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Look to the Birds and Remember I didn’t doubt the greatness of God or what He could do; I just doubted that He’d move mightily in my life. I don’t know why that was my mindset, but it’s probably because I had been living in the land of disappointment. I had experienced some major letdowns over the past few years and had watched others that I love experience them as well. God is good, but I didn’t feel like I was seeing that in a personal way. A few months ago I knew that God was trying to teach me to expect Him. With an attitude, I said, “Fine, then show me where in Your Word it says that I’m supposed to expect You to act.” He led me to James 1:6-7 which says, “When you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” From those verses, I knew He wanted me to expect Him to move, but I still had to work through my typical way of thinking. He kept bringing …Read more
Why I Never Take the Advice “Just Be Yourself” I’ve heard it said a million times. Everything will be okay if you “just be yourself.” But will it? What if, underneath it all, you have an angry, vengeful heart? What if you have to work hard every day to be a nice person? What if you are embattled in choosing your response to everyday little things? Sometimes it is quite honestly exhausting for me to “just be myself.” I was wronged as a child, and I became a fighter. An angry, scrappy emotional fighter. I was very impatient and annoyed easily, and I was so bitter and angry for so many years it became second nature. I think I chose Anger because anything less than that to me was weakness. Weakness was not something I dared tolerate in myself, because in my eyes weak people got hurt. If you were strong and powerful and quite frankly scary, people would leave you alone. I felt it was better to push people away from the start to avoid the possibility of really knowing or trusting them. As the years passed, the outward anger subsided more and more, and I grew into a …Read more
A few days ago, I received a letter in the mail. Beautifully composed, this script was the written words of my friend as a tribute to his late father in commemoration of his birthday. The pages were filled with snapshots of the life and legacy of his father: a language teacher and wrestling coach, a friend and family man, a mentor and leader, a loss still grieved. The letter closed with a memory of his father’s last day on earth. An avid sailor, this gentleman had competed in a race that very day. Prior to the race, as he prepared his vessel to take on the vast sea, he spotted a tiny bird perched on the railing of his sailboat. This little bird, set against the backdrop of an infinite seascape, brought about a joy that my friend’s dad immediately captured on his phone and sent to his family: the convergence of joy and beauty—mighty and miniature—and the reflection of the Creator and Caregiver to all. My friend’s father lost his life on the ocean that day—the same day he gained heaven. Careless in the care of God, he was received into the arms of his Father, the One who …Read more
Questions and Statements Let me get this out there right off the bat: I don’t read the Bible nearly as much as the majority of Bible-believing Christians probably think I “should.” Is that a vast generalization? Am I putting words in the mouths of a whole lot of people that I don’t know? Yes. Absolutely. But I’ll stand firm on that statement anyway, because I don’t have an easy time reading the Bible. Sometimes, understanding the Bible is the most difficult thing in the world for me to do. Sometimes there’s a long wrestling match involved in making peace with what it says, so I don’t do it very often. You see, I “put my trust” in Jesus when I was a little boy with very childlike faith. It wasn’t until later that I experienced the trauma that we all of us experience in life, to one degree or another, when we learn what it means to have our trust betrayed by someone else. Learning what it actually means to believe that Jesus is trustworthy, and to then really trust in him, is something that I’ve spent the past few decades fighting to master. So when I do read the …Read more
