It was embarrassing at times as it seemed Mom would try to make some forceful corrections in our lives by introducing uncomfortable elements of faith, or in correcting the actions or words of a friend. Mom wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but in the end she loved Jesus and she had little problem letting people know. About 10 days before Mom left the hospital for the last time she had emergency surgery to remove a tumor on her spine that had paralyzed her from the waste down. The following afternoon after the surgery, and after receiving the first in a long line of bad news my Mom asked for her purple iPod Nano, unplugged the headphones, and played and through tears attempted to sing Matt Redman’s You Never Let Go. It is a memory that moves me to tears as I write. At it’s conclusion she then asked for hugs from every family member and pronounced a blessing over every single person with some words of wisdom and encouragement as she embraced them. She knew the end of this life was near for her, and she used the platform of her impending physical death to point my four cousins, my uncle, two aunts, my grandmother, my sister, my brothers, a soon to be sister-in-law and her mother to Jesus and His ways.

It was an episode that she repeated with every new visitor. Even when she could not stay awake for the visit she would wake up and pray over people before they left. Only time will tell of the fruit Jesus bears from those moments. Her moments with me have already born much fruit.

In the age where more and more families are broken and more and more fathers are absent the faith of the Mothers will be the primary guiding influence in the lives of children in America. While it is tragic that so many men have failed to be a Christ-centered spiritual guide for their families we cannot ignore supporting the mothers in their struggle to raise their children while trying to stem the tide of divorce, unwanted pregnancy, co-habitation, and the absence of men in churches. We must never let go, because He won’t.

The events leading up to this anniversary left me little time to plan a celebration, buy a present, or select a card. I have typically been a very creative planner of special events that have included surprise trips, weekend getaways and thoughtful or sometimes handmade gifts. I have often begun to plan some events months in advance, but there have been a few, for sure, that just never hit my radar until too late. In years gone by the obviousness of my oversight would have been bitterly received as if I cared little for her as a person, a special creation, an image bearer of the Most High God and are burned into her memory…and mine. I admit now that my previous oversights that included card and present shopping on the day of the event had more to do with my selfishness than my circumstance, and the hurt it caused was real.

But this time, it was FULL of Grace.

In a way this anniversary was the best because it allowed me to see just how far we have come, and gives me hope for just how far we will go. There were no demands or expectations outside of just being with me in my grief. We have journeyed a long way since those early days of dining at the buffet of selfishness.

Kristi, you are God’s greatest gift to me.

You have shown me forgiveness beyond what I could have expected.

You have held me to a higher standard.

You have made me a better father…a better man…a better person.

You are the mother I dreamed my children would have.

You have grown into a compassionate woman full of wisdom and grace.

You are a radiant bride whose gaze can still make my heart race.

You have been and continue to be a tremendous friend.

We have danced in minefields and sailed into many storms.

I am thankful you keep promises.

I am glad God gave me you to dance, and sail, and walk through this life.

By the way, Andrew Peterson, thanks for this song!

In reality, my parents did what was most important for me and that was expose me to and encourage me in my faith. Through their influence, especially Mom’s, we children were at just about every church function possible. Mom continually volunteered, and often drug us along. I can remember being drug to the homes of the elderly to deliver birthday cakes and sing happy birthday to those long forgotten. I really didn’t want to go and couldn’t wait for it to be over, but now I relish the memory and the woman who made me do that.

I remember my alcoholic little league football coach taking jabs at me about being a choir boy. Mom picked me up early every Wednesday from football practice so I could attend the children’s choir practice at church. I hated it then, but now, I’m very glad she did it. I’m glad my football coach took some shots at me too. Others remember her compassion as well. A childhood friend reminded me earlier this year of the chocolate chip cookies Mom baked for him right after his mother died of cancer when we were in Middle School.

That’s my Mom. Like a bulldog she seldom backed down from her convictions or in her protection of her children. She also never wavered in her care and while she hated we were all grown and in less need of it she has always been ready to offer plenty of advice on how to take care of ourselves, our spouses, and our children. She has been a great gift.

As her first born she understandably has some regrets in how she raised me as I do and will with my first born. Nothing can erase the memories of those events, but nothing is better than to be forgiven. And today I publicly pronounce that I forgive my parents  for anything that they might have done wrong. In the end, they got the most important thing right. They gave me a legacy of faith in the matchless Son of God, Jesus the Nazarene, our King, who in the end will bring her home when He desires and who will most likely receive her grand children, and her grand children’s grandchildren.

I love you Mom, and I’m thankful for the privilege of being your son. I hope Jesus does a miraculous work and lets you stick around a few more years, but if He doesn’t I’m glad we have a hope that this is not the end.

