oasisCHURCH

Sheep

Sheep have to be one of the dumbest animals on the planet.  They wander around and get lost.  They are dirty.  If one of them gets spooked, and runs off a cliff, the rest of the flock will follow right along.  It's no wonder that God refers to us as sheep.  We are so much alike it isn't funny.  We think we are "wise" and yet, I don't know about you, but I can get a case of the "stupids" at the drop of a hat.  We too wander around and get lost, both literally and figuratively.  We try to bring God our righteousness, instead of taking His righteousness, even though the Bible tells us that our righteousness is like "filthy rags".   So is there any hope for us "sheep"?  Yes there is, when we remember that God is our great Shepherd.  Even though we stray from God and fall in a ditch,  God has a long arm which is able to pull us out of the mire, clean us up, and set us back in His pasture. 

This analogy of the sheep came to me today, as I sat in my office, with stress induced stomach pains, thinking about all the "stuff" that I have to do today.  I began to think, "What is wrong with me"?   Then God in His gentle way, began to whisper to me. Whisper to Me... sounds like a song I know. (sorry, I digress).  He began to remind me that I have not really spent much time with Him in the past few days.  I haven't sat in His lap and shared my day with Him.  I have not read His word, and been reminded of all the promises He has for me.  I have been a sheep.  No wonder I am feeling sick, and disoriented.

Isn't it great to know that God is our Shepherd?  I am thankful that he takes his staff, and yanks me back on the path, or even cracks me over the head with it, if that is what I need.  I have learned to appreciate God's correction.  I am so glad that we serve The Good Shepherd, who restores our soul, and leads us in paths of righteousness.   

An Update: Songs My Father Taught Me

Back in mid-November I announced on the blog that I was working on a new album entitled “Songs My Father Taught Me”. I’m glad to announce that these past seven or so months have been very fruitful for me. God has been gracious enough to quiet my mind, open up my heart, and say to me, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it with good things (Psalms 81:10).” I’m very proud and excited about this new project because it is featuring the works of some very gifted individuals in our fellowship. Two of the songs on this project are by none other than Des Jeffers. I’m sure you would all agree that Des is someone we are all very lucky to know and also someone whose gifts continue to bless us in the best of ways. There is also a tune on here by the ever sensitive to the Spirit Lara Perrin. Lara and I are still collaborating to finish her song but it will be ready to record some time in the near future. Other than that one song every other song on the following list is completely written and ready to record. However, the recording process is still somewhat far away. I really want to take my time and record this album right. So I’m not rushing anything. I’m currently saving up money for a good quality drum machine that I’ll be able to use in home recording for many years to come. It will be just like having my own portable Jared all the time. Once I have that I’ll launch headlong into recording. I’m hoping for a November release date but that might be just a hair too soon. If not by then I’m definitely aiming to have this sucker ready to go by Christmas. This will be a full-bore kind of project. If you want to get a taste of what the entire album will sound like you can scroll back through the archives and find the version of “Break Me” that I put on the blog recently. Hopefully I can make it sound even better than that. So anyway, here is the updated list of tracks that I plan to put on this new project. Some of these tunes you have heard and some will be new to your ears.

Break Me

Call To Worship

You Move Me

You…My God

God With Us

Rush

Bloom (by Lara Perrin)

Rise (on the blog I accidentally called this Arise but Des’ original title is Rise/Sorry Des)

Let My Heart (adapted from Psalm 119)

Victory Dance (yet another Des goody)

Without You

Saved

Body and Soul (adapted from Song of Songs)

Bonus Track: Teach Me (plugged in)

I’ll keep you posted if there are any changes or other developments on the project. I’ll also be posting tunes on the blog so you can hear them as each one comes off the presses. My heart is overwhelmed with love for each of you that has supported me and encouraged me through this time in my life. Thank you with all the honesty of love that I can possibly muster. I love you, my family.   

A Walk to Remember

I love going on little “trips”. I’m a person who doesn’t really like to get caught up inside all the time. I especially enjoy going to places where I haven’t been in a long time. This past Saturday Jamitha and I embarked on a little “trip” that we had been planning for a little over a week. It was quite the event for us. For nearly the entire week leading up to our outing we could not stop discussing the details. Needless to say, we had an almost child-like giddiness about the whole affair. The destination: Old Man’s Cave. If you grew up and attended school in or around Meigs County then there’s a strong chance that you took a school field trip to Old Man’s Cave. It was in this fashion that I first encountered this beautiful juggernaut of nature. Yet my initial visit to Old Man’s Cave was probably a little more than fifteen years ago so you can consider it safe to say that my explicit memory of the entire location has been somewhat dulled by time. Jamitha’s visit was within the past decade so she tends to remember things a little better than I (this is also a rule of thumb for just about everything…my senior moments are already starting to kick in). However, all the memories we collectively have of this locale are very endearing. We were nearly beside ourselves when we went to Wal-Mart on Friday to get supplies such as the nature hiking essentials of Snack Packs (chocolate chip cookie dough flavor), Ritz chips (which if you haven’t tried you need to get yourself to a store ASAP and pick some up), and Capri-Suns (or as I call them, “Heaven in a Silver Packet”). The Rutland Department Store supplied our lunchmeat. Ma and Pa Willford generously loaned us the usage of an Igloo Xtreme cooler that will, by the way, keep ice in it’s icy form for up to sixteen hours in a 250 degree heat wave. We were stocked, locked and ready to roll by the time Saturday morning rolled around.

