The way I think about people has a direct effect on my joy, peace and own fulfillment. I spent an entire week just being critical and judgmental of people in my life. I can always point out the faults and shortcomings in others and by the end of this past week God decided to point out that this is exactly what I have been doing. This was the reason why I was getting all worked up for no good reason. Those closest too me never see to wonder how I can get worked up over hypothetical situations, but in all honesty, I think we can all do this to an extent – I just tend to do it out loud more than others. So how does judging others connect to anxious hypothetical? Well, let me elaborate.

Ish43: 18 (The Msg) Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new.

One barrier that keeps me from thinking about people the way

Jesus did is my past experiences. Past experiences with different kinds of people can shape how I enter into new relationships and interactions. In defense of my heart, I can become particularly critical or suspicious of those around me resulting in me running hypothetical scenarios through my head. If I can prove that the people currently entering my life are like those ‘other’ people I can protect myself from being hurt again and keep them at a distance and society often backs me in supporting stereotypes so there is a high probability that I will be right in my assumption. In this way I also manage to not trust friends or allow new friendships to develop. I have seen this in my work and personal relationships. Being hurt by past work situations has made me more suspicious of the people I work with presently. In getting to know new people I have been meeting I can also pass judgment prematurely. My past experiences can feed my prejudices, stereo types and presumptions preventing me from loving people the way Jesus loves and from sharing Him with them.

This attitude also gives Satan a foothold to puff me up. In this mindset I can easily place myself in a position to look down on others or think myself better than others. If I am ‘better than’ someone that makes me too good to serve them or give to them. I’m too good to serve my house-mates because I’ve taken out the trash 3 times this week already so I’m not gona’ do it again as than they will expect me to pick up after them all the time. I won’t do something at work that I see as being ‘beneath me’ or not in my job description because than I will be taken advantage of.

Matthew 7:5 (The Msg) It's this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.

The Message version of this scripture helps me to look at myself first and remember that as I am judging and measuring others up they too are doing the same to me. Neither myself or the other person doing the measuring is in the right, despite the fact that we may be completely right in some of our assumptions, it doesn’t matter, we are wrong to assume in the first place.

Romans 12:1-21(The Msg) 1 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life--your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life--and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. 2Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Jesus died for that person who I am critical of, the one who gets on my nerves, the one I don’t understand and the one I can’t stand. Not only that but by giving into the past I can allow this act of faithlessness to steal what God has in store for the future. I can miss out on being used by Him, miss out on touching others lives as well as them touching mine, miss out on His blessings because of actions fueled by my suspicious or judgmental thinking. It’s not always about some great bond or connection, others motives won't always be clear or good, we will not click with everyone, heck there will be many a day we won’t feel like we are clicking with God or understand His motives but we keep going because we fix our attention on Him and we hold on to what is promised and through this type of faith he is able to bring out the best in us, despite us. So we keep fighting our own hypothetical because we know that God will blow them out with His truth.

"I believed if time passes, everything turns into beauty. If the rain stops, tears clean the scars of memory away. Everything starts wearing fresh colors. Every sound begins playing a heartful melody. Jealousy embellishes a page of epic. Desire is embraced in a dream but my mind is still in chaos and....."

June 7, 2007
Success Covers a Multitude of Sins

Having a "successful ministry" can keep pastors from the hard work of character transformation.

This week I am attending the Midwest Regional Spiritual Formation Forum at Elmbrook Church near Milwaukee. The conference theme is “spiritual formation and the mission of the church.” Most interpret “mission” to mean a measurable impact in the world. Are people coming to Christ? Is the church making a difference? But the first plenary speaker, Dave Johnson—pastor of Church of the Open Door in Maple Grove, Minnesota—says our desire for external impact should take a back seat to internal transformation.

Johnson spoke about the pressure that comes from being anointed for ministry. When God empowers us with the skills to powerfully carry out his purposes it is like a weight being put upon us, and it takes real interior strength to carry it for any amount of time. This interior strength is a character formed in the image of Christ.

