Thursday, March 17, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Monday, June 28, 2010
Do You Ever Feel Like This?
Wow! I saw this picture a couple weeks ago and it absolutely blew me away! Just looking at this guy sent a ton of thoughts in my head, most of them good. Your first reaction might be that I'm nuts because this guy just lost it and is now flying out this window speeding towards his impending death. Some days you might feel like this.
But that's not what I see.
My first thought looking at this guy is, "Wow, the point where he is right now, there's no turning back." At this point, there is NO turning back. He is 100% committed. He couldn't take back this decision if he wanted to. He can never go back to the way his life was.
Then I started thinking about it, REALLY thinking about it. This is how I am called to live for God! I feel like God has this calling on our lives for us to be radical about our love for Him. That our whole lives should be completely wrapped up in this decision to follow Hiim with everything. This is the model right here.
To live this life to the point of no turning back. Following Jesus with reckless abandon. Dying to ourselves so we can actually have a life worth living.
It is so much a gut feeling it is hard for me to put it in words. I want every single thing about my life to scream and testify of God's love for us. I want to drop all my selfish addictions so that everything I do actually has a purpose. I really want to be this radical, loving person that reaches out to everybody to show them love and changes their lives. I want to know that God is using me, the way He wants, all the time.
I want to be satisfied with my life because its not mine anymore and that's how I'm living.
I hope you feel the same.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Woah how he loves!!!
The last few days have been a tough, and bitter sweet. I have been cleaning up around our house getting ready for 1oo or so people to come over to celebrate Lucas’s graduation. – He graduated Saturday and turned 18 on Sunday. When the youngest of our three daughters graduated about 10 years ago my wife Penny had a hard time with it. I was to busy conquering the world and wasn’t phased by it.
School was extremely difficult for Lucas, and his Mother, he is severely dyslexic we pulled him from public schools and enrolled him in a private Christian school in the sixth Grade it went reasonably well for several years and then High School came. They don’t like it when I say but they his school is college prep. And he was not college bound, or at least with traditional teaching. It has been a trap of not knowing what to do and seemingly the lesser of all evils, we wanted to pull him out and home school him tenth grade, but he is such a people person and chose to put up with the school for the social part. We have learned a lot thru this, it has been a constant battle with teachers. What is messed up is my sister, who went back to school and got her masters in something, helped with, or did some of his papers, and other stuff and she got better grades in college than at Grace. At the beginning of this year I saw things were beginning again and I met with all his teachers, the principal, and administrator, and basically told them, that he was not going to college and it would be nice for him to feel like his senior year was somewhat successful, and they needed to back off, that worked great for about a month. To their defense they are not set up for his disability; they loved him and did the best they could. Despite it all he has developed coping skills that will help him in life, he has been influenced by some good people, teachers and students, he is very good with people, and loves life. It is incredible the number of successful dyslexics. Having said that in this new world we are in, success is measured by what we do for the kingdom our relationship with the father. And a lot of what he has experienced has been preparation to share compassion and empathy with other people.
Here is the biggest thing that has been eating at me. The schools way of dealing with him for the last three years has been to let him go until he gets lost and then bail him out, which says when it gets hard and I quit I get bailed out, this has really grated at me but we haven’t known how to fix it. For a couple of years he has been planning to come to work for me, and he has been working with my crew when he wasn’t dealing with a injury or surgery. He has become excited about it after he figured it out he would have to work for a living. We have picked up a few jobs recently but nothing that is very long term, and I keep hearing ‘a new thing is coming’. My intent when he graduated was to take him under my wing do my best to push him up. He has been tested as ‘near genius’ in his graphic design, we really haven’t seen the fit for that, but It seems natural that at some point he could take over the design end of the business. Anyway it is all up in the air. I have been telling him that he needed to be praying about what he is to do cause things are uncertain but he wants to work for me.
The thing is God loves him more than I could ever get close to, he has the best plan possible for him. The story of my life these days is God seems to be about getting me out of the drivers seat, and letting him take the wheel. I never thought of myself as a control freak but this sure is a fight. Honestly if God would get in the middle of this in a second he could do what I couldn’t do in a lifetime. Last night I think I got real before God the real issue is we know God can but we don’t believe he will.
Last night I read this. Hosea 4: 6 says my people perish for a lack of knowledge. I always heard or thought this meant we didn’t have the formulas down and weren’t doing the stuff right. But as I was studying this the NLT seems to be most accurate in the writers intent. My people are destroyed because they don’t know me.
3: 5 Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days.
come in fear literally means, 'shall fear TOWARD the Lord and TOWARD His goodness' - i.e., trembingly flee to the Lord, to escape from the wrath to come; and to "His goodness," The "fear," is not that slavish fear which "hath torment" (1 John 4:18), and which makes men flee from the sin-hating God, but the fear of losing Him, which makes them flee to Him, and reverence inspired by His goodness realized in the soul (Ps 130:4). Though fearing because of past unfaithfulness, they are attracted to Him and to His goodness by their fear of being any longer without Him.
WOW!!! In short when we ‘know God’ intimately we trust in his goodness, we run to him in fear of missing out on his goodness. This is the God I passionately want the world to know. Not the one who lives in a book stuck on a shelf. I love the book of psalms and the story of how David and other’s met him. About a year and a half ago I met him at a conference and he poured out his love on me thru one evening thru the night and I will never be the same. This is my Jacob’s limp. The cares of this world can definitely drain us but there is a hunger that only his presence can satisfy. If we are hungry enough, we will be filled, the hunger is our part the filling is his. There is so much we have missed by not learning to be still and quiet and allowing him to come and reveal himself to him. Someone said ‘busy-ness is not of the devil, busy-ness is the devil’
I discovered this song right after my God encounter it has become my anthem, and there are bad days I have to play loud and continuously until I come back to the fact that he loves, WOAH HOW HE LOVES!!