We arrived at Old Man’s Cave right around 12:15 P.M. We broke out a picnic blanket, got out the cooler and enjoyed a killer lunch before hitting the trails. After a visit to the little boys and girls rooms we hit up the ranger station for a trail map and we were off. Now here I have a small confession to make. I had no idea that Old Man’s Cave was merely one part of a bigger entity called the “Hocking Hills State Park”. I also had no idea there was something like six or so odd miles of trail that you could walk around the entire park. The six miles part was something I didn’t discover until well into our hike. We started our walk around 1:15 P.M. or so. We headed to the Lower Falls section of Old Man’s Cave first. From there we saw a sign that said “Cedar Falls”. I said, “Oh honey let’s walk there and see more pretty waterfalls.” This was but one of the many stupid things I would say this day. She said, “Ok,” and we were blazing the trail towards what I believed to be the not very far away Cedar Falls. One of the best parts about Old Man’s Cave is going on all the “No Trail” paths. So naturally Jamitha and I are hitting a bunch of side paths on our swath to Cedar Falls. Finally, at roughly 3:30 P.M. Jamitha and I see a sign that says 1 mi. to Cedar Falls. We were both like, “Huh?” We’d been walking for nearly two hours, not a straight path mind you but still, and we had yet another mile to go before we hit our destination. We decided, silently I think, at that point to try and stick a little more to the path and make up some ground to the falls. Probably some time between 4 and 4:30 P.M. we arrived at Cedar falls. We rested only for a short while and decided not to walk back the way we came. We instead decided to take the three-mile route back to Old Man’s Cave. The upper rim trail that we followed back to our car was, in many ways, a much easier road. The only real obstacle on this high road trail was hills. It was here that I had an encounter with a telegram from God. Jamitha and I were walking a strong steady pace in order to make good time back to the car when we passed a gentleman who looked like he might just live in these hills. If it weren’t for the fanny pack bouncing on his hip I would have officially declared him a rugged mountain man. He was tall and thin. He wore very sturdy hiking boots, navy colored shorts that hit him about mid-thigh, a white t-shirt, glasses, and a navy colored baseball cap. He had a bushy gray beard and tufts of his gray hair struggled to get out from underneath his cap. As he passed us he smiled and asked, “Was it worth it?” Jamitha and I must have looked worn down because there was a subtle chuckle underneath his question that almost seemed to say, “You guys looked beat.” Granted, we were beat. After nearly five hours of climbing these hills we were both very ready to sit down and take a load off. Regardless of all that, we were both having this incredibly great time together so we didn’t really emphasize to ourselves how tired we were, only that we had had this amazing day with one another. So I smiled back and heartily responded to his question, “Oh yeah, it was well worth it.” Then something rather akin to déjà vu happened. Jamitha and I had walked probably a solid half-mile or so when we passed a group of people. Within this group was a young woman. She startled me with this question: “Was it worth it?” In that moment I simply blurted out my reflex response of, “Yeah, it was well worth it.” It wasn’t until I had walked about another hundred feet that my startled feeling really got a hold of me. I remember thinking to myself, “How odd. Two completely different people, at quite an interval apart in terms of space, but in near succession of one another in the scope of time, asked me the exact same question. What are the odds of that?” Now I’m no mathematician (here I expect a mathematical response from 100 ft. Mike) but such a sequence of identical questions just didn’t seem very probable to me. However some might say that it only makes perfect sense because everyone knows that the trail is incredibly long and it only stands to reason that others walking it would want to know if they are wasting their time in a rather un-scenic and pointless endeavor. To me, however, this was no chance encounter of strong or flimsy mathematical odds. Let me explain why.

Earlier that week I had finished reading “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis. I learned a great deal from this book that helped to highlight many of the finer points of understanding scripture. One of these lessons was about the trouble of “self”. I’m still planning another post about this very lesson but I’m as yet in the process of piecing together my thought. I actually sat down on Friday night and typed out a full page for this article, which I had entitled “Dining With the Enemy”. As I typed, something just felt out of place. As I finished the last paragraph on the page I felt God say to me, “This isn’t what you want to say. Scrap it.” I was momentarily taken aback because this was a full page worth of work and I hate to just trash the start of what might have been a decent thought. However, God was very insistent with me in that moment as I heard again, “Just get rid of it. It’s not what I want you to say.” So I reluctantly highlighted the entire selection and hit delete. But I wasn’t bothered by that because I believe that when you begin to understand what it means to actually trust God then you understand that your will and your passion doesn’t always run concurrent to the passion or will of God. I think it is always of extreme importance for us to keep in mind that God is busy “perfecting” us all our lives. It is necessary for us to stop, listen and discern what it is God wants from us or perhaps what God is trying to tell us.