Drawing from the life and downfall of Samson, he went on to tell the stories of men and women who were used powerfully by God to accomplish even miraculous things, but who eventually collapsed because their characters simply could not carry the weight of their anointing. These leaders had not made the transformation of their characters the first priority in their life and ministry.

The reason many of us ignore the formation of our character, says Johnson, is because it will slow us down. Many ministry leaders want success, a big church, or a crowd. But how many of us want a real life? How many of us want a life in God? We can have that, Johnson believes. We can have a character that produces love, peace, patience, kindness…but it will slow us down. It might mean the church won’t grow as big as quickly. It might mean the crowd will get smaller.

But the alternative is both devastating and all too common. The alternative is a ministry of high impact but shallow character. As only Johnson could say it, “In the bible it was a miracle when God spoke through an ass. Now it happens everyday.” Translation: God is speaking powerfully through many pastors, but their characters show nothing of God’s life. These leaders, along with their anger, pride, bitterness, and cynicism, are tolerated by many churches because they are able to “fill the room.” Their powerful spiritual gifts, like Samson’s, deflect the flaws of their characters.

Johnson believes that many of us opt to ignore the slow, hard work of character formation because we simply don’t want it. It is a matter of intention. We don’t want to be slowed down in our pursuit of ministry impact and tangible achievement. In order to have a life in God, a life full of his character, we have to want it more than anything else.

Johnson concluded with this simple but haunting question—What do you want?

(My thought: The issue here applies to everyone, not only pastors.)

This time, This place

Misused, Mistakes

Too long, Too late

Who was I to make you wait

Just one chance

Just one breath

Just in case there’s just one left

‘Cause you know,

you know, you know

That I love you

I have loved you all along

And I miss you

Been far away for far too long

I keep dreaming you’ll be with me

and you’ll never go

Stop breathing if

I don’t see you anymore

On my knees, I’ll ask

Last chance for one last dance

‘Cause with you, I’d withstand

All of hell to hold your hand

I’d give it all

I’d give for us

Give anything but I won’t give up

‘Cause you know,

you know, you know

That I love you

I have loved you all along

And I miss you

Been far away for far too long

I keep dreaming you’ll be with me

and you’ll never go

Stop breathing if

I don’t see you anymore

So far away

Been far away for far too long

So far away

Been far away for far too long

But you know, you know, you know

I wanted

I wanted you to stay

‘Cause I needed

I need to hear you say

That I love you

I have loved you all along

And I forgive you

For being away for far too long

So keep breathing

‘Cause I’m not leaving

Hold on to me and

never let me go

German Lutheran theologian and Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison: 'God does not give us everything we want, but He does fulfill all His promises ... leading us along the best and straightest paths to Himself.'

I am the only one to blame for this

Somehow it all adds up the same

Soaring on the wings of selfish pride

I flew too high and like Icarus I collide

With a world I try so hard to leave behind

To rid myself of all but love,

To give and die

To turn away and not become

Another nail to pierce the skin of one who loves

More deeply than the oceans,

More abundant than the tear

Of a world embracing every heartache

Can I be the one to sacrifice

Or grip the spear and watch the blood and water flow

To love you - take my world apart

To need you - I am on my knees

To love you - take my world apart

To need you - broken on my knees

All said and done I stand alone

Amongst remains of a life I should not own

It takes all I am to believe

In the mercy that covers me

Did you really have to die for me?

All I am for all you are

Because what I need and what I believe are worlds apart

And I pray,

To love you - take my world apart

To need you - I am on my knees

To love you - take my world apart

To need you - broken on my knees

I look beyond the empty cross

Forgetting what my life has cost

And wipe away the crimson stains

And dull the nails that still remains

More and more I need you now,

I owe you more each passing hour

The battle between grace and pride

I gave up not so long ago

So steal my heart and take the pain

And wash the feet and cleanse my pride

Take the selfish, take the weak,

And all the things I cannot hide

Take the beauty, take my tears

The sin and soaked heart and make it yours

Take my world all apart

Take it now, take it now

And serve the ones that I despise

Speak the words I can't deny

Watch the world I used to love

Fall to dust and thrown away

I look beyond the empty cross

Forgetting what my life has cost

So wipe away the crimson stains

And dull the nails that still remain

So steal my heart and take the pain

Take the selfish, take the weak

And all the things I cannot hide

Take the beauty, take my tears

Take my world apart, take my world apart

I pray, I pray, I pray

Take my world apart

Worlds Apart.

