesus talks about loving your enemies and praying for them. We all think such a thought is very noble but, in reality, we oftentimes don't have an immediate application to this. I may have people that I don't care for, but I wouldn't necessarily call them "enemies" of mine. Or when Jesus tells us to "turn the other cheek" when responding to ridicule or abuse. I'm fortunate enough not to face this on a constant basis but what happens when I do? Will I prepared to respond to that in the manner that Jesus, my mentor, would have me?

The first time something like this happens, we are often unequipped for it. What did you do the first time you realize you really do have an "enemy", someone that actively works toward your misfortune. Or what did you do the first time someone ridiculed you in front of others? You may still be in the process of overcoming some of these things. It may still take some time for us to respond to situations like this in a Godly manner. But when you finally do begin to respond in such a way, when you begin to see victory in these situations, many of us feel a profound sense of closure about that virtue. We think, "Well God, I'm glad we figured that lesson out. Now lets leave that and move onto the next thing." And we pack that lesson away into our box of "life tools" expecting (or at least hoping) to never have any need for it again.

So it sometimes comes as a suprise when a very similar situation arises some time later. You know this situation, you've faced something like it before. But will you respond to it the way you did before; could you possibly even respond better? And so we dig that tool out of the bottom of our tool box to see what kind of condition it's in. Many times we find that we're a little rusty in our handling of it or that the tool has become a little dull. It doesn't take an incredible amount of time to get it back in working order but we feel inconvenienced for having to do so. It feels like we're retaking a class we already finished and we question the Teacher over the wisdom of this. Frustrated, we ask God, "Why am I having to deal with this again? I learned what I needed to learn the last time so what's the purpose of dealing with it again now?"

Perhaps I'm rambling, but this is I'm feeling right now. Praying for my enemies and responding to ridicule in a Godly way is not something I've never done but its not something I do often. I struggle to find purpose in this. It's like having to take a test again just to see if you'd get the same score. But, reluctantly, I am beginning to see the purpose in the Teacher's ways. These aren't skills that I can just acquire and then just discard. I not only have to keep them, but I have to keep them in good repair. While I'm working on one part of my character, I don't want to neglect another part and see it atrophy. These virtues may be some of my least used tools but they are no less important because of it. They are no less a part of who I am and can just as easily lead to my undoing if I let them fall into disrepair.

And so I find myself in a place I haven't been for a while. Praying for people who I'm sure aren't praying for me and turning the other cheek till I run out of cheeks for them to strike. The Teacher may not have caused this situation to arise but, rest assured, he's using it to teach me something that will eventually make me a Master Life Liver. That's my goal, not comfort, not security, just him - I wanna be like him.

Choosing Your Cross Wisely

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

This is a famous quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the nature of following Christ. It's famous, I believe, because it stands in vast contrast to the contemporary perception of what it means to be a Christ follower. And so while Jesus himself can say very pointedly that, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me," many of his followers still think that choice is somehow involved when it comes to living a sacrificial life.

Now don't get me wrong, there is choice involved but the misconception is in where that choice lies. This misconception is not only reserved to Christ followers either. In fact, this misconception is the one of the main reasons many non-Christians don't follow Christ. I would say that people are mistaken into thinking that they can choose whether they will live a sacrificial life or not when the real question is what you will sacrifice for.

This my rather long-winded way of stating that everyone will sacrifice their life for something and your choice, whether you feel like you have that choice or not, is to pick what that will be. To sacrifice your life for something is to devote yourself to one thing to the detriment of all other things - it is the proverbial cross you have chosen to carry. Most of the time all of the "other things" may not necessarily feel neglected. But when those things come into competition with that which you devote yourself to, the other things will loss out.

It may not be immediately apparent what your proverbial cross is but I believe with most assurance that you do have one whether you know it or not. And once we have reframed the argument from whether you will sacrifice to what you will sacrifice to, some really interesting conversations can happen. The fundamental question really centers around whether you are sacrificing your life for the right thing. This is a subjective question and only you have the perogative to answer that (because it was your choice, in the first place, what that thing was).

The second question that can then emerge is whether what you are devoting yourself to is really worthy of such a sacrifice. More often than not, its been my observation that people devote themselves to things that are not really worthy of such a sacrifice - they've either undervalued their own life or overvalued what they are devoting themselves to. And its not just that people have been asking these questions and coming up with the wrong answer; I think they have never even bothered to think about it in the first place. The questions have never been asked at all.