Flash forward in time to my hundred-foot walk past the young woman who had asked the déjà vu question, “Was it worth it?” For days I had been contemplating the idea of choice and how it is both the greatest gift as well the greatest curse of humanity. Every day we are faced with choice. Virtually every second of our lives is about choice. It is perhaps the most commonly exercised thing that we humans have. Yet as often as we exercise it, it doesn’t mean we really know how to use it in an advantageous way. I think back over the vast chronicles of ignorant choices in my life to be reminded that I’ve spent most of my life abusing choice. How ironic is it that choice is both the very thing that helps me serve God as well turn from Him. What a massive responsibility we each have as carriers of this infection called choice. Choice can either be a bad infection or a good infection. At the risk of sounding trite I’m going to say that there is but one vaccine for the “bad choice infection” disease. That cure is simply God. Now that I’ve made myself sound like a televangelist I want to try and redeem myself by saying that we simply don’t know how to handle choice. I believe each of us would acknowledge that there is at least one thing in our lives that we know, no matter how much effort or study we put into it, we will just never be good at doing. For me such an example would be math. In all of our spiritual senses, however, none of us will ever be good at choice. It just isn’t going to happen. We need help in that regard. We need a driver because we only run ourselves into guardrails when we try to drive ourselves through the fog laden back roads of choice. The only smart choices are the ones made under the will and supervision of God. Everything else is just a blind human guess with a poor seek to success ratio. Sure sometimes we might hit the nail right on the head but most of the time we’re just going to whack ourselves on the thumb. Again my mind reels back to experiences where I have to ask myself the question, “Was it worth it?” To many of these experiences I can repulsively say, “Hell no it wasn’t worth it,” only to stop and remember this: Our choices help to both define us and lead us. Trek back over your life and imagine, for the moment, that you could remove the most difficult year of your life. After having done that ask yourself this very integral question: Would I be the same person without that year?

Here is a cold, hard, fast truth: None of us can look back over the catalogue of our choices and say that every moment of decision was a laudable one. Yet, as the old adage says, what is done cannot be undone. However, this does not mean that we should spend the rest of our lives in Christ kicking ourselves over crossed bridges that we cannot return to in order to make drastic corrective alterations. If we were to fall into such a trap we would spend our whole lives recounting a mediocre existence instead of passionately praising the one who gave us any existence at all. Was it worth it? This life has been worth it for one reason: God. I would rather never have been born if it meant that I had to go through this whole life never knowing Christ. However, I was given life, made a lot of really crap choices, and despite all my own inadequacies God still sought me, broke me down, and built me back up again. Why did He do that? It doesn’t make sense to a “logical” mind because it somehow defies what we have come to define as good sense. Yet despite that, God made the choice to go ahead with each and every one of our lives. He made the choice to stick with us. He made the choice to save us. He made the choice to seek after us all our lives. He made the choice to be our Father. He made the choice to take responsibility for His creation. He understood perfectly where His choices would bring Him and He did it just the same. And He didn’t just do it because He could. He did it because He understood His choices. He knew what we would need. He knew what we would feel. He knew how we might treat Him. He knew He would be despised as well as loved by those He had crafted with His own hands. In a way it almost seems reckless but for those who believe, does it seem so reckless to you? Our lives are made “worth it” because God filled them with worth. Our little sojourn through the world may sometimes be tiresome and even seemingly cumbersome to endure but this is only true if we are trudging along with our feet stuck deep in our own sense of reality. There are many realities for sale these days. You see them everywhere. Go through any grocery store line and you’ll see eight different realities on the market tailored especially for you (whatever that means). Go through any bookstores bestseller list and you’ll see them festering with the latest cure for the “life blues”. Everyone is searching for something. Everyone is searching for a reality to call their own. Everyone is like a junkie looking for fix and in their search they find one of two things: Either band-aids or actual cures. Many will never find anything that really heals the wounds they seek to mend. This is what I mean by finding “band-aids”. Yet God is the only steadfast cure that has never, and will never be, diminished. That is why our road will always be worth treading.

God fixes us. But why? I believe it is because God believed in some part of us that is somehow blind to our own eyes. In other words, He believed we were worth it. Of course I’m not claiming here that I believe I have seen the full breadth of God’s perspective for creation but I think there is something in scripture that breathes this very sentiment of worth. God wanted us. Sometimes we look at God as this very distant father figure sitting atop an ivory white throne looking down through the miles at His creation in either quiet satisfaction or thundering disgust. Yet what if God were that shabbily dressed guy in the next town that everyone claimed was some kind of wise individual or even some silly religious lunatic. What if the spirit of God was that thing inside you making the machine of your life turn in the sequence He knew was best. What if all that had been in your life was, as H.G. Wells once said, “…the dream before the awakening.” What if God were like the hero in some classical work of romantic fiction who loved us so strongly, lived His promise to us rather than just discussed it, who fought for us, who died for us, and lived on inside of us in Spirit while constantly feeding us life from the inside. That’s no distant picture of God nor do I believe that scripture ever paints God as a distant character somehow on the fringes of the bigger story. God isn’t seated eons away from anything you could ever touch. He is, and always has been, right where you could find Him. God is no Houdini nor does He try to be. God simply is only what He’s always been with us. He’s never been anything different. God is the best part of us. Long and tirelessly He has struggled for us.

In other words, He believed we were worth it.

May our eyes never be blind to this unwavering fact: This existence was worth knowing because our existence was, is and always will be, God.

Family

I just wanted to take a moment to step back and say a very warm thank you to the entire Oasis family for all that you have done for me in regards to my graduation from OU.  Everyone has been so wonderful during this important time in my life.  I could go on for page after page about how filled my heart is by the love that you give to me.  I think, however, I would rather let this card (posted below) from the Stewart family, specially designed by Brock, speak for me.  It says better in a few words and pictures what I couldn't express in a million.  As a family, we hold each other up.  We comfort one another.  We help one another see things that our eye might have always missed.  We help remind one another why we're important.  God knew exactly what he was talking about when He said, "It's not good for man to be alone."  Fellowship is important.  God knows it is not healthy for us to live our lives in exile from others.   I'm so thankful that God has put me among this particular network of individuals and I'm anxious for a future that I cannot yet see where I will come to know even more fascinating people.  I send my love steadfast and full out to all of you.  Thank you an inumerable amount of times over.  I love you.