How He Loves : John Mark Mcmillen (David Crowder does a version of this I like JMM better personally I think it is more passionate.) He is jealous for me Love's like a hurricane, I am a tree Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory and I realize just how beautiful You are and how great your affections are for me. Oh, how He loves us so Oh, how He loves us How He loves us so. Yeah, He loves us Woah, how He loves us Woah, how He loves us Woah, how He loves. So we are His portion and He is our prize, Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes If grace is an ocean we're all sinking So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way That he loves us, Woah, how He loves us Woah, how He loves us Woah, how He loves
School was extremely difficult for Lucas, and his Mother, he is severely dyslexic we pulled him from public schools and enrolled him in a private Christian school in the sixth Grade it went reasonably well for several years and then High School came. They don’t like it when I say but they his school is college prep. And he was not college bound, or at least with traditional teaching. It has been a trap of not knowing what to do and seemingly the lesser of all evils, we wanted to pull him out and home school him tenth grade, but he is such a people person and chose to put up with the school for the social part. We have learned a lot thru this, it has been a constant battle with teachers. What is messed up is my sister, who went back to school and got her masters in something, helped with, or did some of his papers, and other stuff and she got better grades in college than at Grace. At the beginning of this year I saw things were beginning again and I met with all his teachers, the principal, and administrator, and basically told them, that he was not going to college and it would be nice for him to feel like his senior year was somewhat successful, and they needed to back off, that worked great for about a month. To their defense they are not set up for his disability; they loved him and did the best they could. Despite it all he has developed coping skills that will help him in life, he has been influenced by some good people, teachers and students, he is very good with people, and loves life. It is incredible the number of successful dyslexics. Having said that in this new world we are in, success is measured by what we do for the kingdom our relationship with the father. And a lot of what he has experienced has been preparation to share compassion and empathy with other people.
Here is the biggest thing that has been eating at me. The schools way of dealing with him for the last three years has been to let him go until he gets lost and then bail him out, which says when it gets hard and I quit I get bailed out, this has really grated at me but we haven’t known how to fix it. For a couple of years he has been planning to come to work for me, and he has been working with my crew when he wasn’t dealing with a injury or surgery. He has become excited about it after he figured it out he would have to work for a living. We have picked up a few jobs recently but nothing that is very long term, and I keep hearing ‘a new thing is coming’. My intent when he graduated was to take him under my wing do my best to push him up. He has been tested as ‘near genius’ in his graphic design, we really haven’t seen the fit for that, but It seems natural that at some point he could take over the design end of the business. Anyway it is all up in the air. I have been telling him that he needed to be praying about what he is to do cause things are uncertain but he wants to work for me.
The thing is God loves him more than I could ever get close to, he has the best plan possible for him. The story of my life these days is God seems to be about getting me out of the drivers seat, and letting him take the wheel. I never thought of myself as a control freak but this sure is a fight. Honestly if God would get in the middle of this in a second he could do what I couldn’t do in a lifetime. Last night I think I got real before God the real issue is we know God can but we don’t believe he will.
Last night I read this. Hosea 4: 6 says my people perish for a lack of knowledge. I always heard or thought this meant we didn’t have the formulas down and weren’t doing the stuff right. But as I was studying this the NLT seems to be most accurate in the writers intent. My people are destroyed because they don’t know me.
3: 5 Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days.
come in fear literally means, 'shall fear TOWARD the Lord and TOWARD His goodness' - i.e., trembingly flee to the Lord, to escape from the wrath to come; and to "His goodness," The "fear," is not that slavish fear which "hath torment" (1 John 4:18), and which makes men flee from the sin-hating God, but the fear of losing Him, which makes them flee to Him, and reverence inspired by His goodness realized in the soul (Ps 130:4). Though fearing because of past unfaithfulness, they are attracted to Him and to His goodness by their fear of being any longer without Him.
WOW!!! In short when we ‘know God’ intimately we trust in his goodness, we run to him in fear of missing out on his goodness. This is the God I passionately want the world to know. Not the one who lives in a book stuck on a shelf. I love the book of psalms and the story of how David and other’s met him. About a year and a half ago I met him at a conference and he poured out his love on me thru one evening thru the night and I will never be the same. This is my Jacob’s limp. The cares of this world can definitely drain us but there is a hunger that only his presence can satisfy. If we are hungry enough, we will be filled, the hunger is our part the filling is his. There is so much we have missed by not learning to be still and quiet and allowing him to come and reveal himself to him. Someone said ‘busy-ness is not of the devil, busy-ness is the devil’
I discovered this song right after my God encounter it has become my anthem, and there are bad days I have to play loud and continuously until I come back to the fact that he loves, WOAH HOW HE LOVES!!
How He Loves : John Mark Mcmillen (David Crowder does a version of this I like JMM better personally I think it is more passionate.) He is jealous for me Love's like a hurricane, I am a tree Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory and I realize just how beautiful You are and how great your affections are for me. Oh, how He loves us so Oh, how He loves us How He loves us so. Yeah, He loves us Woah, how He loves us Woah, how He loves us Woah, how He loves. So we are His portion and He is our prize, Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes If grace is an ocean we're all sinking So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way That he loves us, Woah, how He loves us Woah, how He loves us Woah, how He loves
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