These questions are probably worth our effort and time though. They concern themselves with the ultimate point and goal of our life. And while every worthy devotion will ask for your entire life, not everything that asks for your entire life is worthy. In Christ, we follow a God that thought long and hard about the sacrifice that he made for us. On the night he was betrayed he sat in a garden and asked these very questions. And when he got up to face his accusers we know by that action that he considered that which he was passionate about was worth his life. In Scripture it says that he carried our transgressions and died on a tree for our sins - so that we would separated from God no longer. In the garden, Jesus decided that being with you was worth dying for. The cross is his resounding "YES".

We have a incredible example of sacrifice to follow in Jesus. A valuable question to ask today is not whether we will sacrifice but, rather, is what we're sacrificing for more worthy of our lives than Jesus is. The weight of his life and his sacrifice makes it hard to answer that question in the affirmative but that, of course, is up to each of us to decide.

Rain

Its rainy in Richmond this morning. It's one of the first rainy days we've had this summer and for whatever reason as I sat here this morning reading the Bible, I looked out the window and thought about Blacksburg. I guess I remember sitting in Bollos so many mornings when it would rain like this and I would stare out that window and think about life, same as I did today. It's funny that something apparently quite random could trigger such nostagalia in my heart but I guess that's what made it home, the tiny, supposedly insignificant things.

I've spent the last couple months feeling like I couldn't miss Blacksburg. I felt like if I gave into that emotion I would somehow trap myself in a memory to the detriment of the life I am now living - which is equally amazing in its own right. The life I'm living now is amazing, Katie, Richmond, Commonwealth (our new church), even my job. This is my life now and this is home even if it doesn't completely feel that way yet. Until this place starts to feel completely like home, I guess I should expect to miss Blacksburg from time to time and I guess that's not such a bad thing. Maybe missing my old home is a way to celebrate all that I love about that place - the town, the school, my church, my incredible friends. None of its gone, its just less prevalent in my day-to-day reality now.

So if you're reading this you'll have to forgive my ramblings. I'm moving from one awesome reality to a new, equally awesome, reality and I'm trying to get my head around this. I think I'll just sit here and watch the rain for a while.

The Discipline of Excitement

As always, JD was gracious enough to comment on my recent post and he made a good point. So, just to recap, our excitement in following God has more of an influence on our world than any of our clever arguments or slogans BUT, and this was JD's point, being and staying excited on a day-to-day basis is "freakn' hard sometimes dude!" (that's not a quote from JD but that's how I imagine him saying it if he were here right now :-) Oh how true that is JD, I, for example, had a rotten day last Thursday (I mean it was not very good at all) but the next day I was on top of the world (partially because it was friday). So perhaps complete and total on-top-of-the-worldness is a little hard every single day of our lives but its also equally true that, with a more disciplined thinking on the matter, it can less the exception and more the rule of our lives. And that is what God always intended.

To many people, the words "excitement" and "discipline" probably don't seem like they go together very well. In our minds we might think that discipline is required for running or dieting or driving less than 70 mph on the way to work. But discipline can be applied to the emotional aspects of our lives as well. Looking a little closer, the discipline of excitement involves a combination of the heart and the eyes. It is concerned with how you choose to see life and how you choose to feel about life - the operative word being "choose". And that so-called choosing is done with our mind. So if you think of your heart and eyes as a ship, let's call it the USS Attitude (it's cheesy, I know), then your mind would be the rudder. So oftentimes, in situations that we may classify as less than desirable, our natural inclination is to plot a pessimistic course for our heart and our mind to follow that does little to remedy anything.

Some people might tend to think that what I just described is not disciplined excitement or joy but just simply wishful thinking - that is not the case. Disciplined excitement or joy is different from denial because it can recognize a crap situation for what it is. But what it does do is dictate how I respond to that crap situation - that is the one part of a situation that I always have control over.

At first, controlling our response to situations may indeed seem contrived or fake but that it only because our natural tendencies have taken us a far different course for so long. But just as in any training, it will eventually become habit. Now I am by no means a master at this but what a blessing it would be to habitually look at life in a hope-filled, excited, joyous manner?!

I'm writing this at my desk at 8:25 in the morning. My day officially starts in about five minutes and today I'm going to practice what I preach. I'm going to exercise my attitude and work to see and respond to things in a way that is helpful. I'm going to act as if God is glorified most through my smile. Because perhaps the grandest experiment we could undertake on a daily basis is to live in world that feels well justified in its pessimism, rise above it, and see if others follow.