Does God know what He's doing? (An anecdote)

Why?

Out of all the questions that get fired towards God this is perhaps the most common one. If not this singular worded question then perhaps some “wordier” version still asking the mysterious “why”. Let’s face a very honest reality: God knows and we don’t. It’s really as simple as that. Some people tend to think in the here and now. Some people tend to think ahead in time. Some people prefer to live in days gone past. However, the fact remains that no matter how much we bend our minds on the subject of occurrences in our lives we see our world in a realm of time that is always in some shadow of mystery to our understanding. A lot of people don’t like that kind of talk because many people know “where they’ve been” and they know good and damn well “where they’re going”. People have this illusion that their lives belong to them and that they steer the course of events in their lives. I know because I used to be such a person. I was confident that I had things under control. I was confidently and unsympathetically cool about who I was. I was defined not by any outer force but by my own choices. I lived life only on my terms and that’s just the way it was. And why? Because I was smart enough. Because I was clever enough. Because I saw things that other people didn’t. I acted older than my age. Here you can safely insert any other arrogant, self-indulgent assumption and you would be remarkably accurate. What I realize now is that I was basically full of poo.

I learned humility the hard way, as is seemingly sometimes the only true way to get it to sink it. Let me tell you another story out of the pages of my life. This story is one of the reasons that I learned not to ask if God knows what He is doing.

Picture this scene: It’s a muggy country day and two friends work on an old beater vehicle in the five o’clock sun. They are working steadfastly in the heat at the end of a long driveway that winds up a long hill. Of the two friends, Matthew and Justin, only one is something of a mechanic. Justin, who knew far more about cars than Matthew will one day go on to become an engineer for GE. Matthew was not far from heading off to Devry to begin his studies in the ever-expanding technological field. Their conversation, I am told, was rather light and pertaining to nothing of any great significance. Matthew had always been interested with the notion of God but had never studied in any great depth but understanding God on a greater level was something that Matthew had always been interested in. Just by chance a traveling missionary stumbled up the steep driveway to where Justin and Matthew were working. What exactly transpired next and just what was said I’m not sure. This is what I do know: At the end of that conversation with the missionary Matthew decided that he wanted to be baptized. If I understand the story correctly Matthew was baptized right there in his own tub. The missionary went away and not much else was said about the whole encounter. Matthew simply let it go. Justin was never quite sure why Matthew did what He did that night but when the story reached my ears it somehow made sense. That was just Matthew. If he heard a compelling argument he would tend to throw his heart right into it. He was just one of those people. Not 72 hours after Matthew had been baptized he died of a brain aneurysm at the Ohio State University Medical Center. The story of his baptism merely days before his death would incite much talk amongst people. In the days following his death I remember receiving a phone call from someone at Kentucky Christian College. I had sent something to the school months before because I was considering going to college there after I graduated high school. I had, however, already made my final decision to attend Ohio University. The woman who I talked to that evening was simply following up on my interest in attending KCC. What began as a courtesy call eventually turned into a powerful opportunity for the Holy Spirit to get involved. I explained to the woman on the line, and I’m still not sure why I did this, what was happening at the time. I told her about Matthew and the baptism. She shared with me and I shared with her. It was amazing. We were talking like old friends and to this day I recall that conversation but I couldn’t tell you who she is. She was there in an instant and then just gone but the impact of how she was able to minister to me that night was unbelievable. I found out later through someone else I knew who was attending KCC at the time that this woman, whoever she was, had told the story of our conversation to other people at KCC. There was prayer and an outpouring of the Spirit because peoples minds were fixated on the fact that Matthew had committed his life to Christ merely days before he passed away. The evidence of God at work was simply staggering to many who heard it. The story inspired nearly everyone who heard it. And it was a powerful testimony that Matthew had been baptized merely hours before his own passing but that wasn’t the end of it.

That night in the OSU medical center, while machines were sustaining Matthews’ life, there was a young girl his age dying in another wing. She was in desperate need of a liver transplant. I believe it was a liver but it could have been a kidney. Whatever the case, this girl had been given no hope. She had perhaps only days to live. She and her family were settling in for the grim reality that this was one fight she wasn’t going to win. Her name was Molly. She was the pride of her school. She was athletic, like Matthew. She was one of the most popular kids in school, like Matthew. She wore the beauty of youth like a garland, like Matthew. They shared so many similarities in their lives that it was somewhat startling. Matthew was an organ donor. When he passed away it was discovered that the organ that Molly so desperately needed was compatible with her body. Molly was rushed into surgery and given the transplant. The Columbus Dispatch would later run an article entitled “Miracle Molly”. And it was a miracle. The chances of Molly finding a donor in the same hospital only hours before her own passing was a long shot like few others. Molly would later be told that her donor was a boy her age that was a lot like her. The papers would ask Molly how she felt about the boy whose organ had saved her life. The mere thought of it made Molly hang her head as she realized that another had died and given her a new lease on life. Yet if I could have told Molly something as she struggled with this thought I would have told her that Matthew would have had it no other way. He was one of the only selfless people I have ever known in my life. Many people talk about serving others but he did it as naturally as he took in a breath. From what I understand Molly is a beautiful person from the inside out. I pray that she is well wherever she is now.