“It’s not a hard, fast rule to be sure, but the idea is that sitting around looking at your spiritual belly button isn’t going to provide an object lesson for your faith. The idea is that faith makes sense in the context of some other pursuit.“

Read the rest of his blog to give this quote some context, but the better we church leaders are able to communicate to our people that growing closer to God and discovering more about God and falling into a deeper love of God is done in the context of every aspect of life not just what we term “spiritual contexts” like Bible reading, study, meditation, prayer, etc. If I am paying attention God will reveal Himself in how I feel about Chocolate Chip Cookies, especially warm gooey ones…Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

The Context for Spirituality is not Spirituality | Donald Miller’s Blog

The Context for Spirituality is not Spirituality

I don’t read very many books about faith. And I don’t listen to very many sermons about faith. I’ve not known exactly why for some time, or at least until lunch yesterday. Those books were fine (I may have even written one or two) but they didn’t seem to be very applicable to my life. And it’s never actually helped me to “work on my spirituality or my relationship with Jesus” either. What has helped me is finding myself lost in the woods and calling out to God, looking for wisdom in the scriptures.

Yesterday, at lunch, my friend David mentioned he’d spent some time in Colorado with the guys at Ransomed Heart. David used to work with them and went back to hang out with them for a weekend in the mountains. He mentioned that one of the guys reminded him that spirituality was not a context. I asked David what the guy meant, and Dave said what he meant was that you learn about God while learning to fly a plane or raising a child or planting crops in a field. It’s not a hard, fast rule to be sure, but the idea is that sitting around looking at your spiritual belly button isn’t going to provide an object lesson for your faith. The idea is that faith makes sense in the context of some other pursuit.

And that might be the reason I don’t migrate toward conversations specifically about faith.

In the Bible, God guides people through stories. Stories is how He teaches people about themselves and Himself. He doesn’t get the children of Israel out of Egypt instantly. God drags it out, creates plagues, guides them through positive and negative turns, all to shape their faith. He does the same with Joseph, giving him a vision, then immediately letting him be thrown into a well by his brothers.

If we think we are going to grow in faith by sitting around at a Bible study, we are wrong. That stuff is fine, but without a story, without diving into something really difficult, something that requires us to look to God for support and wisdom and comfort, it will be more difficult to become a person of great faith.

After God sends Moses to lead his family out of slavery in Egypt – granted it’s over a million family members, but they are family none the less – the family becomes a nation with an organized form of government, laws, and religion in a relatively short amount of time. After this critical moment in God’s interaction with us God continually references the Exodus events as his identification and as proof that He cares.

When God has had enough of the rebellion and a turning point is necessary for these people He uses Exodus language to announce through His prophets how He will discipline and how He will redeem.

I just finished Hosea, a prophet who lived 2000 years after the Exodus who announces the future destruction of the Northern Kingdom, Israel,

“5 They will return to Egypt
Assyria will rule over them
because they refuse to repent!” (Hosea11:5, NET)

The Northern Kingdom will again be taken into slavery because of their rebellion. It seems a cruel punishment. God even declares that pregnant women will have their wombs cut open and their babies heads will be dashed against the rocks. Wow! Pretty violent, and if we remove this discipline from the context of 2000 years of patience shown to the Israelites by God I think we might have an opinion of God as merciless. However, He’s given them 2000 years to follow Him. He rescued them from slavery in order to follow Him. Instead the people of the Northern Kingdom and especially their kings disobeyed the law and worshiped other gods. I think 2000 years is about 1999 years longer than I would have given them.

What about you? Is God patient, merciful, gracious, kind, and just? Or is God some kind of malicious, jealous, and enraged ogre?

Detroit Pitcher Armondo Galarraga threw a perfect game. Through nine complete innings, he struck out or was sloppily hit by twenty-seven consecutive batters to complete the twenty-first perfect game in the history of baseball. But he won’t get credit for it. On the last play, Galarraga ran over to cover first and clearly hit the base before the baserunner Jason Donald arrived, and the umpire blew the call. Galarraga knew it, the fans knew it, and even Jason Donald knew it. Jim Joyce, standing within a few feet of the base, called the runner safe. Replays clearly showed he missed the call. The Tiger’s manager stormed first base irate, but Joyce stood his ground. It wasn’t until the game was over and Joyce saw the replay that he realized he’d blown the call and cost the young pitcher a coveted place in the history books. What happened next, in my opinion, is what really made this game such a great story. Both Galarraga and especially Joyce responded, well, perfectly.

It is rare to find a person with the strength to admit they were wrong. Joyce is under no obligation to apologize for a missed call. The human element gives baseball it’s charm. But after he saw the replay, he went to Galarraga and apologized, with tears in his eyes. Galarraga gave Joyce a hug and offered forgiveness, and in a subsequent press conference expressed deep sympathy for the umpire, saying nobody in the world felt worse than him. The next day, as Joyce went onto the field to call the game, Galarraga came out and handed him the batting order as a sign of reconciliation and forgiveness. Perfect.