It takes genuine courage to trust God. It’s a lot easier to just be a coward because cowardice behavior is generally more acceptable and excusable. Trusting God can be like a Trust Fall, you blindfold a person and have them fall backwards into someone’s arms. As I have myself participated in this I remember feeling completely over-confident when I first tipped from my heals and began to tumble backwards, but how quickly my confidence was shattered when my body began to shift from just being at an angle to almost parallel and I still did not feel hands bracing my back! I got that twisting knot feeling in the pit of my stomach and throat and fear griped my chest and it was at that very moment when my partner caught me inches from the ground.

Proverbs3: 3, 5-7 (Message) don’t lose your grip on Love and Loyalty. Tie them around your neck; carve their initials on your heart.

When I see the command in verse three the first thing that comes to mind is that if I am being warned against losing my grip than for sure there will be times that I will do just that. I have indeed lost my grip on God’s love and loyalty and I have done so when I tried to make sense of things for myself.

Trust GOD from the bottom of your heart; don't try to figure out everything on your own.

Listen for GOD's voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; he's the one who will keep you on track.

Don't assume that you know it all. Run to GOD! Run from evil!

Trust is me shifting my focus from how I see and make sense of a given situation and instead turning back to seek God’s nature. If I can just get to a point in my prayer or thinking process where I begin to dwell on God’s nature as I know it from the scriptures I can acknowledge Him and trust a bit more in that very moment.

It takes courage to trust because trusting for me has also meant shifting from praying and hoping for clarity to praying and trusting in the absence of clarity because as Paula Rinehart writes, “The path will always appear no clearer than one little step at a time.”

I don’t think I have ever truly understood trust in this way. I have tried to “trust” that God would give me what I want, as well as how I want to get it. I have also tired to “trust” that God would provide clarity where there was none or catch me right before I hit the ground. Instead I am learning that God will let me fall a bit longer than I am comfortable with, He won’t give clarity, and His plan almost never resembles mine in any way shape or form. So as I face the big unknown career wise and ask what's next for my life in all its many aspects, I can feel challenged by the call to truly trust.

Brannan Manning once wrote, “The scandal of God’s silence in the most heartbreaking hours of our journey is perceived in retrospect as veiled tender presence and a passage into pure trust that is not at the mercy of the response it receives.”

So when the scripture says to “trust in the Lord always” all of a sudden as I get older and my life experiences broaden, along with the experience of pain and/or things and events that just don’t make sense to me, the emphasis on ALWAYS is amplified in my heart as the call to trust becomes not just a matter of surrender or hope, but all out war to hear God’s voice among so many other murmurs. It takes courage to keep straining to listen.

In my darkest moments a quote that really has always helped me to regain perspective has been,

“When you come to the edge of all the light you know and you are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown faith is knowing one of two things will happen: There will be something solid for you to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.” (Unknown Author)

"And the parched ground shall become a pool."

We always have visions, before a thing is made real. When we realize that although the vision is real, it is not real in us, then is the time that Satan comes in with his temptations, and we are apt to say it is no use to go on. Instead of the vision becoming real, there has come the valley of humiliation.

"Life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And batter'd by the shocks of doom
To shape and use."

God gives us the vision, then He takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of the vision, and it is in the valley that so many of us faint and give way. Every vision will be made real if we will have patience.

Don’t burn out. Burn on.

Without Sacrifice, there can be no victory. – Captain Archibald Witwicky, Transformer 2007