This is but one of many stories of how Matthew’s death gave others life. His own life gave people hope and inspiration. His funeral, as the Daily Sentinel would later remark, was one of the biggest funerals that Meigs County had witnessed in the last fifty years. This stands as a testament to how many lives were touched by the life of this one man. For me I feel like there are volumes I could write about my friendship with Matthew. We weren’t just friends. We were family. He knew me better than anyone and vice versa. He wanted me to see to it that he was remembered well. Now I see an even higher purpose than that alone. I believe that this is what Matthew would want me to say most about the whole experience surrounding his passing.

Does God know what He’s doing? To many it seemed so wrong that a young virile man such as Matthew should be struck down in the prime of his life. I’ll never forget holding his mother as we stood over his grave and she said, “It’s just not fair.” And to that I agreed. It didn’t seem fair. Never had I felt such immense anguish pour off any one individual in all my life. My heart hurt merely standing ten feet away from her. The unimaginable lament that falls over a parent as they lose one of their own precious children is a thought I can’t bear to even imagine. Any parent can probably feel their stomachs turn over in the most sick of ways to even hint at the idea that something could happen to your children and you would be powerless to reverse it. Yet I believe Matthew would want me to ask myself, “What did God do in all that?” “Was God simply cruel?” “Was God just using one pawn on the board as a sacrifice to save a better piece?” I don’t think of it that way. I now acknowledge it like this: God knows and I don’t. What happened to Matthew was, to date, the worst thing that has ever happened in my life and it is grief such as that that I never want to look in the face again. The scary thing is that I know there is a very likely possibility that I will. Despite that I try to say this one phrase over and over again: God knows and I don’t. I don’t just say it. I try to live it. Does God know what He’s doing? Matthew was baptized and believed in the Holy Spirit hours before he died. He found salvation right before his time on earth expired. Does God know what He’s doing? Molly lay dying in a hospital and the miracle of life was given to her despite the most impossible odds in the medical field. Does God know what He’s doing? Out of the blue some woman I had never even met said exactly everything that I needed to hear in my greatest hour of need. This stranger helped me more than anyone during that time. How strange. Does God know what He’s doing? I have no fancy answer for this question and perhaps it’s impossible to answer to everyone’s satisfaction. I know this though: I’ve seen God do the impossible. I’ve seen God minister in the most improbable of ways. I’ve seen God save and that one rescue, not to mention all the God given gifts that poured out of that occurrence, shook me right down to my very foundations. A cynic might say, “Oh, that’s just a series of chance events. The odds are against it but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.” To that I would say, “Yes you’re right. It was a series of chance events and the odds against something like all that is just ridiculous. You say chance and that is all you see, just chance at work. Some might call it dumb luck. Yet I give that a name and I lay my faith headlong into that singular belief.”

The question still stands in all things tragic or terrific in life: Why? To be honest…I don’t really care. This is what I do care about: God knows and I don’t. Some might ask, “Can you really live with something like that?” To that I have only this to say: Yeah…I can live with that.

Faith Training

For about a month now I’ve been reading through about five different books. One of those books is “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis. Many of you, no doubt, recognize this authors name in conjunction with the famous “Chronicles of Narnia” but what is often less known is the theological writings of the same man. “Mere Christianity” stands as but one of the several seminal works by C.S. Lewis that contain important narratives on Christian doctrine. This book is having a huge impact on me and I wanted to share some thoughts on the recent chapters that I have just finished reading. The issue at hand is Faith. The questions are: How do we define faith? What is our perspective of faith? What gives longevity to any legitimate belief? What are the components of faith?

As in any theological discussion it is important to remember that we are dealing with points of view. What is presented here, such as the questions above, is merely an expression of one point of view. I’m confident that if C.S. Lewis could counsel us personally he would probably say, “Take my word for what it is, the word of a flawed human being. I do not pretend to have all the answers or all the fancy angles. Take this for what it is worth and then seek the truth for yourself.”

Faith seems to be, in essence, used in roughly two ways by the Christian community and each of these views seems to be readily accepted by most. On one level faith could merely act as a synonym for belief, which means that one accepts that the doctrines presented in the Christian argument are both true and ultimately conclusive. The second perspective of faith is that it is a virtue. This is a difficult statement for some to swallow because it might seem asinine to certain minded individuals that merely believing a set of statements is either conclusively moral or immoral. Perhaps the reason for such a struggle inside an individual is because they simply believe that their mind is autonomously ruled by reason. But as we all could most likely attest from horrific experience, the mind is ruled not by reason alone but also by elements of emotion and imagination. You may, for example, have complete faith in a surgeon before you “go under the knife”. Your reason tells you that you’re dealing with highly qualified individuals who execute this kind of procedure every day and that you are in no way in any immediate danger. Yet the moment they throw the mask on you and begin pumping anesthetic into your system you begin to experience childish bouts of panic. You are afraid that they will start cutting before you’re completely out. You’re afraid you’ll wake up before the procedure is completely finished. Your panic turns to absolute terror as the environment around you begins to swirl into black. What has just happened? Before the moment of applied anesthesia you were fine because your faith in your reason was very sound and couldn’t possibly be misapplied. Yet your imagination and your raw unadulterated emotions kicked reason out of the drivers seat and put your fear into overdrive.