Because Joyce was not defensive, and because he did not make excuses but took responsibility for his actions, players, fans and even the harshest people in the world, sports radio personalities, sang his praises on the radio for the rest of the week. Joyce had made a mistake, for sure, but asking forgiveness, showing remorse, not making excuses, that’s the stuff of the supernatural, and when we see it, there is something in us that recognizes the exceptional.

If you’re a leader and you’re wrong, admit it. People will respect you. Admit it and show remorse. And if you follow a leader who struggles admitting they are wrong, DO NOT FOLLOW THEM. We all make mistakes, and people who admit their mistakes are in touch with their humanity, and those who don’t are simply delusional. And if they are not willing to pay for their mistakes, you better believe they are going to make those around them pay.

Congrats to Armondo Galarraga for his perfect game and to Jim Joyce for his perfect response to making a mistake. I was more inspired by what happened in that game than I’ve been in, perhaps, any contest I’ve seen. Remarkable stuff.

Evotional.com

Everything I’ve ever done is laced with selfish ambition. Why? Because I’m not completely sanctified. If you want to go to the next level of leadership you need to allow God to crucify your selfish ambitions, but that is only half the equation. You also need God to intensify your godly ambitions. There is a fine line between those two motivations, but they will determine what gets rewarded and what gets disregarded. I think there are lots of leaders who are accomplishing great things for the kingdom, but it will go totally unrewarded because they are doing it for the wrong reasons. And it is our motivations that will one day be revealed and judged by God.

The difference between selfish ambition and godly ambition is sort of like the difference between self confidence and holy confidence. The source of the motivations are polar opposites while the actions on the surface seem to be the same. It’s so easy to do the right things for the wrong reasons and appear to be godly. May God sanctify our motives. May God crucify our selfish ambitions and intensity our godly ambitions. May the glory of God be the only motivation driving us!

I’m enjoying a book by Bill Dallas on second chances called Lessons from San Quentin. At one point he asked a veteran prison guard what would happen if an earthquake hit and all the walls crumbled.

The guard said, “Every short-timer in here would run for the hills like there is no tomorrow…. Death row guys would be shufflin’ out of the gates in their ankle restraints as fast as they could…. And the Lifers who have made peace with themselves would stay right here. They wouldn’t run. In fact, I’d bet that most of them would immediately search through the rubble to help the injured. They know they‘ll leave this place when their time is up. They’ll walk out the front door with dignity.”

I love how he says the Lifers have made peace with themselves. These are second chance people. And after spending years in San Quentin himself, Dallas makes a point that the short-timers are often so focused on getting out, and on what they hate about their surroundings, that they don’t really experience change from the brokenness. But the Lifers are broken by it. In San Quentin they become the life-givers, encouraging others, caring about others and many experiencing transformation through a relationship with God.

How about me? Am I allowing my own struggles to drive me to God to see his transformation and grace? Or, am I so focused on getting through it and blaming others that I receive no real benefit from the experience? How about you?

Why is it that people expect you to fix in minutes what took them days, weeks, months, or years to break? I often find myself initially feeling hopeless about a person’s willingness, or lack thereof, to work on the areas of their life that put them in the position in which they find themselves. I often rhetorically ask, “Why am I doing this?” While if I was on the bus pictured above I’d want out as soon as possible, but I’m pretty sure the events leading up to the bus being in this position may have taken weeks.

I’m not suggesting that the bus crept through the hole in that amount of time. I’m suggesting that the bus driver was preoccupied with a passenger whose child was being a distraction. The passenger, let’s say it’s a single dad, distraught by the recent loss of his wife has been unable to figure out how to help his child behave and is on the way to get some help. The bus driver is at the end of his shift and is looking forward to watching the World Cup at his favorite pub, but he has to get to his last stop on time to make that happen. So, the reason the bus went forward instead of reverse took weeks not moments.

When this happens I must remind myself of a few things:

1. Patience is a piece of the fruit of the Holy Spirit. When I lack it, then I’m forgetting something.
2. I need to be patient with others lack of patience
3. I should not expect others to be patient with their brokenness, especially when the Holy Spirit is absent from their lives. If they don’t know Jesus, then why should I expect them to act like they do?
4. My schedule cannot be determined by the chaos generated in others context.

It took a while for them to find themselves homeless and my immediate response to fix their situation may actually impede my ability to minister to their need for Jesus. Ever wonder why the people Jesus healed had to wait so long for God to finally heal them? Ever wonder about those who got a quick fix from Jesus? Did their lack of misery now lead them away from God instead of toward Him? I wonder if this is what happened to nine of the lepers. While I fully agree that my presence in the world should lead to more justice, mercy, grace, and love I also must recognize that suffering is used by God. So, when one chooses to buy cigarettes and comes up short on rent money maybe the only way to learn not to do it again is point out the choice to smoke over shelter and not provide shelter…at least not immediately.