This same thing often happens in Christianity. If someone who is not a Christian long ago decided through his or her best reasoning that Christianity simply didn’t have enough evidence to support its own validity then it would do no good to tell them, “Well you’ve just gotta have faith even in the lack of evidence.” This is as ridiculous as telling a lactose intolerant person that what he or she needs to cure their ailment is more milk. There is another way to approach such a situation. But lets stay in the vein of a believer and deal with the issue of how faith comes into play and is ultimately tested. As a believer faith becomes very difficult because it is a fundamental element of our cognitive spiritual nature. Have you ever had one of those moments in your life when it would just be more convenient if Christianity weren’t true? It’s times like these where your emotions carry out a vicious blitz on your reasoning. Here we must be careful of how our moods will test our faith. Consider the following passage from “Mere Christianity”:

“Now faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith.”

In the last sentence of the quote above there are two words that literally jump off the page and smack me dead square in the chops. Those two words are: “Train” and “Habit”. Consider the following passage from 1 Corinthians 9:25: “All athletes practice strict self-control. The do it to win a prize that will fade away, but we do it for an eternal prize.” The piece of this scripture that I want to highlight is “all athletes practice strict self control.” When we think of the word habit we tend to think of things like smoking, spitting, chewing with your mouth open, and leaving the lid up. When we think about training we tend to think about things like boot camp, track & field, heat, sweating, and a general feeling of being uncomfortable. Yet neither of the definitions that accompany these words is negative. Take the following examples as a testament:

Training: To make proficient with specialized instruction and practice.

Habit: A recurrent, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition.

It’s funny isn’t it? These words, which often stir up negative connotations, have definitions that a really rather pleasant. However, if you insert the appropriate kinds of behaviors then both descriptions above could be taken in a negative fashion. But when you examine them under the Christian doctrine microscope I believe such definitions are the kinds of things that we should strive to attain in the development of our faith. I say development because that’s exactly what I belief faith takes. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis saying, “One must train the habit of faith.” Virtually any idea must be fed in order to stay alive. For example, if you are upset with someone the most likely way to stay upset is to continually complain about this particular individual. I’m sure all of us have been in this boat at one time or another. If you continue to feed your anger it stays well stoked but if you simply let it go your rage crumbles down to embers and eventually into dust. Even with the pettiest of feelings we must feed them in order for them to stay alive. Why do you think grudges last so long? It’s because people feed their memories with the negative and refuse to simply move forward to let obsolete feuds die out. We must use a similar, but far more emotionally healthy, way of building up our faith. Our faith is an ideal that we must feed. We must stay sharp in our beliefs. We do this through the perseverance of not only studying the word but also living the word and being sensitive to the going ons of the Holy Spirit.

I hate it when somebody says, “This what you need to do,” but never really tells you anything practical beyond that. Any idea sounds great on paper. It’s application that is the real pain in the bootie. So I’m going to try not to be like that. I want to talk about something very practical yet very difficult. What is one of the ways that we can begin, I say this because it’s a very long road, to train our faith? First it is important to remember the virtue of humility. Virtually everyone is “proud” in some area of their life (i.e. something that they just refuse to do). When we realize this about ourselves we are blitkrieged by an army of self-abuse. Anyone who has ever tried to diet and failed knows what I’m talking about here. You start your diet and you swear you’re going to do all these things over the next month to take off that pesky twenty pounds that you’ve been dying to lose. So you begin and the first week goes not too bad. A little tough but ultimately not too bad. Then the next week comes and you cheat on your diet or you skip out on some vital part of your carefully organized routine. The next thing you know you begin beating yourself up over your own lack of control. Next comes the inevitable wave of depression as you slowly but surely fall off the horse. By the middle of week three your new fitness regime is all but forgotten and you’re back into the same routine that you hated and promised yourself that you would never fall back into. Now you’re facing some very difficult truths about yourself and your level of commitment to all things in life. I think the reason for this is that often time’s people just set unrealistic goals for themselves. I think if we begin by setting some simple goals first then we find that life changes become more successful. But the fact remains that if we want to “live the word” then we must train ourselves. I’m almost tempted to use some spiritual cliché like, “We’ve gotta go into Spiritual Cross Training. Yeah baby. Let’s get X-treme in Christ! (Subtitle: drink more Mountain Dew Code Red, the choice of intense Christians everywhere). That’s just some toilet humor but in all seriousness we have to set goals and we have to achieve them. We have to overcome our deficiencies. We do this not by any great volition of our own but by developing a relationship with God. The closer you get to God the more understanding He gives you over time. As you understand more and more what in means to live in this covenant relationship with God you desire to live under his umbrella of principles. But this isn’t automatic. Again, it takes time and effort on our part. This isn’t like passing a test, which is often the assumption. Again I quote C.S. Lewis, “God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam or putting Him in your debt. Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.” “When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins. The man is awake now.”

 

What I learned from a jigsaw puzzle...

I would like to step back and take a moment to praise Mike for his morning message. I was remarking to Jamitha this afternoon that one of the things I love about Mike is the common sense, real world fashion that he is able to tailor into his messages. For example, how quaint and appropriate it is that his message was centralized around scripture that used running as a metaphor for spiritual growth. Perfect. Not to mention the way that he was able to relay the underlying message of the gospel all throughout his teaching. His words inspired a thought in me this morning and the Holy Spirit has been nurturing the idea all day long. So here I am to relay! (A little runner humor there…ha ha…okay shut up Chad)

Have you ever worked a jigsaw puzzle? I must confess that until yesterday I had never worked a jigsaw puzzle. Jamitha and I were in Wal-Mart (a.k.a the tri-county Kings Island) on Saturday when I was hit with the sudden impulse to buy a jigsaw puzzle. I honestly can’t tell you why I had this urge. Perhaps it’s just because I’m weird like that. Such a solution is highly likely if you know me well. It’s similar to the urge I often feel to run to Wal-Mart at 3:22 in the a.m. to retrieve what I feel to be a much-needed Rubik’s Cube. Yes I know…I’m a weirdo and should probably seek immediate medical attention. I’M COMING DR. PHIL!! But in all seriousness…we found this killer deal on jigsaw puzzles for the whopping price of 88 cents apiece. We picked out a very scenic 500-piece puzzle and began working it yesterday afternoon. Now what does this have to do with 100 ft. Mike’s message? Everything!

Those of you who have ever worked a jigsaw puzzle know that there are basically four phases to the puzzle construction process.

Step 1: Locate the four corner pieces.

Step 2: Locate all the border pieces.

Step 3: Group together remaining pieces into similar colors and design.

Step 4: Assemble the sucker!

Finding the four corner pieces is easy. Finding all the border pieces is easy. Both of these things are somewhat time consuming but ultimately not difficult. If you take your time and do it right it becomes very simple to assemble the border of the puzzle. The next part of the process, however, is far more difficult and time consuming. The inner pieces of the puzzle don’t always just jump right out at you. Oh sure there are several parts of the puzzle that will be immediately obvious but then the tediousness of the entire exercise begins to rear its ugly head. Here it becomes increasingly easy to feel aimless in your pursuit. Your eyes tire and begin to play tricks on you. The frustration of the disappearance of simplicity sets in. A smart person will walk away and come back to the puzzle later so that their mind will have a fresh perspective. A stubborn person will continue to work until frustration turns to agitation. Agitation will then give way to blinding rage. The next thing you know the puzzle is back in the box, in pieces, and you’re cursing the very existence of not only the puzzle but also the ratfink communist who thought up the whole notion of something as blindingly unintelligent as a jigsaw puzzle. INSERT OBSCENITY HERE.

So what’s my point? Certain things about our Christian lives are not all that hard to accept. I’ll use an example from my own life. It wasn’t hard for me to accept that God was and is real. It wasn’t hard for me to accept that Jesus was more than just another great moral teacher but that he was in fact our Lord and savior. It wasn’t hard for me to accept that fellowship was important in developing a spiritual family relationship with other believers. It wasn’t hard for me to accept that sin was a part of my life that needed to be eradicated. It wasn’t hard for me to accept baptism. It wasn’t hard for me to accept the sacrament of communion. In general the notion of things wasn’t hard for me to accept. But what is “the notion of things”? In essence, just surface elements. These things are easy to see. Much like it is easy to see someone hit a homerun. It is much more difficult to walk up to the plate and do it for yourself. Accepting the surface notion of any ideal is easy but to actually study it, understand it and, most importantly, live it is an entirely different animal altogether. It was far more difficult for me to actually understand what accepting a life in Jesus entailed. What’s more is that it was even more difficult to live my new understanding. It was also easy for me to see that sin was a part of my life that needed to be eradicated but to actually exterminate that monkey on my back still proves to be a nightmarish kind of battle.

Here I ask myself what seems to be a very necessary question. What is spiritual growth and how is it achieved? Here we need a unit of measure. After you piece together the borders of a jigsaw puzzle there is a ton of empty space in the middle. You can see what you’re trying to achieve from the picture on the box but your eyes can only see in part because the whole picture is yet in pieces. So you take your time and slowly piece together the bigger picture. Eventually the individual elements of the puzzle begin to take shape. Sections of the puzzle begin to connect and make sense whereas before they just seemed like meaningless chunks of picture in the middle of empty space. Each little piece of the puzzle begins to take on its own importance whereas before it seemed like a little piece of nothing. This process isn’t necessarily easy. Sometimes it’s a little on the frustrating side of things. Sometimes it’s not so bad. Some parts are downright easy. Other parts seem temporarily, or sometimes indefinitely, difficult. Our own spiritual growth is much like this. Some parts are very simple but actual growth takes far more effort. Going to church can aide to spiritual complacency. Think about it. When we go to church we get many things simply handed to us. Take our “teaching notes” for example. The purpose of the notes is meant to help further your own study not to stand in as a substitute for it. The praise band is meant to serve as a vehicle for worship through music but not to take residence as your only source of personal worship. That’s why it is so important to not view church as a filling station. We must make an effort to understand what it means to live as the body of Christ (i.e. be the church). We must be willing to take time to nurture our spiritual growth. Consider the successful relationships in your own life. Did they just happen overnight? Did you suddenly know everything about one another in a few hours? What an absurd idea. Real life is no Hollywood story where the entire world gets set right in two hours. All relationships take time, patience, and understanding. We know this from our own real world experiences. Why then would developing a relationship with God take any less time or commitment?

The bottom line is this: developing your relationship with God takes perseverance. This was one of the underlying themes in Mike’s message. Perseverance is not only doing the easy borders of the jigsaw puzzle and then calling it quits. Perseverance is keeping after the hard parts of the puzzle day in and day out until you’ve finished that one and are ready to move onto another one. This is such a fundamental lesson in “building” a relationship with God. We must be wary of the ever-present danger of stagnating in our spirituality. We must constantly seek. That doesn’t mean that we should fill our bookshelves with all the hot Christian literature nor does it mean that we should stockpile our CD collections with the most en vogue Christian artists of our contemporary era. Not that any of that is a bad thing but it’s not the fundamental answer. In the end I think we should ask ourselves the following question: What does scripture tell me about God, my relationship with Him, and what direction He wants me to walk in this life? This is a question that has some easy answers and some very difficult ones. But think of it this way: If all we ever did in life was trouble ourselves with the easy lessons, what kind of life skin would we develop? Probably a rather thin one. Scripture has so much to teach us and it is our fundamental instructional living manual. It is this pivotal piece of writing that we must be able to measure everything else against. The Bible is our unit of measure in all things and what is has to reveal to us may not always be palpable to our palette but it is, however, a reflection of God’s palette of desire for our life in Him. This is why we must study and seek. There could be a whole separate post made on just that last sentence. Don’t let any of this talk hit you in the face as accusatory because that is not my intention. These are merely words that I wish someone would have said to me when I first began attending a fellowship over a decade ago.

My whole point here is that any kind of personal growth takes perseverance. This is especially true when we talk about the dimensions of our own spiritual growth. You may have heard the following cliché a thousand times but I think the underlying implications of its greater meaning cannot be illustrated vividly enough. Faith isn’t always easy. Naturally, faith is easy in times of great prosperity but it is how we respond in the most despondent of times that proves or disproves the validity of our beliefs. Life will not always be roses and sunshine, as all of you know. You will have thousands of questions over your lifetime that will go to the grave with as unanswered musings. You might utter a thousand prayers that never seem to come to the kind of fruition that you may have preferred. You may see the bad guys win while the good guy ends up on the streets with nothing. You will see copious amounts of unfair poured out on those people who seem to deserve only fair doses in their well-lived existence. You will see the young die while the old go on. You will see tragedy where there should have been triumph. You will see miracles and you will see outrages. You will see a world gone mad and then in the next breath you will be witness to an age of reason. You will see the lazy rich grow fat on their own wealth while the hard working middle class individual struggles to keep the electricity on. And why? I do not know the answer. But here is what I believe. This life is not about us and there is certainly no room for a “me, me, me” mentality. This life is about God. That doesn’t mean lollipops and fountain drinks for believers. What it means is that God is our reason to run our own race in life. God is what gives us the perseverance to go back to the hard parts of the puzzle to continue looking for answers. But the odd thing is that this life is not about getting something out of it for ourselves. This life is about servitude and I mean that in the most glorious sense of the word. In this service we will have times worth remembering and times we’d rather just bury in the cold earth. Yet we don’t keep track of our personal injuries nor do we look for some scapegoat to vomit our selfishness all over. We remember that we are living this life by a guided hand with a guided purpose. It is that notion, and the deep understanding under the surface ideology that reminds us what is worth living for. This worth, I believe, can be defined simply as God’s design for us. We may not see it all but as I said, that isn’t necessarily important. What is important is that we learn to listen to God and become sensitive to his call. In doing this we learn how to face trial because we rise above selfishness and press forward for the sake of another, namely God. If we can tap into that vein then I believe that each of us will one day be able to look back on the annals of our lives and say, “We lived. We lived not for ourselves but for our king. Because of this all of our own trespasses are of no consequence for I want to talk not of my own life but of the one life that saved all lives. I want to talk about Jesus. I want to talk about God. I want to show this to all who can see, hear, taste, touch or feel. Let God seep from my very glands so the world would see not a reflection made up of me but rather a reflection composed entirely of the God I love and have always affectionately served.”

An Announcement and an Invitation

Well folks it's finally happened.  After nearly a quarter of a century I'm graduating.  I know.  I can hardly believe it myself.  Anyhow, I wanted to invite all of the Oasis folk to my graduation, although it's really boring and in my opinion mostly for photo opportunities (i.e. don't come to that portion of the day unless you're just raptured by such activity).  But more importantly I want to invite all of you to the after party at my house (this is the part you won't want to miss!).   My family seems to be planning some elaborate thing.  All I know thus far is that there is a Hawaii type them (costume not required) and there will be "punch and pie".  For those unfamiliar with the South Park movie this basically means that there will most likely be ridiculous amounts of free food and drink to indulge upon.  As I said this seems to be a very covert operation headed up by, I can only assume, the following parties:  Jamitha (codename:  Green Bunny), Davey (codename:  Clean Laundry), and my mother (codename:  Connie Jean the Hot Flash Queen).  If you want further details you can contact one of these very suspicious persons....OR...you can just click on any of these pictures which will in turn pop up in a bigger window so you can read all about the what, where, when, who, how and why.  Each picture is for something different so please check each one carefully.  You can talk to me about all this but like most sons, brothers and/or slash loving boyfriends I will be able to provide you with no useful information unless of course you're asking about top notch brands of salsa (either store bought or homemade).  Click and enjoy.  By the way, if the picture pops up and you can't see the whole thing do this:  simply right click on the image and select "view image" from the menu.  The whole picture should then appear.